Michael Collins

British Empire]]torical Figure
 * name=Michael Collins
 * image= Collins.jpg
 * timeline=OTL
 * first=
 * last=
 * nationality=Ireland (born a British subject)
 * race=
 * religion=Catholicism
 * birth=1890
 * death=1922
 * cause of death=Assassination by gunshot
 * occupation= Military Leader, Politician, Guerrilla, Revolutionary
 * spouse=
 * children=
 * family =
 * affiliations = Irish Republican Army
 * timeline 2=Southern Victory
 * appearance 2=''Blood and Iron
 * }}Michael John ("Mick") Collins (Irish: Mícheál Seán Ó Coileáin) (1890-1922) was an Irish revolutionary leader, Minister for Finance in the First Dáil of 1919, Director of Intelligence for the IRA, and member of the Irish delegation during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. Having conducted a brillant and innovative campaign of what would be later called "urban guerilla", Collins understood that he had to accept a compromise with the British Empire which had just won the titanic struggle against Germany. While the Irish had succeeded in overturning the centuries-old status quo of complete British rule in their island, they had to accept an agreement falling far short of the original Irish Republican demands. North Ireland - where the pro-British Protestants were the majority - remained part of the United Kingdom. Moreover, the new "Irish Free State" in the southern part of the island fell short of being a completley independent Republic, being forced to retain the British King as its formal Head of State to whom all office holders had to swear allegiance - a very bitter pill which many Irish Nationalists refused to swallow. Subsequently, as both Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-chief of the National Army, Collins had the bitter duty of conducting the Irish Civil War and fignt against many of his former comrades-at-arms. In the course of that war he was shot and killed in August 1922, under circumstances which remain controversial up to the present.

Michael Collins in Southern Victory
Michael Collins (1890-???) was commander of the Irish Republican Army. During the Great War, with support from the Central Powers, Collins led a guerrilla war which expelled the British from most of Ireland. After the war, he commanded a conventional army which crushed a British-backed rebellion of malcontents in Belfast. Collins had seen the British Empire defeated and considerably weakened in the recent war, though not completley crushed, and he had the full backing of the Great War's victors, the United States and Germany - with the US providing not only diplomatic backing but also the direct military involvement of its naval vessels in the Belfast fighting. Under these circumstances, Collins saw no reason to make any compromise over realising the full Irish Nationalist program - a completley independent Irish Republic embracing the entire island - and imposing it by force on the recalitrant Belfast Protestants. In the short term Collins' policy was entirely succesful, but it contributed to the bitterness nursed by bith the British and Irish Protestants, and cost Irland the bitter years of a new British occupation during the Second Great War.

Literary Note
Having presumably avoided being killed in 1922, as in OTL, Collins would have been just 51 years old in 1941, and likely to be in a position to lead the resistance to the renewed British occupation. However, with the books focusing on North America and only scattered referecnes to Ireland, this is not sepcifically mentioned.