All’s fair in love and war

Friends Michael Collins and Harry Boland fought on opposite sides in the Civil War. They also wooed the same woman, says Richard Fitzpatrick

MICHAEL Collins’s assassination, 90 years ago today, ended the most celebrated love triangle in Irish history. Three weeks earlier, on Aug 2, 1922, Collins’s friend, Harry Boland, who had fought on the opposite side in the Civil War, was killed in a hotel in Skerries, resisting arrest.

Both men had been in love with Kitty Kiernan, whose family ran the Greville Arms Hotel, which is still open, in Granard, Co Longford. Boland pleaded with her to marry him, but Collins, in a bizarre exchange in Dáil Éireann during the fractious Treaty debates in Jan 1922, announced he was engaged to her.