Michael Collins and the Women Who Spied For Ireland by Meda Ryan

Preface
    Some years ago I began research for a biography of Michael Collins but almost at the outset I found myself drawn into the controversial aspects of how he met his death in an ambush at Béal na mBláth on 22 August 1922. Having grown up in west Cork, I was acutely aware of how families were split by the Civil War and also of the silence that surrounded the ambush. Men who had participated in the ambush agreed to tell me the facts of the episode, and as time progressed I found that the details of the final events in Michael Collins’ life required a book to themselves. The Day Michael Collins Was Shot was published in 1989. When I returned to my research on Michael Collins I noticed that the role women had played in his life had, to a large extent, been overlooked. Coming from a family in which women were in the majority and where his mother Marianne was in charge after the death of his father, he got used to the idea of strong, resourceful women early. The adored youngest son of the household, he found it natural that women should love and admire him. He in turn appreciated and admired them. It was obvious to me that were it not for all the women who helped to shield him he would have found it impossible to evade arrest between 1919 and 1921. Furthermore he needed women as well as men to send dispatches up and down the country, women to carry arms and others such as Madge Hales, who travelled on a few occasions to her brother Dónal in Italy to arrange for a shipment of arms to Ireland.
    Women played an important part in Collins’ espionage. They never let him down despite being harassed on occasions. Collins depended on women, who had, in general, an easier time than men in evading the suspicions of the British authorities. When their cover failed and women like Moya Llewelyn Davies and Eileen McGrane were jailed, this upset the chivalrous Collins greatly, as the letters I quote in this book will testify.
    I was fortunate to have had extensive interviews, on the basis of trust, with Madge Hales-Murphy, Máire Comerford, Leslie Price (de Barra), Peg Barrett, Emmet Dalton, Todd Andrews, David Neligan and a number of other participants in events with Michael Collins. They made clear to me how society women like Moya Llewelyn Davies and Lady Hazel Lavery were an essential part of Collins’ intelligence network. I realised that the letters from Lady Lavery in the Kitty Kiernan collection now owned by Peter Barry were more complex than a first reading would suggest. The records, letters and reminiscences of Susan Killeen and Dilly Dicker given to me by their daughters, Moya Llewelyn Davies’ letters given to me by Diarmuid Brennan and the memoirs of Michael Collins’ sisters, Mary and Helena, helped me to understand this unexplored aspect of Michael Collins’ life.
    It was a bonus to be given access, through Íosold Ó Deirg (daughter of Sinéad Mason, who was Collins’ personal secretary), to Michael Collins’ journal which he wrote while in Sligo jail in April 1918 and which has not been included in any other book about him.
    The Kitty Kiernan letters reveal much of the emotion, the turmoil and the great strain on Michael Collins’ personal life from 1919 until his death in August 1922. These are important in portraying a further aspect of the man: his capacity for true romantic tenderness and concern. It is interesting to note that Kitty Kiernan is the one woman in his life who did not play any significant part in his work.
    In interviews with Collins’ contemporaries, I was struck by the fact that they all affectionately called him Mick, regardless of which side they had taken in the Civil War. This is the name I have chosen to use for most of this book.

    Meda Ryan, 1996

Acknowledgements
    When I look at my notebook of names I realise with sadness that many people who helped to shape this book are no longer with us. But I am deeply grateful to them and to all the