Michael Collins: A Biography

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Collins takes you on a trip through his (and some others) family tree and history to portray the changing nature of South London in particular - with the focus on the working class starting from the 1800s. Bits of this book will stay with me, from the closeness of community reflected in the reaction to a Scout group disaster in 1910 to one of the final comments in the book about how it will not be as easy to blame white Brits for any problems of integration in London due to their ever smaller numbers and likely issues between other groups - reflected very recently in a horrible episode with some Muslim men chanting from an open top car about doing some horrible things to Jews. He does not mention Dalton's hysterical reaction on the evening of Bloody Sunday, vividly described by his Civil War opponent Seán Lemass in a letter of support for a disability pension in 1941, by which time Dalton had been in Grangegorman mental hospital for more than two years: he "was of highly-strung disposition, and on more than one occasion I came to the conclusion that the strain of his work was telling on his nerves". (I quoted this in The Irish Times on July 20th, 2013.) Two of the diaries between 1921 and 1922 have gone on display at the Michael Collins House Museum in Clonakilty, the other three are on deposit at the National Archives. Photograph: Darragh Kane

As the brilliant journalist and true voice of and conscience and nonconformity to the prejudices of Britain's left elites , Burchill captured with great skill as the author quotes in the book in a 2001 article from the Guardian " What we now have is a new version of the deserving and undeserving poor-the noble new British working class, who are ethnic and the thoroughly swinish old working class who are white" This is a superb book, written by someone whose understanding covers the whole range from the skills and complexities of flying the craft (of course) to the characters of the people and himself (not all of the participants in The Program were that self-aware), and has the writing skills to communicate the whole lot. Also, over the years, writers have denied that he was there and could not find any proof that he was an ambush participant. Yet from my research I believe he was one of the principal men (a trained engineer) engaged in the ambush, especially at the later stages when the actual ambush took place, and not the prepared ambush where he and the men awaited the anticipated convoy throughout the day. Jim Kearney was a member of the 3rd Brigade.If I had read those words before reading this book I should not have understood what he meant. But now I think I may do. Once the fighting ended, men such as James Doyle, a heroic survivor of Clanwilliam House in 1916, whose “indomitable and cool courage” apparently saved the day for his IRA comrades in 28 Upper Fitzwilliam Street on Bloody Sunday, went on to lead quiet, steady lives. (His son the late Col ED Doyle was, for many years, a measured and perceptive commentator on international affairs for this newspaper.)

Collins achieved the rank of major general. He left NASA in 1970 to join the State Department. Later he became director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, overseeing its construction and opening in 1976. A chapter is devoted to Collins’s death, highlighting how immediately afterwards the myth-making was in full flow, with a statement from army headquarters suggesting “forgive them” were his last words. The reality of the circumstances of his death – the worse for wear with drink and making a stupid military blunder by stopping to return fire – took second place to the conspiracy theories (many motivated by spite) and other imponderables .As is observed laconically, “an ordinary death just would not do”. The anti-treaty side’s response to his death was mixed; some were vexed by the purple prose of the eulogies, but for many soldiers and politicians “this was also a very private kind of loss”. Mullane, a self-confessed inhabitant from planet ‘arrested development’ shares his growing pains in recognising that women could be colleagues and brilliant astronauts at that. His brutally honest depiction of losing his friend Judy Resnik in the Challenger disaster due to NASA hubris. Mullane describes in vivid detail the subsequent appalling bureaucratic treatment of the family members who were present at the disastrous launch. His own experience prior to this when STS-27 suffered near catastrophic heat shield damage from launch damage makes this description all the more poignant. Dr Murphy and Dr Dolan explain the absence of many important events as being the logical extension of his mind. Collins wrote down the things he might forget not the ones he knew he could not forget. “He knew he had signed the Treaty. He did not need to write it down,” they state.Again, while Coogan notes that Charlie Dalton was widely alleged to have been involved in the murder of three teenage prisoners in Clondalkin during the Civil War, he merely says that he later “did well” after emigrating to the United States. Hadfield’s book is a great read and compares favorably with two of my other notable astronaut autobiographies. National Archives director Orlaith McBride says the diaries reveal an 'extraordinarily busy man'. Photograph: John Allen In conclusion, we don’t know the answer to the mystery of the Collins signature and a lot more research will be needed before there can be any certainty. We need to look more closely at the other signatures to better understand why so many famous Irish people seemed to frequent the restaurant at this time. Michael Collins is multilingual. He communicates in written English supremely well. How many men and women ‘of letters’ possess a comparable ability to express themselves in the fields and languages of science and engineering? It’s a rare combination. Collins is also a remarkably modest man, blessed with both a firm sense of responsibility and the most wonderful dry sense of humour. He is a true team player, but, importantly, one whose maturity, skills and talents fully justify his personal sense of worth and purpose.

