Uploaded 12 November 1999

Since the 1960s, a reassessment of the Irish nationalist past has been going on in the Republic of Ireland. This reassessment has a variety of causes, and it began before the eruption of violence in Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s, but undoubtedly the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland has been an important catalyst for a fundamental reconsideration of many of the foundation myths of the independent Irish state. Not surprisingly, questions about political violence have been at the centre of much of the historical controversy. The established view of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, officially sponsored and apparently widely shared in the first five decades after independence, emphasised the heroism and self-sacrifice of the independence struggle. By the 1960s, however, the heroic stories of the revolutionary period were coming under increasing challenge from historians and other commentators. This questioning of the celebration of past revolutionary violence struck a responsive chord with some citizens of the Republic at a time when a revived Irish Republican Army was justifying its armed struggle on the grounds that it was continuing the fight for an all-Ireland republic begun in Easter 1916. Others, however, while equally opposed to the contemporary IRA’s campaign, still wished to take pride in what they saw as a more honourable and justifiable use of armed struggle in the past. These debates have continued up to the present, and I believe they form an important part of the context for Neil Jordan’s 1996 film,  Michael Collins . Jordan’s film is ambiguous and contradictory in its attitude towards republican violence, but it is this very ambiguity which allows Jordan to reconcile the widely felt need for a heroic past with the longing for peace in the present.

The choice of Michael Collins as the hero of Jordan’s film is not surprising, both because of the important role which Collins played during the revolutionary period, and because of the way in which he has come to be regarded in Ireland today. [1]  Collins fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 and subsequently assumed a leading role in the independence struggle. He was Minister for Finance in the republican government formed after Sinn Féin’s victory in the 1918 election, but it was his military role as director of intelligence and organisation for the IRA that made him famous. When the IRA’s guerrilla warfare, together with Sinn Féin’s political campaign, brought the British government to the negotiating table, Collins was chosen, against his will, as part of the Irish negotiating team. He helped to negotiate the Treaty which brought independence to the Irish Free State, but only as a partitioned British dominion. He stood by this Treaty, despite bitter criticism from many of his former comrades who said he had sold out the republic. Collins maintained that the Treaty was the best which could be achieved under the circumstances, and that it could be a stepping-stone to greater freedom. During the Civil War, Collins was Commander in Chief of the Free State army, and in August 1922 he was shot dead in an ambush not far from his birthplace in West Cork.

Even before his death, Collins was already a legendary figure, thanks partly to the British press which focused on him as the leader of the IRA campaign. The fact that Collins remained at large throughout the War of Independence and was never photographed during this period only added to the romance and mystery surrounding him. The Collins myth was developed further in the early years of the Irish Free State, when it was used to rally support for the new state. Because Collins had come to embody the war against Britain, his involvement in creating the Free State was pointed to as evidence that freedom really had been achieved. In the months before his death, the visual image of Collins which would last in the public imagination was created: Collins the general, looking serious, handsome and commanding in his military uniform. This is the image of him which is most often reproduced up to the present day, and which is still sold on the streets of Dublin. It is a warrior image, one which makes it easy to forget his role as administrator and Minister for Finance. [2] After his death, Collins’s memory got caught up in the divisions of the Civil War period. His memory was revered by Fine Gael, the party which had accepted the Treaty in 1922, but was largely ignored by the anti-Treaty party Fianna Fáil, while to more radical republicans he was nothing short of a traitor.

