In a country-wide opinion poll carried out this summer, people in the Irish Republic were asked which national political figure from the twentieth century they held in the highest esteem. The emphatic winner was Michael Collins, the legendary fighter who led the Free State Forces in the Irish Civil War and was killed at the age of thirty-one in an ambush in Co Cork. 

Michael Collins’s status is very high in Ireland: any event about Collins immediately attracts a full house. Michael Collins, the opera, is in preparation for the spring of 2006 at the Cork Opera House, and there continue to be many publications, films and TV documentaries about the man. This new