Fáilte — and welcome back to Irish Roots Weekly.

This week’s edition runs a little longer than usual — but for good reason. Few moments in Irish history have shaped our national story quite like the Treaty divide and the two men at its heart: Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera.

It also happens that this very week holds both their birthdays — de Valera on October 14th and Collins on October 16th — a fitting moment to look back on the friendship, the conflict, and the legacies that still ripple through the Ireland we know today.

To understand them fully requires more than headlines or hero worship. It asks us to sit with the tension, the triumph, and the tragedy that forged a nation — and to see, in their differences, the same devotion to Ireland’s destiny.

So, take a quiet moment to read deeply. The story ahead isn’t just history — it’s the heart of Ireland itself. 🇮🇪

Those words, spoken decades after Collins’s death, capture the entwined fates of Ireland’s two revolutionary titans. Collins and de Valera were comrades turned adversaries whose legacies have stirred debate for a century. Many now believe de Valera’s prophecy has come true: Collins is lionized as the gallant architect of freedom, while de Valera is remembered — less warmly — as the survivor who outlasted the age of heroes.

Yet any honest reckoning must resist simplicity. Both men carried Ireland’s future within them — Collins with his bright urgency, de Valera with his unyielding endurance. They were two halves of one national soul, divided not by love of country but by the question of how to save it.

They began as brothers in the cause. During the War of Independence, Collins and de Valera worked in tandem: one in the field, one in diplomacy. Collins built an invisible war — a web of spies, safe houses, and swift reprisals — while de Valera, in America, sought recognition for a Republic that did not yet exist.

Collins also helped plan de Valera’s daring 1919 escape from Lincoln Prison with Harry Boland — proof of how closely bound their early efforts were. But by 1921, victory demanded compromise, and compromise in revolutions is its own battlefield.

In December 1921, the Irish delegation signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London. It granted Ireland self-government as a Free State within the British Commonwealth, required an oath to the Free State and fidelity to the King, and confirmed a partition already legislated in 1920, allowing Northern Ireland to opt out — which it did.

Collins signed, knowing the cost. “Think — what have I got for Ireland? Something she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain?” he said wearily. He later confessed he had signed his “death warrant.”

De Valera, who had sent plenipotentiaries to London, refused to endorse the agreement. The Republic had been compromised, he argued — freedom half-earned was no freedom at all.

The Dáil Éireann ratified the Treaty 64 to 57. The IRA split. And soon Ireland itself would split — into fire and sorrow.

The Civil War that followed was Ireland’s deepest wound: brothers turning rifles on one another in the name of the same dream.

On 22 August 1922, Michael Collins was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, aged 31. His death froze him in time — forever young, forever right. De Valera was left with the burden of survival: to rebuild a fractured country in which even victory felt like loss.

Whispers later accused de Valera of complicity. They were unfounded. Historians have found no evidence he plotted Collins’s death — only the blind cruelty of civil war.

De Valera’s quiet line — that Collins’s greatness would be recorded at his expense — reads not as bitterness but as recognition. He understood the cost of leadership, and the loneliness of being right too soon or wrong for too long.

Decades later, Michael Collins (1996) returned the story to the screen, with Liam Neeson’s portrayal rekindling the myth of the “Big Fella.” Yet every legend casts a shadow, and de Valera’s was made colder by the film’s dramatic lens — a choice scholars still debate.

But myths, like revolutions, simplify what they cannot bear. The truth is quieter and more tragic: both men believed themselves to be saving Ireland, and both were right — in their own time, in their own way.

Collins’s life ended at dawn; de Valera’s stretched to dusk. One became myth, the other became memory.

De Valera went on to found Fianna Fáil, draft the 1937 Constitution, and steer Ireland through neutrality and hardship alike. Longevity brought scrutiny — moral austerity, deep Catholic conservatism, and the isolation of age.

Collins, meanwhile, remained the Ireland of possibility: the leader who might have been, the promise that history preserved in amber.

And in the fullness of time, Collins became the people’s hero; de Valera, the nation’s architect — revered, if not always loved.

Yet the measure of a people is not whom they mourn, but whom they forgive. Modern Ireland, with its calm maturity, has learned to hold both men without bitterness.

On the centenary of Collins’s death in 2022, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar — leaders of the parties once divided by the Treaty — stood together at Béal na Bláth. The gesture acknowledged that Ireland’s future no longer rests on old divisions, and that both men deserve honour, not opposition.

De Valera’s words linger like a benediction:
“It will be recorded at my expense.”

Yet in truth, both paid dearly. Collins gave his life for Ireland’s freedom; de Valera gave his life to its keeping. And history, at last, has room for both.

There are moments in history when two opposing truths can both be right — and both break your heart.

Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera stand as Ireland’s eternal mirror: one radiant, one enduring; one the spark, one the steady flame.

Freedom, it seems, requires both — the dreamer who leaps, and the guardian who endures.

Step back into Ireland’s fading age of music and memory with our latest feature on Patrick Byrne — the last great wire-strung harper of Ireland. His story echoes the final notes of a vanished tradition and the spirit of a people who carried their history in song.

Before Ireland had a tricolour, there was another — the golden harp on green. Raised by rebels, carried by emigrants, and remembered by generations, it told of courage, exile, and belonging. This week, we trace the journey of Ireland’s earlier banner — the flag that sang of freedom long before independence. ☘️

Before black cats prowled Halloween tales, they guarded Irish hearths, courts, and myths. From Brehon Law to sacred caves, cats held a place of honour — part hunter, part spirit, part judge. Step into a world where Ireland’s earliest laws meowed with meaning. 🐾

🎁 Your Irish Roots Gift 🎁
Use code IRISHROOTS10 at checkout
and enjoy 10% off your first order.

_{A small thank you for subscribing — valid across all our Irish knitwear, jewelry, and heritage gifts}