Northern Ireland

Cross Where Collins Fell – On This Day in 1924

Third anniversary of ambush that killed Michael Collins marked in Co Cork

Michael Collins and James Craig, in the first of their two short-lived pacts of January 1922, endeavoured to find ‘" more suitable system than the Council of Ireland… for dealing with problems affecting all Ireland"
Michael Collins was shot dead in August 1922 at Béal na Bláth in Co Cork
By Cormac Moore
August 19 1924

The anniversary of the death of General Michael Collins will be celebrated in the Southern Command on the 22nd inst. at Béal na Bláth, Co Cork, where he was shot.

A cross will be unveiled on behalf of the army, and a wreath will be placed on the base of the cross on behalf of the various units of the Southern Command. Army hands and units will attend the ceremony.

A religious service will take place, after which the cross will be unveiled by General [Eoin] O’Duffy.

The annual commemoration of Michael Collins’s killing at Béal na Bláth continues to this day, attended by large crowds each August.

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The Baldwin Invasion

The cause of Mr [Stanley] Baldwin’s sudden determination to invade Ireland remains unexplained. If anything was to be said about it officially, the News Letter would not have subjected Mr Baldwin to a severe editorial boycott yesterday.

The Whig, having nothing to tell, lectured the visitor on his duty to “Ulster”, repeating the familiar formula: “If the commission is to be set up, it should be made clear that the intention of the signatories was to carry out a very slight rectification of the boundary, and not to create a new boundary.”

Here the contingent appointment of a commission is contemplated – on the strict understanding that the commissioners must act on the Northern Government’s orders.

Trial by jury would become quite a popular institution amongst those parties to suit who could decide the exact nature of the verdicts before the juries were impaneled. Being in a similar state of ignorance regarding the object of the Englishman’s descent on our shores, the Evening Telegraph railed hysterically at an English paper which had hazarded a guess.

But the public who learned from Mr Baldwin that rain fell on Sunday, that the sun shone on Monday, and that he wished everybody good luck, were provided by the puzzled ascendancy press with an ample store of information about the visitor’s great-grandmother – an ancient lady whose father saved his head by leaving Scotland for Ireland in 1745.

As the Labour Government was preparing legislation to appoint Northern Ireland’s Boundary Commissioner, the opposition leader, Stanley Baldwin, visited James Craig in Belfast to contemplate the Conservative Party’s stance.