Michael Collins Irish leader: Encyclopedia II - Michael Collins Irish leader - The First Dáil

Michael Collins Irish leader - The First Dáil

Like all senior Sinn Féin members, Michael Collins was nominated to seek a seat in the 1918 general election to elect Irish MPs to the British House of Commons in London. And like the overwhelming majority (many without contests), Collins was elected, becoming MP for South Cork. However, unlike their rivals in the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Féin MPs had announced that they would not take their seats in Westminster, but instead would set up an Irish parliament in Dublin. That new parliament, called Dáil Éireann (meaning Assembly of Ireland, see First Dáil) met in the Mansion House, Dublin in January 1919. De Valera and leading Sinn Féin MPs had been arrested. Collins, typically, had been tipped off by his network of spies about the plan and had warned leading figures. De Valera, equally typically, had talked many into ignoring the warnings, believing if the arrests happened they would constitute a propaganda coup, only to find that with the leadership now arrested, there were few people left to do the necessary "spinning" in the media. In de Valera's absence, Cathal Brugha was elected Príomh Aire (literally prime minister, but often translated as 'President of Dáil Éireann'), to be replaced by de Valera, who Collins helped escape from Lincoln prison, in April 1919.

Collins in 1919 had a number of roles: in the summer he was elected president of the IRB, and in September he was made Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army¹, as the Volunteers had become (the name symbolising the organisation's claim to be the army of the Irish Republic ratified in January 1919). The Irish War of Independence in effect began on the same day that the First Dáil met in January 1919, when two policemen guarding a consignment of gelignite were shot dead by IRA volunteers acting without orders, in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The First Dáil", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki