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Corrigan - Mapping An Idea Test Page

Page history last edited by Corrigan 10 years, 4 months ago

When Irish political figure and revolutionary Michael Collins embarked upon the trip that would ultimately see his demise, he remarked that he would be safe in Ireland, because they wouldn't kill him in his own country. Although it's still unclear exactly who was responsible for the assassination of Michael Collins, his prediction clearly turned out to be dead wrong -- no pun intended, honest. Collins newfound unpopularity was largely due to his negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created a separate Irish Free State, but relinquished the six counties in the north of Ireland to British control. This did not sit well amongst the Irish, who sought full autonomy from the British. 

 

I was interested first in mapping the route Collins's convoy took on August 22, 1922, looking at the places Collins felt that, despite his recent fall from grace, he would still be welcomed -- or at least marginally safe. His choice to visit these particular locations would indicate that he felt an ideological kinship with the people of this area, whether due to political agreement with his diplomatic decision-making, or due to a shared Irishness that surpassed politics. I wanted to see if he was completely deluded in thinking this would be the case, so I tried to think of a way to look at the revolutionary potential or tendency toward political violence in the area he toured. I'm sure there are better methods, but for the sake of a quick visual, I elected to look into the major conflicts of the Irish Civil War and see if there was any overlap in the locations in which those battles took place and the area where Collins was assassinated. Below is the map that I created:

 

 

In looking at it, based on this very, very unscientific analysis, Collins doesn't seem to have been entirely myopic in his assumptions. Aside from a major battle occurring in Cork, which was a stop on Collins's route, there is little connection between the more southern route he took and places of considerable unrest. He was assassinated in Béal na mBlath, more than 30km from Cork. This may not seem like much, but would not have been a quick jaunt in 1920s Ireland. Thus, in terms of radically violent ideologies, the places he was visiting would seem to have been largely innocuous. A combination of bad luck and underestimation of the degree to which radical Republicanism penetrated more rural areas led to his demise.

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