MEDA RYAN's Michael Collins and Women in His Life (Mercier, £8.99) is a timely reminder that, contrary to what the Neil Jordan's recent movie would have us believe, a number of women were of crucial importance to Collins. Here Kitty Kiernan is not the nincompoop Julia Roberts portrays - one of whose immortal lines is "Mick, they can shoot us but they can't kill us" - but a woman with whom Collins had "lovely, serious talks". They wrote to each other almost daily, Kitty urging him to conserve his strength: "I don't consider that you will do Ireland or the people of Ireland any good by killing yourself working . . . You are the one that, by living for Ireland, helps her."
And as for intelligence gathering in the Castle, along with Ned Broy, there was also Collins's cousin, Nancy O'Brien, who passed on many secret coded messages. Women typists in the Castle and at army headquarters were invaluable sources of information.
An early girlfriend, Dilly Dicker (who played piano for the silent movies), frequently hid in a wickerwork mail basket on the mailboat, emerging in a sorter's uniform and stuffing letters destined for the secret service into her knickers. Moya Llewelyn Davies transported guns for Collins in her motor car; she also passed on Cabinet information gleaned from her husband. She was eventually arrested and imprisoned.
Collins's contentious involvement with Lady Lavery is here portrayed as infatuation on her side and his appreciation of the valuable role she played as go between during the Treaty negotiations. Emmet Dalton - whom Ryan interviewed in 1974 - corroborates this; but whether they had an affair remains tantalisingly unclear.
The book is an easy to read guide to the main events of the period, but, irritatingly, neglects to go into the details of the shooting of Collins, urging the reader to buy Ryan's other book - The Day Michael Collins was Shot - instead.