In recent years, I've been half-expecting -- half-hoping, half-dreading -- a management/leadership book based on Michael Collins, a.k.a. "The Big Fella," a.k.a. "Mick." Collins was the revolutionary leader in Ireland's War of Independence, and later Ireland's first head of government after the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Collins's death during the Irish Civil War set down the fault lines of 20th-century political life in Ireland. He died at the age of 32, at the hands of former comrades-in-arms in an ambush in his home county of Cork, bringing anguish to Ireland, and a bitterness that has only recently softened. Béal na Bláth, the name of that bend on the quiet country road where Collins died, only adds poignancy: Literally, it means "mouth of flowers," but properly, it's an open gate into the meadow.

Several years of civil war would pass before naïf or zealot could call Ireland's Free State any kind of a promised land. For decades after, Ireland was a somnolent, threadbare, conservative country, chloroformed by the Catholic hierarchy and run by a self-satisfied petit bourgeoisie. But almost a century has passed since Collins's time, and Ireland seems to be coming into its own, a promised land, its capital's skyline filled with cranes and its people intensely integrated into a continent brought to its doorstep by Ryanair.

Picking a title for that self-help book would be a cinch. Call it Mick's Way: The Big Fella's Guide to Achieving the Impossible. On any given day, Collins's to-do list would have included: a) Organize and raise the finance for Ireland's War of Independence and then the government that he led post-Treaty; b) contest and win parliamentary seats four times; c) organize, train and arm the IRA before and during the War of Independence; d) direct that guerrilla war; e) wreck British intelligence -- oxymoron aside -- in Ireland with his own hit squad; f) negotiate the Anglo-Irish Treaty; g) lead the first independent government in Ireland; h) command the Irish Army in defeating the anti-Treaty forces (Eamonn de Valera et al.) in the Civil War; i) leave plenty of time for boisterous sessions of drinking and sing-songs, and Indiana Jones-style escapes from military and police primed to shoot him on sight.

Daring, dangerous and handsome (until you got close enough to see the teeth of a heavy smoker), Collins was the first glamorous guerrilla in the communications media of the time. Collins made his own luck, but while he was a conventionally religious Catholic Irishman of his time, he was no mystic follower of the likes of Patrick Pearse, who led the 1916 Rising. That Rising, in which Collins played his part, had been inspired by a potent combination of Catholic devotional zeal and a cult of sacrifice wedded to the ideals of Irish republicanism. All this from a farmer's son whose modest education did not include finishing secondary school.

To me and many of my generation and circumstances growing up in Ireland, Collins seemed part of our lives. How often I heard uncles take Collins's side in heated discussions. Most were in good humour, and frequently larded with subtle mischief, and with a witty, indulgent raillery I miss more and more. Nonetheless, politics was serious business, and I was walked carefully and expertly by my uncle Dan around every square inch of Béal na Bláth. This pilgrimage was a gentle effort, perhaps to give me some inoculation against my own parents' politics. At the time they were Fianna Fáil, the anti-Treaty, anti-Collins and IRA side. Mention of Collins stilled any partisan wrangling, and the conversation would ebb when his name came up. Often there'd be quiet before the talk turned to something else. It was acknowledgement that Collins's death was an insufferable loss for all.

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