Episode 136: Remembering the film Michael Collins at 30

It's hard to believe that Neil Jordan's biopic Michael Collins is 30. How is that possible? 

➡️ Is the film perfect? No. Is it therefore awful? Also no.

➡️ Did Neil Jordan use Michael Collins as a device to talk about the greater arc of Irish history?

➡️ Was Michael Collins a man of war turned man of peace? Or have we misunderstood the whole ball of wax?

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(Irish_leader)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57315/the-rose-tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(film)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT4gE4UC1k8

https://www.thejournal.ie/michael-collins-film-neil-jordan-5845651-Aug2022/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18941077

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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the 30th anniversary of Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins, reflecting on its impact and historical accuracy. She recounts Michael Collins' life, from his birth in 1890 to his role in the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence. Collins' contributions, including his appointment as Director of Intelligence for the IRA and his negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty, are highlighted. The film's portrayal of Collins' assassination and its influence on public perception are examined. Sara emphasizes the film's value as a historical introduction rather than a documentary, encouraging viewers to delve deeper into Collins' legacy.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Michael Collins, Neil Jordan, film anniversary, Easter Rising, Irish independence, Anglo-Irish Treaty, guerrilla warfare, British rule, Sinn Fein, IRA, Liam Neeson, historical biography, modern urban guerrilla, Michael Collins tour, Irish history.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins. I cannot believe that we're at the 30-year anniversary of that film. I remember still being in high school, watching that movie with my mother at the movie theater, and being absolutely riveted by it. For me, it was a watershed moment. I didn't quite know what to expect other than a general biopic, a general history film, but it impacted me deeply. Not long ago, one of the public broadcasting channels showed it in my area, and I sat and watched it for the first time in years, and it has not lost its potency for me. If you were listening earlier this year, at the beginning of April, I welcomed Patty Cullivan onto the show to talk about his Michael Collins tour, he takes a somewhat dim view of the film, calling it high school history. And believe me, I get that. It's like people who see Oliver Stone's film JFK and then they accuse everybody of thinking that it's actual literal history, like it's cinema verite, and we're watching a documentary of what actually happened. When no, it's a Hollywood movie. Some characters are composites. Some probably didn't exist at all. Some may have been portrayed differently from how they behaved, IRL, etc. So look, I get that Michael Collins is not a perfect film, but my goodness, to me, it has a soft spot in my heart, and I still think it is very much worth your time. So, what we'll do tonight, we'll talk a little bit about Michael Collins himself. We'll talk about the film and what it looks like now at age 30. Stay tuned.

Sara's award-winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjold, and her latest release, Simply Dag: The Public Man in a Private and Dangerous Office, are available on Amazon. The Simply Dag audiobook can be found along with other cool merch on her storefront at SaraCausey.Shop. And now back to the show.

