Ireland (24 page)

So history isn’t at all boring. It tells us who we are and where we came from. In the future, it will tell later generations about who they are and where they came from. It will tell them about us.

When we look at the map of the world, Ireland seems little more than a green speck when compared to China or India. Around 6 million people live on the island of Ireland. Over 1 billion people live in China, another billion live in India. When we consider the size of India or China, we realise that Ireland should be one of the most insignificant countries in the whole world. The rest of the world should not have ever heard of us.

But the rest of the world has heard of us. People from other countries love to visit Ireland. They love those mountains and lakes and rivers and rolling green fields, which are so much a part of our landscape. But above all they love meeting the Irish people. In the end, it’s people who matter. They have always mattered, and always will matter. Who we are today has been fashioned by 9,000 years of history, just as the people who come after us will have been shaped by us. It’s how it has been since the beginning of time and how it will always be. We are making the history of the future now. Let us make it as best we can so that those who come after us can say in 9,000 years time: ‘We are proud to be descended from those people who lived in Ireland in that long ago time that was the twenty-first century.’

THE END

Also by the Author

O
ne winter morning in 1919, police and British soldiers raided a house in Dublin city. Heavily armed, they came without warning. Their mission was to capture or kill one man. His name was Michael Collins, the most wanted man in the whole of the British Empire.

The house, at 76 Harcourt Street, was Collins’ headquarters. From here he planned and directed a guerrilla war against the British Empire. The British government had already made many attempts to capture him, but all had failed. They had even put an enormous price on his head, but so far no one had claimed it.

Now, acting on a tip-off from a spy named Harry Quinlisk, the house was being raided. They hoped that their quarry would be caught off guard and they would at last catch him. By this time Collins had been on the run for over a year, and he knew from his many previous escapes that he had to be vigilant and prepared to flee at any moment.

Now he heard the police vehicles screech to a halt in front of the house. Men shouted urgent orders. There was the thump of heavy boots on the pavement. Michael had to get away.

He was prepared for such an eventuality. The house had a skylight in the roof though which he could escape. He had had a special lightweight ladder made with which he could climb onto the roof. He could then pull the ladder up with him and close the skylight.

Michael was a big man, but urged on by the seriousness of his situation, he scrambled up the ladder with the speed and dexterity of a monkey. He hauled himself out onto the roof and pulled up the ladder behind him. Then he closed the skylight. The shouts and the thumping of the soldiers’ boots were louder now. But Michael had no time to wait and listen. He scrambled across the roofs of the adjacent houses until he came to the Standard Hotel which also had a skylight.

He had already arranged that this skylight would be left open permanently for just such an emergency, and that another light ladder would be available so that he could climb down into the hotel.

Michael lowered himself through the skylight, only to discover to his horror that the ladder was missing. He was hanging by his fingertips over the well of the staircase. From here it was a sheer drop to the floor of the hotel lobby far below him. If he fell he would be killed, or at the very least, seriously injured. His only hope was to leap to the safety of the landing. But to reach there he would need to build up momentum to clear the landing rail. Still hanging by his fingertips, he began to swing his body back and forward like a pendulum.

When he felt he had built up sufficient momentum, he released his grip on the edge of the skylight. He leapt into empty space with that sheer drop to the lobby gaping below him. His momentum was sufficient to clear the landing rail, but he caught his foot and fell heavily. His leg was badly injured, but ignoring the pain, he quickly scrambled to his feet. Limping, he descended the stairs to the hotel lobby and made his exit onto the street.

By now a number of his comrades had arrived on the scene. They were watching the entrance to 76 Harcourt Street, which was sealed off by heavily armed soldiers. At any moment the watching men expected to see the man they knew as The Big Fellow being dragged out in handcuffs. Instead, to their utter disbelief, they watched Michael emerge from the Standard Hotel. Apart from the fact that he was limping, he seemed fine. He was smiling, as if at a great joke, calmly hailed a horse-drawn hackney cab and was driven off.

The police, yet again, had failed to catch their most wanted man. After searching No. 76 from top to bottom, they were forced to withdraw empty-handed. Once more Michael Collins had escaped to carry on the fight, a fight he would eventually win.

Within less than two years the British were forced to admit defeat. Collins, with a small group of guerrilla fighters, had beaten the army of the most powerful empire on earth. The British government, unable to capture him or defeat his fighters, was forced to sue for peace.

In October 1921, Michael sat down to negotiate freedom for Ireland with the very government that had sent their policemen and soldiers to capture or kill him. He signed a treaty with the British government that at last gave Ireland her freedom. Less than nine months later he would be dead. For years the British had tried to capture or kill him, but it was to be his, and Ireland’s, tragedy that it would be one of his guerrillas, his comrades in the fight for freedom, who would kill him.

This is the story of how Michael Collins, a farmer’s son, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest Irishmen of the twentieth century. It is the story of his fight for Irish freedom and of how he defeated the might of the British Empire. It is also the story of how and why he met his death on a lonely road at Béal na mBláth, in his native County Cork, on 22 August 1922.