Michael collins
Michael collinsIn Michael Collins, I found the embodiment of that Irish virtue and tragedy. Michael Collins remains one of the most obscure and controversial heroes in Irish history. A survivor of the disastrous 1916 Easter Rising, Collins forged the fragments of the revolutionary movement into a ruthless underground army that compelled the British to sue for peace. Reluctantly serving as a treaty negotiator under the orders of the Irish president, �amon de Valera, Collins returned in 1921 with an agreement that left the country in its current state of partition into an independent south and a unionist north. De Valera and his followers refused to accept and civil war broke out. The following year Collins was ambushed and murdered by extremist republicans. Collins's life and death are apt metaphors for the long, ongoing tragedy of Irish nationalism: a tale of incandescent love of country, savage violence, gleeful melancholy, and treachery Early on, Collins erupts into its most spectacular moment -- British artillery blasting the handful of Republican volunteers defending the General Post Office in the Easter Rising. It's the Irish equivalent of the Alamo, and the terrible beauty addressed in Yeats's poem "Easter 1916" can almost be glimpsed in the painstakingly re-created destruction, carnage, and valor. Wooed by Boland and won by Collins when his friend and rival travels to America with de Valera in search of support, she serves as a device to separate the two boys and inject feeling into passions that are largely theoretical.
The character who most projects the burning, almost pathological patriotism that has fueled Irish nationalism to the
present day is Alan Rickman's de Valera. His aquiline eyes buttressed by rimless spectacles, he writhes with a
pinched, fanatic devotion to his cause. He emerges finally as the villain of the piece: envious of Collins's
popularity, power, and success, he returns from America and nearly undoes the revolution by returning to more
"honorable" conventional tactics. Jordan suggests he set up Collins to take the fall for the peace treaty and may
even have been involved in his rival's assassination.
In short, de Valera comes off as a more interesting figure than Collins. What's missing is Jordan's irreverence and
sardonic wit; though not exactly hagiography, Collins probes no deeper into its hero than to have him show
symptoms of mild dyspepsia when he has 19 British agents murdered on Bloody Sunday. As an introduction into the
causes and history of one of the longest-festering wounds in the world today, Michael Collins might be a landmark,
but its scale is more broad than epic....
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