Irish History: As Peter Hart observes, Michael Collins has had a remarkably easy ride from historians and biographers who have essentially been writing the same story since his death in 1922: Collins as Monte Cristo, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Sherlock Holmes, his miraculous feats and escapes from near certain capture and death.
In his new biography, Peter Hart doesn't want to debunk Collins but to start from scratch, stripping away the layers of myth and anecdote which have accumulated around his embalmed reputation. We've heard this pious rhetoric before so what's new about this book?
Hart has packaged Collins for the generation of the Celtic Tiger - manager, insider, player, politician, director, minister, CEO (these are just some of the chapter headings); Collins the political junkie, horsing about with the boys of the IRB frat house. The breezy locker room idiom won't be to everybody's taste but it doesn't diminish Hart's scholarship. He has mined the archives which have become available over the last quarter century for the period of the Irish Revolution and the Collins who emerges is an altogether more credible, complex and human figure.
Collins's personal history was typical of many men in the revolutionary movement, so why did he rise to the top? Hart thinks that part of the answer lies in the unprecedented opportunities which opened up for his generation with the vacuum caused by the first World War, the Rising, and the collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party. By the end of 1917 Collins was treasurer of the IRB, director of organisation of the Volunteers and a member of the Sinn Féin executive. It was exhilarating: "he and his friends were making history: a bunch of teachers and clerks and tradesmen taking on the politicians, the employers, the civil service and the police - and winning".
Collins was a consummate networker. He played the protegé and cultivated a series of important mentors. He also possessed a greater organisational ability, tactical skill, and personal persuasiveness than his colleagues. All these qualities stood him in good stead in the frantic jockeying for power after 1916. This was one side of Collins but there was a darker side which Hart analyses in cold-eyed detail. Loyalty and friendship lasted only as long as they were useful. He may have been a good boss and comrade but could be a truly awful colleague, "consistently interfering and insulting, dismissive, critical and undermining of anyone who didn't do what he wanted". Ironically, of all the Dáil ministry it was de Valera to whom he was closest in 1921 until the fatal Treaty split.
Hart isn't persuaded by claims that Collins was the founder of modern guerilla warfare. The various local studies of the 1916-23 period published over the last decade have shown conclusively that Dublin GHQ contributed little at local level and Collins himself rarely left Dublin after 1919. The IRA's decisive advantage lay in intelligence but even here Collins's record is not unblemished. Hart discusses in some detail the most serious breach of IRA security which occurred during the War of Independence, the story of Mr Jameson, alias John Byrnes, a rather Pooteresque figure from Romford who had a series of meetings with Collins about buying arms. He was in fact a British agent who was eventually picked up by the Squad and murdered in March, 1920.
When it comes to the Treaty negotiations, Hart dismisses the picture of Collins as the simple soldier unused to the cut and thrust of diplomacy; it must have been someone else, then, who sat on the executive of his party, wrote those memos on electoral strategy, was Dáil Minister for Finance and also acting president. How could Collins resist the chance of starring on such a big stage? As negotiators, Hart thinks that Collins and Griffith were mediocre and plainly not up to the job of dealing with Lloyd George.
But once he made the decision to sign and implement the Treaty and became the most powerful man in Ireland as a result, Collins did not flinch despite the appalling obstacles. He was sucked into a morass of treaties, pacts and agreements and also saw the IRA, which he regarded as his organisation, now out of control and headed inexorably for civil war. But as military leaders he and Richard Mulcahy were superior to their republican counterparts and, most vital of all, made fewer mistakes.
Collins's love life has attracted attention in recent years. In the chapter entitled "Loving Michael Collins", Hart weighs up the evidence for sexual liaisons with Lady Lavery and Moya Llewellyn-Davies but concludes that it's rather thin. For his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, alias the Belle of Granard, there is of course their correspondence but that only raises more questions, which Hart doesn't answer, such as how long their marriage would actually have lasted before Collins, goaded beyond endurance by her endless prattle about frocks, hats and beaux, finally throttled her?
Since Collins's afterlife has contributed so much to the growth of his legend, this needed far more analysis than Hart has given it. His legacy was an uncomfortable one for his successors. To claim, as Hart does in his conclusion, that Collins was the most successful politician in modern Irish history is nonsense and unfair to the men and women, from both sides, who had the task of building a democratic state from the horrors of the civil war.
Deirdre McMahon is a lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Her book, The Moynihan Brothers in Peace and War 1908-1918, was published by Irish Academic Press last year
Mick: The Real Michael Collins By Peter Hart. Macmillan, 485pp. €30