Conor Gearty, Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and professor of human rights law at the LSE, has written a number of books on terrorism and human rights.
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Vol. 18 No. 23 · 28 November 1996
pages 28-29 | 4006 words
Diary
Conor Gearty
It was only after the IRA ceasefire that I began once again to be proud of my family’s political past. For more than two generations, it’s been doctors, solicitors, dentists and teachers. Like many Irish families we’ve been happy to lengthen our names with the prefixes and acronyms of professional achievement, while glossing over the patriotic killing and the willing sacrifice of an earlier generation that fought two terrible wars for our unborn lives. Now, after Canary Wharf, Manchester and Lisburn, it should have been back to silence and material success. But a complication has emerged, which threatens to bar our family’s return to its amnesiac state. Michael Collins, Neil Jordan’s film, is not about us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 24 · 12 December 1996
From Tom Paulin
I was interested by Conor Gearty’s dynastic response to Neil Jordan’s film, Michael Collins (LRB, 28 November), but troubled by his remark: ‘Jordan has been excoriated for using the wrong kind of gun in one incident and the wrong kind of bomb in another, as though the exposure of such minor details destroyed the movie’s central truth, which is that Michael Collins was the revolutionary leader of a popular movement which defeated the British forces in most of Ireland.’ This is to miss the point that the car bomb episode involves blowing up a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary who speaks with a strong Ulster accent – the clear intention is to be topical and to treat with comic disdain the loss of life which the RUC has suffered at the hands of the IRA during the last quarter of a century (car bombs were not used during the Irish war of independence). Jordan has said that he regarded this episode in the film as a joke – this is an insulting remark which Gearty might have commented on. In Michael Collins those characters who speak with an Ulster accent are demonised, British violence is portrayed as sadistic, while Irish Republican violence is stylised and palliated. The film also ignores the fact that the war of independence began with the cold-blooded murder of two RIC men by six Republican Volunteers at Soloheadbeg on 21 January 1919. Though there is much that is coarse and crude in Jordan’s direction of Michael Collins, it is a powerful film which deserves to be argued about. It makes the case for proper peace talks and for compromise in the North of Ireland now.
Tom Paulin
Oxford
