TALLY HO is right! What else would an Anglo Irish tearaway on a horse shout in 1901? That Neil Jordan finds it funny that the young huntin' shootin' fishin' Constance Gore Booth should shout "tally ho" says as much about his sense of Irish social history as the fact that he found a car bomb scene in his film "funny" tells us about his sense of contemporary Irish politics.
And the way David Hanly and Richard Crowley treated themselves to a snicker in studio when it was read out by John S. Doyle tells us plenty about RTE's politics. Perhaps, like Dr Johnson, they should plead pure ignorance.
"Tally ho" is what screenwriters call a speech tag, like Scarlett O'Hara's "Fiddle de dee", or John Wayne's "That'll be the day". In my movie it punctuates the political progress of Constance Gore Booth. The carefree young Constance Gore Booth shouts it as naturally as Fergie until politics takes her breath away.
Commandant Constance Markiewicz of the St Stephen's Green garrison shouts it as an ironic battle cry to British officers with whom she danced at hunt balls. Constance, the survivor of 1916, now a tired Minister for Labour in the revolutionary Government of Dail Eireann, murmurs it ironically in memory of her former self when she meets Collins.
Finally, in later drafts, Markiewicz, the embittered enragee of the Civil War, spits it ironically at Collins to show they are no longer on the same side - because it would be a shared word between them. Surely David Hanly - if not Richard Crowley - would have heard people like Sean O Riada using the word, as in "What's the tally ho?" Perhaps he cannot remember it for purposes of this controversy.
Sitting on such a supine nag as RTE, high on a soft saddle of hype, with RTE holding the horse's nose, it was not surprising that Neil Jordan should spoil his robust response to my criticisms of Michael Collins by a sneering and self serving synopsis of Mick, my screenplay for Kevin Costner.
Since Costner is careful with money, you have to ask why he paid a million dollars for my screenplay and passed on Neil Jordan's if there is nothing more to it than tally ho.
Most of our media have hyped Michael Collins to high heaven. The other side of that coin is the censorship of any commentary critical of Neil Jordan. For example, no RTE programme has mentioned his extraordinary interview in the Daily Telegraph which was deconstructed by Kevin Myers in this newspaper.
Asked what he now felt about a scene in his film, in which a Belfast Protestant policeman is blown to bits, Neil Jordan said first that he found it funny, and indeed ironic, and later, perhaps feeling that he had been a little too laid back, he changed his mind and said: "Maybe I shouldn't have done that, OK?"
Loyalists are not likely to see the joke. So having knocked down such a heavy hurdle how come the media claim he has a clear round? Let me attempt a personal answer.
THE national question, no matter how hidden, nudges every elbow. Any artefact novel, play or film whose subject is the birth of the State has to take sides on that question. Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster appeals to all audiences, but particularly to pluralists. Terry George's Some Mothu's Son which, unlike Michael Collins, is open about its agenda, appeals to republicans.
As the Irish people are Aristotle's original political animal it is not surprising that they have picked up the politics of Michael Collins from such clues as the car bomb scene, Jordan's attack on revisionism, his self confessed return to traditional republican values and the fact that Sinn Fein was satisfied with this film.
So it came as no surprise that the coverage of Michael Collins the movie should cause the country to split into two camps. Seeing the movie reinforces rather than changes these prior positions. Republicans will love it, revisionists will loathe it, and people living in Jordanland will purse their lips and say: wasn't Alan Rickman remarkable.
What I want to say is what I think about his film, and about what he has to say about my screenplay. Let me give the ground rules.
Never did I argue that Neil Jordan's film had to be historically accurate. He made that claim. For the past 10 years I have said my own film script is a fiction based on the life of Michael Collins. All I ask is that if a writer of an historical film change the facts he or she should be willing to say why they did so.
For my part I am willing to say why I compress dates and have Collins present at almost all major events. And in turn I am asking Neil Jordan to come clean about why he used the car bomb scene which is causing so much anger in the North.
Neil Jordan, in his angry response to Kevin Myers, says: "My film is set in the years 1916-1922 and relates only " That is not so. Michael Collins is a metaphor for some aspects of the armed struggle in the North.
Cinematically there is a constant commentary. The first of these is the car bomb which he told the Daily Telegraph (they did not torture him to say so) he found "funny" and meant to be ironic, and which he now feels was a mistake but has done nothing to remedy.
There are many others: the priest waving a white flag during the Bloody Sunday shootings; the ghost of Gerry Adams is there when Collins asks: "Can you ever see Churchill shaking my hand?" And his disingenuous dismissal of Kevin Myers's caustic comments founders when he notes in his Film Diary: "things lacking in a story like this: a funeral and a hunger strike."
The connection between then and now is constantly drawn to our attention: by speech (the fword), by visual style (Dublin workers' life in flats rather than Georgian houses), by anachronistically callous attitudes to the taking of human life (Dan Breen's breezy brutality was the exception not the rule), by the casting of so many familiar Northern faces (Stephen Rea's Northern accent distances us from Dubliner Ned Broy), by the way neither side gives any quarter (an attitude typical of the Provisional IRA but not of the Old IRA - Sean Mac Eoin allowed wounded Auxiliaries to be treated and sent them back to bar racks - and by the director's desire to make everything look blacker than it was (Connolly being kicked, Croke Park crowds machine gunned) and his self serving statement about the "absolute necessity of the savagery of that time".
