A 1937 Mercedes-Benz 170V Cabriolet B saloon that was once registered to Dr Eduard Hempel, Nazi Germany’s ambassador to Ireland during World War II, is set to be sold at auction in County Cork later this month. The car, fully refurbished in 1988 and 1989 and kept in storage ever since, will be offered by Marshs Auctioneers at the Ramble Inn in Ballinhassig on August 29, as part of a wider sale of vintage motors on behalf of Alan and Mary Barry, who are retiring.

Hempel was appointed to Dublin by Adolf Hitler in 1937 and remained in the post until the war’s end in 1945, even after he was pressured to join the Nazi Party in 1938. This was because Ireland remained neutral throughout the war; Germany’s diplomatic mission in Dublin retained its formal accreditation, allowing Hempel to keep his post while the rest of Europe burned.

The German legation on Northumberland Road in Dublin became a hub for intelligence gathering and communication during the war years, though Irish counterintelligence kept close tabs on its activities, limiting its ultimately effectiveness.

The ambassador’s tenure in Dublin is remembered above all for one extraordinary moment. In 1945, on hearing of Hitler’s death, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera made the controversial decision to travel to Hempel’s home on Sloperton Road, in Dún Laoghaire, to offer the condolences of the Irish state, a gesture that drew sharp criticism abroad and remains a subject of historical debate to this day.

Once the war ended, Hempel and his family were not sent home immediately. Instead, they were granted asylum in Ireland and lived here until 1950, when they returned to Germany, where Hempel went on to help establish the diplomatic service of the newly formed Federal Republic.

The Mercedes itself, a 170V model with the elegant cabriolet body style, was among the most popular cars Mercedes-Benz produced in the years before the war. It represents a design era prized by collectors.

The car is just one highlight in a packed sale of 333 lots at Marshs, which also includes a threshing mill, an 8-ton excavator, an antique yard crane, vintage enamel wall signs, and pieces of everyday Irish history like famine pots and a Victorian brass cash register. Two early works by the celebrated Riverstick, County Cork furniture maker Joseph Walsh, whose pieces hang in the National Gallery of Ireland and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, are also expected to draw strong interest.

Viewing for the sale takes place at the Ballinhassig venue on August 26, 27 and 28, ahead of the live and online auction, which begins at 11 a.m. on Saturday, August 29.

On August 19, 1876, the Catalpa rescue reached a conclusion as the whaling ship docked in New York Harbor, having successfully carried six Fenian revolutionaries from a penal colony in Australia. 

It began with a letter. In 1873, John Devoy, the famed Irish rebel leader and exile, received a smuggled communication in his New York office from the former Fenian James Wilson, who was imprisoned with other Irish political prisoners half a world away, in the dreaded Fremantle penal colony in Western Australia.

“What a death is staring us in the face,” wrote Wilson, “the death of a felon in a British dungeon, and a grave amongst Britain’s ruffians. I am not ashamed to speak the truth: it is a disgrace to have us in prison today.

“A little money judiciously expended would release every man that is now in West Australia. Think that we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest and that it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon us. One or the other must give way.”

To underline this message, Wilson added, “Remember this is a voice from the tomb. For is this not a living tomb? In the tomb, it is only a man’s body that is good for worms, but in this living tomb the cankerworm of care enters the very soul.”

Wilson’s powerful words moved Devoy, and he immediately resolved to help him. As a journalist for The New York Herald and an active member of Clan na Gael, Devoy was singularly well placed to take action on Wilson’s behalf.

At the very time Devoy received the secret letter, the fight for Irish independence had reached a low point. But in reading Wilson’s entreaty, Devoy realized that here was an unfettered cry from the heart, a cry that had the power to move all who heard it.

It was also, Devoy realized, a bracingly political speech that had the power to boost morale and to bring the fight for Irish independence back into focus.

In Ireland, in the early 1860s, James Wilson joined the 5th Dragoon Guards (British Army). But in secret he also became a Fenian, taking an oath to obey his leaders and to do his utmost to secure a democratic, independent Irish Republic.

To that end, he deserted with conspirator Martin Hogan in November 1865 after they had secretly enrolled many other Irish soldiers in the organization. But then, as so often in Irish history, local informers gave away the details of renewed Fenian activities to the British forces, and Wilson was quickly arrested.

He was court-martialed in Dublin on February 10, 1866, where he was found guilty of mutinous conduct and received a sentence of death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment in Fremantle Prison.

It was, in a real sense, a kind of death in life. Wilson was placed aboard the Hougomont, bound for Fremantle, with the other Fenian prisoners. When they arrived in Australia, on the advice of the Catholic chaplain, civilian Fenians were allowed to work together away from the other convicts, but a special contempt for British military deserters like Wilson was expressed by dispersing them among convicts, much to their disgust.

Years passed, and by 1869, more than half the Fenian convicts were granted royal pardons, but not a single ex-British soldier was among them. The Duke of Cambridge, it was rumored, had prevented Prime Minister Gladstone from showing them a shred of clemency.

It soon became obvious to Wilson and the others who remained that they would never receive a pardon. The only choice was to serve out their terms or escape.

