SCENES AT THE AMBUSH.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 August 1922, Page 5

SCENES AT THE AMBUSH.

WARNING OF THE PLOT. LEADER S LAST WORDS. Received Aug. 24, 7.55 p.m. London, Aug. 23. Collins* party consisted of 20, including General Sean O’Connell. A despatch rider preceded the staff car, and a whippet armored car followed. Owing to obstructions on the main roads and the destruction of bridges, there was no alternative route available, though a warning had been received that an ambush was laid and that the ambushers numbered 200. Mr. Collins continued to fire from the ground after the attack opened. In his last moments Dalton and O’Connell comforted their dying chief, whispered prayers for the dying, and recited the Act of Contrition. Before requesting foregivenes* for the rebels. Mr. Collins asked to be buried in the Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where Griffith, Parnell and other notable Nationalists were interred.

The body was taken to Cork in an armored car and deposited in the Shanakiel Hospital, where officers formed a guard of honor. The mournful procession to the steamer was headed by the Archbishop and a large number of priests. It moved through streets lined by troops and a weeping, wailing multitude, and partook semi-State character. Distinguish Free Staters acted as pall bearers. The body will lie in state in Dublin, pod a national funeral will be accorded the dead leader. FUNERAL ON MONDAY. Received Aug. 24, 9.40 p.m. London, August 24. Mr. Collins’ body has arrived at Dublin. The funeral will take place on Monday.

AN ADVENTUROUS CAREER. Mr. Michael Collins, Finance Minister in the Provisional Irish Government and leader of the Sinn Fein forces in the field, was born in 1890, and educated at Clonakilty and King’s College, London. He is said to have been at one time a sorter at the General Post Office, and afterwards a clerk in a Dublin firm of accountants. Captured and imprisoned for his share in the Easter rebellion, he was released in the amnesty. Afterwards he became celebrated for the number and ingenuity of his escapes and disguises while “on the run.” He was organiser and adjutant of the Irish Volunteers, and was generally regarded as one of the ablest of the Sinn Fein leaders. He was elected unopposed for South Cork County in 1918. A young lady who knew Mr. Collins well in his days in London is quoted as follows by a writer in the New York World: “Even at sixteen,” she said, speaking of the time Michael Collins went to work as boy clerk in the London General Post Office, “even at sixteen the boys thought there was nobody like him.

The “boys,” of course, were the others of that young group of exiles, the London Irish. From Miss Nora Brennan’s account of them one gets a thrilling impression of these Irish youths firing in the very centre of the British Empire and thinking and working devotedly for Ireland.

Michael Collins was “educated at Clonakilty," according to the London Times. That means he went to the so-called National School near Rosscarbery, probably barefooted and with dozens of the young imps of County Cork. His people were small farmers. He bad an older sister At work in the London Post Office. At fifteen or so Mick joined her in London, and got a job as sorter in the General Post Office.

But this big, energetic, handsome youth was no ordinary subdued boy off an Irish farm. In Collins’ blood there dances something merry and capricious and wild, lie was, even then, the sort of Irishman whom serious people imagine is not always quite sober. “He always took the other side of every question, just to be perverse,” said Miss Brennan.

Collins was 24 years old when the World War broke out. By that time he had attended King’s College. London, and was soon to leave the Post Office work for the Guaranty Trust Company in their London branch. In that occupation he apaprently got his training to be the Finance Minister of Sinn Fein. He and two hundred of the other London Irish drilled secretly at Wormwood Scrubs, and, as a big, highly energised man, he was one of the leading spirits of that contingent. In 1915, at 25, he returned to Dublin. For a short period he worked as an accountant, and later as secretary to the Sinn Fein leader, Count Plunkett. In April, 1916, Collins went, as a friend expresses it, from one branch of the postal service into another. In other words, he was among those in Easter Week who got the command, “Exiles to the Post Office.” He fought in the rebellion of 1916 as an inconspicuous soldier, and, being inconspicuous, was simply one of those deported to Wandsworth Prison and later to Frongoch internment camp. The rise of Michael Collins in Sinn Fein circles took place between 1916 and the election of 1918, when he became a member of the Dail Eireann from his home district of South Cork. In that npriod he acted as secretary to a special Sinn Fein convention after amnesty was granted; was extremely active in regard to the Irish Republican Army, and was marked for the work of orgaiiiset and adrQm