06.02.1997

Michael Collins in context

Speaking to a packed public meeting organised by the West London SLP Branch on Monday night, authoritative Irish historian Peter Beresford Ellis pointed out that, like Eisenstein’s October,the film Michael Collins was not a documentary, and so could be forgiven its many historical inaccuracies.

Some have complained of excessive violence in the film, but the opposite is true. The gratuitous violence of the British forces in the suppression and partition of Ireland was in fact played down. While the establishment is happy to let the blame for violent excesses fall onto the infamous Black and Tans, the British armed forces played a full part. Beresford Ellis’s father, as a young reporter on a Cork newspaper, was witness to the direct involvement of the Oxfordshire Regiment and the Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, for example, in the bloody sacking and burning of the centre of the city of Cork in December 1920.

The film left unexplained, the speaker said, the reasons for the guerrilla war which it showed.

The 100 MPs from Ireland out of a total of 600 in Westminster, had been “impotent, but invested the UK parliament with Irish consent,” as Pitt put it. Four out of five of the Irish MPs had for decades favoured separation of Ireland from Britain, but no less than 28 proposals for Home Rule had been voted down by the English majority.

Michael Collins’s democratic base as the elected MP for Cork South was omitted. In fact the film made no mention of the 1918 ‘khaki’ general election which, Beresford Ellis said, gave popular endorsement to the 1916 Easter Rising.

It was British backing for the breakaway unionist Six Counties, the day after a 32 county republic was announced, which started the war. “When Westminster talks of democracy in the Irish context, it makes Irish people want to throw up.”

The speaker explained why Collins could not be held personally responsible for the 1921 Treaty which partitioned Ireland. He was the youngest and least politically experienced of a powerful delegation which included five senior members of the Dáil, three of whom were cabinet ministers, backed by an authoritative team of political advisors. The weak link of the delegation was in fact its leader, Arthur Griffiths. “The idea that Michael Collins could impose his will on such a team of negotiators is nonsensical.”

The erudite and informative opening was followed by an open discussion of the kind which now characterises the public meetings of the West London SLP Branch. However, a motion condemning the oppressive imperialist role of Britain under Tory and Labour governments alike, and resolving to campaign for immediate British withdrawal from Ireland, revocation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the immediate freeing of Irish political prisoners was disallowed by the chair for reasons which the chairperson did not deign to explain to the meeting.

Sean Bird