I don't suppose Fine Gael can be expected to abandon its diseased and counter-factual obsession with Michael Collins before the 80th anniversary of his death next year: but after that, will it be possible to leave his bones, his deathbed and his wretched memory alone?
Other necrophiliacs no doubt will step forward and claim him for their own, and let them: there should be no place in a modern 21st century party for such an unhealthy obsession with a man who introduced systematic cold-blooded murder into this country, and then signed away the very aspirations and the very polity for which those murders were committed.
If Fianna Fβilers wish to claim him, as apparently some do, instead of the present silly squabble over the title-deeds to his memory, Fine Gael should say: "Have him. You're welcome to him." For what possible continuity links the sleekly peaceable burghers of Fine Gael with such a man, with his endless death-lists, his rejection of democracy, and finally his twin betrayals. The first was the Treaty; the second was his reneging on it with his assault on the new Northern state, whose foundation stone he had authorised with his own signature.
Yearly charade
No such continuity exists; absolutely none, and only a grotesque distortion of historical truths can allow Fine Gael yearly go through the mythological charade that Collins was a man of vision, a democrat, a moral giant, the founding father of our political institutions, a man to whom the Irish people and Irish democracy owe a vast debt. In their hearts, in the stiller watches of the night, Fine Gael's guardians know this is untrue.
In almost every sense outside the annual rhetoric of BΘal na mBlβth and - God help us, the even more historically-disconnected events in Bodenstown - Irish political life resembles that of any European country. Politics inhabits some central consensual ground, with policies differing only in the merest texture and tone. To be sure, we have the firbolgs of Sinn FΘin mumbling their tribal gibberish, but their star, with God's good grace, might merely cross the heavens and depart; and provided conventional parties hold steady, and with Colombia as proof of what its true agenda is, Sinn FΘin should vanish from the night sky, leaving us the orderly constellations of constitutional politics.
Obsession
So why reverential obsession with the 21st century with figures who were so entirely men of their time? Is this not playing into the hands of those who worship at the pagan shrines of untimely death and deadly ambush? And what in reality was Michael Collins - a man who organised an intricate killing machine against the rule of common law, or one who was devoted to the orderly triumph of constitutional politics? Only a fantastist would say the latter; and those who have inherited the traditions of his murder-machine in PIRA, RIRA and CIRA can properly say that they are his heirs.
Fine Gael, based largely on Anglo-Norman caste of Old Catholics, inherits nothing from that tradition, other than a taste in pious mumbo-jumbo towards traditional shrines. Once such places were purely religious: now they are religio-political, and in the case of BΘal na mBlβth it is merely a fleetingly-referred to and thoroughly spurious confirmation of Fine Gael's "republican" credentials. This is balderdash. Fine Gael could just as well boast that it is the party of Black September, Jamaican Yardies or the Ikud. Take your pick, Peter Barry.
If anything, Fine Gael's real charm is that for 364 days a year it is totally opposed to that deviant political tradition which goes by the grotesque misnomer "republicanism" and which in reality is no more than an armed, pseudo-Catholic, pre-Christian cult of death-worship. Did anyone other than the owners of recently crushed brains ever vote for Fine Gael in the belief that what they were voting was a united Ireland NOW? Those who agreed to the legal division of Ireland in 1921 were the founding fathers of post-republican anti-republicanism. They recognised reality. As briefly, did Michael Collins. He was the legal author of partition but also, intellectually and morally, was a founding father to the present lexicon of IRAs.
Anyone who went to London seeking a united Irish Republic was going to come home disappointed. And those today who think that the British were being "unfair" at the promise of outright and terrible war during the Treaty talks are being childish. For war is what empires do; that is how they became empires. Wise men don't presume to start a war against an empire and then think they can fight it on their terms only.
Vile war
And what a vile war it was. I have often referred to the IRA campaign of murder of ex-servicemen during 1920-22, which Collins must tacitly have approved of. So why do apologists for Collins never acknowledge that this abomination took place? Why does no history book or Fine Gael speechmaker refer to it? A stupid question: for at its nadir, that campaign hideously conveyed the distilled quintessence of armed Irish republicanism; a willingness to murder, in the name of Ireland, those whom you do not like or whose pasts you disapprove of.
Instead of implicitly linking itself with these horrors, Fine Gael should exultantly boast of its loathing of such atavistic heathenry; but it can't do so while it continues to hero-worship a murderer. Once next year's ceremonials are over, it might sensibly move on to more morally appropriate themes, and finally abandon the blather of BΘal na blah blah blah.