Michael Collins: Love, hate, and the Big Fellow’s public image

On the 125th anniversary of Michael Collins’s birth, Ryle Dwyer examines how attitudes to him have fluctuated through the decades, including a period when he was almost forgotten

WHEN Michael Collins was killed in 1922, there was considerable anguish and national mourning, while his nemesis Éamon de Valera was widely reviled.

But growing up in Tralee, Co Kerry, during the 1950s and early 1960s I never remember hearing the name of Michael Collins mentioned in school. It was as if he had been written out of history.