It was not until bitterness over the Civil War had subsided that Collins could begin to re-emerge as a unifying figure in the Republic of Ireland. There are a number of things about Collins and his story which make him appealing to many Irish nationalists today. First, there is the inherent romance of his life: the poor boy from West Cork who took on the might of the British Empire, the warrior who finally chose peace but was then forced to fight his former comrades and was killed, aged only 31, at the poetically named Béal na mBláth, the Mouth of the Flowers. Second, there is his death at a young age, with all the accompanying myths of unfulfilled promise which such early deaths give rise to. Like John Kennedy in the United States, Collins is the lost leader, the man who, if he had only lived, could have set right all the nation’s problems. Thirdly, again because of his untimely death, he was not associated with the unmet expectations and the sheer mundaneness of conventional politics. In this respect, he contrasts strongly with his great opponent in the Civil War, Éamon de Valera. De Valera went on to serve as Prime Minister for over twenty years, and then for another fourteen years in the figurehead position of President, finally retiring only in 1973 after almost sixty years at the centre of Irish political life. His extraordinarily long political career ultimately led many members of the generation which came of age in the 1960s to associate de Valera with what they saw as the stagnation, boredom, conservatism and repressive social norms of the 1950s and 1960s. To a generation half a century removed from the independence struggle, de Valera was no longer the hero of that struggle, but simply a tired and foolish old man. Collins, on the other hand, remained forever young and vital, and was remembered as a revolutionary, not a politician.

The reaction against de Valera provides a fourth explanation for the contemporary appeal of the Collins myth. Even when both men were in their prime, the contrast between de Valera and Collins was striking. De Valera was charismatic in his way, but he was a rather cold, aloof, puritanical and intellectual figure. Collins, by contrast, was a man of the people, handsome, passionate, humorous, a man who drank and swore and liked women, to whom he was supposedly irresistible. As the grip of the Catholic church loosened and the Republic of Ireland became more liberal, Collins became a more attractive figure than de Valera, who came to be seen as a wowser and a killjoy. The fifth and final reason why Collins has become such a popular historical figure has to do with the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland. Collins was a dedicated republican who was determined and often ruthless during the fight for independence, but in the end he negotiated a settlement with Britain and accepted less than his ideal of an all-Ireland republic in order to end the war. Collins could thus be seen as providing a positive example to present-day gunmen and their allies in Northern Ireland.

All these aspects of the Collins myth – the romantic and tragic figure, the lost leader, the perpetual rebel, the man of passion, and the peacemaker – have combined to create a very high level of interest in Collins in Ireland today. It is not surprising, then, that there was intense interest in Irish director Neil Jordan’s film about Collins. Jordan, who both wrote and directed the film, is clearly nationalist in his sympathies. The brief historical synopsis which comes on the screen at the start of the film sets the story in a classically nationalist framework. It begins:

At the turn of the century Britain was the foremost world power and the British Empire stretched over two-thirds of the globe. Despite the extent of its power its most troublesome colony had always been the one closest to it, Ireland. For seven hundred years Britain’s rule over Ireland had been resisted by attempts at rebellion and revolution, all of which ended in failure.

The key elements of the nationalist view of Irish history are present in this statement: Irish history is presented in terms of a seven hundred year struggle against British colonisation. Within the film itself, the idea that Ireland was a British colony is emphasised not only by depictions of the brutality with which British forces suppress Irish resistance, but also in the condescending attitude of the British intelligence officer Soames towards his Irish associate, Broy. Soames twice refers to Broy as ‘Boy’, and the implication is clear: to the British, the Irish are just another bunch of natives to be kept in their place.

While Jordan clearly sympathises with the nationalist cause which Collins aimed to advance, his attitude towards republican violence is ambiguous and contradictory. Jordan’s first film, Angel, dealt with violence in Northern Ireland, and speaking about this film in 1982 he said: “‘Pull out a gun and things cease to be in your control.” [3]  This statement could be applied not only to Angelbut also to two of Jordan’s subsequent films: The Crying Game and Michael Collins. In The Crying Game, an IRA member, Fergus, tries to escape from the organisation by moving to London, but his IRA colleagues find him and force him to carry out another assassination. Although the film ends with Fergus merely jailed and the other IRA members dead, it seems that Fergus, having once picked up the gun, can never be sure of escaping from the IRA and its violence. In Michael Collins there is an even greater sense that violence has inescapably tragic consequences. Collins develops the tactics of guerrilla warfare and uses these tactics with great success, but then things escape from his control. He tries to call a halt to the violence, but is killed in the end by his own methods.