This was a time when Home Rule was on the statute book, offering not much far short of what Collins was forced to settle for.
BUT at the end of the day it is the car bomb scene which sums up everything that concerns me about Michael Collins. Basically, I believe that the scene is like a forensic clue to Neil Jordan's political agenda - to make an artistic comment, however oblique, on the armed struggle.
There are many movies that could be made on the life of Michael Collins. But none of them can avoid commenting on the armed struggle. The basic choice is between republican Collins in which you play up the bang hangs, and revisionist Collins in which you play up the politician who ran a country from bits of paper in his pocket.
Neil Jordan has given us neither. What he gives us is a Northern Collins, a most modern Collins, a savage Collins, a basically Belfast Collins who deals out death to faceless digits before Jordan bothers to bring them to artistic life in the first place. Had he not made every British officer a sadist and every RIC man a thug it is doubtful that Sinn Fein would be giving it the warm welcome they are giving it all over the world.
Neil Jordan's screenplay can be summarised simply. After the 1916 Rising Michael Collins gathers a gang and starts taking out the Brits until they pack up and go home. Jordan sacrifices almost everything to that storyline.
Gone is the organisational genius, the man who ran a government out of bits of paper in his pockets. Gone are the Treaty negotiations replaced by a risible caption that says "Four Months Later". Gone is any real sense of a social revolution - the Labour courts, the War Bonds, the Republican courts.
Gone is the crucible of that revolution the Gaelic League and the literary renaissance which led to the moral power of Terence McSwiney's hunger strike.
Gone are the girls of Cumann na mBan, the revolution in rural Ireland, the thrilling deeds of Tom Barry, the whole powerful romantic sweep, sweet and bittersweet. of the Irish revolution, as caught by Sean O'Faolin and Frank O'Connor.
So much for Neil Jordan's Collins. Now for mine. Where Neil Jordan wrote a gangster movie I tried to write Once Upon a Time in Ireland. And I wanted everything that might have helped make Michael Collins to be in it somewhere: Fenianism, Redmondism, life in London, 1913, Yeats, the Abbey, the Asgard. 1916, the Battle of Kilmichael, London again, the Treaty, and the statesman who suppressed those who defied the new democracy.
To do that I had to compress time, move Collins about, but at no time did I deliberately falsify history to make a contemporary point. However tempted I might have been as a revisionist, my Bloody Sunday is bloodier than Neil Jordan's in the matter of dispatching the spies.
And when I fiddle with a fact I do so to show greater historical truth. To take them in turn: when move a west of Ireland eviction to west Cork it is to show how such fresh folk memories would fill the mind of Michael Collins. When I distort some dates to have him meet Tom Clarke in London, it is to show the ideological continuity of Fenianism on the Irish Volunteers, and to let us see the size of the Empire which they are about to engage.
When I move Markiewicz from Sligo to west Cork it is first for dramatic reasons, so she can be converted to republicanism by Collins, and second to remind us that most rural Irish volunteers were born in the shadow of a Big House.
When I have Collins share an office in London with a Kiplingesque young Englishman, Harry Crake - who will become an amoral auxiliary - I am showing the symbiotic relations between Ireland and Britain and how close Collins was to English life.
When Harry Crake comes to Ireland, a cruel survivor of the Somme and Churchill's counterrevolutionary force sent to suppress the Bolsheviks, he comes with history in his eyes.
As the lorry leaves Macroom barracks for Kilmichael it is not full of Hollywood digits to be done to death but of men morally maimed by war: "In their dead eyes are many battlefields - Ypres, the Somme, the Russian plains ..." When Crake is cut down at Kilmichael his death has a tragic dignity. There's a huge moral difference between the death of a man and the death of a digit.
Likewise, when I have Collins meet Hazel Lavery in the buff in a bush, it is by way of a blow against the macho culture of Irish nationalism that inspires the lethal laddism of many Neil Jordan movies, and particularly Michael Collins.
THERE are three powerful women in my story - Kitty Kiernan who stands for all the girls of Cumannna mBan who wanted to do their bit for Ireland - but also have a good time; Constance Markiewicz who put a cause above her country; Hazel Lavery, who could have been an agent of Churchill's but who certainly softened Collins with her sexuality.
Given the have it both ways homoeroticism of his movies, it came as no surprise when Neil Jordan dismissed this wonderful woman as merely "an old bat". Adult women are absent from his macho cinema. In fact, I reckon that the three strong women's parts in Mick add up to about 3 million per cent more proper women's roles than in all of Jordan's films combined - films where far too often women are acting like men, or actually are.
Finally, I would not disagree with Neil Jordan when he says my screenplay seems to come out of the world of Dion Boucicault and the Young Irelanders. Certainly I see pre 1916 Ireland as a golden age, an age where a vibrant folk culture composed of aisling and Colleen Bawn was still alive.
And I am proud that my script reminded him of Young Ireland, of Thomas Davis and the most inclusive definition of Irish identity ever voiced by Irish Nationalism. "Orange and Green will Carry the Day Boys" they sang. naively but nobly. And I would rather make a Young Ireland movie than a United Ireland movie.