{"id":8591,"date":"2022-08-19T13:44:13","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T12:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpol.qub.ac.uk\/?p=8591"},"modified":"2022-08-19T13:44:13","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T12:44:13","slug":"remembering-mick-the-contested-legacies-of-michael-collins-1922-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/remembering-mick-the-contested-legacies-of-michael-collins-1922-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering \u2018Mick\u2019: the contested legacies of Michael Collins, 1922-2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Monday 22 August 2022 marks one of the more significant dates in the Irish decade of centenaries, the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of the revolutionary leader, Michael Collins. In three reflections based on their research, historians for QUB look at the significance of Collins\u2019s death in the context of 1922 and how his legacy and memory has been fashioned in politics and film in the intervening century. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the first article here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the third article here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 2020, a portrait of Michael Collins that hung on the wall of outgoing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar\u2019s office, and which was usually removed after a change of government, was elevated to a symbol of reconciliation between Fine Gael and Fianna F\u00e1il. To \u2018symbolise unity 100 years on from the Civil War\u2019, Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s leader and incoming Taoiseach, Mich\u00e9al Martin, asked Varadkar to return the portrait to hang it alongside one of \u00c9amon de Valera. The Fianna F\u00e1il Taoiseach will also address the Michael Collins centenary gathering at B\u00e9al na mBl\u00e1th.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Official remembrance, as these developments confirm, remains highly selective and is frequently orchestrated to complement contemporary political climates, aspirations and agendas. Michael Collins, it also seems, continues to inhibit the popular imagination. His grave is the most frequently visited site in Glasnevin Cemetery; daily floral tributes of appreciation are left, many of which include romantic overtones\u2014 indicating a curious sense of intimacy for a figure who has been dead for a century. Among the items displayed at the National Museum of Ireland\u2019s Soldiers and Chiefs<\/em> exhibition was the overcoat Collins wore on the night of his death, his sidearm and the pen he used to sign the Treaty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Material culture, once associated with dissent and division, is now broadly accepted as part of the historical fabric of modern Ireland. Historically, the ghost of Collins functioned as both a source of stability and dissent; remembering Collins was a selective process that involved forgetting certain aspects of his career. We might even note the existence of two ghosts of Collins: one focusing on his pre-Treaty militancy, the other emphasising his state building achievements after the Treaty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through official commemoration, in various respects, Collins had embodied the Treaty\u2019s political legacy. Beginning with his funeral and maintained through annual commemorations, Collins was publicly recalled in remembrance rituals that attempted publicly to instil his posthumous image as a visionary, founder of democracy and Free State martyr. In the promotion of this narrative, the erection of the Leinster lawn cenotaph was critically influential. From 1923, Collins had been commemorated as part of a state-sponsored project which also incorporated the memory of Arthur Griffith and later Kevin O\u2019Higgins, following his assassination in 1927. Such monuments of multiple remembrance remain, in the Irish context, a rarity. Normally reserved for war graves, they promote a sense of unanimity of purpose, outlook, and sacrifice which, as with the example of the Collins-Griffith(-O\u2019Higgins) memorial, was exaggerated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019, as Arthur Griffith\u2019s recent biographer, Colum Kenny, has noted, \u2018finds it easier to acknowledge Collins as a gunman than to accept Griffith as the father of the state\u2019. Although what might be described as the \u2018official\u2019 interpretation of Collins emphasised his role as a state-builder and Civil War leader, the counter-narrative emphasised Collins\u2019s militant republican role during the War of Independence. Cosgrave\u2019s government, it has been argued, under-emphasised Collins\u2019s this aspect as reminders of his previous militancy could have legitimised republican violence towards the Free State during the Irish Civil War. For Cumann na nGaedheal, Collins\u2019s reputation as the \u2018man who won the war\u2019 legitimised the compromises of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and their emphasis on the discipline, work ethic and sacrifice of the martyr Collins had many propagandistic benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The period 1948 to 1973 proved highly significant in the shaping of Collins\u2019s posthumous reputation. This era witnessed the formal establishment of the Republic of Ireland, an assertion of legitimacy which, for some, underlined the futility of Civil War, and vindicated – apart from the persistence of partition – Collins\u2019s stepping-stone vision of the Treaty. These years were also characterised by the emergence of two republican campaigns of violence, governmental attitudes towards which involved the promotion of Collins, the democrat and state-builder, as opposed to that of the advocate and key organiser of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless what P.S. O\u2019Hegarty regarded as Piaras B\u00e9asla\u00ed\u2019s (Collins\u2019s first biographer) \u2018super gunman\u2019 portrayal of Collins continued to resonate, and provided the foundation of an uncomfortable parallel with the upsurge of violence in Northern Ireland. Kenneth Griffith\u2019s 1973 Collins documentary Hang up Your Brightest Colours<\/em> was deemed so controversial that it was banned for two decades before being screened by BBC Wales in 1993. It was then shown throughout the remainder of the UK in 1994, a period which conveniently coincided with the IRA ceasefire. This confirms that popular interpretations and receptions of Collins are largely dependent on the contemporary political climate, with periods of republican conflict being particularly influential in shaping attitudes towards his memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Widely accredited for enhancing Collins\u2019s fame are Tim Pat Coogan\u2019s 1990 biography and Neil Jordan\u2019s movie (1996). Notably, it was in 1997 that the Collins monument at B\u00e9al na mBl\u00e1th began to resemble a religious shrine; personal items, and religious symbols, including rosary beads and candles were placed around the memorial. These were later removed by the organisers of the annual commemoration, but such devotional scenes undoubtedly signify the extent to which the cult of Collins had ultimately evolved. Michael Collins\u2019s memory, as current commemorative practices will confirm, has many uses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The featured image<\/a> has been used courtesy of a Creative Commons license.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the second of three articles on the 100th anniversary of Michael Collins’ death, Dr Conleth McCloskey reflects on the commemorations and contested legacies of Collins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2645,"featured_media":8592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1059,1060,1063,1062],"class_list":["post-8591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics-and-democracy","tag-irish-history","tag-michael-collins","tag-michael-collins-anniversary","tag-war-of-independence"],"mb":[],"acf":{"authors":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":9774,"key":"field_66d0cbf58f930","label":"Authors","name":"authors","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"relationship","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":9772,"wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"post_type":["authors"],"post_status":["publish"],"taxonomy":"","filters":["search"],"return_format":"id","min":0,"max":10,"allow_in_bindings":0,"elements":["featured_image"],"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"authors","_valid":1}},"description":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":9776,"key":"field_66d2183027749","label":"Description","name":"description","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":3,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":9772,"wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","allow_in_bindings":0,"tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":1,"_name":"description","_valid":1}}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/76\/2022\/08\/MC1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"mfb_rest_fields":["title","jetpack_featured_media_url","jetpack_sharing_enabled","amp_enabled"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2645"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}