I want to begin by talking about Michael Collins, the person, he was born on October 16, 1890, in County Cork, Ireland. His father, Michael John, was a farmer, and he was 60 years old when he married Marianne O'Brien, who was only 23. They had eight children, and in fact, Collins was the youngest of all the kids. He was the third son, but the youngest of all of the children, Michael is in fact only six and a half when his father passes away. When he's 15, he takes the British civil service exam in Cork in February of 1906, and he moves to where his sister Hanny is living in London, and he becomes like a junior level clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank. The author Tim Pat Coogan has said there's a pretty long tradition of this type of work happening, not at all uncommon. While he's living in London, he studies law briefly at the King's College London, but he doesn't finish the degree. He joins the London GAA, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and then through this organization in turn the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He has a great sense of patriotism and participates in the Easter Rising in April of 1916. And it's important for us to remember that Ireland is still under colonial rule from the English, and there's a long history of oppression. I've been doing research and just kind of pulling together some preliminary notes for a Romana clay that I want to write about JFK because the minute that you say Kennedy out loud, it's like touching a live wire, and I I just don't want all of that to cloud the actual story. And I've been doing some research about what the potato famine was really like, and it's just incredibly sad, very tragic, and certainly a terrible scenario made even worse by the British. So the Easter Rising is an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week, April 1916. It was organized by a group of Irish Republicans who were against British rule in Ireland, and it was really the most significant uprising there had been since the rebellion of 1798, We have World War One going on at this time. Initially, there's not a lot of sympathy for what's going on. With this rebellion, but 16 of the leaders of the Easter Rising are executed starting in May 1916. As word gets out about this, the tide of sympathy begins to turn. Because of his participation in the Easter Rising, he's sent to jail, and he winds up at Frongoch Jail in Wales. He was originally like sort of siphoned out from the group to be interrogated further, possibly even to be executed. But he moves into another group, and that's how he winds up at Frangoch. And the author Tim Pat Coogan has said that that actually turns out to be one of the luckiest escapes that he ever made, and it may have well saved his life. Some of the organizers knew surely that the rebellion wouldn't take hold, and that they were making a sacrifice for the future. One of my favorite Yeats poems is "The Rose Tree. Oh, words are lightly spoken, said Pierce to Connolly, "Maybe a breath of politic words has withered our rose tree, or maybe but a wind that blows across the bitter sea. It needs to be but watered. James Connolly replied, "To make the green come out again and spread on every side, and shake the blossom from the bud to be the garden's pride. But where can we draw water? Said Pierce to Connolly. When all the wells are parched away, oh plain as plain can be, there's nothing but our own red blood can make a right rose tree. In the 1918 general election, Sinn Fein has a very strong showing in the Irish Parliament. Eamon De Valera is also gaining a lot of ground within the government. In 1919, De Valera appoints Collins as Minister for Finance in the Ministry of the Dial, some have argued that the Irish War of Independence begins in earnest on the day that the first Dial convened, which was january 21, 1919.

On April 7, 1919, Eamon Broy smuggles Michael Collins into the archives of the G division in Great Brunswick Street, and he's able to look at the G-men, six of whom would wind up being pop pop by the IRA. In the middle of 1919, Collins is made director of intelligence for the IRA. The British, of course, as they are wont to do, escalate the war instead of trying to figure out the best way to massage everything down. It's sort of like if you bring a knife, we'll bring a cannon. So they have these special forces like the auxiliaries, the Black and Tans, and the Cairo gang, who set about not just meeting fire with fire, but as I said, if you bring a knife, I'll bring a cannon. In July of 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George offers a truce. De Valera is known for being a statesman and a highly skilled negotiator, so one thinks that well, if someone's going to negotiate with the British for Irish independence, it would have to be Aiman de Valera. But no, he taps Michael Collins to go as a delegate to the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. As the negotiations wear on, finally David Lloyd George says, "You either put your signature on this document, or you will have an immediate and terrible war. The treaty gets signed on december 6, 1921, at about 220 in the morning. It does call for the partition of the six counties in the north, which we refer to as Northern Ireland. Colin's own words about the treaty were as follows: I say that rejection of the treaty is a declaration of war until you have beaten the British Empire apart from any alternative document. Rejection of the treaty means your national policy is war. The treaty was signed by me not because they held up the alternative of immediate war. I signed it because I would not be the one to commit the Irish people to war without the Irish people committing themselves to war. It has been widely reported that upon signing the treaty, Michael Collins made the comment, "I may have signed my death warrant. Debates rage on about the treaty. We have anti-treaty and pro-treaty sides at war with each other. Michael Collins becomes commander in chief of the Irish National Forces. He goes back to Cork because he's thinking that he can try to negotiate for peace, and he has been reported as saying. They won't kill me in my own country. They won't kill me in my own area. Of course, we know now that that did not bear out to be true. There are a lot of discrepancies about what actually happened. The gist of it that I will offer here is that some type of ambush occurred. Collins is going around in an open-top vehicle in enemy territory, hmm, where have we heard that scenario play out before? And Collins winds up being the only man killed in the ambush. No autopsy was performed, and there also has been no official inquiry vis-a-vis what actually happened to Michael Collins, it's believed that De Valera said in 1966, "It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time, history will record the greatness of Michael Collins, and it will be recorded at my expense. Collins lay in state for three days, and 1000s of mourners went past his coffin to pay their respects. Now we fast forward to Neil Jordan's biopic. In his own film diary, he says that in October 1982, his first film, Angel, had just been released. He was working on the proofs of a novel, and he gets this letter asking, "What do you know about Michael Collins? And when he asks himself, he realizes very little. He sort of gets an impression in his mind of somebody in a military uniform, something to do with the Civil War and Independence. But he doesn't know really that much about Michael Collins, and I applaud him for being honest about that because this is something that I have found as a Hammarskjold biographer. You know, you have people in Scandinavia. They're like, "Oh yeah, Dag, the Swede, of course. Oh, a secular saint. Okay, but what do you really know about him? Crickets, tumbleweeds, and I'm trying to change that. So I give kudos to Neil Jordan for not saying, 'Oh, I knew everything there was about the man.

