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Reviews
| Mick: The Real Michael Collins, by Peter Hart. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. 485 pages. $17.00, paper.
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| Michael Collins was the preeminent personality in twentieth-century Irish politics and he casts his shadow over today's Irish political culture. His quick rise to prominence during the turbulent and momentous years from the Easter Rising in 1916 to his death in an ambush in 1922 during the Irish Civil War created the public and cultural space for the creation of the "Story of Michael Collins," as Peter Hart describes. Collins lore fed a popular need for heroes during the founding of the nation that, because of partition, still felt incomplete by many. After Collins became a revered revolutionary figure, honored across the Irish political spectrum, there were few who questioned the "Story" of Collins—hence the need for Hart's book. It is the projections of that "Story" that Hart so ably corrects in this calm evaluation of Collins's life and impact. Hart succeeds in his goal to offer a "new, forensic, perspective" on Collins, using only publicly accessible sources as opposed to previous Collins biographies that often used private sources or interviews. |
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Hart divides his book into two major parts. In the first section, roughly a third of the book, we read of Collins's family origins in Cork and his various clerical jobs in London during his late teens and early twenties. There, he actively participated in London's Irish nationalist organizations, but he returned to Ireland, was stationed at the General Post Office for the Easter Rising in 1916, was captured, and served time in prison. Hart credits Collins's ability, while in prison, to create networks and to establish relationships with his fellow prisoners as setting the stage for his rise to leadership. After release from prison, he became the manager of a fund designed to aid Rising veterans. Collins's extensive letter writing kept him in touch with all the significant nationalist leaders and his ability to dispense financial aid soon made him the "man to see in Dublin." |
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In the second section, Hart outlines the development of Collins from a newly emerging leader of the nationalist movement to the ambushed head of an Irish army. Again, Collins used his behind-the-scenes organizational skills to create and maintain an efficient communication system. By 1919, these skills enabled Collins to become Intelligence Director of a new Irish shadow government. Collins ran an incredibly successful operation that targeted British personnel. The rest of the book details events well known to students of Irish history: the Anglo-Irish War, the talks with the British about a treaty, the controversy of who would attend those talks, Collins's decision to sign and defend the treaty, and the eventual devolution into the Irish Civil War. Hart does this with incredible clarity, and this will allow undergraduate students to see Collins's role and better understand his times. |
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Throughout the book, Hart clearly lays out Collins' role as can be judged by the evidence and contrasts that view with the popular cultural view of Collins. For example, Hart shows that Dublin Castle's activities against Irish nationalists in the period 1918–1920 were haphazard at best, thus effectively deflating the traditional view of Collins's prowess in defeating a vast and highly efficient British effort to infiltrate the Irish Volunteers or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Hart also challenges the popular belief that the factions and divisions that developed in late 1919 through 1920 were the work of those jealous of Collins. Instead, he places the blame on Collins, showing him to be a "good boss and a fine comrade, but [one who] could be a truly awful colleague." Yet Hart also rescues and elevates some elements of Collins's life that have been unfairly de-emphasized, when, in retelling the Treaty debates, he makes clear Collins's important contributions to the intellectual nature of Irish nationalism. He might be criticized, after his harsh words about previous works that discount Collins's early life, because he himself treats the period before 1916 in just seventy-four short pages. His book would have benefited by including a bit more on why the mythical vision of Collins took root in the Irish political world. Finally, in his conclusion, Hart unfairly ranks Collins as merely among the "thousands of men and women [who] performed just as well." Surely Collins deserves more than that. These minor comments aside, this book would be a wonderful addition to any modern Irish history reading list. |
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| Central Connecticut State University |
John Tully |
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