Michael Collins And The Anglo Irish War

How the British Secret Service failed to neutralize Sinn Fein and the IRA

As leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Michael Collins developed a bold, new strategy to use against the British administration of Ireland in the early twentieth century. His goal was to attack its well-established system of spies and informers, wear down British forces with a sustained guerrilla campaign, and force a political settlement that would lead to a free Irish Republic. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War reveals that the success of the Irish insurgency was not just a measure of Collins’s revolutionary genius, as has often been claimed. British miscalculations, overconfidence, and a failure to mount a sustained professional intelligence effort to neutralize the IRA contributed to Britain’s defeat. Although Britain possessed the world’s most professional secret service, the British intelligence community underwent a politically driven and ill-advised reorganization in early 1919, at the very moment that Collins and the IRA were going on the offensive. Once Collins neutralized the local colonial spy service, the British had no choice but to import professional secret service agents. But Britain’s wholesale reorganization of its domestic counterintelligence capability sidelined its most effective countersubversive agency, MI5, leaving the job of intelligence management in Ireland to Special Branch civilians and a contingent of quickly trained army case officers, neither group being equipped—or inclined—to mount a coordinated intelligence effort against the insurgents. Britain’s appointment of a national intelligence director for home affairs in 1919—just as the Irish revolutionary parliament published its Declaration of Independence—was the decisive factor leading to Britain’s disarray against the IRA. By the time the War Office reorganized its intelligence effort against Collins in mid-1920, it was too late to reverse the ascendancy of the IRA. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War takes a fresh approach to the subject, presenting it as a case study in intelligence management under conditions of a broader counterinsurgency campaign. The lessons learned from this disastrous episode have stark relevance for contemporary national security managers and warfighters currently engaged in the war on terrorism.

"The Irish War of Independence, January 1919 to July 1921, constituted the final stages of the Irish revolution. It went hand in hand with the collapse of British administration in Ireland. The military conflict consisted of sporadic, localised but vicious guerrilla fighting that was paralleled by the efforts of the Dail Government to achieve an independent Irish Republic and the partitioning of the country by the Government of Ireland Act."--Book jacket.

Michael Collins is often thought of as Ireland's lost leader: a man born into a revolutionary environment who became a skilled statesman and military leader. This book looks in at Collins' key role in the Anglo Irish War using primary sources which have not previously been available.

Collins became the first commander-in-chief of the Irish Army while still in his twenties. This book--published to coincide with the release of the film The Big Fellow, based on Collins' life, starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts--contains 30 of Collins' articles and speeches in which he evaluates Ireland's heritage and charts its future.

An evaluation of the contribution made by Michael Collins to the making of the Irish state. A series of specially commissioned essays, written by some of Ireland's leading historians (academic and popular), on the contribution made by Michael Collins to the making of the Irish state. This is a professional evaluation of Michael Collins which brings to light his multi-faceted and complex character. The contributors examine Collins as Minister for Finance, his role in intelligence, his policy towards the north, his career as Commander-in-Chief, the origins of the Civil War, his relationship w.

When the Irish nationalist Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he observed to Lord Birkenhead that he may have signed his own death warrant. In August 1922 that prophecy came true when Collins was ambushed, shot and killed by a compatriot, but his vision and legacy lived on. Tim Pat Coogan's biography presents the life of a man whose idealistic vigor and determination were matched by his political realism and organizational abilities. This is the classic biography of the man who created modern Ireland.