Some stories never go away. The Arms Trial came back to haunt us this week on RTE's Prime Time and the debate on who shot Michael Collins will be with us always. Last week, Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton attended the launch of James Hogan; Revolutionary, Historian and Political Scientist, edited by Donnchadh O Corrain and published by Four Courts Press - writings about and by the former director of intelligence in the National Army in the Civil War. Hogan brings up another controversy: who shot Kevin O'Higgins? The then minister for justice was assassinated on his way to Mass in July 1927. Hogan writes that Dave Neligan, the double agent, told him it was the work of a small group of politicians centred on "Sean MacBride, Gilmore, Ryan and among its activists were Fitzgerald and Price . . . who were closely associated with the attempt to get a communist movement going in the IRA". Neligan said that despite McBride's alibi, "from his behaviour, they did not doubt that he knew of the impending crime and therefore was likely to have connived in it or planned it".
FitzGerald avoided this thorny subject and spoke instead of how Dev's arrest in Ennis in 1923, while saving him from assassination by Collins's supporters, allowed W.T. Cosgrave to develop the government. When Cosgrave was ill, O'Higgins used the 1924 army mutiny to establish himself as a man of force and was on his way to eclipising Cosgrave when he was shot.
Hogan writes that Dev emerged unscathed and untouched through the Civil War, as through previous struggles. "None of the men left had the ambition, or if they had, had the intelligence and force of character needed to take the place of either Collins, Griffith or O'Higgins. De Valera simply outlasted the others and did so by paying the strictest attention to his own self-preservation, both in the elementary physical sense and politically in the sense that he was careful not to let any really rigorous or independent minded man come to the top in his own party, surrounding himself from the first to the last with mediocrities. Loyalty to the `Chief' was the only passport to office and promotion."
Quidnunc can be contacted at rholohan@irish-times.ie