For Wilson, the choice was clear. He wrote his secret letter requesting help immediately.

Although it would take a year to come, help arrived in the shape of the Catalpa, an American whaling ship hired by Devoy from secret donations made by Irish independence organizations across the United States. Amazingly, informers did not foil the daring rescue plan, and the ship reached Australia without mishap.

Fremantle was—and still is—an imposing prison. Situated in hostile terrain, there was very little opportunity for escape because on one side there were hundreds of miles of inhospitable (and deadly) desert and a shark-infested ocean on the other. The British guards weren’t worried about people running away, assuming escape was impossible.

The rescuers rowed to shore to collect the six waiting Irish convicts who had left their posts while working outside the secured area. Their Irish rescuers were waiting with wagons and weapons. But like all good rescue dramas, complications cloud their flight. When the freed prisoners began to row back to the Catalpa, a sudden, unexpected storm meant they could not reach the ship for another day, by which time the alarm had been raised, and British police ships launched.

The British commandeered a gunboat called the Georgette, which they pulled alongside the Catalpa, requesting that the prisoners be handed over. Captain Anthony, the ship’s celebrated American captain, defiantly refused this request and raised the American flag, warning his pursuers that the Catalpa was in international waters and could not be boarded.

If they fired on the Catalpa, they would be firing on the U.S. This parry enraged the British captain of the Georgette, who conceded reluctantly.

Eventually, the Georgette was forced to give up the chase, although all on board were convinced they had seen the missing men. Shortly after, as John Devoy predicted, the Catalpa rescue bolstered Irish morale across the globe and spurred the fight for Irish independence, which was finally won in 1922.

Devoy lived long enough to see that lifelong ambition realized and, half a century after being exiled himself, he returned to the country he had fought so hard to free.

* Originally published in Aug 2016. Updated in 2026.

Editor’s Note: In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic sunk having struck an iceberg while en route to New York. Those icy waters claimed the lives of 1,517 people. On April 11 the White Star Line ship stopped on Queenstown (now Cobh), in County Cork, to pick up passengers. This is the tale of one woman who had planned to board the ship. 

The incredible good luck of a woman who should have perished on the Titanic on April 15, 1912, and instead went on to start a new life in the New World.

My image of my grandmother, Margaret Boyle nee Martin, was an old lady with her dark, fine hair scraped back in a bun. A widow for many years, she dressed in the regulation black and white of her generation, with the occasional navy blue thrown in as a nod to high days and holidays.

When we stayed at the family farm outside Milltown, Co. Galway in the 1960s and 1970s, she wore workman-like black boots and I’d stare at them thinking that back in Yorkshire, my home city, I didn’t know any women who wore such footwear.

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Margaret Martin, from left, with her sister Celia (Noone). Back row, from left, her brother Jim Martin, Delia (McHugh) Martin and husband Pat, Owen Martin

Life halted at 6 pm in her bungalow as Irish TV played the Angelus – the prayer of devotion traditionally recited in devout Catholic households three times a day. My grandmother stopped whatever she was doing, sat in her high-backed wooden kitchen chair and prayed. Then the TV would be switched off – and covered with a tea towel while we ate.

At nighttime, I’d quietly watch her silhouette as she knelt at her bedside to pray before she got into bed with me.

Her careworn face was lined and tanned – undoubtedly from years of running the farm, raising her seven children, caring for a disabled husband and tending the orphaned seven children on the neighboring farm.

But though the top of her back was stooped as age took hold, her blue eyes always had a twinkle in them.

Today, her story would probably register as shocking. Back then, and in the harsh times of life in the first half of the 1900s, it was undoubtedly one replicated in all of Ireland’s counties.

Indeed, many readers whose family hailed from other native shores will tell similar tales.

Occasionally, it would be mentioned that my grandmother had been to America as a young woman. And more shockingly, she had been due to sail on the Titanic, joining the hundreds with a third-class ticket hoping it would transport them to a better life across the Atlantic.

It was a story I never, regrettably, asked her about. But it is said that on the April 15 anniversary of the ship’s sinking, she would never talk about it and would feel ill.

I have spent years researching my family tree – long before the Internet was in mass use – and my doggedness helped me get quite far back on my mother’s Mayo-based Costello, Leitrim-rooted McPartland, and Wicklow Keegans lineage.

It’s only in the last three years that I have tackled the Boyle and Martin (my paternal grandmother’s maiden name) side.

But as I gathered information, it made me reassess the old lady staring stoically into the camera in our family photos and see through fresh eyes the once beautiful young woman she was.

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The Boyle cottage, Emeracly

Following the 1840s Famine, Irish people were forced to leave their homeland to survive. They really only had two choices – America or England. And so my ancestors immigrated to both lands. By 1890, two of every five Irish-born people were living abroad. By the end of the century, the population of Ireland had almost halved, and it never regained its pre-Famine level.

The second and third generations of my family settled in northern England, working in the mills, mines, and construction industry. My maternal grandfather Patrick Costello recalls the sign `No Irish Need Apply’ displayed at several boarding houses in the West Yorkshire city of Wakefield, where he worked down the coal mines.

