Michael Collins/Bio & Battles

"Give us the future, we've had enough of your past. Give us back our country, to live in, to grow in, to love."

- Michael Collins

Michael Collins was an Irish revolutionary leader, Minister for Finance and Teachta Dála (TD) for Cork South in the First Dáil of 1919, Director of Intelligence for the IRA, and member of the Irish delegation during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. Subsequently, he was both Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-chief of the National Army.

Throughout this time, at least as of 1919, he was also President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and, therefore, under the bylaws of the Brotherhood, President of the Irish Republic. Collins was shot and killed in August 1922, during the Irish Civil War.

Although most Irish political parties recognize his contribution to the foundation of the modern Irish state, supporters of Fine Gael hold his memory in particular esteem, regarding him as their movement's founding father, through his link to their precursor Cumann na nGaedheal.

Michael Collins first became known during the Easter Rising in 1916. A skilled organiser of considerable intelligence, he was highly respected in the IRB, so much that he was made financial advisor to Count Plunkett, father of one of the Rising's organizers, Joseph Mary Plunkett, whose aide-de-camp Collins later became. When the Rising itself took place on Easter Monday 1916, he fought alongside Patrick Pearse and others in the General Post Office in Dublin. The Rising became a military disaster. While some celebrated the fact that a rising had happened at all, believing in Pearse's theory of "blood sacrifice", Collins railed against it, notably the seizure of indefensible and very vulnerable positions such as St Stephen's Green that were impossible to escape from and difficult to supply.

Collins, like many of the other participants, was arrested, almost executed and was imprisoned at Frongoch internment camp. Collins became one of the leading figures in the post-rising Sinn Féin, a small nationalist party which the British government and the Irish media wrongly blamed for the Rising. It was quickly infiltrated by participants in the Rising, so as to capitalise on the "notoriety" the movement had gained through British attacks. By October 1917, Collins had risen to become a member of the executive of Sinn Féin and director of organisation of the Irish Volunteers; Éamon de Valera was president of both organizations.