An Saorstát / The Free State

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SECOND EDITION AN SAORSTÁC THE IREL STATE No. 28. Vol. 1 DUBLIN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1922. PRICE TWOPENCE. MICHAEL COLLINS MEMORIAL NUMBER. How We can make Him Live. By EOIN MACNEILL. MICHAEL Collins was, is, and is destined to be a national hero. By instinct, a sure and wise instinct, the nation had known him its leader and champion. He then had known everything about him by knowledge that they thought about him by instinct, they would have given him the same place of honour. Men do not readily recognise the merit of those who are a generation of younger older than themselves. I am a guardian of a century older than Michael Collins, and I have had plenty of opportunity of seeing what was in the men of Ireland during my time. No enthusiasm about chiefs and leaders is likely to confuse my estimate at this day. I want to give testimony, the testimony of an older man, and is the greatest Irishman of our time. He was a country lad, and what we commonly and foolishly call education ended for him at the age of sixteen, and then he went into the world and among strangers, a country lad of sixteen, with capacity to back him but his own greater and nothing and the force that the character and tradition of our mother, Ireland, gives to those who are willing to take it. He had to educate himself. When I think of him as a did educator himself. I wander. I cannot start wondering what we are doing with some of himself and others and schools. So far as any ward and special help of education came to him, it came from the Irish-Ireland movement, even in a foreign capital, and his acquired powers ought to convince every doubter that Ireland's great source of strength is her national tradition. In 1915, when things were shaping to a crisis, I understood and took his course with characteristic decision. After his storm burst, he quietly took the helm, and his hand has been on his sine, and is on it still. Every men who came in contact with him knew that whatever position any other man might hold, Michael Collins was the nation's pilot. He was the pilot and he knew the course. He took the trouble to know it. He was so full of energy and action that they might think he could not give himself time to watch and learn, but nothing that could tell for Ireland's good or harm enscaped his attention. He took on departmental duties, and, as Minister of Finance, he appeared to do the work of a trained accountant as if he had nothing else to think about and as if nothing else mattered, but all the time he was in full touch with everything else. He was posed in the smallest degree as a hero, yet all around him knew that in every moment he was the bravest of the brave. He never struck the self-flattering attitude of an idealist, and yet nothing but the real fire of ideals could explain his lifes. There was a priority on his head, and all on his track. No desperado ever led such a hunted life, but he was never for a moment a desperado, and his course was as far as his measures a…