The first time someone called him "Taoiseach", he almost laughed.
"Chief is good enough," he said wryly, but the title stuck. People needed names for things, and Ireland needed a name for the man at the centre of this whirling experiment.
He'd thought the war had been complicated.
Then he met the school system.
"Half the country can quote Latin prayers," he complained to his education minister one afternoon, "and can't balance a household budget or read a technical manual."
They were in a draughty meeting room, windows rattling, piles of reports threatening to avalanche.
The minister, a patient woman from Galway with steel behind her spectacles, folded her hands.
"What do you want our schools to make, Michael?" she asked. "Saints? Farmers? Engineers? Patriots?"
"Yes," he said. "All of the above. In different combinations. Depending on the child."
He rubbed his face. [Management] quietly organised the chaos of his thoughts, slotting ideas into sequences.
"Start simple," he said. "Compulsory primary education, properly enforced. Not just on paper. Inspectors with teeth. And the curriculum—"
He reached for a blank sheet and started writing headings.
Irish & English (proper literacy in both)
Maths (practical and advanced)
History (ours and the world's, not just martyr stories)
Science basics
Civics – how government, taxes, law actually work
Trades & domestic economy
"Teach them how their own state works," he said, tapping the page. "So they don't grow up thinking politics is a thing that happens to them, not something they can shape."
The minister smiled faintly. "You realise you're designing a country that will be very hard to rule badly," she said.
"That's the idea," he replied.
From that room, changes rippled outward: new teacher training colleges with more secular influence; grants for poor families to keep older children in school; pilot technical schools in cities that combined classroom learning with apprenticeships.
[City Design] weighed in quietly when he demanded that new housing estates be built with schools within walking distance, not tacked on as an afterthought.
"Put the school at the heart," he told planners. "Literally. In the middle of the estate. Let every child feel it's theirs."
He did not forget the countryside.
On a soft spring day in Mayo, he stood in a farmer's kitchen, the range warm at his back, rain ticking softly on the small window.
The farmer—a wiry man with weather-scoured hands—poured him tea.
"You in Dublin talk of factories and trams," the farmer said. "But what about us? We fought too. We hid men in the hay. Are you going to leave us with the same hunger we had before, only under a green flag?"
"No," Michael said simply.
[Analysis] traced the lines of distrust and pride in the man's face, the generations of being talked at by landlords and inspectors.
"We can't turn every byre into a museum," he went on. "But we can do three things. One: make sure your children have a real choice—education enough to leave if they want, and enough support to stay if they don't. Two: help you make the land pay better if you stay. Co-ops. Credit. Training. Three: make sure the roads from here to the nearest town aren't mud tracks that strand you in winter."
He sketched as he spoke: a local creamery owned by its members; a small rural electrification node; a proper tarmac road.
"Electrification?" the farmer echoed sceptically. "Out here? For lamps?"
"For lamps," Michael agreed. "And for machines. Radio. Refrigeration. Things we haven't thought of yet. If we wire only the cities, the countryside will empty or revolt. Neither is good for the Republic."
Back in Dublin, [Finance] helped him sequence it: not every valley at once, but pilot projects that could prove their worth and be copied. Co-operatives got seed capital with strings attached: transparent books, democratically elected boards, annual audits.
"You don't trust us?" a co-op founder joked.
"I don't trust systems that have no checks," Michael replied. "Including my own."
Not every battle was with institutions.
Some were with ghosts.
In late 1920s Dublin, he sat in a smoky room with de Valera again, the two of them older, their rivalry tempered by years of working in the same claustrophobic capital.
On the table between them lay drafts of a new constitution.
"You're softening the language again," Dev said, tapping a clause about executive powers. "We fought for a Republic, not a glorified county council."
"And we're writing something that has to last more than a decade," Michael replied. "If we give the head of government too much unchecked power, someday it won't be you or me sitting in that chair. It'll be some chancer we haven't met yet. I'd like to make his life difficult."
Dev's mouth quirked despite himself.
"You think we can bind the future with phrases?" he asked.
"Not bind," Michael said. "Nudge. Channel. Make it harder to do the worst things, easier to do the decent ones."
He'd used [Politics] and [Analysis] relentlessly over the years to keep Dev inside the tent: giving him big roles in language revival, constitution drafting, foreign affairs—areas that met his need for moral and symbolic leadership without giving him direct control over the levers of daily economic policy.
It wasn't always comfortable. They clashed often. But the clash was within the same parliament, not across barricades.
Ireland, watching them from newspapers and street corners, got used to the idea that politics was argument, not war.
In 1939, the world went mad again.
Sitting in Cabinet as reports came in of Hitler's advance across Europe, Michael felt a cold old fear and a new calculation intertwine.
[Military] surveyed Ireland's strategic position: small, under-armed, with ports coveted by both Britain and Germany. [Intelligence] added threads: Nazi propaganda aimed at Irish republicans, British pressure for bases, American eyes watching from across the Atlantic.
"What are we?" one minister asked. "Neutral? With Britain? Against them?"
"We are Irish," Michael said, voice flat. "And our primary duty is to keep Ireland alive."
He pursued a line he'd sketched years earlier in the margins of that first notebook: armed, principled neutrality.
To the Dáil, he framed it plainly.
