On this day in 1922, Michael Collins was shot dead in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, in County Cork. He was thirty-one. He had been commander-in-chief of the National Army for about six weeks, and chairman of the Provisional Government since January. The road was in the county he came from; he had known that country since he was a boy.
Ten days earlier, Arthur Griffith had died in Dublin. The new state was not yet a year old and had buried two of its principal men inside a fortnight, in the middle of a civil war whose lines ran through families and parishes.
The front page below, from the Evening Star in Washington the next evening, gives the news the width of a column and announces a national funeral. Around it the paper carries on with coal talks and railway plans, as papers do. The painting below shows him lying in state, a crucifix laid on his body, under the words "Love of Ireland".
Marguerite, the funeral in Dublin drew crowds counted in the hundreds of thousands, and among the mourners were people who had taken the other side of the split. The lying-in-state was at the Pro-Cathedral, and the queues to pass the coffin went on for days.
The place-name is usually rendered 'mouth of flowers', though scholars differ on the older form. It is a hard thing for a road to be remembered for, carrying a name like that.