Over half of my ancestors went to the US. Margaret was the seventh of 12 children. She was born in 1891 to Thomas and Ellen Martin on a small farmstead in County Mayo.

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Ellen Martyn, Sheron’s Boyle’s great-grandmother

When the brown-haired young 20-year-old decided to try for a new life in America, where at least three siblings had already immigrated, she paid £7 for her steerage class ticket – no 367167 – and was booked to sail along with the 120 other Irish folks on April 11, 1912, on the Titanic.

She was due to sail with a cousin, Celia Sheridan of Stripe near Milltown Galway.

Family myth has it that thanks to Celia being late leaving her family home, and so possibly unable to buy a ticket, the duo missed the boat – finally leaving 24 hours later on the SS Celtic. My grandmother canceled her passage and her ticket (which incorrectly has her listed as Mary) simply states ‘Not boarded.’

Though she never discussed her brush with that fateful journey, she must have imagined herself in the place of those who perished on the ship that night. Her chances of survival were slim – 44% of steerage passengers did not survive.

However, when the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic crashed into an iceberg, Margaret was fast asleep in her cabin 700 miles away.

US newspapers indicate that news of the sinking – in which 1,517 passengers died and 700 were saved – was kept from the Celtic passengers. As the New York Times, on 21 April 1912, reported:

“The news that the Titanic had gone down was received by Capt. Hambelton of the Celtic last Monday, several hours after the liner went down, but it was not known among the passengers until last Wednesday when it was posted on the bulletin board. Many of the passengers became nervous when they read the terrible story told in the bulletin and from that time on some of them kept a life preserver near at hand.

The second and third-class passengers did not learn of the disaster until Friday when the liner was in halting distance of New York. The Rev. Dr. W. F. Hovis took the lead in a successful effort to calm the more excitable of the passengers.”

The Chicago Tribune for Sunday, April 21 reveals the Titanic sent an ‘SOS’ to the Celtic, but other boats were nearer, adding:

“After Wednesday the nervousness spread. Few passengers, if any, took off their clothing when they retired. When Mrs. H. C. Bergh, wife of a Rochester businessman, refused to go to bed, her example was followed by most of the married women passengers. A minister, the Rev. W. S. Hovis, of South Bend, Ind., was pressed into service as a storyteller to help relieve the gloom of the cabins.

The news of the disaster was kept from the second cabin and steerage until yesterday.”

And so as Margaret was among the first passengers to sail into New York on April 20, docking in the very bay where the Titanic should have been, it must have been a gloomy New World she entered.

But she must have thought how lucky she was to have missed the boat, in the very saddest sense.

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Sheron Boyle with her grandmother Margaret Boyle, Galway 1962

Margaret went on to a new life – joining her sister and spinster aunt (both named Celia Martin) working as a maid in Hartford, Connecticut, for the prosperous and politically active Hooker family.

It was while in America, she posed for a handsome black and white photo with her three brothers – Owen, Jim, and Pat and the latter’s wife Delia, and her sister Celia Martin, all living in the Hartford area. Margaret has a lovely white blouse on, her lustrous hair piled high and her high cheekbones defined her face.

Shades of her strong character emerged, as it became known that she had become close to a man who, shockingly for then, rumor had it was a non-Catholic and was said to have German origins. My Aunt Margaret Cleary – my father’s sister who lives in Manchester, CT – believes his first name was possibly Michael and surname Blackburn.

I employed a genealogist to help me overcome the hurdles I faced. Michael Rochford found a copy of the Titanic ticket and then, amazingly, helped track down a Blackburn family in Connecticut.

He discovered the Blackburns left Dewsbury – a mill town only six miles from my home today – where the father was a foreman and moved to Sagan in Germany for him to work in a mill there.

A widower, he met and married a German woman and en masse they immigrated to Windsor Locks, Connecticut, which had a developing mill industry. Michael Blackburn was a product of his father’s first marriage but had a German step-mother – hence the link.

The family story passed down is that at some point my grandmother won a raffle and the unusual prize was a paid trip back to Ireland – so she went home – as yet I cannot find when.

I personally doubt there was ever a raffle and wonder if it was a story put out by her family? Did her spinster aunt, then in her 50s, disapprove of the relationship? Did she write to her brother and wife telling them what their beloved daughter was doing? Did they then order their young daughter home?

With the religious and cultural differences, Margaret and Michael were never going to be, though as she left America for good, he gave her a gold ring with the letter `M’ engraved inside it. In the romantic sense, they were ships that passed in the night. She later told a neighbor it was an engagement ring.

Margaret’s effort to carve out a new life in the bright New World ended not as maybe she hoped. And so in 1923, at the relatively late age of 32, Margaret wed my grandfather Michael Boyle, a man older than herself. It was thought to be a semi-arranged match.

They settled at his family homestead in a hamlet called Emracly outside Milltown, Co Galway. After fathering seven children, including a set of twins, Michael succumbed to arthritis – so severe that my own father Michael could never recall seeing him walk.

But the redoubtable Margaret coped with her lot, running the small farm, raising her brood, and overseeing the seven neighboring orphaned Donnelly children. When social workers came to take them to children’s homes, she put her cattle on their land and simply refused to allow them to be split up. To this day, the Donnellys – many now in Philadelphia – credit her with keeping them together.

