The Michael Collins Industry
Michael Collins and the women in his life
By Meda Ryan
Published by Mercier Press
Price £9.99
In his own words: Michael Collins
Edited by Francis Costello
Published by Gill & Macmillan
Price £8.99
Michael Collins: The Final Days
By Justin Nelson
Published by Justin Nelson Publications,
151 Foxrock Park, Dublin 18.
Price £9.95
The rehabilitation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood leader and
signatory of the 1921 Treaty which led to Ireland's Civil War
continues.
Following Tim Pat Coogan's biography of his hero, Michael
Collins, and his hatchet job of his anti-hero Eamonn de Valera,
came the historically-flawed Michael Collins film. All served to
whet the Irish people's, and others, curiosity about the Big
Fella, his life, his ideas, the contradictions and the what ifs.
A virtual industry of books accompanied the film and has
continued churning out material on Collins' life.
While much of the material in the books under review is not new,
the author's approach to Collins's life is. Meda Ryan's book
outlines the influences of the many women in his life. How women
such as Lady Hazel Lavery and Moya Llewylen Davies played as
important a role in the intrigue of the IRA's Director of
Intelligence's operations as did the likes of Madeline `Dilly'
Dicker, Kathleen Clarke, Nancy O'Brien and Susan Killen to name a
few. The major part that his mother, Marianne, and sister Hannie
played in his upbringing and life are also detailed.
Ryan also tackles his love affair with Kitty Kiernan and the
suggested liaisons with Lady Lavery in a more restrained way than
other recent books. Ryan states that it was a media creation with
Kitty Kiernan writing on 30 May 1921 saying: ``Don't forget to
keep papers about your sweetheart! It was extraordinary, wasn't
it. I'd like to see the paper. So don't forget.'' Not the words of
a woman scorned.
Costello's collection of Colins's speeches are very interesting
though I am surprised that one of his most important speeches is
omitted, and not for reasons of space. Following the 1916 leader
Thomas Ashe's death on hunger-strike on 25 September 1917 the
task of giving the graveside oration fell to this young IRB
Supreme Council and Volunteer Provisional Executive member.
Stepping forward following the final salute of a volley of shots
over the grave Collins said one sentence and withdrew:
``The volley you have witnessed is the only appropriate tribute to
a dead Fenian.''
It is worth remembering when ploughing through these and the
other works on Collins that his formal education ended when he
was 15 and that he was but 31 when he was assassinated. In that
time he became IRA Director of Intelligence, TD, Minister for
Finance, Treaty negotiator, President of the Irish Republic by
virtue of his position as head of the IRB, founder of the Garda
Síochána and the Free State army.
Costello uses extracts of speeches given by Collins during this
period to illuminate the Big Fella's vision for Ireland, his
views on the Treaty, the Free State, the Civil War, partition,
democracy and other topics. The selected extracts help bring this
complicated period to life and with Justin Nelson's illustrated
life book you would be far better informed of the facts of
1916-'22 than 30 visits to see Neil Jordan's film.
Justin Nelson's contribution to the Michael Collins library is
like a scrapbook of the period with articles by Collins's nephew,
also Michael Collins, General Tom Barry, Cathal O'Shannon, Con
Houlihan, Piaras Beaslaí, Síle de Valera, General Sean Mac Eoin,
the graveside oration of General Richard Mulcahy. Much of the
photographs are reprints from the contemporary newspapers and
brochures, many I hadn't seen before. A must for those intrigued
by the mysteries of Michael Collins.
As a type of introduction Nelson uses the words of a man who
opposed Collins during the Civil War on the occasion of the
unveiling of a memorial to Collins at Sam's Cross, Béal na
mBláth, County Cork in 1965, General Tom Barry.
``Many of you were on opposite sides. Let us leave it at that.
Each of us, like I did myself, believed in the correctness of our
choice.
``Let us end all the futile recriminations of an event which
happened so many years ago and which divided brother against
brother and neighbour against neighbour.''
With Ireland's future in the hands of today's Irish republican
leaders, we must hope that never again will Irish people turn
against each other and away from the task of uniting Ireland in a
fitting tribute to those who died for it.
By Aengus O'Snodaigh
Conquering castles
Castles in Ireland: Feudal Power in a Gaelic World
By Tom McNeill
Published by Routledge
Price £16.99
When I was at University there was a standing joke amongst
history students that in the event of being unable to come up
with a decent opening sentence for an essay about any period of
European history there were two standard lines to fall back on:
``This was a period of great social change'', or alternatively
``During this period there was trouble in Ireland''. Either would
do because neither would ever be wrong, no matter what date was
in the essay question.
With this in mind it is surprising to discover that someone with
the erudition of Tom McNeill has had to resort to such an obvious
undergraduate ploy in the opening sentence of Chapter 1: ``Society
in Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth century was in a state of
flux''. This is rather poor historiography, otherwise known as
Stating the Bleedin' Obvious. The day when someone can write
about Ireland and say ``This was a period of peace and harmony
when the Irish were not being systematically dispossessed by the
English while simultaneously having the crap kicked out of them''
has yet to come.
Nevertheless, this is a quibble in what is a meticulously
researched and scholary combination of archaeological
investigation and interpretation of the wider socio-political
context of the construction of castles and the purposes to which
they were put. And although the stone-by-stone descriptions of
every pile of rubble in Ireland which has ever resembled a castle
are liable to reduce the non-academic reader to a state of
catatonic boredom, there is, buried amongst the minutiae, the nub
of an intriguing and highly contentious thesis.
Essentially, McNeill concludes that the evidence provided by the
examination of castles demonstrates that the partial conquest of
Ireland was achieved not by the English as the mighty military
power of received history, but rather by the English as a bunch
fo mercenary opportunists with a talent for exploiting
pre-existing divisions amongst the Irish aristrocracy to their
own advantage - and that the Irish had a distressing inclination
to occasionally facilitate them; in 40 years the English
``occupied a much greater area of land than they had conquered in
a century of warfare in Wales... The occupation or seizure of an
Irish kingdom was usually preceded by either an invitation to
intervene... the death of a strong king... or a straightforward
power vacuum''. Uncomfortable reading, and arguable to say the
least, but perhaps there are lessons here for the modern age.
All in all, the work provides an extremely useful and
comprehensive research tool, but this is definitely one for the
academic specialist. In the meantime, we can look to historians
such as Patrick Collinson, Eamon Duffy, Diarmuid McCullough and
Christopher Haig as examples of those who understand the art as
well as science of writing history.
By Fern Lane