Sir, - In his otherwise excellent piece on the Michael Collins film, Garret FitzGerald states that "the roughing up of the leaders of the Rising after their surrender has no historical basis and adds nothing to the film".
In her autobiography, Revolutionary Woman, Kathleen Clarke says of her husband Tom Clarke: "We had to go through the agony and horror of surrender and then the terrible indignities he was subjected to, with my brother (Ned Daly), in the Rotunda Gardens, and finally to be treated like a mad dog or worse in Kilmainham Jail".
Her version is further backed up by a footnote - recollections of Joseph Sweeney, in K. Griffith and T. E. O'Grady's Curious Journey. He states: "We were marched into a little patch of green in front of the Rotunda Hospital, an oval patch, and we were made to lie down there . . . we were kept there all night and a British officer amused himself by taking out some of the leaders. He took out poor old Tom Clarke and with the nurses looking out of the windows of the hospital, he stripped him to the buff and made all sorts of disparaging remarks about him. `This old bastard has been at it before. He has a shop across the street there. He's an old Fenian', and so on."
The way in which the Rising leaders were treated by the British in general seems to have had a major influence on the way in which the War of Independence was conducted, and in particular on Collins and his group, who witnessed this abuse. The scene, therefore, seems to be in keeping with the facts and to be entirely relevant to the story of Collins. - Yours, etc.,
Monaleen, Castletroy, Limerick.