Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland is a clear-eyed biography of perhaps Ireland's most revered patriot written by journalist-turned-historian Tim Pat Coogan, who for 20 years was editor of the Irish Press. That national newspaper was started as a propaganda organ by Eamon de Valera, the first president of the Irish Free State, who considered Collins his arch-enemy for the hearts and minds of their fellow countrymen. (While interviewing participants and probing documents for this book, Coogan learned the depth of de Valera's dislike of his fellow freedom-fighter and determined to do an accurate story of "The Long Fellow" untainted by de Valera's own rewrites of the authorized biography. That book was reviewed in the last issue of The Shamrock News.) Coogan's father worked for Michael Collins, and the author had unprecedented access to historical accounts as he produced this definitive biography, a carefully researched and annotated book that was the basis for the movie Michael Collins. 

 It would seem that Michael Collins was too young to have done so much. He began forging a new history for Ireland - in a firestorm of words, gunfire, negotiations, bravado and sheer charm - at the age of 26. Within six years, when he was murdered in his home county of Cork as he sought to negotiate an end to the civil war, he had wrested Irish independence from the English overlords and ended hundreds of years of servitude. He rewrote the art of fighting, creating a new urban guerilla warfare out of necessity, because the British had far superior strength, weaponry and training. He bested the British at their own well-developed game of spies and informers, knowing the details of military orders and English maneuvers before they were delivered to their intended recipients. He inspired everyone with a nationalistic fervor, and earned the grudging admiration of his chief antagonists among the British government.

 He had brains and brawn, with an enormous energy and an even more enormous ability to go without sleep. Those attributes were essential to his work, for Michael Collins not only was a fighter and military tactician but a thinker, a planner who drew up many proposals to carry his country through conflict to peacetime self-sufficiency in finance, commerce, education and other areas. A banker by trade, Collins was a brilliant, driven man who gave his life single-mindedly to bringing freedom to his beloved homeland.

Collins traced his origins to the O'Coileain clan, once holders of Ui Chonaill, now called the Upper and Lower Connelloe in County Limerick. His stock included the 18th century poet Sean O'Coileain and generations of warriors celebrated in ancient writings. He did, however grow up as a member of the Duainaire, the dispossessed. His family was relatively off by Catholic standards but, like all of Ireland, was under the yoke of English oppression. His father, 75 when Michael was born, was a farmer, a member of the Irish National Brotherhood, which his son would one day lead. The elder Collins was a noted mathematician who spoke several languages - in a period when English penal law made it illegal for Irish children even to be taught to read. The elder Collins' teacher was his cousin, one of the secret "hedge" schoolmasters who had been a friend of the revered Wolfe Tone, who had coalesced the national yearning for an Irish Republic. His mother, punished as a child for voicing a preference about being Irish instead of English, learned Latin, Greek and a love of reading from another hedge schoolmaster. So Michael Collins' grounding in the importance of education, a fondness for Irish history and nationalist literature and the longing for freedom began early in life.

An athletic lad with a penchant for lively wrestling matches and flashes of anger or melancholy shadowing his usually sunny outlook, Collins was a born leader. He took eagerly to the revolutionary stories supplied in his youth; by age 12 he was devouring nationalist editorials and writing about an Irish Ireland. By the time he was 15, the West Cork youth was living with a sister in London, where, at age 18, he turned the Irish community on its ear by successfully banning the playing of English soccer by the Gaelic Athletic Association. 

At the time, he was carefully learning all about the world of finance and organizational affairs, of social and economic conditions, agriculture and both skilled and unskilled labor. He went from banking to stockbrokerage, the Board of Trade and a trust company, all calculated to provide him with tools he would need later. He was reading incessantly, absorbing the lessons offered by the theater, moving through Sinn Fein circles in England and growing ever more politically active, a mixture of maturity and youthful wildness. Tall, muscled, good-looking and successful at whatever he attempted, he was fast becoming the "Big Fella" who would lead his country toward independence.

He returned to Ireland to participate in the 1916 Easter rising. He was 26. From a first job with the IRB as financial advisor to one of the Rising's organizers, he plunged into the ill-fated fray and spent time in England's jails for his troubles, one of the "Republican Universities" where interned Irishmen fanned their revolutionary fires. He returned to help elect other prisoners to government offices, to draft the Irish Volunteer constitution, to be elected himself to a leadership post in Sinn Fein and the Volunteers, as a member of Dial Eirann, as the Irish Republican Army's leader. He was on his way to meet his destiny. 

The story of how he marched into the annals of Irish history in six short years - of his highly effective "flying columns" ... floating a national loan when the mere publicizing of it was banned ... of countryside attacks which saw farmers defeating the hated Black and Tans then returning to their fields... of the agony he suffered each time he had to order an enemy killed ... of far-sighted plans for future banking, shipping and agri-business efforts after the war ... the doomed independence negotiations with the English ... the civil war that he was so loath to join ... the bravado that may have helped hasten his death while on a mission to end the civil war... a petty de Valera refusing to allow a cross to mark Collins' grave for 17 years, and then banning any mourners except his brother when it was erected - all make for gripping reading in Coogan's book. 

How would Ireland be different today had Michael Collins lived to realize his potential? The author's assessment is a bittersweet look at many years wasted in the nation's development. "Ireland would have benefited enormously had he lived." ... "In the eye of the storm, [Collins] was able to take time to try to plot a course for his people and his country ... No potential area of development was left unconsidered," Coogan wrote. "Collins had political skills and powers of oratory of which the least that can be said is that he was better equipped than most men to make his dreams come true."