THE depiction of Michael Collins has developed over the years from Mick the Misogynist to Mick the Gay Cavalier, but this could soon be replaced by Mick the Blade, Dr T. Ryle Dwyer of UCC told the KISS Summer School in Tralee yesterday.

Dr Dwyer was discussing the making of the latest film of Michael Collins, directed by Neil Jordan.

"Over the years, the depiction of Collins has developed," he said. "The Mick the Misogynist of Piaras Beaslai's biography was in danger of developing into Mick the Gay Cavalier but, if we are to believe what we read in the papers, we could be about to get Mick the Blade.

"I would hope that the movie will cover properly the two most important facets of his career - his role in essentially provoking what became known as the Black and Tan War, and his part in ending it. More people are undoubtedly aware of the latter role, but not the fact that he deliberately provoked the conflict with what might be called malice of forethought.

"Supporters of Michael Collins are frequently fast to denounce the provisional IRA, but it is my contention that if they are honest with themselves, they should admit that the Provos have really been emulating Collins, who was a rather contradictory character," Dr Dwyer told the second day of the Kerry International Summer School of Living Irish Authors.

He said that in any of the earlier biographies of his life, there was so little mention of sex that no one could be blamed for concluding that Collins was gay. One grandnephew had told him, he recalled, that he came to such a conclusion and suggested as much to his uncle, who laughed and said that Collins's problem was that he was too fond of women.

From discussion with people involved in the latest film about Collins, Dr Dwyer said he understood that the film makers had made composites of a number of characters, and Hollywood style - had put in plenty of sex.

"If this is so," he added, "this aspect of the movie will likely be little more than a fantasy."

EXAMINING the work of three Irish writers - Kathleen Coyle, Mary Lavin and Jennifer Johnston - Dr Anne Fogarty, a lecturer in English at UCD, said that each of them grappled with the contradiction attendant on the identification of women with nature and with the cyclical process of life and death.

It was a striking feature of their work, Dr Fogarty said, that they concentrated on women's dual and contradictory association with processes of destruction and of creation.

"Ultimately, as in the Freudian theory of the death instinct, these writers show that the depiction of women's lives in their fiction has as much to do with the abolition of memories as with their disinterment," she added.

Kathleen Coyle was born into an Anglo Irish Protestant family but converted to Catholicism. Al though she wrote numerous novels throughout her turbulent life her literary reputation had fallen into oblivion until the recent publication by Wolfhound Press of A Flock of Birds, Dr Fogarty said. Wolfhound now plans to re issue her memoirs, entitled A Magic Realm.

In A Flock of Birds, Dr Fogarty said, the tragedy faced by the heroine is particularly universal.

"The novel, above all, is a critique and exploration of maternity ... Coyle represents women's time as inherently different from that of men. She seems both to invoke and interrogate traditional aspects of femininity. Female passivity is a sign not of weakness but of strength. Moreover, she sees women as motivated by a counter ideal.

"At the same time, Coyle links women with cyclical processes of renewal. Women's lives are dependent on those evolutionary cycles. Coyle implies that female wisdom, because of this recursive nature of women's time, is of a higher order. She sees women as capable of peripatetic, bisexual understanding," she added.

Turning to Mary Lavin, Dr Fogarty said that in the afterword to her first novel, Mary O'Grady, Gus Martin commented on "the outrageous privacy" of her fiction. This sense of privacy had less to do with her propensity to delve into the feelings of her characters than her ability to suggest private worlds of emotion that are never described.

"Lavin is above all a social realist - her stories are dominated by the minutiae of everyday existence. Her vision of life is also intensely social, her characters are stretched out for us in terms of their interactions with others."

In her novel, In the Middle of the Fields, Dr Fogarty said, Lavin's widow is depicted as central and marginal. She seems like an abandoned object in the landscape but there is also a sense of her resolution and suppressed emotions. In Lemonade, a multi stranded narrative, Lavin had used the same irresolution, while in The Invisible Worm, by Jennifer Johnston, a picture is painted of a woman attempting to probe the causes of her madness and to excavate the reasons for her guilt.

The three writers, Dr Fogarty added, had revealed the multi faceted and plural nature of women's lives, particularly in their roles as wives and lovers.

"They make use of the liminal vision of their heroines to uncover the complex but often illusionary truths which sustain us."