While working on what I had planned to be a book on the War of Independence in West Cork, I interviewed a man named Neilius Flynn, in whose house some of the Hales family stayed after their house was burned. He confessed to knowing ‘a republican’ who had participated in the Béal na Bláth ambush. Flynn wasn’t sure if this man would grant an interview. ‘I’ll let you know, next time you call,’ he said. Coogan emphasises that it is essentially a reheat of portions of his hugely influential 1990 biography, Michael Collins. That pioneering though controversial work made innovative use of Bureau of Military History statements and other material then in private hands. (The bureau records were opened to the public only in 2003, and the enormous military-service-pensions archive only in 2014. Both are accessible online at militaryarchives.ie.) Days in the Life: Reading the Michael Collins Diaries 1918-1922 is being published by the Royal Irish Academy in time for the centenary of Collins death which occurs on August 22nd this year. The pair write in the foreword to their latest book that the diaries are “radically different to the other sources of Michael Collins life. They bring us closer, closer than ever maybe, to the bustle of his life”. Coogan’s latest work is best read neither as a reheat of old research nor as an attempt at forensic history but as a familiar and lengthy ballad or prose poem dedicated to a selection of untarnished revolutionary heroes headed by Michael Collins, contrasted with one monumental, cowardly villain in Éamon de Valera. Perhaps appropriately, then, his publisher’s imprint is Head of Zeus.I bought this book as I had heard that Michael Collins’ ‘Carrying the Fire’ was the best book available covering the Apollo missions to the moon and whilst I have nothing to compare it to, I can certainly believe the claim. Collins is an excellent writer and his book conveys the feelings of a humble and humorous individual who frankly has little to be humble about as like all Astronauts he had to be exceptional just to be selected as part of the 3rd Astronaut intake (having failed in his bid to be taken on in the 2nd – proving persistence is a virtue).

Collins was originally going to title the book World in my Window, but he later decided that was "too corny". After discussing it with his editor, they decided to use three words to describe spaceflight. Collins decided on Carrying the Fire. Another version says Collins’s own comrades in the convoy fired the fatal shot, possibly in an alcohol-fuelled blunder since some had been drinking, or as part of a conspiracy by government figures to remove a rival. Yet another theory claims British intelligence orchestrated the killing to stop Collins subverting Northern Ireland, which remained under British rule. In his autobiographical An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, the now retired Hadfield provides one of the most readable and honest stories of his journey from being a glider in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets in 1975 to commanding the international space Station in 2013 - after ‘only’ 21 years of astronaut training. He candidly describes the effort and training to get to being a modern astronauts - studying, practicing, learning, waiting, preparing for the worst - then being flexible enough to deal with the unexpected. What I liked is his can do approach as explained in his response to the 1969 Apollo 11moon landing and wanting to become an astronaut: I am a space buff and have read many good accounts of the space program, including Andrew Chaikin’s amazing “A Man on the Moon,” which should be required reading for everyone interested in these genera. As for books written by astronauts, “Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys” by Michael Collins is probably the best I have read along with Jim Lovell’s “Lost Moon,” aka “Apollo 13.” An important point to make right off the bat is that Collins had no co-author on this project as many do. He did it all himself, and let me tell you, he can write.

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The state broadcaster, RTÉ, has lined up detectives, academics, psychologists and the retired state pathologist Prof Marie Cassidy to examine the evidence in an upcoming documentary, Cold Case Collins. The historian doubts the theory that Emmet Dalton, one of Collins’s senior aides, killed his chief, accidentally or on purpose, and covered it up. “He must have been a hell of an actor to carry that lie. He was in awe of Collins and became a keeper of the flame.” For him, pen-pushing and administrative efficiency was an extension of battle, and his exasperation with tardiness compelled him during the War of Independence to continually stray beyond his ministerial brief of finance. The authors have highlighted, for example, a large body of neglected correspondence in the archive of the underground Irish republican government that documents his attempt to manage the Dáil’s relationship with its representative in London, Art O’Brien. But Collins was also prone to lapses in discipline, as when he arrived at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London in October 1921 to visit prisoners, drunk and boasting. Functional killing As one of the “reluctant” negotiators of the Anglo-Irish treaty, Collins could be either forensic or belligerent depending on the circumstances, although the choreography of reaching the deal in December 1921 might have been teased out more by the authors. Collins was a “formidable” politician, constantly calculating but not a team player and prone to melodrama. What he actually believed is difficult to discern and strangely neglected by his biographers. Since his death he has been recruited to countless causes, but he was not a deep thinker. He was derivative in his meanderings on the idea of an Irish “nation” and aped the sentimental mush about the western seaboard beloved of his generation despite all the guff pedalled about Collins as the great “moderniser”.