However, if the overall narrative of Michael Collins suggests that violence has tragic consequences, the film does not repudiate republican violence. At one point Collins says “War is murder. Sheer bloody murder”, and the assassinations carried out on Collins’s orders are depicted in all their casual brutality. Nevertheless, the film evades some of the more unpleasant realities of republican violence during the War of Independence. British violence is shown as excessive and indiscriminate: an officer kicks one of the leaders of the Easter Rising as he lies wounded on the ground; the notorious police reinforcements known as the Black and Tans open fire on the inhabitants of a Dublin tenement; an armoured car massacres civilians at a football match. IRA violence, by contrast, is carefully targeted. Early in the film we see the IRA raiding a police station to capture guns, but the policemen are not harmed. Later we see a number of IRA assassinations, but all the victims are men who, the film tells us, Collins knows to be British agents. This is a serious distortion of the nature of the IRA’s campaign. The IRA killed several hundred police in the course of the war, though it must be said that the Royal Irish Constabulary was an armed, paramilitary force. In addition, the IRA killed many people on suspicion of being informers, despite the fact that many of these people were in no position to pass on useful information to the authorities. Peter Hart’s study of County Cork shows that most so-called informers seem to have been targeted because they were outsiders in some way: Protestants, British Army veterans, itinerants and others considered to belong to undesirable social groups. [4]  Such assassinations were part of a wider campaign of intimidation by the IRA, made necessary by the fact that the Irish population was not so united behind the armed struggle as the public mythology of the War of Independence would later have it.

By avoiding the nastier aspects of the IRA campaign and suggesting that republican violence was a restrained reaction to indiscriminate British brutality, Neil Jordan’s film manages to preserve the heroic view of the War of Independence. At the same time, by focusing on Collins, Jordan can ultimately advocate peace. The story of Collins is another instance of Jordan’s favourite theme of violence spinning out of control; as Jordan says in his film diary, published with the screenplay, the film shows both “the exhilaration of violence, [and] the grotesque conclusions of its outcome”.[5] It is not only the tragedy of the story which implies the need for an end to violence, however; Collins himself is depicted as a reluctant warrior who wants peace. In The Crying Game the British soldier being held hostage by the IRA says of Fergus, his captor, “He’s a good soldier… He believes in the future.” Collins, too, is a good soldier in these terms, because he also believes in the future. He declares his belief in the future in a sequence which intercuts between Collins and his fiancée, Kitty Kiernan, in a hotel room, and Collins’s assassination squad executing British intelligence agents. “You’ve sent your boys out, haven’t you?” asks Kitty. “It’s written on your face. Every step they take. Like so many valentines. Delivering bouquets.” In this sequence Kitty’s valentine metaphor, the intercutting between the intimacy of the two lovers and the brutality of the killings, and the intrusion of the assassins into the domestic spaces of their victims, all suggest that in time of war love and domesticity cannot be kept apart from hatred and destruction. War perverts love, and the love note Collins delivers to the British is a deadly one. But in the midst of war, Collins is thinking about the future, about the possibility of true love for himself and Kitty, and for Ireland. The message of his “valentine”, he tells Kitty, is: “Give us the future… Give us our country back. To live in. To grow in. To love.”

Earlier, Collins has said to his friend Harry Boland: “I want peace and quiet. I want it so much I’d die for it.” “You’d kill for it first”, says Boland. “No,” replies Collins “not first. Last.” Collins then explains that he hates the British: “Not for their race. Not for their brutality. I hate them because they’ve left us no way out. I hate whoever put a gun in young Vinnie Byrne’s hand. I know it’s me, and I hate myself for it. I hate them for making hate necessary. And I’ll do what I have to to end it.” Collins is a reluctant fighter, someone who just wants peace and quiet, someone who believes in the future, and this is why he finally tries to end the violence by reaching a compromise settlement with the British. Knowing the full horror of war, unlike de Valera who has been in America for most of the war, Collins pleads with de Valera to support peace: “It’s not worth fighting for. Anymore. We’ve got to learn to build with what we have.” This message is reinforced in the closing titles, which tell us that Collins “died, paradoxically, in an attempt to finally remove the gun from Irish politics.” An Irish audience would recognise the contemporary reference here; “remove the gun from Irish politics” is a phrase which has been repeatedly used during the current peace process in Northern Ireland by Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams.