He gets a biography called The Big Fella by Frank O'Connor. Neil Jordan writes, and while the book was a good one, it did not entirely attract me to the character. I disagree. I have that book, and I actually think that it's really excellent. I think it's also interesting that Neil Jordan writes one thing did strike me immediately, though, when I read the O'Connor book through this single character, Michael Collins, one could tell the story of the most pivotal period in Irish history. So, at least by his own words at that point in time, it's less about I want to make a biopic of this one particular man, and more like I'm making this picture about one particular man because it highlights the greater arc of Irish history, the plot of the film is essentially this: It begins at the ending of the Easter Rising in 1916, when the Irish Republicans surrender to the British Army. Several of the organizers are executed by firing squad men like Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonough, Tom Clark and James Connolly, Eamon De Valera is spared because he is an American citizen, but he goes to jail along with Michael Collins and Harry Boland. The 1918 Irish general election results in Sinn Fein being victorious, and there's this unilateral declaration of Irish Independence, De Valera becomes the president, and Collins is appointed the director of intelligence for the nascent IRA. Ned Broy is a member of the G division, but he sympathizes with the cause of independence, and he tips Collins off that the British intend to arrest the entire Irish cabinet that night. Dev thinks that if he gets arrested, there will be a hue and cry around the world. So he dissuades the cabinet from going into hiding. However, Michael Collins and Harry Bolin go into hiding, and they're able to keep from being arrested. With help from Ned Broy, Michael Collins starts a counterintelligence campaign against the Brits. De Valera gets broken out of Lincoln Prison, but announces that he's going to go to the U.S. to try to get support from President Woodrow Wilson. The war continues to escalate. A British officer named Soames is sent to counter the IRA, but he and several of his agents are killed in an attack that was orchestrated by Collins. In retaliation for this, the Blackened Hands get sent to Dublin at Croke Park, and they open fire on unarmed citizens during a Gaelic football game, that was in fact the first Bloody Sunday in Irish history. There's another one that happened later, but that was the first one. With Ned Broy's assistance to Collins being discovered by Soames, Broy gets turned in, tortured, and killed. Dev. Comes back from America, not able to get any firm commitment of support from President Wilson. The Brits start hinting that they would communicate with the Irish, but certainly there's this sentiment of like you're going to have to get Michael Collins to turn off his campaign of guerrilla warfare. So De Valera says that the IRA has to operate as a conventional military would, as opposed to using guerrilla warfare. De Valera orders a siege on the custom house, but the IRA suffers heavy casualties, and the attack fails. So it's sort of like you know he has the idea of we need to operate like a real military would, but then they do that and it fails. It's like Collins' way was the way that was working. The British, however, call for a cease to the conflict. Collins is then sent to London to negotiate Irish interests as part of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which gets signed in 1921, Ireland is not immediately granted its independence, but the treaty enables Ireland to achieve it over time while remaining a British dominion in the interim. And then there's the loss of the six counties to the north that stay under British control as Northern Ireland. De Valera says that he wants unconditional independence for Ireland and rages. He and his supporters, which include Colin's friend Harry Boland, they resign in protest to this. A vote of the people backs the treaty, but De Valera rejects that result. And in 1922, he stages an attack on the four courts in Dublin. The national army, which is led by Collins, is ordered to recapture it. In the subsequent Battle of Dublin, Harry Boland is murdered.