The circle of life continued and – as countless other families had to – she waved off one son Pat and three daughters, Mary, Margaret and Philomena to the US, and my dad and his brother Jimmy for the UK, while the youngest Sean stayed behind to run the family farm.

In their late teens, my father Michael and his lifelong pal Jimmy Donnelly traveled to Lincolnshire and the North Yorkshire market towns, where they slept in a barn with pigs and hired themselves out for work.

Dad eventually settled in Wakefield and worked for decades as a miner and a laborer. His siblings settled to varying degrees in the US. Margaret was just 16 when in 1948 she left their thatched cottage home – with no electricity or indoor toilet – and flew into New York for a new life.

My generation of the family undoubtedly benefited from their hard work – we were the first to go to university, travel the world for pleasure, not a necessity, and have genuinely comfortable lives.

After my gran’s death – at the great age of 92 in 1982 – her wedding ring and her lost love’s ring – which she had kept all her life – were passed to her daughter Mary, in Philadelphia.

As for her lost love, my aunt Margaret Cleary was introduced to Mr. Blackburn at a social event in Hartford in the 1950s, where she had settled.

Mother-of-five Margaret, now 85 and living in Manchester, Conn, recalls the meeting: `It was at a picnic and my Uncle Pat Martin, a bus driver, introduced us. Mr Blackburn was told I was Margaret’s daughter but he said he knew straight away who I was as I looked like my mother.

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Margaret Boyle in her final days in 1982, with sons Jimmy, Sean, Pat

`I think he was called Michael, but I am unsure. My mother did tell me about him when I was young. I wish now I had asked her more but you don’t think about it at the time.’

Mr. Blackburn told my aunt that he had never married but was very pleased to meet her. Did he always hold a candle for my grandmother?

My grandmother told a friend she regretted leaving America. I took my children to see the house where she worked as a maid and thought why wouldn’t she feel sad – leaving her first love and the home comforts and hopes of a modern US to return to the hard life of rural Ireland?

One day, I hope to tell her story in a book. Meanwhile, it is left to us, the ancestors she left behind, to ponder how different life would have been if Margaret Martin had boarded the Titanic – if she had not missed the boat in many senses of her life – but such was the journey she took that brought me to be born and raised in Yorkshire and my other family to America.

*If anyone has any information about the Martin or Blackburn family, you can contact Sheron by e-mail or via Facebook, or on Twitter.

* Originally published in November 2014. Last updated in April 2026.

Michael Collins left Dublin on August 20, 1922, feverish and against his doctor’s advice, on a journey through Cork that would end in gunfire on a quiet country road. This hour-by-hour account follows his final banking meetings, peace talks, and family visits before the fatal ambush at Béal na Bláth.

When he left Dublin, he was ill and feverish, and his doctor recommended postponing the trip.

Had he merely been going on an inspection trip, it could have been delayed, but it appeared Collins had something more in mind.

August 20, 1922

Collins’s convoy left Portobello (now Cathal Brugha) Barracks, Dublin, at 5:15 am on Sunday, August 20, and made its first stop at Maryborough Jail (now Portlaoise Prison), where Collins discussed transferring some of the prisoners there to Gormanstown camp to relieve the overcrowded conditions.

He also spoke with some of the prisoners, including Tom Malone, about ending the Civil War. He asked if Malone would attend a meeting to “try to put an end to this damned thing.” As he left, he slapped one fist into his hand and said, “that fixes it—the three Toms [Malone, Tom Barry, and Tom Hales] will fix it.”

Then the convoy headed to Roscrea Barracks for an inspection and breakfast. At Limerick Barracks, the Officer/Commanding (O/C) of the Southern Command, General Eoin O’Duffy, met with Collins and discussed his belief that the Civil War would soon be over, and he understood that Collins wanted to avoid any rancor. The convoy then headed through Mallow and spent that night in Cork City, where he stayed at the military HQ in the Imperial Hotel.

That evening, Collins met his sister, Mary Collins-Powell, and her son, Seán, and spent the rest of the evening in consultation with the O/C of the area, Gen. Emmet Dalton. Dalton felt that “normality and law and order would not be too far off. We were in possession of the principal towns in County Cork. Michael Collins and I discussed this on the journey through West Cork.” Most of the escort spent the first evening in the Victoria Hotel.

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A photograph of Michael Collins (RollingNews.ie)

August 21, 1922

On Monday, August 21, Collins again visited with his sister, and then he and General Dalton went to the Cork Examiner to discuss the Free State’s general position on publicity with the editor, Tom Crosbie. Collins also visited some local banks in an effort to trace republican/IRA/anti-Treaty funds lodged during their occupation of the city.

First, they visited the Hibernian Bank, then the Bank of Ireland, then the Land Bank, and finally other smaller institutions to try to recover the funds. During July, the IRA collected £120,000 in customs revenue and had hidden this money in the accounts of sympathizers.