Thus, the film Michael Collins is in part a contribution to contemporary debates about the Irish past, and particularly about the revolutionary period. While it does not shy away from showing some of the brutality of war, it largely confirms the traditional nationalist view of the War of Independence rather than the views of revisionist historians: the War of Independence was a justifiable response to British determination to hold on to Ireland, and the IRA fought an honourable war. At the same time, war has tragic consequences, and peace is worth compromising for. The film cannot be seen as giving comfort to republican hard-liners; instead, with its reference to removing the gun from Irish politics, it attempts to link the heroic figure of Collins to Gerry Adams and others in the contemporary republican movement who have been involved in negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In this way, Jordan states a position which is probably very widely held within the Republic of Ireland: a reluctance to repudiate the armed struggle which created the independent Irish state, combined with an abhorrence to present-day violence in Northern Ireland. Collins is a perfect figure for those who want to feel good about the past nationalist struggle but who also want to see an end to republican violence in the present: his story shows that men of war can turn to peace, and that the nation will benefit if they do.

Michael Collins is not just an Irish film, however; it is also a Hollywood film, and some classically Hollywood aspects of the film work against the message of peace. [6]  A type of populist politics, the sort which claims to be against politics and politicians, is common in American films and in American public life. The film plays up to this populist politics by ignoring some aspects of Collins’s life and highlighting others. We know that Collins believes in the future, but we never learn what kind of future he believes in; the film tells us nothing about his political beliefs. Nor does it examine those aspects of his public life which were not military in nature: his role as Minister for Finance, or his involvement in negotiating the Treaty with Britain, for example. Collins was undoubtedly a brilliant strategist of guerrilla warfare, but he was never involved in actual fighting: he was, in fact, a politician and an administrator, a man whose success in undermining the British state owed as much to his meticulous file-keeping as to his strategic brilliance. None of this is apparent in the film, which instead celebrates Collins as a man of action and a man of the people.

“I’m not a politician”, he tells de Valera. “You’re the statesman.” Unlike the politicians, Collins gets things done, if sometimes by unorthodox methods. When de Valera wants to take Harry Boland with him to America, Collins tells his friend: “He’s scared to leave the two of us together. We might achieve that republic he wants to talk to the world about.” Collins and Boland are men of action; de Valera is only a man of words, a politician. What’s more, de Valera the politician is thwarting the men of action. This is an old idea: soldiers can win the war if the politicians get out of the way and let the military men use whatever methods are necessary. One of the great American myths of Vietnam is that America was defeated because the military was held back by the politicians; hence the question grunted by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo (USA 1987): “Do we get to win this time?” Collins is also like another American film hero, Dirty Harry, and any number of other characters who get results by refusing to play by the rules. “We won’t play by their rules”, he says to Harry Boland after the disaster of the Easter Rising. “We’ll invent our own.” Once again, though, Collins is opposed by the politicians: de Valera and other members of the Dáil Cabinet want to fight a conventional war against the British, but Collins realises that the war can only be won by unconventional means.

The film encourages the audience to believe Collins rather than de Valera because Collins makes things happen. Collins is a true leader not because of his ideas or his political or administrative skills, but because he is a man of action, a man who achieves things. His legitimacy comes also from being one of the people, and here again he is contrasted with de Valera. Collins is down to earth, he speaks the colloquial language of rural West Cork, he swears, he is gregarious and operates as part of a close-knit group. De Valera is shown as an isolated figure who speaks coldly and precisely. The contrast between the two men is most obvious just before Collins is killed, when Collins returns to Cork in the middle of the Civil War and visits a pub. While Collins is received warmly by his people, de Valera is literally out in the cold, shivering in a nearby hayfield. Collins is both exceptional and ordinary; as a leader he stands out from the crowd, but he could also be part of the crowd. Early in the film he addresses a meeting, and Collins tells the crowd that the police would like to shut him up by jailing or shooting him. “If they shut me up, who’ll take my place?” he asks. A sea of hands is raised in response. Because Collins is a man of the people, he and his people are interchangeable – he stands in their place as their leader, but if necessary they could take his place.

