tom barry on michael collins

remington 700

i know that dan breen worshipped collins just wondering what did barry think of him

snafuk35

remington 700 wrote: »

i know that dan breen worshipped collins just wondering what did barry think of him

Barry claims to have seen the entire republican prisoner population of the prison he was held in at the time kneeling in prayer and saying the rosary after the death of their former commander.
Barry and other officers in Munster and the West fell out with GHQ. Barry had come up with audacious plans that had not been supported and while there was a shortage of arms and ammunition. Ernie O'Malley who sent down the country to train and communicate with regional commands was won over to the anti-Treaty side. Barry believed he could have continued fighting the British for years but Collins, Mulcahy and others in GHQ believed that they were weeks away from defeat.
Barry did not see eye to eye with Collins but he respected him greatly.

Prior to the capture of the major towns and the killing of Collins, there was a respect for either side.
Free State forces and Anti-Treaty forces in different regions were reluctant to fight eachother and treated the war as a joke despite their differences of view on the Treaty.
There are stories of sympathetic officers in the Free State Army allowing IRA men to slip away before leading their men to raid houses.
But after Collins died and certainly after guerilla war replaced conventional line fighting, a bitterness and hatred set it in.

If Collins had lived and he had agreed to the hardline policies of executions that Mulcahy and Cosgrave and Higgins implemented then Collins would have been as hated as all the rest of "murder government" were by Barry et al.

saffy27

remington 700 wrote: »

i know that dan breen worshipped collins just wondering what did barry think of him

I don't if you know this already but there is a great little clip of Dan Breen talking about Michael Collins on Youtube.

masti123

Major bump, but here's a wonderful clip of Tom talking about the death of Collins.

And here he is talking about the Anglo-Irish treaty.

Ascendant

In his memoirs, Barry described Collins as an “an outstanding figure” and “a great son of West Cork” - whether he thought that the time of the Civil War is another question.

He described, in the same book, meeting Collins in Dublin during the WoI - it's been a while since I read but I got the impression that the two didn't exactly mesh, with Collins playing the part of the irreverent joker who liked a pint or three with Barry being more reserved and serious.

Of course, that doesn't mean TB couldn't have still respected Collins as a soldier, as many anti-Treatyites did (albeit some, like Séumas Robinson and Cathal Brugha, didn't).

Collins had the good timing to die before things got really nasty, so he remained 'unblemished' in the eyes of many anti-Treatyites and republicans, something that could not be said for other Free State figures who survived, like Richard Mulcahy (who had to give up the chance of being of being Taoiseach in 1948 because the staunchly republican Clann na Poblachta refused to work with him).

Certainly, Liam Lynch never ceased respecting Collins even when the CW broke out and paid tribute to him when he heard of Collins' death.

That Collins as the great war hero died at the hands (so to speak) of his fellow West Corkmen was a thorny problem for many of them in the years to come - Todd Andrews thought the West Cork IRA suffered from a "sense of collective guilt" from the ambush. This article attempts to look at the reactions and written accounts of Liam Deasy, Florence O'Donoghue, Tom Barry and others of the infamous Bealnablath ambush:


Evasive Manoeuvres: An Examination of Florence O’Donoghue’s Account of the Death of Michael Collins