21.11.1996

Pandora’s box

Tom Ball reviews Michael Collins, written and directed by Neil Jordan

Tabloid ‘critics’ of Michael Collins may rant all they like, but this film is not, at first sight, a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for today’s Irish Republican Army. Indeed, director Neil Jordan has presented what he set out to do: safely rework and make respectable the early 20th century struggle to force British imperialism to give up its oldest colony. In the process of beautifying Collins, Jordan has tried to make plain that, “Collins wasn’t a proponent of terrorism. He developed techniques of guerrilla warfare later copied by independence movements around the world, from Mao Tse-Tung in China to Yitzhak Shamir in Israel ...

“Collins would never be a proponent of contemporary terrorism as practised today. He was a soldier and a statesman and, over time, a man of peace” (quoted on the Warner Bros web site, http://www.michaelcollins.com).

In fact, the ‘festival of reaction’ north and south prior to the partition of Ireland became inevitable. It resulted from the removal of the working class leadership of the Irish national liberation struggle during the 1916 Easter Rising, whose denouement at the Dublin Post Office opens this film. The Irish Socialist Republican Party - the only party of the International, apart from Russia’s Bolsheviks, prepared to take advantage of the inter-imperialist World War II was beheaded when its leader, James Connolly, was executed by British forces in 1916.

The film jumps effortlessly over the next two and a half years to when Michael Collins (played by Liam Neeson), elected to the Sinn Fein executive in 1917, helps the party win 73 Irish seats (out of 105) in the all-UK general election of December 1918. Sinn Fein exercises its mandate, refuses to participate in the British parliament, and sets up its own Dail Eireann, which declares independence, with Eamon de Valera (played by Alan Rickman) as president and Collins as minister of finance.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood becomes the Irish Republican Army, the new republic’s armed forces. Collins is elected president of the IRA Army Council and not only organises raids on Royal Irish Constabulary armouries, but builds up an intelligence organisation to rival that of the British.

Collins takes over as acting president when De Valera goes to the USA and other leaders, including Griffiths, are arrested. The British state’s terrorist force, the infamous Black and Tans, recruited from ex-soldiers and criminal elements in British prisons, are set upon the Irish to bring them to heel. Collins, with contacts in the heart of the British secret service in Dublin, organises the assassination of 14 of its officers on November 21 1920, effectively destroying it in Ireland; the Black and Tans massacre l3 people at the Croker football ground in reprisal. But none of Collins’ spies were ever caught, contrary to what the film suggests.

Once the British sue for peace and treaty negotiations start, however, there is no light shed by this film on why Collins signed away the Six Counties, except to suggest he shares De Valera’s thought that it was inevitable in face of British threats to resume fighting even more strenuously. When the Dail narrowly ratifies the treaty, Collins does not join De Valera’s opposition to it; by default, the film suggests this is only a tactical disagreement, but without explanation.

Mistakenly, De Valera is depicted as being in control of the anti-treaty forces, when in fact these irregulars were soon nationally under no single command. The pro-treaty forces are seen to be commanded effectively by Collins, which is hardly surprising, given his experience and the supply of artillery by Churchill.

Overall, Michael Collins is pessimistic, though inclusion of Collins’ innovative use of guerrilla fighters and the establishment of an intelligence service in the film clearly show the strength and effectiveness of such tactics in struggle. But Collins’ motivations are not clarified by this film, nor does it give any clue as to the real differences in the protagonists’ political positions during the civil war; audiences will have to research that for themselves.

Why has it been made now? Well, Jordan has been hatching it for 13 years, but the real explanation for financing his effort may relate to British propaganda efforts to erode support for present-day republicanism. By extension, the anti-treaty section’s failure against the more ‘reasonable’, statesmanlike section led by Collins can be paralleled with those for or against a ceasefire in the Six Counties.

It is not necessary to propose that a conspiracy of misinformation exists, of course; merely that the line put over by Michael Collins matches an approach favoured by British imperialism at the moment, trying to split ‘moderates’ in Sinn Fein from the ‘wild elements’ in the IRA or elsewhere in republicanism. And therefore there is a readiness to finance and promote a film about a sensitive subject - Irish liberation.

But films like Michael Collins can cut both ways: once the issue comes up for discussion the questions of the completion of Irish liberation and its dramatic effect on conditions for revolution in Britain fly out of a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed.

Tom Ball