THE OAK tree on the hillside was perhaps just a sapling at the time and the bank of briars perhaps unchanged as crowds thronged the glen of Beál na mBláth to recall that day 90 years ago when the Big Fellow was laid low.
They came from all over the country – from Dublin and Waterford, Mayo and Galway, and of course from Collins’s own west Cork – devotees making their way around the winding bends to where Collins fell.
Historical accounts say it was a misty evening on August 22nd, 1922, when Collins and his companions drove into an ambush by Irregulars and he fell mortally wounded to a shot fired from the briary hillsides.
Yesterday, dark clouds released a deluge but the skies began to clear just before 3pm as Taoiseach Enda Kenny arrived to become the first serving holder of the office to give the oration at Béal na mBláth.
Among the crowd – estimated by gardaí at about 6,000 – were Gerard Murphy and his wife Teresa, who had left their home at Glencollop in Co Mayo at 8.30am to see their neighbour and fellow Mayo-man speak.
“I remember my father telling me he was only a child but he could remember the day Michael Collins was killed – the old people always maintained Collins would have got the 32 counties if he hadn’t been shot,” said Murphy.
Commemoration committee chairman Dermot Collins thanked the Taoiseach for accepting their invite, and he pondered on how proud Collins would have been to see soldiers of an Irish Republic salute the tricolour.
The Taoiseach, Minister for Defence Alan Shatter, Defence Forces chief-of-staff Lieut Gen Seán McCann and Frank Metcalfe of the Beál na mBláth commemoration committee laid wreaths at the monument.
A lone piper, Finbar McCarthy, played a lament as the band of the Southern Command prepared to play Amhrán na bhFiann beside the armoured car Sliabh na mBan, which was part of Collins’s convoy – making its first return to Béal na mBláth since 1922.
Helen Collins, on behalf of the Collins family, spoke of how the death of her granduncle had left a traumatic mark on her family to this day, but added her grandfather and father never bore any bitterness over his death.
“My father took the view that a tragic civil war was taking place and it was an inevitable heartbreaking consequence of war that people died – he strongly believed this would have been his uncle Michael’s view,” said Ms Collins.
Among the other members of the Collins family attending the event were Michael Collins’s grandnieces, Nora Owen, Mary Banotti, Elizabeth Collins and Fidelma Collins, as well his grandnephew, Michael Collins Powell.
Others attending included Ministers Michael Noonan, Jimmy Deenihan and Frances Fitzgerald, Seán Kelly MEP, Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr John Buttimer, Mayor of Cork County Cllr Barbara Murray, and Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr Naoise Ó Muirí.
