ONE scene in the screenplay of Michael Collins raises troubling questions. It concerns MacBride, "a huge bear of a detective", who has arrived in Dublin Castle from Belfast with a contingent of Northerners to make good the losses Michael Collins's Squad has caused to the G-men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
MacBride demands that everybody associated with Collins is lifted that night. "It's not that simple," says Detective Ned Broy (who is in for an interesting fate).
"But it is simple, Mr Broy. We'll make it that simple," says MacBride, adding: "There's a new regime in here and it's starting now." He and his team get into the car.
"A bit of Belfast efficiency is what they need," sniffs MacBride.
The driver starts his motor. The car is blown to pieces.
No such event occurred during Collins's campaign against the DMP in Dublin. So is it fiction? No indeed it is not. That kind of anachronistic booby-trap bombing is taken not from 1920 but from the IRA's campaign in the North of the past 25 years. The murder of these four policemen cannot but be an allusion to more modern IRA methodology and the mordant graveyard humour of the modern troubles.
"A bit of Belfast efficiency is what they need." Boom. Very funny.
How will that scene go down amongst the IRA supporters of West Belfast? With gales of laughter? A bit of Belfast efficiency - oh that's a cracker, so it is.
That scene alone is confirmation that this film is not just a film, nor is it a simple historical drama in which a certain licence could be taken with the truth. Michael Collins draws from the events in the North today. Among those so disposed, it could only reinforce their attitude that violence pays. And so does violating the truth.
The Ned Broy who sees his four colleagues being blown to pieces in a technically implausible way for the time and the place - a self-starting engine in 1920, and right in the heart of Dublin Castle - is of course based on the Ned Broy who went on to become Garda Commissioner and died a hugely old man in 1972. In the film, he is tortured to death by the British because he betrayed his fellow policemen.
He did betray them, in what he thought was a good cause. And as in the film, his betrayal of his colleagues was uncovered. What did the British finally do to this man who actively conspired in the murder of fellow-policemen (for the most patriotic of reasons, of course) when they discovered what he was up to? Nothing. He was arrested and imprisoned but not tortured, and was able to participate in the Treaty talks.
Neil Jordan tell us in his film-diary that one of his problems with earlier drafts of the script was the absence of villains; that deficiency he has attended to heroically. There are villains, and they are either English, or brutish Irish detectives, who get their long-deserved come-uppance.
And there are heroes, and heroines too, most visibly Kitty Kiernan, transformed from the simple country-girl she actually was into a 1950s vamp. "You know how to give a girl a good time," she whispers to Collins after he has kissed her in his room in the Gresham Hotel. In his arms, she divines that at dawn he is sending out the Squad to eliminate British Intelligence.
The Girl Who's Just Had A Good Time asks the meaning of the message the Squad will deliver that morning. "It says give us our country back. To live in. To grow in. To love," intones Collins, eerily echoing the words from the theme song of The Alamo.
Meanwhile the plucky Squad is knuckling down to the task of getting their country back. To live in. To grow in. To love - things which apparently had not happened for 800 years. They do so by bumping off dastardly Brits, one of whom, a complete bounder, uses the pretext that his wife shouldn't be a witness to his murder, and while his gentlemen-assassins begin to usher the woman out, uses the cover of her body to reach for a gun. But happily he is shot down and finished off on the ground, and the woman cries in a Dublin accent "I'm not his bleedin' wife".
No doubt more roars of laughter. And so very British the roller's not merely a spy, but a corrupter of Irish womanhood too. Worth every bullet he got. We do not see the wives who did see their husbands murdered, nor do we see the entirely uninvolved men shot down that morning by the Squad. But we do see Tom Cullen, one of Collins's closest aides, brutally hanged to death from a skylight by the cruel Brits. (Fortunately, he recovered from his death sufficiently to remain a close companion of Collins through to the Treaty.)
IF Tom Cullen might feel a little aggrieved at his early death, Kitty Kiernan might be quite astonished at how she is transformed. When anti-Treatyites try to break up a Collins meeting, there is a fusillade of shots from the platform. The crowd, we are told, falls silent, shocked, while Collins is "gobsmacked"; why wouldn't he be?
Behind him stands the figure of Kitty Kiernan, who has just emptied a Thompson sub-machine gun into the sky.
"Now let the man speak," she intones, and handing the gun back to Sean McKeoin (sic: presumably Sean Mac Eoin), winks at him. Nice little Kitty Kiernan from Granard is suddenly turned into a winking Annie Oakley with a Big T in her hands.
And why shouldn't Kitty Get Her Gun? The real commercial market for this film is across the Atlantic. The snappy modern idioms - "Join the club", "I can live with that", "Talk to me Harry", and best of all, Collins to a boy threatening to shoot him: "Do it, kid, it'd save a lot of bother" - will probably go unnoticed there, as no doubt will the use of a zip on a bag or a telephone in a room in the Gresham Hotel (at least there is no fax).
Americans will not know that the fictional murder of Broy is merely a filmic metaphor for the horrifying murders of McKee, Clancy and Clune by Auxiliary RIC officers, or other crown atrocities such as at Clonmult (though many of us will). And no real harm results - Michael Collins probably has no more falsifications or anachronisms than any other patriotic film-hagiography, from The Alamo to the Dambusters.
But there is a difference for Irish audiences, and a morally serious one. It concerns the knockabout-end of four policemen from the North. "A bit of Belfast efficiency is what they need," says MacBride getting into his car.
Boom.
Four stiffed peelers.
Very funny.