ON 12 August 1922 Michael Collins left Dublin for a tour of the south, passing through Naas, where his Lancia touring car went on fire and only started with difficulty.
The entourage continued on where their first official stop was Maryborough (now Portlaoise). Collins’ tour of inspection was called off when news of President Arthur Griffith’s death reached him in Tralee.
He returned to Dublin for the funeral. Arthur Griffith, whose father had worked as a compositor in Naas with the Kildare Observer before moving to Dublin, had died of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged 50, as he rose on the morning of 12 August.
Two days later, Michael Collins marched at the head of the funeral procession, resplendent in his new uniform of the Commander-in-Chief. “I was at Arthur Griffith’s funeral on August 14,” Ellen Gaul, from Rathasker Road, Naas, recalled many years after the event.
“A week later I was in the same place at the funeral of Michael Collins.”On 20 August Collins again set out from Dublin to finish his tour of the south and ‘to visit his old home place and relatives and friends in West Cork’.
The convoy drove to Naas and stopped at the barrack where Bugler Larry McGarr sounded the general salute. Its tones brought every man to the barrack square where General Collins shook hands with many of them and wished them well.
The convoy then went on to Newbridge and then on to the Curragh Camp where Collins carried out an inspection. Two days later Collins was shot dead in an ambush at Béal na mBláth.
Father PJ Doyle, who was to be parish priest of Naas from 1938 until his death in 1962, was an enthusiastic supporter and personal friend of Michael Collins.
“My last encounter with Collins was in Naas at the time he was on his tour of inspection of the Irish Army posts. In his inspection he was ruthlessly intolerant of any defects, and hence these inspections raised the temperature of the Army posts to a hectic degree. One day I got a message from the Commandant at Naas Military Barracks to go up at once, to function as a lightning conductor in the storm that was anticipated. After the inspection Collins came down to my house for a short time, and then left for Dublin. It was the last time I saw him alive.”
When the question arose, on his death, of bringing his body to Dublin, owing to broken communications by road and rail, it was decided to have the body conveyed by sea to the North Wall, Dublin.
On the day the body was due to arrive Fr Doyle received a message from army headquarters to go to Dublin. He was taken by motor car to the North Wall in the company of General Richard Mulcahy and Gearóid O’Sullivan, where they met members of the Government and a small group of Collins’ most intimately devoted followers.
“There was a long and strained wait until about 2 o’clock, when we saw a light moving down the river. It was the boat from Cork, a cross channel liner. The boat’s engines had been cut out, the spacious, empty decks were blazing with light, the solitary figure of the captain stood motionless on the bridge. In the inky darkness of the night the great, gleaming, white vessel came drifting towards us in eerie silence, like a phantom ship of destiny, borne on the black, swiftly in-flowing tidal waters of the Liffey.”
When the boat moored, Fr Doyle accompanied the entourage on board and then walked in silence behind the coffin, mounted on a gun-carriage, as it made its slow progress to City Hall. Here he sorrowfully took leave of the mortal remains of his great friend.
“It was in no excess of hollow sentimentality that I stooped, and with reverence and gratitude, kissed his forehead. On the morning of the funeral Gearóid O’Sullivan told me that the army authorities had requested that I should officiate as Deacon at the Requiem Mass, but the request had been refused by the Ecclesiastical authorities at the Pro-Cathedral, where the Requiem was celebrated.
“I walked in the funeral procession and stood beside the grave at Glasnevin Cemetery until the last sad rites were completed.”