Collins is naturally devastated upon learning that his friend has died. He goes back to West Cork, where De Valery is hiding, and Collins says he wants to try to mediate for peace. But Michael Collins is misdirected by a boy who is in league with De Valera. He gets led into an ambush where he's shot and killed. Now, is that literally how it happened in history? No. We have to remember that this is a film. It is not perfect. It gives us some general ideas of what was going on, but it's not literal history. Why does the film have such a soft spot for me? Because I remember sitting there in the theater, not knowing what to expect, not knowing anything about Michael Collins, knowing very little about Irish history, and we have to remember that Michael Collins accomplished so very much so very young, and that was not something that I had any idea about. Liam Neeson was born in 1952, so in 1996 he's 44, and I'm thinking, you know, as a teenager still in high school, I'm like, okay, well, so this person was an older person; he had actually lived a life. We get to the end. I didn't expect that he was going to die, and then when I learned that Michael Collins was so much younger, he dies at the age of 31. I was absolutely stunned by that information. I could not believe it. I was very, very emotionally bought into the film, and I set about learning as much as I could, not only about Michael Collins but about his times as well. It for me was really like a line of demarcation. I remember walking out of the theater and thinking to myself, "My God, like how can anything be the same after seeing that film, somebody else might watch it and think, "Yeah, it's a powerful film, but it wasn't a watershed moment. But for me, it was. Maybe I always had the makings of a biographer. I'm not sure. There is a great episode of the South Bank Show that talks specifically about Michael Collins. I will drop a link to it if you have not seen it before? I highly encourage you to watch it. One of the people they interview is Colonel Michael Dewar, who's a counterinsurgency expert, and he says if you're thinking in terms of modern urban guerrilla warfare, Michael Collins was probably its inventor. I'm going to hop now to the journal.ie out of Ireland because there's a more recent article from August of 2022 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Collins's death. I was never a fan of De Valera, Neil Jordan on the legacy of his Michael Collins biopic. The film is credited, along with a biography published around the same time, of bringing Collins's role as a revolutionary to prominence. In this article, we read, "I took the template of a gangster movie. You know the Warner Brothers movies of the 30s and 40s. That's how I wanted to structure the film. He recalled the fierce controversy surrounding the film upon its release. I was being accused of making some kind of apologia for political violence. It. Was the structure of a crime movie, and people misinterpreted that in certain ways. Nobody seems to mention the amount of which we did get right. I think for me, one of the most fascinating questions here is whether or not Collins was a man of peace, a man of war. You know, we're told probably the inventor of modern urban guerrilla warfare, turning into someone who is tired of that and simply wants peace. That's one of the arguments that Neil Jordan makes in the film: is that Collins dies paradoxically in an effort to remove boomsticks from Irish politics, and you have a host of people who say that just simply is not true. That Collins was still trying to get weaponry to the North, was encouraging people in the North to continue fighting for their independence, so that every county in Ireland would be united as Ireland and would be free from British occupation altogether. Does he sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty because he's tired of bloodshed. Does he believe what Lloyd George has said about an immediate and terrible war, and he doesn't want to put Ireland through that?

Is it some combination of thinking if we sign this and we placate the Brits here, we can continue fighting on? We live to fight another day. Did De Valera know ahead of time that the British were not going to give Irish full independence, and he sent Michael Collins off to bring home the poisoned chalice? I find those questions really fascinating, and it certainly is an interesting contradiction. If we think, okay, you have Michael Collins, who is a man of war, who later becomes a man of peace, and then that's what he becomes a murder victim for doing. Stranger things than that have happened, quite frankly. I personally do recommend the film Michael Collins in the same way that I would recommend Oliver Stone's film JFK. Not for you to assume that you're watching a documentary, or that you're watching actual literal history taking place, but simply to get a foot in the door, to learn about the story, to become interested in the life and times of Michael Collins. I myself, based on my personal opinions and the research that I've done, I lean in the direction of Michael Collins was tired of the bloodshed. He did not think that the IRA, that Ireland as a whole, could somehow defeat the might of the British Empire. They had a full-on military. He didn't want the immediate and terrible war. He didn't want to continue the bloodshed, and he felt like if we can get in, if we can have more of a seat at the table, and maybe the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak, it gives us more leverage to finesse out what we actually do want without bloodshed and violence every day. As always, come to your own conclusions, do your own research, and make up your own mind. I, as I said, I do recommend the movie. There are some great books: Frank O'Connor, Tim Pat Coogan. Those two certainly come to my mind immediately. And if you didn't hear the episode that I recorded earlier this year with Patty Cullen, be sure to check that out too. I'll make sure to drop a link in the write up for this episode. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you next time.

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