Last ICI Writing

Explain the opening lines of the film: “Michael Collins's life and death defined the period in its triumph, terror, and tragedy.” By A. Lesca with some editing by MCS.

The production Michael Collins narrates the life and death of the homonymous Irish leader who fought for Ireland’s independence. The film opens with a text that explains that Ireland was the earliest, the closest, and the most difficult colony for the British to control. Even though several rebellions had taken place, all of them had failed to free the Irish from British rule. In 1916, the Easter Rising took place. This rebellion did not succeed in itself but it led to the development of a new type of warfare to fight against British domination. In 1919, Collins became the mastermind of the War of Independence (1919-1921), which eventually drove the British out of most of the island. On the one hand, the British information system was broken and, on the other, the occupying British forces were defeated by guerrilla warfare. The British Government was finally forced to call a truce and to negotiate with the Irish. Within the opening lines of the film the final statement “Michael Collins’ life and death defined the period in its triumph, terror, and tragedy. This is his story” is used to summarize the essence of the production.

This quote refers to Michael Collins’s key role in changing Irish history once and for all. He was devoted to fighting the British forces by unconventional means to achieve the dreamed Irish Republic. His victory first involved the wrecking of the British intelligence system. However, Collins’ greatest achievement was his leadership in the War of Independence. For the first time in their history, the Irish gained the chance of diplomatically negotiating with the British, who agreed, by the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, to the creation of an Irish Free State within the British Empire and Commonwealth. This realization can be listed as Collins’ greatest feat.

The IRB leader accomplished these triumphs through sheer terror. He introduced guerrilla warfare, which had as a key objective instilling fear into British forces and Irish informers. In order to inflict and spread terror, intelligence had to be gathered as to the best ways of eliminating the enemy. The British were not passive either: they violently counterattacked, sometimes killing non combatant civilians. Bloody Sunday, on 21 November 1920, is an example of Collins’ use to panic to simultaneously kill nineteen Cairo Gang members who had been sent by the British Government to Dublin to eliminate Collins and his Twelve Apostles. In retaliation for this outrage, that same afternoon, the RUC and the Auxiliaries indiscriminately fired into a crowd watching a Gaelic football game in Croke Park, killing fourteen civilians. In order to halt this escalating violence, the British Government called the truce which would eventually result in the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

Michael Collins considered the Anglo-Irish Treaty, his triumph achieved through terror, as a stepping stone towards complete freedom. However, its ratification by a majority of the Irish people unleashed a national tragedy in the form of a fratricidal war. Many Republicans regarded it as a mistake since it had precisely failed to achieve the republic. The effect of the Treaty was the division of the IRA into pro- and anti-Treatyists, or Regulars and Irregulars. In this way, the Treaty disastrously unleashed terror over Ireland once more. During the subsequent Civil War, former bothers in arms in the War of Independence killed one another. The greatest tragedy of all came on 22 August, 1922, when Michael Collins fell, victim to an Irregular ambush in West Cork, his native land. In his thirty one years of life, Collins had, albeit often violently, accomplished what many had not even dreamed of. His greatest misfortune was having fallen, as Jordan puts it “in an attempt to eliminate the gun form Irish politics.”