At each bank, Collins told the managers to close the doors and said they would allow the banks to reopen only if the managers cooperated fully. Collins had the bank directors identify the suspicious accounts, then he concluded that “three first-class men will be necessary to conduct a forensic investigation of the banks and the Customs and Excise in Cork.” He told William Cosgrave to consider three people, but “don’t announce anything until I return.”

He and Dalton then traveled the thirty miles to Macroom, where Collins met Florence O’Donoghue, an IRA member and one of its leaders in County Cork during the War of Independence, but neutral in the Civil War. The first phase of the Civil War was ended, O’Donoghue later wrote. He and many others recognized at this point that the IRA/Republicans could not win the war and that Collins came south searching for peace.

Collins was desperately trying to bring the War to a close and to offer a face-saving agreement to the leaders on the other side. It is thought that he asked O’Donoghue how to stop the War and to mediate on his behalf. After lunch at the Imperial, they headed out to review the military in Cobh, and then returned to Cork in early evening.

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Michael Collins at the wedding of Commander Sean McKeown (The Blacksmith of Ballinalee) and Miss A Cooney in June 1922 (Getty Images)

August 22, 1922 – The Fateful Day

Collins’s party left the Imperial Hotel, Cork, at 6.15 am on Tuesday, August 22.

That day, the convoy included the following:

A motorcyclist, Lt. John ‘Jeersey’ Smyth.

A Crossley Tender under the command of Cmdt. Seán (Paddy) O’Connell, Capt. Peter Conlon, Sgt. Conroy, Sgt. Cooney, John O’Connell, and eight riflemen, Gough, Barry, Carmody, Coote, Edmunds, Murray, Caine, and McKenna.

Collins and Emmet Dalton in a yellow Leland Thomas Straight Eight touring car.

The driver was Private Michael Smith Corry, and the reserve driver was M. Quinn.

A Rolls Royce Whippet armored car (A.R.R. 2), the Slievenamon. Capt. Joe Dolan was riding in the car. Jim Wolfe was the driver, Jimmy ‘Wiggy’ Fortune the co-driver. The Vickers machine-gunner on the armored car was John (Jock) McPeak. (He deserted on December 2, 1922, with Billy Barry and Pat and Mick O’Sullivan and took the armored car to the IRA; he said he did it for a woman. He was arrested in Glasgow in July 1923 and was imprisoned in Portlaoise, where he went on a hunger strike. Cooney and Monks were the other members of the armored car crew.

The military detail was far too small for the protection of the Free State Commander-in-Chief, especially as they would be traveling through some of the most active anti-Treaty areas of South Cork.

The convoy went through Macroom towards Béal na mBláth about 8 am, where it stopped to get directions, then through Crookstown, then to Bandon.

In Bandon, Collins briefly met in Lee’s Hotel with Major General Seán Hales, O/C of the Free State forces in West Cork. It is thought that Hales was informed of a meeting Collins had intended with Civil War neutrals in Cork that evening and that he had met with O’Donoghue and others the day before and discussed how an end to the War could be achieved.

At Clonakilty, the convoy stopped for lunch at Callinan’s Pub.

In the afternoon, the convoy went to Roscarberry, and Collins had a drink in the Four Alls Pub (owned by his cousin Jeremiah) at Sam’s Cross, where Collins declared: “I’m going to settle this thing. I’m going to put an end to this bloody war.”

But there is no sign he was open to compromise. Clearly, any hope he had of settling the Civil War would not be done at the expense of the Treaty. Collins told his brother, Johnny, that he would “go further with the British government once there was peace here.” His principal aim was to end the Civil War. He said, “The British have given up their claim on us. When we begin to work together, we can help those in the northeast.”

On the way back, Collins’s party passed by the burnt remains of his childhood home, Woodfield, and Collins pointed to the rugged stone walls.

“There,” he said to Dalton, “There is where I was born. That was my home.”

Still, Collins was as happy as Dalton had seen him.

“He was able to let himself go, and also I think he felt things were now moving his way. He didn’t say much as we traveled along the flat road towards Bandon; he appeared lost in the myriad thoughts of a crowded and successful day.”

The convoy left the Eldon Hotel in Skibbereen at 5 pm and headed back to Cork. Collins met his great friend John L. Sullivan on this journey. The convoy detoured around Clonakilty on the way back because of a roadblock. It stopped at Lee’s Hotel in Bandon for tea. (It has never been fully explained why the convoy returned the same way they came out in the morning; however, when the anti-Treaty forces left Cork city, they blew up most of the bridges and cut most of the roads, so there were few passable ways to travel in County Cork.) There, again, he met Hales, who was the brother of Tom Hales, by coincidence a member of the ambush party. “Keep up the good work! ’Twill soon be over” was Collins’s parting salute to Hales.

On the road out of Bandon, Collins said to Dalton, “If we run into an ambush along the way, we’ll stand and fight them.” Dalton said nothing.

In the early morning of Tuesday, August 22, the ambush party met in Long’s Pub (owned by Denis “Denny the Dane” Long, the “lookout” who spotted Collins’s party as it passed through Béal na mBláth).

