Lifestyle – An unusual photo of Michael Collins, taken at a wedding during the War of Independence has strong Galway links. He’s looking straight at the camera, something he rarely did at a time when the British had a price on his head. However, it was his own people who killed Collins, 100 years    ago this month, as historian WILLIAM HENRY recalls.

A photo of Michael Collins, found 90 years after he was killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth during the Irish Civil War, has family links with Galway.

It’s the wedding photograph of Paddy O’Donohue and Violet Gore who were married in June 1919, with the reception held in the Shelbourne Hotel. Collins was the best man and Mary Healy was bridesmaid.

The young man sitting on the ground second from the right is Jack Buckley. He and Mary Healy were cousins of the  Whelan family from Shanaglish, who have had  pub in south Galway for generations. Well-known city chemist Michael Whelan and PP of St Patrick’s Church in Galway City, Fr Pat Whelan, are members of that family and Fr Whelan was given a copy of the photo by a descendent of Jack Buckley.

The original photo was discovered by writer and broadcaster Dave Kenny in the attic of his Dublin home; it had been gifted to his grandparents by the newly-married couple, who were friends and fellow nationalists.

Violet Gore, a singer, had helped raise funds for the Irish cause through concerts in Ireland and England while Paddy O’Donohue, had been a leading IRA activist in Manchester and was a key figure in Collins’ network. The photograph is unusual because Collins is looking directly at the camera. That’s something  he avoided doing during the War of Independence, as he was a marked man with a bounty on his head.

According to Fr Whelan, the photograph was hung on a wall in the family home after the wedding and although house was raided, the Black and Tans didn’t realise that Ireland’s most wanted man was watching them.

Just a couple of years later, on August 22, 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Michael Collins was killed by his own countrymen in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, County Cork, the county in which he had been born on October 16,1890. He was 31 years old when he died.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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