Buttons in Collins’s pocket sell for €5k

A set of buttons found in Michael Collins’s pocket the day he died at Béal na Bláth have sold at auction for more than €5,000.

The nine buttons were bought for a hammer price of €4,250 before fees amid huge interest from collectors, historical groups and others. Auctioneer George F Mealy said there was huge interest in the item on Tuesday, with absentee bids and others in the room taking the price well above the pre-auction estimate of €1,500 to €2,000. The brass army uniform buttons, marked IV for Irish Volunteers, came from a collection of material once owned by Gen Eoin O’Duffy and were accompanied by a 1933 note from Collins’s sister, Margaret Collins Powell: “Please send me a receipt for the enclosed found in Michael’s tunic pocket, August 22nd 1922”.

“It would have been lovely to see them repatriated to Cork, where we had a lot of interest from. The person who bought them is delighted and has quite a large collection of Collins material, so they are in safe hands,” said Mr Mealy.

It was one of the top lots at Tuesday’s sale by Fonsie Mealy auctioneers of a range of historical, literary, and sporting items.

From the same O’Duffy archive, discovered in a basement by the daughter of an intended biographer of the general, was an even more prized relic of the early years of the Irish state. The series of 1927 letters from Lady Lavery to Eoin O’Duffy reveals her grief at the murder of Kevin O’Higgins, with whom it only emerged in recent years she had been having an affair.

In one letter, she wrote about how “... the black emptiness of left engulfs me again”, and in another, “I am so miserable and alone”.

The hammer went down on the letters at €5,000, with speculation in the Dublin hotel where the auction was held that the successful phone bidder may be a relative of one of the parties involved.

Another lot with Cork interest was withdrawn ahead of the auction. A 1940s book issued to a Det Garda Madigan in the city had a pre-sale estimate of €400 to €600, and featured more than 200 mugshots of known criminals of the time.

Other top lots included the extensive archive of Waterford-born journalist and publisher Edmund Downey, bought for €12,000 by the National Library of Ireland. A collector of arts and crafts materials paid €9,000, plus fees, for a Celtic design box in brass, bronze, copper, marbles and semi-precious stones, in which a Freedom of the City scroll was presented in 1910 to Dublin’s chief medical officer Sir Charles Cameron.

A 21-page essay handwritten around 1913 by Pádraig Pearse made €5,500 and numerous GAA medals did very well, including the €4,200 hammer price on an All-Ireland Football medal for the 1905 championship won by the Roseberry club of Kildare.