By Sean Healy
The responses to my review of Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins by Bernie Bryan and Mike Heaney (GLW #261) show a romantic and one-sided view of Michael Collins.
It is true that Collins was a figure of enormous influence during the war of independence, that he was (in the words of the original review) "one of Irish republicanism's greatest heroes".
But politically, Collins was a moderate bourgeois nationalist and nothing more. His influence was not limited to the battlefield. Politically, his role was decisive in selling one of the more unequal treaties of 20th century history.
Peter Berresford Ellis, in his authoritative A History of the Irish Working Class, writes of Collins' politics: "Collins seemed to believe in a hazy form of 'co-operatism' and harked back to the Celtic system. His idea, however, was the establishment of a Napoleonic dictatorship 'to prevent Communism'."
The split in the republican movement over the treaty largely followed class and political lines. As one of the leading left-wing republicans of the day, Countess Markiewicz, put it, "It is the capitalist interests in England and Ireland that are pushing this treaty to block the march of the working people in Ireland and England".
Which side did Michael Collins end up supporting? Whilst it's true, as Bryan says, that Collins "vacillated", the side he came down on was the reactionary one. (De Valera, also a bourgeois nationalist, at least opposed the treaty).
The argument, which is implicit in both Heaney and Bryan's pieces, that the Dail could not have gotten a better deal is very debatable. Politically (as opposed to militarily) both the international and, more arguably, the domestic contexts favoured the republicans more than they did the British.
In any case, we should weigh up the concessions Collins and the other negotiators gave up in comparison to what they got. In my opinion, they got worse than they gave.
Neither Heaney nor Bryan raise what Collins actually did during the civil war — repudiating the national coalition agreed to with De Valera, leading the attack on the IRA-held Four Courts with donated British artillery, reoccupying his home county of Cork with an army filled with ex-British army and Royal Irish Constabulary personnel.
Collins was personally responsible for all these things. "Collins marches through Cork. Why not through Belfast?" said the writing on Cork's walls.
Official Irish history has mythologised and romanticised Michael Collins, and for a thoroughly reactionary purpose: to legitimise partition and the southern Irish state. I don't think the left should do the same.