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These monthly journeys to and from Cork turned Michael’s soul to iron. In the very year that Pat and Tom were convicted, an association demanding the Three Fs — Fair rent, Free sale and Fixity of tenure — was formed with the avowed intention of extinguishing landlordism altogether. Out of this association would evolve the Land League in 1879 which would eventually achieve these aims, but along the way there would be constant heartache and numerous setbacks as the Land Leaguers battled against the vested interests of the landowning classes. In the end, it would take a worldwide depression in agriculture combined with three wretched harvests in a row (1877—79) before the Westminster parliament passed the great Land Act of 1881. The youngest of the Collins brothers chafed at the seeming lack of progress towards justice for the tenantry and sought other solutions.

Michael Collins was a fervent admirer of a Rosscarbery man, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who tried to give fresh impetus to Irish nationalism by founding the Phoenix National and Literary Society. The authorities viewed this as yet another subversive organisation and, in the wake of the 1848 uprising, it was suppressed.

The Phoenix was reborn, however, a decade later. On St Patrick’s Day 1858, James Stephens, John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny founded a secret society known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B), recruiting former Phoenix members with the help of money raised in America from survivors of the 1848 rising. In America the movement came to be known as the Fenians (after the heroic Fianna of Irish mythology) but in Ireland itself it was usually known by its initials. Despite being condemned by the Catholic Church as a secret society whose members were bound by oath, the IRB grew steadily, though its achievements were quixotic rather than real — an abortive invasion of Canada (1867), the rescue of political prisoners from a convict settlement in Western Australia (1876) and the invention of the submarine (1881), designed by John Holland to bring down the mighty Royal Navy.

What role, if any, Michael John Collins played in this secret brotherhood is unknown. By 1875, at the age of sixty, the youngest of the four brothers took a bride forty years his junior. Mary Anne seems to have provided a much -needed woman’s touch to the spartan bachelor farmhouse. Michael now had a warm house and a woman to love. Early in 1877 their first child, Margaret, was born, to be followed at more or less eighteen-month intervals by John (Johnny), Johanna (Hannie), Mary, Helena, Patrick and Kathleen (Katie). The children’s names were chosen according to the strict formula of the period: Margaret was named in honour of Michael John’s mother; Johanna after Mary Anne’s mother, and the third daughter after Mary Anne herself. Similarly; John was named after Michael’s father, Patrick after his uncle, and the third son, the last of the eight children, would be named Michael, after his father.

Raising a family in old age must have left Michael John little time for politics. The I880s were a decade in which the Invincibles of the IRB turned to more extreme action: the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and his assistant Thomas Burke in Dublin’s Phoenix Park on 6 May 1882, was the prelude to a bombing campaign in the heart of the enemy s capital which began the following year and climaxed on 24 January 1885 with the simultaneous dynamiting of the House of Commons, the Tower of London and Vkstminster Hall. The explosions had little effect, however, and the IRB soon sank back into lethargy. The limited attainment of political objectives, mainly through the Land League founded by Michael Davitt in 1879, and the Home Rule party led by Charles Stuart Parnell, seemed to promise independence gradually by constitutional means, although it tended to polarise Ireland along sectarian lines. By 1890 the collaboration between the Liberal party led by Gladstone and the Home Rule party seemed about to bear fruit, when it was destroyed by a divorce. When Captain 0’ Shea, an Irish MP divorced his wife Kitty and cited Parnell as co-respondent, the Catholic hierarchy called for the latter’s resignation. Parnell refused and his party was violently split down the middle.

Charles Stewart Parnell

The O'Shea—Parnell scandal was coming to a head when Mary Anne was far advanced in her eighth and last pregnancy, complicated by a bad fall in which she saved the baby she was carrying but broke her ankle. The fracture was inexpertly set, leaving her with a bad limp for the rest of her days, hut she struggled on with her chores. One autumn evening she milked her cows as usual, then did a large baking and attended to other household duties before retiring to her bed where, early on the morning of Thursday, 16 October, she gave birth to her third son. Later that day, Father Peter Hill having been summoned from Rosscarbery, the newborn infant was solemnly baptised. The parish register shows that he was christened Michael, although he went through a phase in childhood where he assumed a middle name, James (after his mother’s father), and sometimes signed his name ‘M.J. Collins’, but he dropped this affectation as he got older

Mary Anne was only thirty-five, but three years had elapsed since Katie had been born. The baby’s father was now seventy-five, but his powers, both physical and intellectual, were undiminished by the passing of the years, and he would retain the appearance and vigour of a man half his age right up until his death in March 1897. The baby who bore his name became the favourite child of Michael’s last years. Young Michael, in turn, was very close to his elderly father and when he was very young would accompany him everywhere and in his own childish way try to help about the farm.

The young Michael Collins with his mother Mary Anne, his Grandmother, Sister and brother Johnie

Life at Woodfield in the 1890s must have been idyllic. Mary Anne doted on her youngest, and the boy’s sisters adored him unreservedly; ‘We thought he had been invented for our special edification,’ commented Hannie Collins many years later. Little Michael grew up in a close, loving environment. It would not have been surprising had all this love and attention turned his head, but he seems to have gained the positive benefit of self-assurance without the negative quality of becoming self-centred. His earliest memories were of his parents and his sisters, of cuddling up to his mother as she milked the cows and softly crooned the Irish ballads which she had learned from her grandmother. It was Michael’s earliest exposure to the Irish language; years later he would regret that he had not had the opportunity to speak it as a native.

Old Michael John appears to have been a rather austere, forbidding figure, awkward and reserved with his older children; but young Michael’s perception of him was quite different. In extreme old age Michael opened out to his last-born, whom he regaled with the myths and legends of old, as well as exciting deeds and tragic tales from Ireland’s history.

Running like a golden thread through this oral education was the rank injustice of the antiquated system of landholding. Some day this must be put right, and the land restored to the people who actually tilled the soil. In fact, the Land Purchase Act of 1885 made it practicable for tenants to buy their farms. The landlord would receive eighteen times the annual rental from the government, and the tenant would repay this sum over forty-nine years. Later legislation would accelerate the process by providing generous bonuses (up to an eighth of the purchase price). Taking advantage of this concession Johnny Collins would eventually undertake the purchase of Woodfield in 1903. By 1921, two-thirds of the land in Ireland had passed from the old landowning class to the tenantry under voluntary transactions of this kind, and one of the first acts of the Free State administration was to complete the process.

Although the worst excesses and injustice of the old land system had been mitigated by the time Michael was a little boy, the collective folk memory was sharply etched with bitter memories. As late as 1886, when Johnny was nine, he had been the tenor-stricken witness of an eviction, watching the local stalwarts of the Royal Irish Constabulary manhandling the tall gallows contraption used to batter down the mud walls of a cotter’s cabin before the thatch was torched, as the evicted family huddled shivering on a frozen November afternoon and watched their house go up in flames. Johnny never forgot the look of sullen, impotent rage on the face of the cotter. Shortly before Michael was born, an old man was forcibly evicted as he lay on his deathbed. On that occasion one of his sons was goaded into attacking the land-agent with a pitchfork, putting a tine through the man’s eye. What became of the assailant ts not recorded, but apparently there were no evictions in that area thereafter.

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