“‘Bring me into the spotlight of a London conference’: Michael Collins from Truce to Treaty”

A famously reluctant member of the Irish delegation which negotiated a peace settlement with the British government in autumn 1921, Michael Collins seemed best placed to convince many of those committed to the republic to accept the inevitable compromises. The measure of his success or betrayal, depending on your point of view, often flowed from this ambiguous bind.

While the reasons that took Collins to London are many, by going, he became the focal point of a new and intense type of attention. Using the stories and press reports that circulated about him during the negotiations, Dr Anne Dolan and Dr Will Murphy will consider in this lecture, the nature and consequences of this focus upon Collins. How did it shape the negotiations? Did it help or hinder Collins? Did that ‘spotlight’ expose as he feared, ‘the common clay of which I am made’?

Programmed as part of the Dublin Festival of History, this event is co-hosted by the National Archives and the National Library of Ireland, 23 September 2021.

Speakers
Anne Dolan is Associate Professor in Modern Irish History in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 and with Cormac KH O’Malley, editor of ‘No surrender here!’ The Civil War Papers of Ernie O’Malley. Her research focuses on the history of violence in the revolutionary period and the social and cultural history of inter-war Ireland.

William Murphy is Associate Professor at the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University. He is the author of Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912–1921 (2014) and co-editor of Leisure and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (2016) and The Gaelic Athletic Association, 1884–2009 (2009).

They are joint authors of Michael Collins: The Man and the Revolution.

Moderator
David McCullagh is an RTÉ journalist and a presenter of the Six-One News. He is the author of The Reluctant Taoiseach, a biography of John A Costello, A Makeshift Majority, a history of the first Inter-Party Government and a two-volume biography of Éamon de Valera, Volume I: Rise and Volume II: Rule.