The men who assembled at Béal na mBláth were not a column, but officers trained in guerrilla warfare who gathered to hold a pre-arranged important staff meeting. When Florence O’Donoghue met with the surviving members of the IRA/Republicans in 1964, they said they were unaware that Collins was in the area until that morning. The plan to ambush the party was part of the general policy of attacking all Free State convoys, not a specific plan for this convoy. They saw an opportunity to overpower an enemy convoy on its return journey and decided to take up the challenge by ambushing it.

The IRA/Republicans stopped a Clonakilty man, Jeremiah O’Brien, who was taking a cartload of empty mineral bottles to Bandon. They commandeered his cart and removed one of its wheels, blocking the road. In combination with the mine they were placing in the road, the ambush party knew the convoy would have to stop abruptly. The ambush party remained in place all day, but there was no action. In the late afternoon, a message was received that Collins’s party was in Bandon, but as it was thought unlikely that the convoy would come through Béal na mBláth a second time, they began to disassemble the mine and evacuate the position.

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Michael Collins (Getty Images)

The ambush of Michael Collins

Originally, the ambush party numbered between 25 and 30, according to varying sources. Some men stayed all day; others came and went as the day went on.

The ambush took place at Béal na mBláth (between Macroom and Crookstown, about ten miles short of Bandon) just before sunset, at 7.30 pm. When the first shots were fired, Dalton ordered: “Drive like hell.” Collins countermanded the order just as he had predicted and yelled: “Stop, we’ll fight them.”

Collins and Dalton first fired from behind the armored car, and then Collins shouted “there—they are running up the road.” The Lewis machine gun in the armored car jammed several times, and when it did, the IRA/Republicans took advantage of the lull in firing to move their positions.

Then, Collins ran about fifteen yards up the road, dropped into a prone firing position, and continued shooting at the IRA/anti-Treatyites on the hill.

Dalton said, then he heard the faint cry, “Emmet, I’m hit.” Dalton and Commandant Seán O’Connell ran over to where Collins was lying face-down on the road and found a “fearful gaping wound at the base of his skull behind the right ear. We immediately saw that General Collins was almost beyond human aid. He could not speak to us. …O’Connell now knelt beside the dying, but still conscious, Chief whose eyes were wide open and normal, and whispered into the ear of the fast-sinking man the words of the Act of Contrition. For this, he was rewarded with a light pressure of the hand. …. Very gently, I raised his head on my knee and tried to bandage his wound, but owing to the awful size of it, this proved very difficult. I had not completed this task when the big eyes quickly closed, and the cold pallor of death overspread the General’s face. How can I describe the feelings that were mine in that bleak hour, kneeling in the mud of a country road not twelve miles from Clonakilty, with the still bleeding head of the Idol of Ireland resting on my arm?”

Later, Dalton said: “It was a very large wound, an open wound in the back of the head …and it was difficult for me to get a First-Field-Aid bandage to cover it, you know, when I was binding it up. It was quite obvious to me, with the experience I had of a ricochet bullet, it could only have been a ricochet or a dum-dum.”

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Michael Collins at the Curragh Barracks in Co Kildare with Col Dunphy, Major General Emmet Dalton, Comdt-Gen P MacMahon, and Comdt-Gen D O’Hegarty in July 1922 (Getty Images)

After the ambush

The ambush was over in approximately thirty minutes, and before it ended, darkness had fallen, so it was impossible to get off an aimed shot. No one in the anti-Treatyite party fully knew that Collins had been shot or that the convoy suffered any casualties. It was only when Shawno Galvin returned to Béal na mBláth that they received the first report of casualties.

Collins’s body was first placed into the armored car, then transferred to the touring car for the sad trip back to Cork City. On the way into Cork City, Dalton stopped the convoy at a church in Cloughduv. Dalton asked where the priest’s house was. Getting directions there, they knocked on the door, and the curate, Fr. Timothy Murphy, came to the railing. Seeing Collins was beyond hope, he turned to get the sacred oils, but Cmdt. O’Connell misunderstood this to be a refusal of his ministry. O’Connell pointed a pistol at him, but Dalton knocked it away.

As they approached Cork City, they stopped at the Sacred Heart Mission at Victoria Cross. Here, Fr. O’Brien administered the Last Rites to Collins.

Then the convoy headed back to the Imperial Hotel, where Dalton, Cmdt. O’Connell, Sgt. Cooney and Lt. Gough went into the Hotel to inform Maj. Gen. Dr. Leo Ahern asked him to take charge of the body.

Dr. Ahern first examined Collins’s body when it was brought to the Imperial Hotel, and then at Shanakiel Hospital. He was the first doctor to examine the body and pronounced Collins dead. His examination found a large, gaping wound “to the right of the poll. There was no other wound. There was definitely no wound in the forehead.”

From the hotel, Collins’s body was taken to Shanakiel Hospital in Cork, where Dr. Michael Riordan was detailed by Dr. Ahern to examine and prepare the body, and they conducted the autopsy. Dr. Christy Kelly was present during a thorough second examination later and confirmed a huge wound on the right side behind the ear, with no exit wound. In contrast, Dr. Patrick Cagney, a British surgeon in the British army during the war who had a wide knowledge of gunshot wounds and who examined the body, still later confirmed there was an entry wound as well as a large exit wound.

