The rehabilitation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood leader and signatory of the 1921 Treaty which led to Ireland's Civil War continues.

Following Tim Pat Coogan's biography of his hero, Michael Collins, and his hatchet job of his anti-hero Eamonn de Valera, came the historically-flawed Michael Collins film. All served to whet the Irish people's, and others, curiosity about the Big Fella, his life, his ideas, the contradictions and the what ifs. A virtual industry of books accompanied the film and has continued churning out material on Collins' life.

While much of the material in the books under review is not new, the author's approach to Collins's life is. Meda Ryan's book outlines the influences of the many women in his life. How women such as Lady Hazel Lavery and Moya Llewylen Davies played as important a role in the intrigue of the IRA's Director of Intelligence's operations as did the likes of Madeline `Dilly' Dicker, Kathleen Clarke, Nancy O'Brien and Susan Killen to name a few. The major part that his mother, Marianne, and sister Hannie played in his upbringing and life are also detailed.

Ryan also tackles his love affair with Kitty Kiernan and the suggested liaisons with Lady Lavery in a more restrained way than other recent books. Ryan states that it was a media creation with Kitty Kiernan writing on 30 May 1921 saying: ``Don't forget to keep papers about your sweetheart! It was extraordinary, wasn't it. I'd like to see the paper. So don't forget.'' Not the words of a woman scorned.

Costello's collection of Colins's speeches are very interesting though I am surprised that one of his most important speeches is omitted, and not for reasons of space. Following the 1916 leader Thomas Ashe's death on hunger-strike on 25 September 1917 the task of giving the graveside oration fell to this young IRB Supreme Council and Volunteer Provisional Executive member. Stepping forward following the final salute of a volley of shots over the grave Collins said one sentence and withdrew:

``The volley you have witnessed is the only appropriate tribute to a dead Fenian.''

It is worth remembering when ploughing through these and the other works on Collins that his formal education ended when he was 15 and that he was but 31 when he was assassinated. In that time he became IRA Director of Intelligence, TD, Minister for Finance, Treaty negotiator, President of the Irish Republic by virtue of his position as head of the IRB, founder of the Garda Síochána and the Free State army.

Costello uses extracts of speeches given by Collins during this period to illuminate the Big Fella's vision for Ireland, his views on the Treaty, the Free State, the Civil War, partition, democracy and other topics. The selected extracts help bring this complicated period to life and with Justin Nelson's illustrated life book you would be far better informed of the facts of 1916-'22 than 30 visits to see Neil Jordan's film.

Justin Nelson's contribution to the Michael Collins library is like a scrapbook of the period with articles by Collins's nephew, also Michael Collins, General Tom Barry, Cathal O'Shannon, Con Houlihan, Piaras Beaslaí, Síle de Valera, General Sean Mac Eoin, the graveside oration of General Richard Mulcahy. Much of the photographs are reprints from the contemporary newspapers and brochures, many I hadn't seen before. A must for those intrigued by the mysteries of Michael Collins.

As a type of introduction Nelson uses the words of a man who opposed Collins during the Civil War on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial to Collins at Sam's Cross, Béal na mBláth, County Cork in 1965, General Tom Barry.

``Many of you were on opposite sides. Let us leave it at that. Each of us, like I did myself, believed in the correctness of our choice.

``Let us end all the futile recriminations of an event which happened so many years ago and which divided brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour.''

With Ireland's future in the hands of today's Irish republican leaders, we must hope that never again will Irish people turn against each other and away from the task of uniting Ireland in a fitting tribute to those who died for it.

By Aengus O'Snodaigh





When I was at University there was a standing joke amongst history students that in the event of being unable to come up with a decent opening sentence for an essay about any period of European history there were two standard lines to fall back on: ``This was a period of great social change'', or alternatively ``During this period there was trouble in Ireland''. Either would do because neither would ever be wrong, no matter what date was in the essay question.

With this in mind it is surprising to discover that someone with the erudition of Tom McNeill has had to resort to such an obvious undergraduate ploy in the opening sentence of Chapter 1: ``Society in Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth century was in a state of flux''. This is rather poor historiography, otherwise known as Stating the Bleedin' Obvious. The day when someone can write about Ireland and say ``This was a period of peace and harmony when the Irish were not being systematically dispossessed by the English while simultaneously having the crap kicked out of them'' has yet to come.

Nevertheless, this is a quibble in what is a meticulously researched and scholary combination of archaeological investigation and interpretation of the wider socio-political context of the construction of castles and the purposes to which they were put. And although the stone-by-stone descriptions of every pile of rubble in Ireland which has ever resembled a castle are liable to reduce the non-academic reader to a state of catatonic boredom, there is, buried amongst the minutiae, the nub of an intriguing and highly contentious thesis.

Essentially, McNeill concludes that the evidence provided by the examination of castles demonstrates that the partial conquest of Ireland was achieved not by the English as the mighty military power of received history, but rather by the English as a bunch fo mercenary opportunists with a talent for exploiting pre-existing divisions amongst the Irish aristrocracy to their own advantage - and that the Irish had a distressing inclination to occasionally facilitate them; in 40 years the English ``occupied a much greater area of land than they had conquered in a century of warfare in Wales... The occupation or seizure of an Irish kingdom was usually preceded by either an invitation to intervene... the death of a strong king... or a straightforward power vacuum''. Uncomfortable reading, and arguable to say the least, but perhaps there are lessons here for the modern age.

All in all, the work provides an extremely useful and comprehensive research tool, but this is definitely one for the academic specialist. In the meantime, we can look to historians such as Patrick Collinson, Eamon Duffy, Diarmuid McCullough and Christopher Haig as examples of those who understand the art as well as science of writing history.

By Fern Lane