In Great Haste: The Letters of Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan

Even seventy years after his death, Michael Collins remains a colossus of modern Irish history. During the five years before he died, Collins grew particularly close to Kitty Kienan of Grandard in County Longford. Harry Boland also expressed warm affection for Kitty in several letters, but it was the relationship between Michael and Kitty that developed and they planned to marry. They exchanged more than 300 letters which revealed not only their intimacy, but also the extraordinary pressure under which Collins lived during the tempestuous days of 1921 when the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty were being hammered out. A sequence of letters from London in May 1922 shows him near the breaking point. Kitty's letters in turn are full of concern about the life of strain Michael is forced to live and its looming physical danger. Both of them wish for a normal life in marriage.

This new and splendidly designed edition contains, for the first time, facsimile reproductions of the letters and includes correspondence first discovered in 1994. It is being published to coincide with the release of a major motion picture on Michael Collins, wirtten and directed by Neil Jordan, starring Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts and based upon the relationship between Michael and Kitty.

Lion O Broin was a distringuished writer, broadcaster, historian and public servent. He died in 1990.

CIan O Heigeartaigh is a journalist and television producer.