Celluloid in the 1990s has not been kind to Eamon de Valera. The debunking of the Long Fella, which characterised Neil Jordan's bio-pic Michael Collins, continued last night on The Madness From Within, RTE's documentary marking the 75th anniversary of the Civil War.
"I think that De Valera has enormous moral guilt on his hands. I think that in later life he probably realised it," said former Irish Press editor Tim Pat Coogan.
"In the light of what happened later, De Valera and the republicans got it wrong," said Dr Tom Garvin, Professor of Politics in UCD. (Mind you, had Dev and the IRA won, the light of what happened later would, for better or for worse, have been rather different.)
This documentary, produced and directed by Colm Magee and presented by Bryan Dobson, was welcome. However, it was not quite, as its publicity suggested, a "full account and analysis of this troubled and taboo subject."
Certainly it was TV's best yet, but it was some way short of a full analysis of a war which cost between 3,000 and 4,000 Irish lives.
It did, in fairness, muster compelling interviewees. And it did, by focusing on the MacNeill family, show how ideology split families, sometimes pitting brother against brother and father against son.
But such divisions, though clearly they existed, were arguably less characteristic of the war than divisions of geography and even wealth.
For instance, most opposition to the Treaty came, not just from impractical, die-hard romanticists (as portrayed here) but from poorer people.
Clearly there was a materialist dimension to the war, reminding us that people are apt to become conservative when they have - or even think they have - something to conserve.
But this aspect of context was not examined. Neither was there a sufficient attempt at a conceptual understanding of what really was at issue over the oath of allegiance to a British monarch.
On balance the Treaty deal, with its "freedom to win more freedom", had a natural and understandable appeal to pragmatists; at the ballot box, a majority of four to one supported it.
So the Free Staters were democrats and the Irregulars were autocrats? Well, yes - in one reading of the split. But, as republicans will logically point out, you cannot endorse democracy by voting to subscribe to supporting the epitome of anti-democracy - a monarchy.
So we got left with a split between those interminable elements of politics - tactics and principle. Common sense suggests that in accepting the terms of the Treaty, the Free Staters were tactically correct at the expense of compromising principle.
The Irregulars, on the other hand, having already pledged an oath to the Republic, were correct in principle, if morally and politically reckless for being so.
The Madness From Within, while it admirably chronicled the major players and events of the Civil War, failed to stress sufficiently Britain's role in promoting the conflict. However one interviewee, Cornelius Collins, a neutral, did point out, "Lloyd George was happy to see them kill each other."
Still, despite its almost exclusively 26-county context (by and large ignoring not just Britain's role but Belfast's anti-Catholic pogroms of the period) and its failure to condemn Fianna Fail and Fine Gael for cynically and perpetually using the ghosts of this war for their own political ends, this was one of RTE's better historical documentaries.
It rightly detailed the viciousness of both sides. If Dev was identified as conniving and not altogether honourable, Richard Mulcahy, commander of the Free State troops, was called by his biographer "a state terrorist". He was - but he was pretty small beer beside Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who got off rather lightly.