Eleanor Gordon, Matron of Shanakiel Hospital, and nurse Nora O’Donoghue cleaned and attended to Collins’s wounds and also later testified to the nature of the wounds. His body was first taken to room 201, then to room 121 after the autopsy, where Free State soldiers guarded it until it was taken to the ship for transport to Dublin. In the afternoon, Cronin & Desmond Funeral Service performed their duties. Fr. Joseph Scannell, Army chaplain, and Fr. Joe Ahern recited the funeral prayers.

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Michael Collins (Getty Images)

Back home to Dublin

The steamship SS Classic left Penrose Quay in Cork and brought Collins’s body from Cork to Dublin. General Dalton sent this handwritten telegram from the Cork GPO to the Dublin HQ:

CHIEF OF STAFF DUBLIN

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF SHOT DEAD IN AMBUSH AT BEALNABLATH NEAR BANDON 6.30 [sic] TUESDAY EVENING WITH ME, ALSO ONE MAN WOUNDED. REMAINS LEAVING BY CLASSIC FOR DUBLIN TODAY, WEDNESDAY, NOON. ARRANGE TO MEET. REPLY DALTON.

As the vessel sailed down-channel from Cork, it passed the assembled remaining British vessels, upon the decks of which the British sailors mustered, saluted, and the Last Post played.

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Michael Collins in October 1921 (Getty Images)

The Éamon de Valera factor

Though he was within a few miles of Béal na mBláth on the day Collins was killed, Éamon de Valera had hoped to meet him, but no plan had been made. Moreover, de Valera was not involved in the ambush; he had little political influence on the IRA at the time and no military influence at all. By this time, de Valera was also trying to bring the Civil War to a halt.

Liam Deasy spoke with de Valera the night before, and de Valera’s position was that, having made their protest in arms, and as they could no longer hope to achieve military success, the honorable course was for the IRA/Republicans to withdraw. Deasy explained that there were over a thousand men in the area, and they would not agree to an unconditional ceasefire.

The next day, de Valera went to Long’s Pub, and his efforts at a ceasefire were rejected again. The most reliable evidence indicates that when de Valera went to Long’s Pub, he also tried to prevent the ambush but was rebuffed by the IRA/Republicans. Liam Lynch, O/C of the IRA in the south-west, specifically had given orders that de Valera’s efforts to cease hostilities should not be encouraged.

Again, Deasy met with de Valera and explained that the men billeted in this area would consider Collins’s convoy a challenge they could not refuse.

Despite rumors and innuendo, there is no evidence that de Valera was involved in the planning or the ambush being laid for Collins.

Later, de Valera was quoted: “A pity. What a pity I didn’t meet him.” And “It would be bad if anything happens to Collins, his place will be taken by weaker men.”

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Harry Boland, Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera, and Eamon Duggan in February 1922 (Getty Images)

The funeral of Michael Collins

On the morning of August 23, Richard Mulcahy, as Free State Army Chief of Staff, issued the following message to the Army:

“Stand calmly by your posts. Bend bravely and undaunted to your task. Let no cruel act of reprisal blemish your bright honor. Every dark hour that Collins met since 1916 seemed to steal that bright strength of his and temper his brave gaiety. You are left as inheritors of that strength and bravery. To each of you falls his unfinished work. No darkness in the hour: loss of comrades will daunt you in it. Ireland! The Army serves—strengthened by its sorrow.”

Michael’s sister, Hannie Collins, with whom he lived when he first went to London in 1906, had long planned a holiday to Ireland in August. On the morning of August 23, she went to work at the post office in West Kensington. As she was about to enter her office, she was stopped, taken into the superintendent’s room, and told there was a rumor that her brother had been killed. She said she was not surprised—during the night, she had had a premonition that he had been killed. “I know how unhappy he had been for so long—At the moment of death, the load went…from his mind, so it went from mine.”

She went to see her friends, John and Hazel Lavery, but they were not home, so she boarded the Irish boat train at Euston Station. (The Laverys had already gone to Ireland, where Sir John was painting.) Winston Churchill, having been told of Hannie’s distress by the Laverys’ butler, reserved a compartment for her and paid her traveling expenses. A newspaper reporter at Euston recorded that “Miss Collins, dressed from head to foot in black, was seen off by a lady friend. She was a calm but pathetic figure. She traveled alone.”

George Bernard Shaw wrote to Hannie:

“Don’t let them make you miserable about it: how could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to the shot of another Irishman—a damned fool but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland—‘a Roman to a Roman’…I met Michael for the first and last time last Saturday, and I am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death.

“So, tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colors in his honor; and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.”

In Dublin, Collins’s remains were taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where Dr. Oliver St John Gogarty embalmed the body and had Sir John Lavery paint Collins’s portrait. Albert Power sculpted the death mask.

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The death mask of Michael Collins (Getty Images)

Collins’s body was taken to the chapel in St. Vincent’s on Thursday, August 24, then in the late evening to Dublin City Hall for the public lying-in-state until Sunday evening.

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Michael Collins laying in state in Dublin (Getty Images)

On Sunday evening, his body was removed to the Pro-Cathedral, where it remained under guard overnight. His funeral Mass was said in the Pro-Cathedral on Monday, with Dr. Michael Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe, the principal celebrant, assisted by several other Bishops.

