AN extensive archive of Easter Rising material including two letters written by Michael Collins to his fiancée Kitty Kiernan from London have sold at auction.
The archive, comprising 22 pamphlets and books, eight handbills and about 28 autograph items, fetched $16,250 (£12,700) at Sotheby’s in New York.
Collins, who was assassinated in 1922 just six years after the Easter Rising, had been engaged to Catherine Brigid "Kitty" Kiernan for less than a year at the time of his death.
His letters to her were written while Collins met with Winston Churchill in London to discuss the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed the year before in 1921.
“Ireland will have cause to remember her present-day extremists,” Collins wrote in one of the letters, dated June 1, 1922.
“The whole thing is ghastly but I'll tell you more about it when I see you. It was only after my scribble yesterday I heard of Joe McGuinness' death.
“He is a great loss to us but apart from that I feel the personal loss much more keenly. He was the one most responsible for the recent peace. It makes the present position all the more tragic."
Collins’ wedding to Kiernan never happened, as just two months later he was shot and killed by anti-treaty forces at Beal na mBlath, Co Cork.
In another letter to his sweetheart, dated March 31, 1922, Collins wrote: “I am not very sanguine about the future from any point of view. We have however secured release of all the prisoners.
“But the news from Ireland is very bad and the 'powers that be' here are getting very alarmed and there may be a bust up any moment.
“Were it not for the awful consequences I'd almost welcome it. It would be so pleasant to be relieved of all responsibility — yet one has the responsibility it would be cowardly to shirk from standing up to it.”
The Sinn Féin politician, who was just 31 at the time of his death, added with stark pessimism: “The whole business is casting a gloom over me and in spite of what is a big human hope I cannot keep thinking that as a people we are destined to go on dreaming, vainly hoping, striving to no purpose until we are all gone."
Other documents sold as part of the collection include a copy of the Proclamation, two copies of the Irish War News and letters and signatures of ex-President Éamon de Valera and others.
Also included in the sale was a souvenir program of O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery in August 1915.
