For the Original Green-Reds, Michael Collins was killed by the IRA Marxists.

There was an hard irony in that Collins himself broke Éamon de Valera (of Cuban decent) out of British jail to be later killed by de Valera. m/r

It seems only fitting that, when the hero
dies in an ambush, we should see it from his young assassin's point of
view: having glamorized Collins, the film cannot resist glamorizing his
unknown killer, too. That last, brilliant image – the relish on that
young face – foretells and distills the next 75 years.

Michael Collins :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn
Mark at the Movies
March 15, 2014

Michael Collins is the thinking man's Die Hard – Dail Hard
maybe, given the protagonists' habit of convening every so often in
their make-believe republican parliament. These brief interruptions
aside, though, the film has as many explosions and killings and
thrilling escapes as any Bruce Willis vehicle. It is not especially
anti-English: indeed, the English may rather enjoy it, since, unlike
most republican propagandists, Neil Jordan's film doesn't attempt to
justify the violence by boring on about ancient injustices, real or
imagined, or by dredging up Yeats' "terrible beauty" and the usual
high-falutin' guff. It comes out shooting, goes out shooting, and in
between is a blarney-free zone; its answer to the Irish Question is
"Hasta la vista, muthaf**ker!"

On those rare occasions when the film
stops firing and starts talking, it turns to specious rubbish. Returning
from London in 1921, having secured the Free State Treaty, Collins
tells his pals, "The position of the North will be reviewed, but at the
moment remains part of the British Empire" – a sentence which never
passed Collins' lips, for the somewhat obvious reason that, under the
Treaty, the Irish Free State itself remained part of the Empire; the
North remained part of the United Kingdom.





If the film seems peppered with curiously
lumpy, formal references to "the British Empire", that's because passing
Irish nationalism off as a colonial struggle rather than a secessionist
movement is a canny move in America: anti-imperialism is instantly
sympathetic, whereas secession, under US law, is illegal. Collins'
contribution to Ireland, we're told in the closing caption, was that
he'd "overseen its transition to democracy". But Ireland under the
British was a democracy – although, then as now, the island was riven by
one giant, fundamental difference of opinion. The British take a
relaxed, indulgent view of these rhetorical flourishes – as no doubt
they do of the law passed in New York State in the 1990s requiring the
Irish Potato Famine to be taught in school as a deliberate act of
British aggression and to be included in mandatory courses "devoted to
the study of genocide, slavery and the Holocaust".


[This part of the current crock called public ed.]  ....

-Go to link-