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  • The annual national commemoration honouring General Michael Collins and President Arthur Griffith

The annual national commemoration honouring General Michael Collins and President Arthur Griffith took place at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, on Sunday.

Criticism of Michael Collins for signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London in 1921 failed to recognise the narrow window of time in which the Irish negotiators were working, Independent Senator Michael McDowell has said.

McDowell, who writes an opinion column for The Irish Times, delivered the oration at the annual Collins Griffith Commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery on Sunday. He said detractors of the Treaty – which led to the foundation of the State but also to a bitter split in the republican leadership – had not grasped how precarious a position David Lloyd George’s Liberal government found itself in.

“The very precarity of the Lloyd George coalition, and the very real probability of the Conservative and Unionist Party becoming the sole and utterly hostile interlocutor with Irish nationalism – as happened not much later in 1922 – were well known to Collins and Griffith. So were the implications.

Give us the future… We’ve had enough of your past… Give us back our country… to live in, – to grow in, – to Love. (Michael Collins)

“To me the task is a loathsome one. I go, I go in the spirit of a soldier who acts against his best judgement at the orders of his superior.” – Michael Collins on being sent to the Treaty negotiations by De Valera.

“The course of life and labour reminds me of a long journey I once took on the railway. Suddenly, there was a breakdown ahead, and passengers took the event in various ways. Some of them sat still resignedly, and never said a word. Others again, went to sleep. But some of us leaped out of that train, and ran on ahead to clear the road of all obstructions.” Michael Collins

“To go for a drink is one thing. To be driven to it is another.” – Michael Collins in a letter during the treaty negotiations.

“When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London’s streets, cold and dank in the night air. Think – what have I got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past 700 years. Will anyone be satisfied with the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this -early this morning I signed my own death warrant. I though at the time how odd, how ridiculous -a bullet might just as well have done the job 5 years ago.” – Michael Collins in a letter to John O’Kane after the Treaty.

“In my opinion it gives us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire … but the freedom to achieve it.” – Michael Collins on the Treaty in debates.

“Yerra, they’ll never shoot me in my own county” – Michael Collins to Joe O’Reilly just prior to his journey to West Cork in August 1922

“That valiant effort and the martyrdoms that followed it finally awoke the sleeping spirit of Ireland” – Michael Collins, regarding the Easter Rising of 1916

“Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken whether children yet unborn would approve it, but few have spoken of whether the living approve it.” – Michael Collins, Dáil debate, Christmas 1921.

“Put him in to get him out.” – Election slogan of Joseph McGuiness, in jail when elected for South Longford.

Winston Churchill on Michael Collins.

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