A century on and mystery still remains over who fired shot that killed Michael Collins

In early August 1922 the captured diary of an anti-Treaty IRA officer recorded that Michael Collins had tried to initiate a dialogue with his political and military opponents to bring the Irish Civil War to a swift close.

Collins apparently believed that he and ‘the three Toms’ (Tom Malone, Tom Barry and Tom Hales) could succeed where others had failed. Collins had visited Tom Malone in Maryborough jail and may have been visiting Co Cork to meet the other two IRA leaders. However, a degree of scepticism is appropriate because George Bernard Shaw had met Collins a few days before his death and found him in an aggressive and unforgiving mood.

Co Cork was both Michael Collins’ native county and home to some of the most implacable anti-Treaty sentiment.

Collins’ decision to visit the county provoked a heated exchange with Joe McGrath, a close ally, fellow IRB man and his director of intelligence, who told him that it was ‘crazy’ to go there. Joe Sweeney told Collins he was a ‘fool’. Collins replied: ‘Ah, whatever happens, my fellow countrymen won’t kill me.’

Collins was killed at Beal na mBlath (‘The Mouth of the Flowers’) when his convoy was returning to Cork city from Mallow at about 7.15pm on the evening of August 22 1922. He had passed the same way earlier that morning and IRA irregulars were waiting for him to return the same way. (It was a serious error of judgment to travel the same road on both the outward and return journeys.)

At dusk, the IRA irregulars were about to retire for the night when the convoy returned.

When the ambush began, Collins, disregarding the advice of his aide-de-camp Emmet Dalton to drive on, ordered his men to return fire. Collins was firing from behind an armoured car but, when he unwisely ventured out into the centre of the road, he was hit by a single gunshot to the head. He died instantly. Collins was the only fatality arising from the ambush.

In February 2021 Dr Gillian O’Brien of John Moores University in Liverpool explained: ‘In the past, I’ve done quite a lot of work researching him [Collins]. I was down in west Cork and in one day I heard nine different stories about his death – and every single person was adamant they had the right story.’

Canon Cohalan of Bandon preached a sermon in which he asked: ‘The day Michael Collins was killed where was de Valera? Ask the people of Beal na mBlath and they will tell you. There was a scowling face at a window looking out over that lonely valley and de Valera could tell who it was.’

As Tim Pat Coogan points out in his biography of Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera had spent the night in a farmhouse about two miles from Beal na mBlath.

De Valera’s close physical proximity to the scene is not the same as proof. It may even have been pure coincidence, but it gives rise to suspicion.

It is very difficult to eradicate from one’s mind that colourful assessment dating from late 1921, attributed to Kevin O’Higgins by Ernest Blythe, ‘that crooked Spanish bastard [de Valera] will get the better of that pasty faced blasphemous f***** from Cork [Collins].’

Throughout his political career de Valera was accused by his enemies of being responsible for the death of the man who organised his escape from Lincoln Jail in February 1919.

Apart from de Valera, responsibility for what happened at Beal na mBlath has been laid at the door of the (British) Secret Service, a republican double agent in Collins’ entourage and Collins’ cabinet colleagues, but without serious or credible evidence. Tom Hales, one of ‘the three Toms’ in whom Collins had placed his faith, was one of the ambush party.

The man widely credited with firing the fatal shot was Denis ‘Sonny’ O’Neill, a native of west Cork, because in 1980 former IRA intelligence officer Eamonn de Barra suggested in ‘Shadow of Beal na Blath [sic]’, an RTÉ documentary, that O’Neill had ‘accidentally’ killed Collins while firing ‘a warning shot’. Why it should be regarded as ‘a warning shot’ is a mystery.

O’Neill had served in the RIC and in the South Irish Horse during the Great War and is alleged to have been a trained marksman. He joined the IRA in 1918.

According to the Military Service Pensions Archive, O’Neill was present at Beal na mBlath on August 22, but he did not claim responsibility for firing the fatal shot. Nor was he asked.

German archives record that O’Neill had a severe injury to his right arm when he was repatriated in 1918. British archives reveal that he had a 40% disability in his right arm. This was sufficient for the RIC to reject his application to rejoin after the war.

Paddy Cullivan, an art historian who has taken a very close interest in O’Neill’s alleged role in the death of Collins, claims on this basis, perhaps fancifully rather than with mathematical accuracy, that the likelihood of a disabled man like O’Neill successfully shooting Collins with a single shot to the head was like ‘winning the Euromillions lottery twice in the same week’. Furthermore, Cullivan is sceptical that O’Neill was a marksman, insisting that his area of expertise was with horses.

Realistically, the truth will probably never be known.

Collins defended the Anglo-Irish Treaty as ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’. De Valera repudiated that proposition and plunged the south into a vicious civil war but in the 1930s demonstrated the validity of Collins’ analysis by systematically dismantling the treaty.

Throughout his long career, de Valera rarely, if ever, missed an opportunity to denigrate Collins or belittle his legacy.

In turning down an invitation to become a patron of the Michael Collins Foundation, de Valera effectively explained why: ‘It’s my considered opinion that in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Michael Collins and it will be recorded at my expense.’