The pedal power and the glory as Big Fella’s statue unveiled

LAST yearn I produced an RTÉ documentary called Cold Case Collins which examined the circumstances of how Michael Collins died in an ambush at Béal na Bláth on August 22, 1922.

For months, I pored over 100 years of scholarship and speculation about how this great, clever man died in a ragtag skirmish on a road in West Cork.

I looked up his birth certificate, read his sister’s memoirs, and walked the roads around the place of his birth in Woodfield and place of his death, in an effort to understand how it all came to pass.

It was a fascinating project, one that deepened my appreciation for everything Collins achieved in his short life.

During those months, I used to take my bike on the train to meetings in Dublin. On the morning of my first production meeting I locked up my bike to a lamp-post on Tara Street, only to realise that the Big Fella himself was looking straight at me holding his own bike.

The famous image of Collins with his trusty Pierce bicycle had been stencilled onto an electrical box in striking yellow and black spray paint, and I laughed out loud at the coincidence.

Here I was with my bike about to go into a meeting and talk for a few hours about this very important guy and his bike. 

Could I admire Collins any more? Freedom fighter, patriot, and a cyclist.

After the documentary aired, I contacted the artist Andy Mc to purchase a print of that street art image to mark the end of a memorable production.

Fast forward to this year and I had been noticing, and writing about, the deteriorating derelict public toilets on Grand Parade, wondering when was the council going to do the right thing and remove them.

The adjacent Three Fools Coffeepod is my caffeine pit-stop of choice in the morning, so I have had ample time over the last few months to bemoan what a blight those toilets were on the streetscape.

You can imagine how thrilled I was when the toilets were finally levelled, and even happier to hear the whispers that it was the chosen spot for a new statue of Collins, almost the exact location where he addressed 50,000 Corkonians to argue the merits of the Anglo Irish Treaty.

According to the British Pathé footage of the address, “Mr Collins receives enthusiastic reception from the huge gathering despite salvoes of shots from a few malcontents”.

Well, 101 years later Collins received another enthusiastic reception from Corkonians. Under the giant ‘A City Remembers’ banner, it was obvious that yes, the city does.

In fact, there were people who travelled from Roscommon and Dublin to attend the occasion, along with local schoolchildren, ex-servicemen and the great and the good of Cork.

It was a perfect people-watching occasion - faces from all walks of life coming together to get a first look at The Big Fella on a Bike.

The crowd was thick. There were craned necks and people on tippy toes trying to get a look at who was speaking.

A few eager people mounted the Sliabh na mBan for a better look, presumably forgetting that it was the very vehicle that accompanied Collins around West Cork on that fateful day in August, 1922, and therefore a national monument. A polite and large soldier asked them to dismount. You wouldn’t have argued with him.

Disappointingly, the PA system wasn’t up to the task of amplifying the speeches for the 1,500 strong crowd. We could have done with an elevated platform and speakers accustomed to projecting their voices, as would have been the case when Collins addressed crowds in 1922. The sounds of the city would have been much quieter back then, it’s hard to compete with the 214 bus.

Thank-you speeches went on and those on the periphery muttered they couldn’t hear a word, “we’d clap if we knew what they were saying”.

If we were all versed in Irish Sign Language, we would have been able to follow the interpreter’s energetic translations.

Grand-niece Fidelma Collins obviously inherited the gift of projecting your voice to a large crowd because hers was the only one I could hear in the speeches, and she was clearly thrilled with the turn-out and the fact that Michael Collins still means so much to people.

She was also especially pleased at the cross-party representation of politicians at the event. Hopefully she didn’t spot the protester with the sign “Are you taking the Mick, it’s a public toilet we need” .

Statesman statues and public toilets are not mutually exclusive, but this man was displeased enough at the removal of the rotting toilet block to scrawl a protest poster.

I cycled into town later in the afternoon with my kids to show them the new statue. The crowds had disappeared but there were a group of descendants getting their family photos with the main man, the likeness of the statue to one of his grandnephews was quite striking.

It is very meaningful that the statue is at ground level - accessible and tactile. That it is a recreation of that famous picture of Collins with his Pierce bicycle is just perfect.

After the horrendous floods of last week, as we face the cruel consequences of the climate crisis, we need the clear-visioned political leadership that Collins embodied more than ever.