On This Day: Irish independence leader Michael Collins is killed in ambush during Civil War

AUGUST 22, 1922: Irish independence leader Michael Collins was killed in ambush during his country’s Civil War on this day in 1922.

The chairman of the provisional government was shot dead by opponents of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that split Ireland into a southern Free State and British north.

Collins, a former IRA intelligence chief who had signed the 1921 accord on behalf of rebel Dublin parliament, was killed as he travelled through his native County Cork.

Since no witnesses agree, all that we can be sure of is that his vehicle was stopped by an Anti-Treaty forces’ roadblock, which triggered a gun battle.

While those in the car exchanged fire with the insurgents, Collins, who had earlier insisted ‘they won’t shoot me in my own county’, was the only man to fall.

His body, which never underwent a post-mortem examination and so has added to the mystery surrounding his death, was taken by sea back to Dublin.

There, he lay in state for three days before his funeral, shown in a British Pathé newsreel, which was attended by 500,000 people, a fifth of Ireland’s population.

Most Irishmen at the time – at least those in the predominantly Catholic south – considered Collins a revolutionary hero who helped end 700 years of British rule.

But opponents, including the former president of the self-declared Irish Republic, Eamon deValera, who is accused of ordering the ambush, thought he sold Ireland out.

They had voted against the narrowly ratified Treaty amid anger that Northern Ireland, whose people were predominantly protestant, remained part of the UK.

They were also incensed that the new recognised Irish Free State would be a dominion within the British Empire - and not the republic they had dreamed of.

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Sinn Fein MPs, who had won the majority of Irish seats in 1918 but refused to sit in Westminster and so established the rebel Dublin Dáil, were also split because it forced Ireland’s politicians to swear an oath of allegiance to the widely hated crown.

Yet historians argue that De Valera had cynically refused to attend the Treaty talks – and sent Collins, a fellow leader in the 1916 Easter Rising, in his place - because he knew Britain would neither permit a republic nor independence for all 32 counties.

The year-long Irish Civil War, which followed the two-and-a-half-year Irish War of Independence rebellion, ended in May 1923 with victory for the Pro-Treaty forces.

It became the defining issue in Irish politics for decades, with Ireland almost unique among Western democracies in having almost no traditional left-right divide.

Collins’s Fine Gale (‘Tribe of the Irish’ in Gaelic) and DeValera’s Fianna Fáil (‘Warriors of Destiny’) remain the two main Irish parties.

Although Fine Gael now governs in a coalition with the much smaller Labour Party, it has been Fianna Fáil that has largely dominated the country’s politics.

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Since coming to power in 1932, De Valera, who served as Taoiseach – or PM – for 21 years and President for 14, has shaped Ireland more than anyone else.

The former rebel, who escaped the death penalty in 1916 due to his American birth, succeeded in pursuing his dream of bringing to life a distinctly Irish state with Gaelic and Catholicism at its core.

Among a minority of Irish speakers, he drafted a new constitution that gave Gaelic primacy over English in a bid to revive the dying native language.

While granting religious freedom, it also recognised the ‘special position’ of the Church and ensured that divorce, abortion and the sale of contraceptives were banned.

The constitution, which came into force in 1937 after being sent to the Vatican for approval, also abolished the controversial oath of allegiance to the crown.

After World War II - in which Ireland remained neutral – Eire, as the south is officially known, finally declared itself a republic, without British opposition.

Following decades of isolationism and social conservatism, Ireland has become increasingly cosmopolitan and largely moved on from its post-Civil War divisions, although Northern Ireland remains a contentious issue.

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De Valera correctly predicted in 1966: ‘In the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Michael Collins; and it will be recorded at my expense.’

Collins’s ideas were later credited with revitalising Ireland’s economy following the 1970s, while De Valera is increasingly viewed as a leader who held the country back.

And the successful 1996 movie Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson in the title role, went on to paint the slain revolutionary as a victim of his duplicitous former boss.