POPULAR HISTORY and cinema have greatly reinforced the celebrity status of Michael Collins, eclipsing many of the other key figures of the struggle for Irish freedom of his time. The Collins myth has also served to obscure the facts and the issues at stake around the ‘Treaty’ signed 90 years ago this month and the subsequent split and Civil War.

The writings of the respected journalist and historian Tim Pat Coogan on Collins and De Valera and the Neil Jordan film based very loosely on Collins’s life have had a huge influence. But both Coogan and Jordan portray Collins and De Valera in ‘hero versus villain’ terms, dwarfing the other personalities and forces at work in Ireland at that time of tragedy.

Collins was undoubtedly a pivotal figure in the struggle for Irish freedom between 1917 and 1921. His copious talents for organisation and motivation and his masterminding of a highly-effective intelligence offensive against the British occupation were crucial in forcing the British Government to the negotiating table. But this was not one man’s war or one man’s leadership.

Much debate has centred on the decision of De Valera not to participate in the negotiations in London. His real motive for this decision will probably never be known. But in many ways he and Collins had a lot in common. Both men had a highly-developed belief in their own abilities and their power to influence people and events.

In De Valera’s case, he was the public face of the Irish struggle, President of the Irish Republic and, by the middle of 1921, he was used to adulation at home and abroad.

Collins was known more by a reputation that had grown to the status of legend by the time he emerged in the public eye after the July 1921 Truce. But Collins’s conviction of his own power was based not on a public image but on his control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Collins was primarily an IRB man and his thinking and strategy were imbued with its conspiratorial ethos. This was a leadership within a leadership and it was a recipe for disaster in the event of a threat to the unity of the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership that had fought the war from 1919 to 1921.

De Valera believed that his power and influence were such that his will would prevail with regard to whatever agreement was brought back from London or, in the event that no agreement was reached, that he could hold together the national forces in the face of a renewed British onslaught.

Why did Collins, of all people, sign the Articles of Agreement? (This was popularly known as the Treaty but was not a Treaty in strictly legal or diplomatic terms.) Argument has raged about whether the IRA could have withstood a harsher and more concerted wave of repression than that endured from the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries before the Truce. British state papers released in 1993 show the extent of British plans to dispatch 50,000 troops to Ireland and intern 20,000 Irish people in the event of the Irish negotiators refusing to accept the British terms. Was it, then, fear of the alternative, Lloyd George’s threat of “immediate and terrible war” that swung Collins, the key man on the Irish delegation?

It seems more likely that Collins calculated that the ‘Treaty’ could be used to achieve full Irish freedom and, crucially, that his own prestige and his control of the IRB would win the support of the IRA and Sinn Féin for the London deal. On both counts it was a woeful miscalculation.

While the Irish people were well-served by both Collins and De Valera during the war, they were badly served by them during the peace negotiations. De Valera wrongly believed that he could manipulate the situation, doing a balancing act in the Cabinet between the republican Cathal Brugha and the dual monarchist Arthur Griffith and controlling the London talks from across the Irish Sea. Collins forgot that maintaining the unity of the Irish leadership and movement was absolutely vital and that a split was too high a price to pay for a deal that was extremely dubious in the first place.

The Collins myth totally obscures the fact that Herculean efforts were made by pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty sides to reach agreement and avoid armed conflict between them in the wake of the narrow Dáil vote for the Treaty in January 1922. These efforts culminated in the Collins/De Valera pact of June, which was designed to ensure that the general election was not a divisive referendum on the ‘Treaty’, that the Third Dáil Éireann would be convened and that agreement could be found on the Free State Constitution.

In the event, none of these things happened because Collins and Griffith succumbed to pressure from the British Cabinet which would not tolerate the continued existence of republican political or military forces in Ireland and any coming together of the divided Irish movement. Collins renounced the pact on the eve of the election; a united Third Dáil was never convened; the Free State Constitution drafted by Collins in an effort to expand on the ‘Treaty’ was summarily rejected by the British.

After that it was a quick descent to civil war with the Provisional Government headed by Collins again bowing to British dictation and, using borrowed British guns, shelling their former comrades of the IRA in the Four Courts on 28th June 1922.

The Articles of Agreement which confirmed the partition of Ireland, established the Free State and led to the Civil War were signed in London on 6th December 1921, 90 years ago this month.