This populist strain within Michael Collins helps to explain its appeal outside Ireland. Throughout the Western world, it seems, there is a growing distrust of government and politicians, a feeling that governments do not listen to the people and that politicians are either feathering their own nests or working to advance the interests of sinister forces behind the scenes. Neil Jordan’s film projects a Collins who can be a populist hero: a man who will not betray the people because he is one of them, a leader who is not a politician but a rebel and a man of action. So strong is the impression of Collins as an oppositional figure that viewers could easily miss the fact that by the end of the film he is actually part of the government. The focus on Collins the action-man also has the potential to subvert Jordan’s message about the need for peace. Although Collins may be seen as a more credible peacemaker precisely because he has earlier done what was necessary to win the war, I suspect that many viewers came away from the film with a more vivid impression of Collins as the man who stuck it up the Brits than of Collins as the man who made peace with Britain.

Film inevitably simplifies history; in the space of two or even three hours only a small part of any story can be told. If a film is to have popular appeal it must also have a clear narrative, without too many confusing subplots, too many points of view. By reducing history to a clear, simple story, filmic histories acquire some of the characteristics of myth. By myth I do not mean an untrue story, but rather a story which the people of a particular society tell about themselves and their history. Myth, like film, relies on images: the diggers swarming up the cliffs of Gallipoli, or an armour-clad Ned Kelly fighting off the troopers at Glenrowan, to take two Australian examples. Again, like film, myth is used to convey messages: people tell these stories about the past because they believe they have something to say about the present. Because of their similarities, in today’s cinema-saturated world, film and myth feed off each other. Historical films draw on myths for their narrative structures, their messages, and their sense of what is important in a particular story. Film, in turn, influences the way we remember history: it provides us with vivid images of the past and can affect our interpretations of that past.

Despite the simplification involved in turning history into film drama, film, like myth, is also complex enough to contain contradictions and ambiguities. Indeed, part of its appeal is that it can contain these ambiguities while leaving the audience, which is carried along by the sweep of the narrative, unaware of them. In a successful film, different audience members can pick up on different messages, yet the audience is not left with the feeling that the film is simply incoherent. If, as I have suggested, Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins contains competing messages about political violence, these contradictions may actually increase the film’s appeal. The film draws on Irish nationalist myths of the revolutionary period while also addressing widespread nationalist distaste for the more recent armed struggle of the IRA in Northern Ireland. It restates the nationalist orthodoxy which emerged after the independent Irish state was established, by depicting the War of Independence as justified and nationalist violence as carefully targeted. At the same time, it suggests that war is tragic and that Collins was right to seek peace. The film does not resolve the conflicts over the Irish nationalist past which resulted from the rise of revisionist history and of unease about the IRA’s claim to represent the nationalist tradition. But by focusing on a figure who was both warrior and peacemaker it tells a story with which, I suspect, most Irish nationalists can feel comfortable.

Footnotes:
[1] For a variety of views of Collins, the man and the legend, see Gabriel Doherty and Dermot Keogh (eds),  Michael Collins and the Making of the Irish State (Dublin: Mercier, 1998).
[2] See John Regan, “Looking at Mick again: demilitarising Michael Collins”, History Ireland 3, no. 3 (1995): 17-22.
[3] Times, 27 October 1982, quoted in John Hill, “Images of violence”, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1988), 178.
[4] See Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ch. 13.
[5] Neil Jordan, Michael Collins: Screenplay and Film Diary (London: Vintage, 1996), 31.
[6] My argument here is indebted to Matthew Ryan’s brief but brilliant article “Michael Collins – Hollywood Hero”, Arena Magazine27 (Feb.-Mar. 1997): 44-45.