Michael Collins was a busy man in April , but not too busy to respond to a letter from a Mr Meagher in Australia. Meagher was curious about the recent state of affairs in Ireland, fought over as it was by the British military authorities and the Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army IRA , and Collins, with an eye to PR and perhaps out of genuine helpfulness as well, took the time to answer his correspondence point by point.
One body only has the right and authority to speak and it is the body brought into being by the freely exercised will of the Irish people. That is the Government of Ireland, and to it all national organisations within Ireland give allegiance. Spoken like a true democrat. Others, however, might have looked askance at this answer and wondered if its author was being entirely straightforward in his avowedly unambiguous response.
Arising out of your letterβ¦re attitude of Irish Volunteers and another organisation, you will notice that there is no difference between the aims and methods of the Irish Volunteer Organisation and the other one you mention. That was not to say that its members could act with impunity, as Collins instructed the Sligo commander to arrest the perpetrators of the mail car robbery and relieve them of their ill-gotten, and unauthorised, gains. Even so, questions continued, for Sligo was not the only IRA area uncomfortable with compromised authority.
If Collins replied, then his answer has been lost to posterity, since most of the subsequent sheets in that particular batch β stored in the National Library of Ireland with the rest of his papers β are in tatters, rendering their words illegible.
In any case, Richard Mulcahy was not impressed with how the Library was handling the memoranda of his old comrade. With his own eye on history, Mulcahy discussed the era with another former colleague, Peadar McMahon, in Mulcahy: Did you ever on any of your moments on organisation work come across anybody who was consciously an IRB man as distinct from a Volunteer?
