Two original photographs documenting Michael Collins’s final hours have been unearthed in a historical roadshow in Cork.
One of the two photographs depicts Collins in a touring car outside a hotel in Bandon just hours before his death.
The second picture captures the scene at Béal na Bla on August 23rd 1922, the day after the ambush and shows what historians believe to be Collins’s shirt collar on the road.
No known photograph of the post-ambush site was believed to exist previously.
The photographs were taken by then 18-year-old Agnes Hurley, from Bandon, using an old brownie box camera.
Her collection spans 20 years dating from 1921 and includes hundreds of photographs. Part of the collection was lost but was rediscovered in an attic in Dublin last year.
Ms Hurley’s niece, Mim O’Donovan from Bandon, brought the pictures to the Revolutionary Decade Roadshow in Clonakilty organised by the history department at University College Cork at the weekend .
Almost 200 people turned up with items of interest from the period 1912 -1923 and family members’ connecting stories were recorded.