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The I.R.B., or Fenian movement, distrusted British politics and politicians as a matter of dogma. The Fenians did not accept that Britain would ever confer Home Rule, or any form of independence on Ireland unless it were forced to, not by parliamentary methods, but by physical force. For those with a taste for symbolism I may digress to remark that

The constitutionalist John Redmond is now seldom heard of in Ireland. Today Ireland's premier sporting trophy is the Sam Maguire Cup which is played for each year in the All Ireland Football Final at Croke Park. And Northern Ireland is still something of a political football.

However to revert to Michael Collins. In his every day working life Collins sought to broaden his range of experience by moving from the Post Office to a firm of stockbrokers, Horne and Co, from there to a clerkship in the Board of Trade and finally, perhaps because of his brother Pat's urgings, he moved, to gain a flavour of American business life, to the Guaranty Trust Company of New York's London Office where war found him.

He found his own war in Dublin in Easter 1916. It was a rebellion that should not have been allowed to happen. Had Home Rule for all Ireland not been aborted by the strength of the unionist/conservative alliance, there would have been no subsequent Anglo Irish war, no civil war, no Partition and no I.R.A., or Northern Ireland problem today. But that searing week of flame and folly during Easter 1916 claimed the lives of some of the people Collins most admired: Tom Clarke, James Connolly, Sean Hurley, Seán MacDiarmada, Joseph Plunkett. To him their deaths were a debt owed, a charge against freedom, which England would repay. However, he would not present his bill for retribution by means of conventional warfare.

He still believed in fighting. In the parliamentary game as played at Westminster the rules were so arranged that the outnumbered Irish nationalists always lost.

Collins now understood also that static warfare, i.e. seizing a stronghold, be it a building such as Dublin's General Post Office in which he fought during the rebellion, or a mountain top, and then slugging it out with rifles and shot guns against an adversary who possessed heavy artillery, would continue to provide the Irish with heroes and martyrs and the British with victories.

Instead Collins evolved a new concept of guerilla warfare based not on the capture of the enemy's bricks and mortar, but of its information. Traditionally, Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration in Ireland, had used a network of spies and informers to infiltrate and then snuff out movements directed at securing Irish independence. Collins perfected a system of spying on the spies. Every important branch of the Castle system, be it banking, policing, the railways, the postal service, was infiltrated by his agents. They were not highly trained, C.I.A. style operatives, but ordinary men and women, people whom nobody had ever taken notice of before. Collins gave them a belief in themselves, a courage they did not know they possessed, and they in return gave him a complete picture of how their masters operated.