The gun carriage on which the casket was transported to Glasnevin Cemetery had been borrowed from the British and used in the bombardment of the Four Courts in June. The Free State Government specially purchased four black artillery horses from the British to pull the caisson to Glasnevin.

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The funeral procession for Michael Collins (Getty Images)

Collins’s death was never officially registered; there was no inquest, and there was no formal, independent autopsy. When the Fianna Fáil government was to take over in 1932, it was said that many papers relating to Collins’s killing were taken from Portobello Barracks and burned by the order of the Minister for Defense, Desmond FitzGerald.

Collins died intestate, leaving an estate of £ 1,950 9s 11d, which passed to his brother Johnny.

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Michael’s brother Sean Collins at Michael’s coffin (Getty Images)

Praise for the fallen Michael Collins

The British press acknowledged Collins’s part in the struggle for Irish freedom. The Daily Chronicle called him a “young and brilliant leader.” The Evening Press described his death as a “staggering blow.”

The Daily Telegraph wrote: “He was a bitter and implacable enemy of England while the English garrison remained in Ireland and Ireland was not free to govern itself in its own way. …The dead man, without a doubt, was the stuff of which all great men are made.”

The London Daily Sketch editorialized: “The hand that struck down Collins, guided by a blinded patriotism, has aimed a blow at the unity of Ireland for which every one of her sons is fighting. Collins was probably the most skilled artisan of the fabric of a happier Ireland. Certainly, he was the most picturesque figure in the struggle, and in the rearing of a new State, a popular ideal serves as the rallying point to draw the contending elements. The death of Collins leaves the ship of the Free State without a helmsman.

“Other sons of Ireland have risen from lowliness to eminence in the struggle, but Michael Collins, by his valor, his sufferings, his elusiveness during the more turbulent periods of the past, and by his own personal charm, bound a spell round the popular imagination and wove a romance which endeared him to his friends and inspired respect in his foes.

“Since the historic hour in the early morning of December 6…the progress of the new State has been dogged and delayed by a malignant Fate.

“The next phase in the life of the Free State is veiled by the tragedy of the present. The helmsman has gone at a moment when no haven can yet be decried.

“What is to happen now?”

Seven years later, Winston Churchill would pay homage to his one-time military enemy and political ally. He admired Collins but evidently continued to be ignorant of the ideals that had driven and permanently separated the two men: “He was an Irish patriot, true and fearless. His narrow upbringing and his whole life had filled him with hatred for England. His hands had touched directly the springs of terrible deeds. We hunted him for his life, and he had slipped half a dozen times through steel claws. But now he had no hatred of England.”

Shane Leslie wrote the following lines:

What is that curling flower of wonder

As white as snow, as red as blood?

When Death goes by in flame and thunder

And rips the beauty from the bud.

They left his blossom white and slender

Beneath Glasnevin’s shaking sod;

His spirit passed like sunset splendor

Unto the dead Fianna’s God.

Good luck be with you, Collins,

Or stay or go you far away;

Or stay you with the folk of fairy,

Or come with ghosts another day.

Brendan Behan’s mother, Kathleen, nicknamed Michael Collins her “Laughing Boy.” She and her first husband had both served in the Rising. In 1935, when he was twelve years old, Brendan wrote a lament to the “Laughing Boy:”

T’was on an August morning, all in the dawning hours,

I went to take the warming air, all in the Mouth of Flowers,

And there I saw a maiden, and mournful was her cry,

‘Ah what will mend my broken heart, I’ve lost my Laughing Boy.

So strong, so wild and brave he was, I’ll mourn his loss too sore,

When thinking that I’ll hear the laugh or springing step no more.

Ah, cure the times and sad the loss my heart to crucify,

That an Irish son with a rebel gun shot down my Laughing Boy.

Oh, had he died by Pearse’s side or in the GPO,

Killed by an English bullet from the rifle of the foe,

Or forcibly fed with Ashe lay dead in the dungeons of Mountjoy,

I’d have cried with pride for the way he died, my own dear Laughing Boy.

My princely love, can ageless love do more than tell to you,

Go raibh maith agat for all you tried to do,

For all you did, and would have done, my enemies to destroy,

I’ll mourn your name and praise your fame, forever, my Laughing Boy.

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A statue of Michael Collins in Co Cork (Ireland’s Content Pool)

*Originally published in August 2018, updated August 2025.

*Joe Connell served in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and the NFL and received a degree from Pepperdine University School of Law. His interest in Ireland, and particularly in its history, reflects his Irish heritage. In time, he came to focus his research/interest on early 20th-century Ireland—with a focus on the period from the Easter Rising through the founding and early days of the Irish Free State. He is the author of the eponymous Dublin in Rebellion, Dublin Rising 1916, Who’s Who in the Dublin Rising 1916, and his most recent book, Michael Collins, Dublin 1916-1923. Connell is a columnist in History Ireland and has written several books for Kilmainham Tales. He is available to speak to groups in the U.S. and can be reached at [email protected].

** This article was originally published in 2018 and updated in August 2026.