Michael Collins by Coogan Tim Pat

Author:Coogan, Tim Pat [Coogan, Tim Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

9

Fighting the Waves

“For forms of government let fools contest.’

Alexander Pope

Now the waking nightmare began. Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats’ synonym for Ireland, would show herself as an envious, strident, venomous bitch throughout the Treaty debates conducted both in and outside the Dail. One of the mildest epithets hurled at the delegates was ‘traitors’. Griffith and Collins were reckoned to have been drugged or drunk when they signed the Treaty,1 but Collins was singled out for special treatment, on the grounds of both drink and sex. Countess Markievicz regaled the Dail with a rumour that Collins had broken up a royal romance!2 She said that the Governor Generalship, ‘the centre of English immorality and divorce’, had been earmarked for a member of the royal family until Collins came along. As a result ‘Princess Mary’s wedding is to be broken off... the Princess Mary is to be married to Michael Collins who will be appointed first Governor.’

This nonsense came at a particularly bad moment. Collins had fallen in love and planned to marry Kitty Kiernan. She had visited him in London during the talks but the strain and uncertainty of his position, and her Catholic conscience, seem to have made the visit a stormy one. She wrote to him saying:

...why not marry the one I really love, and what a cowardly thing of me to be afraid to marry the one I really want, and who loves me just as well as any of the others I thought of marrying.

Then London came. I should not have gone. It gave rise to such talk. People got to know about it and I thought it better from a girl’s very conventional and narrow point of view that we had better have something definite, and so we have drifted... now don’t think by this that I want a row or want you to end it. Not likely. I want you only not to think bad of me when we had those scenes.3

Collins wrote back on 5 and 6 December sending her a two-part letter. The first part said:

If the question were of no interest at all to me surely I could not blame you for having concern for your own future and your lifelong happiness. When it does so very closely concern you I cannot blame you more. This is really my straightforward and genuine point of view.

He was interrupted then by the alarms and excursions attendant on the signing of the Treaty and resumed the letter to express hopes doomed to be unfulfilled:

To bed about five, and up to go to Mass and didn’t (need I say it) forget your candle. My plans in regard to home are as yet uncertain. I don’t know how things will go now but with God’s help we have brought peace to this land of ours – a peace which will end this old strife of ours for ever.

He met the Countess Markievicz’s charge in typically Collins fashion, cutting through the rumours and uncertainties to make his engagement public knowledge, while still safeguarding his fiancée’s identity.

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