They’re all at it, these days. Trying to claim a piece of poor departed Michael Collins for their own. The Republicans profess sincerely that if Mick was alive today, he’d spit on Fine Gael and curse them for their perfidy and abandonment of the North. The Blueshirts themselves profess that it’s sad that the great man can’t come back and see how well the country has done under their leadership, and how rich we all are – you can nearly sense them wanting to take him for a spin up Vico road to have a look at Bono’s house. The Fianna Fáilers are in a bit of a bind, given that ‘twas one of their own anti-treaty lads that shot him, but even they, in the week that’s in it, are out to claim a bit of the Collins legacy, boasting about what a success we’ve made of independence. In true FF fashion, there’s a sense that they’d love to go on the lash with him at the Galway races, drink a rake of pints, and let bygones be bygones.
It’s all nonsense, every last bit of it. And self-serving nonsense at that, for none of it is about celebrating Collins the man, and all of it is about trying to pretend that Collins the man was something he wasn’t: A man with a vision for Ireland in 2022.
The world in which Michael Collins lived, remember, was a very different one. The British Empire was the practically undisputed master of the globe. The United States was not a tired old superpower, but a young and coming land of opportunity. For most of Collins’ life, the Kaiser dominated Europe, the Czar the lands to the east, and travel was still an ordeal. New York was days away, not hours. Collins could not conceive of the Ireland of 2022 if he tried, no more than you or I can conceive of the Ireland of 2122: We’ll all be dead, except some few lucky newborns.
We may as well be wondering what Julius Caesar would think of Rome, if he stood in it today, or what Alexander the Great would think of Greece.
Here’s the thing that bitter political partisans just can’t bring themselves to admit: Everything in Ireland – every last thing – is relatively better today than it was in 1922. That does not mean we must approve of Ireland today, or abandon our own disagreements with various policies. We are people of our time, just as Collins was of his. In 1920, for example, the life expectancy of an Irish person was 54 years. Now, it’s almost 30 years more. Forget your homelessness statistics or your ever-moving definition of poverty, and your fantasy that Michael Collins would think of life in 2022 as anything but a wonder.
Consider that if progress continues at its current rate, the life expectancy in 2122 will be something like 120, and that 100 then will be the age equivalent of about 70 today. You can’t imagine it, and if you were transported to 2122 today, “did we get the six counties back?” would not be the first question you’d ask. Nor would “Is Fianna Fáil still around”? “Do we have flying cars yet?” would be mine.
And besides all that, let’s face it: If Michael Collins was alive today, we know what the Irish establishment would think of him: Being as he was a man of 1922, we can safely assume that he’d be considered a homophobe by today’s standards. Homosexuality was, after all, illegal in his Ireland, and he made no move to change that. He’d probably be horrified by the divorce rates, and the number of children being born outside of marriage. He would not, I suspect, have much time for gender identity as a concept. He’d have some number of meetings with Amnesty Ireland and the National Women’s Council, to undergo re-education.
But those are not his fights, no more than the fights of 2122 are ours.
We should remember Collins for what he was: A hard man, and a man of war, at a time when one was called for. He ordered men killed in cold blood, and slept sound in his bed afterwards, by all accounts. He was also a pragmatist, who “signed his own death warrant” for the good, as he thought of it, of the country, though we know that the loss of the North pained him deeply. He was a sensitive man, in his way. He was both widely beloved, and deeply hated. It was an Irish “patriot”, not a British soldier, who murdered him – nobody took Collins from us, but ourselves. In his own time, he was more divisive, more adored and more deeply opposed, than any modern politician is today. I suspect, had I been alive, I’d have opposed him ferociously and thought of him – and those who shot him – as little more than terrorists: But I am not alive then, so in truth I do not know. Perhaps in 1922, I’d have been a good and fanatical Sinn Feiner, not a lousy anglophile west brit. And besides, time has a way of granting a perspective that the heat of the moment does not.
Collins has no relevance at all to the Ireland of today. There is nobody alive who knew him. His thoughts and beliefs about our country, as it is, are the inventions of those with an agenda. I like to think that if he were transported to our time, he would ignore politics altogether: That he’d learn to do things he could never have imagined, like ploughing a field in an hour with a tractor, rather than in a week with two horses, or taking a flight to New York, rather than spending six month’s wages on a two-week boat trip. What does rest in peace really mean, anyway, if not that tomorrow’s problems are no longer yours to worry about? It is not for us to wonder about whether Collins would have approved, any more than it was for him to wonder about whether somebody like me would have approved of him, a hundred years after his death. He deserves to rest, not to be constantly disentombed for the agendas of people whose lives he could never have imagined.