"We will not be a pawn for Berlin or London," he said. "We will defend our territory against any who would use it without our consent. We will co-operate with neighbours for mutual security where it does not compromise our sovereignty. And we will shelter those we can from the storm, within our limited means."
Behind the scenes, [Intelligence] co-ordinated quiet agreements with the British: shared weather reports, submarine watch, the understanding that if German troops ever tried to land, British forces might "assist" at Ireland's invitation.
"But no permanent bases," Michael insisted. "Not this time. You want to win the war? Fine. We want to win the peace."
He also made a decision that would have been unthinkable in his previous life's Ireland: he quietly relaxed immigration restrictions for a small number of Jewish refugees, overriding both bureaucratic inertia and clerical prejudice.
"Ten thousand souls won't break our budget," he told a sceptical official, [Finance] giving him hard numbers. "But it might save our own souls when history asks what we did."
Some bishops grumbled. He stared them down.
"Christ was a refugee," he reminded one. "We can afford a bit of inconvenience."
It didn't make Ireland a utopia of welcome. But it meant that, in a few towns, dark-haired children with German and Polish surnames grew up speaking Irish-accented English, adding their own threads to the new tapestry.
By the 1950s, he'd started to feel old.
Not in the heroic way statues suggested, but in the ordinary way of men whose knees had been up and down too many stairs.
One afternoon, he visited a university lecture hall in the new campus he'd once sketched in pencil.
Rows of students—women and men, some from farms, some from cities, some with foreign accents—filled the seats, notebooks open.
The young lecturer was talking about economic cycles and social welfare.
"Keynes would argue…," the lecturer said, chalk tapping against the board. "But in the Irish context, with our smaller open economy, we must adjust…"
Michael sat in the back, hat low, anonymous enough to be just another old fellow sitting in on a class.
[Analysis] read the room: curiosity, scepticism, a comfortable irreverence. Some students would go on to work in Finance, some in NGOs, some in politics, some abroad and back again.
He remembered the farmer's kitchen in Mayo. The cramped tenements. The prison huts of Frongoch.
We did some of it, he thought. Not all. But some.
Later, in a quiet corner of the campus with a view over the Liffey, a young woman approached him.
"Excuse me," she said, a bit breathless. "You're… you're Mr. Collins, aren't you?"
He smiled. "I've been accused of that, yes."
She flushed. "Sorry. I just wanted to say—my grandfather always said that if it weren't for the housing programme, they'd have stayed in the slum and he'd never have made it to secondary school. I'm… the third in my family to come here now."
He felt something twist in his chest that had nothing to do with age.
"What are you studying?" he asked.
"Engineering," she said. "Civil. I want to work on rail. We're talking about the west coast line extension—there's debates in the papers about it, but I think—"
She caught herself. "Sorry. I'm rambling."
"Don't be," he said. "Ramble more. Argue about it in every café you can find. Make a nuisance of yourself in public consultations. That's your job now."
She grinned. "Is that an official instruction?" she asked.
"Yes," he said gravely. "From a busybody old man who once scribbled rail lines on a napkin and hoped someone like you would come along to make them actually work."
As she walked away, [City Design] quietly traced the possibilities of her career: bridges, tunnels, timetables, in a country that no longer thought of itself as tiny and fixed, but as something that could be improved, iterated, argued over.
At home that night, alone for once in the big, slightly draughty house that had accumulated decades of papers, he opened the old copybook again.
So many of the original pages were worn thin with handling. He added one more, near the back.
If by some mad grace I've changed things: remember nothing is ever finished. Every generation thinks their fights are the last battles that matter. They're wrong. Make room for the next lot to do better.
He sat back, the fountain pen heavy in his fingers.
Somewhere deep inside, the memory of Eoin Kelly's first life stirred: the endless online arguments, the feeling of shouting into a void while decisions were made by men you'd never meet.
He thought of all the times he'd, in that old life, cursed "the state" as if it were a monolith instead of a mess of humans doing their best or their worst.
Now he'd been the state.
It was messier than he'd imagined. It was also, in its best moments, kinder.
"You cheated," he told himself softly. "You had help. Skills you didn't earn."
Maybe. But he'd also spent years waking before dawn and falling asleep in his clothes.
No system had written the laws or sat in the kitchens or walked into the camps. That had been him—all of him, Michael and Eoin both.
He closed the copybook gently.
On the mantelpiece stood two photographs.
One was of a young Volunteer unit in 1919, faces serious, uniforms mismatched. He recognised too many of them by name.
The other was of a group of children on a new housing estate, all elbows and knees, schoolbags askew, grinning at the camera in bright, defiant defocus.
He'd chosen to keep both there, side by side.
The price and the dividend.
"Right," he murmured again, though his days of running were mostly done. "On you go, then."
Outside, in a city that hummed with buses and trams and arguments, the next generation was already gathering in pubs and classrooms and union halls, complaining about his choices, planning improvements, dreaming up revolutions of their own.
He found the thought more comforting than threatening.
After all, if Ireland ever stopped arguing with itself, that's when he'd really worry.
For now, he leaned back in his chair, listening to the faint, distant sounds of a country he'd helped drag onto a different track.
And for the first time in a very long time, Michael Collins allowed himself to simply sit, breathe, and be one small, satisfied citizen of the Republic he'd once only known from history books and angry tweets.