"MY DEAR KITTY, this note is certainly going to be short. Several people waiting for me and a conference at II. Have just come back from Mass. Lit a candle for you as I do each morning. I don't know how many times I have read your letter. It's awfully good, and I do really love it. Your rebuke for it is just ever so little a rebuke about someone else who would really be the one is a little upsetting.
"You don't mean it like that tho' I'm sure. You are the one never fear. How I wish I could see you now and have one of those lovely serious talks with you. They are the best ones, aren't they? Parts of your letter were somewhat like them.
"You'll never know what good that letter did me yesterday it helped me all through the day, and it was one of the hardest days we've yet had. At it from early morning until eight almost, and you don't know what an ordeal that is. Slan leat, for the day. Am looking forward to a letter in half an hour. God be with you. Fondest love, M."
"Do you like my letters or only some of them?."
That letter was written to the love of his life, Kitty Kiernan, by Michael Collins from London on October 14th, 1921.
She replied. "My very dear Michael, I had closed my letter to you yesterday before yours arrived your first from London (post only gets here at one o'clock). You can just picture my delight to know that you had got there safely and feeling in good form. Went to Mass and H.C. again this morning if you knew what that means for lazy Kitty to thank God you were safe and well.
"Yesterday's letter didn't exactly displease me, it was full of little questions."
The above is just a sample of hundreds of letters between Collins and Kiernan which went on display last night at the Cork Public Museum in an exhibition entitled "Dearest Kitty".
The letters were purchased by the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Peter Barry, last year for a sum understood to be in the region of £45,000. Mr carry said yesterday that his motivation was to ensure that they were kept in trust for the nation.
The exhibition contains almost 300 letters, many of which have never been seen in public before, and at the official opening of the exhibition last night the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman James Corr, said that the correspondence was a valuable primary source of information for historians.
He went on. "By its nature, the writing of history produces complex explanations and constantly revises these in the light of new evidence or the posing of new questions. This process may be termed `revisionism'. It has led inevitably in Ireland, as elsewhere, to clashes with traditionalists of various kinds for whom the simplistic, inspirational, nationalist version of the past are not only sufficient explanation but are matters of piety or ideology. It is, this easy to understand why modern history writing can cause offence to undermine popular myths without replacing them with other forms of consoling simple explanation can be profoundly disturbing as well as challenging."
Alderman Corr said that the "Dearest Kitty" letters provided an insight not only into the love affair which grew from the time of Collins's first meeting with Kitty Kiernan in Granard, Co Longford, in 1918, but, more importantly, they showed the worries and the strains which permeated their relationship as Collins fulfilled his duties as the leader of a guerrilla war and a negotiator in the long, tortuous and acrimonious discussions leading to the signing of the Treaty.
He added. "Then there is the involvement of Harry Boland, friend of Collins, who was also very much in love with Kitty Kiernan. One wishes as one reads the letters that the three of them could have lived and worked out their lives in the stable conditions of a free and independent Ireland. Boland speaks highly of his rival for Kitty's affections, and Collins, on hearing that Boland had been shot by Free State troops, says. I only thought of him with the friendship of the days of 1918 and 1919."
In another part of her reply to Collins's letter of October 14th, 1921, Kiernan says. "I told H I didn't love him and he was prepared to risk it with the idea that I might grow to love him, and I think I told you all the other little things before. It would take so long to tell you now and I want to tell you `other things'. Please forgive me, dear, for not being more satisfactory, but you can be happy to know that you are out of it and will not be blamed in the slightest, it was all my fault. I think it better not to discuss it further just now, but you can, if you feel like it I don't."