& misfortune..
REBEL UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT
tedly fractious, politicians and administrators in that team,” the authors write.
POLITICIAN
“An experienced soldier would have seen it coming.”
It was, perhaps, ultimately, his lack of experience in soldiery that contributed to his death. Ultimately, it was a casual bullet in an ill-planned ambush that killed the hero – not in front of the flash of cameras or a rowdy crowd of supporters, but on a lonely road with only a handful of colleagues and assailants.
Years later, Emmet Dalton, a former British Army officer who fought with Collins at Beal na mblath, is thought to have said: ‘If he had ever been in a scrap he’d have learned to stay down … and so Mick was killed standing up.” While
With Harry Boland and Eamon de Valera in 1919 planning the film that would star Liam Neeson as Collins, Neil Jordan visited Beal na mblath, later writing: “So his life ends in nondescript absurdity, in an Liam Neeson as Collins in movie
Liam Neeson and Julia Roberts
ambush that was almost called off.” Jordan added: “The actors are stunned. It seems to them almost too peremptory, too casual.”
Michael Collins: The Man and The Revolution by Anne Dolan and William Murphy is published by The Collins Press and is available now (RRP €29.99 hardback)
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