Cold Case Collins

A number of people have asked me in the past week what I thought of Cold Case Collins, the documentary screened on RTE 1 to commemorate the death of Michael Collins a hundred years ago. Apart from a minor irritation – I can’t stand the docu-drama format of actors re-enacting historical events – I was gratified to see that what facts as could be established around the events at Bealnablath were confirmed and that the many myths and legends surrounding Collins’s death were given short shrift. I would have been even more gratified however if I had been included in the credit notes at the end of the programme because it seemed to me that ninety percent of the evidence used in the film must have lifted directly from my book The Great Cover-Up. This extends from putting Florrie O’Donoghue at the centre of events, to the exoneration of Emmet Dalton, to the fact that there were several groups of IRA men, not just one, at Bealnablath on the day. Even the idea of two Gardai investigating the killing two years afterwards was borrowed, though I allowed them their real names and published what they found – or what they believed they had found, even if it contradicted some of what I believed myself. In fact, the entire programme, bar one salient detail, seems to have been entirely culled from my book.

As most people who know me are aware I was trained as a scientist. It is drilled into scientists to always give credit to those who made the prior discoveries on which our own are based – we stand on the shoulders of giants and all that kind of stuff. I try to operate on that basis and make every effort to give credit where credit is due – even if I may not like a particular individual. If you use somebody else’s findings, then you are honour bound to cite your sources. This does not seem to be the case in history circles, however, at least in Ireland, or at least that has been my experience of them. People seem to think they can take your research and pass it on as their own without giving any credit for it. Though it is not strictly speaking plagiarism it is still a form of deceit and should be a complete no-no in any knowledge-based enterprise. In the case of Cold Case Collins it even extended to the stack of books written on Collins on the table in front of the panel of experts in which mine is notable by its absence even though it is the only coherent book published on Bealnablath in the past thirty years and has to have been the principal one used in the programme. Or at least if it is present, it cannot be seen. Maybe it was a sort of literary Schrodinger’s Cat, which makes things even worse. It’s all quite extraordinary.

Then again, it could have been a lot worse. A number of academic historians have borrowed my sources on an industrial scale to set up an entire data base while at the same time taking every opportunity to attack me for having used those sources in the first place – while themselves deliberately misinterpreting them. So I was expecting some snide commentary. It didn’t come – apart perhaps from one from Caoimhe Níc Dhábhéid in which she was cheerfully dismissive of books written on Collins’s death, while she herself took the trouble to appear on a documentary about Collins’s death! I suppose we should be grateful for such small mercies.  The bottom line is that my book saved the documentary makers from having to carry out half a decade’s worth of research. Or alternatively, it saved them from making a totally rubbish programme. To borrow its contents without acknowledging its existence is pretty bad manners, to say the least.

But this is all beside the point. The important thing is: did the programme shed any new light on the death of Collins? The short answer is that it did – a little. A forensic examination of the cap Collins wore on the day carried out for the programme showed a tiny entry bullet hole on the lining of the cap behind the left ear, as well as the larger exit wound on the right. This confirmed what I had found when I tracked down a note written by Dr Patrick Cagney who examined the body in Shanakiel Hospital on the night of the killing in which he said he found a small entry hole on Collins’s skull in the hair-line at the back of his left ear. While this adds nothing new to the story, it does confirm that bit of it. The bullet that killed Collins was travelling left to right and at roughly the same elevation as Collins’s head. So the shooter, wherever he was to Collins’s left, was level with his head.  Almost everything else in the programme was a reprise of what is in The Great-Cover-Up.

However, I also had the feeling that there was more to the story than meets the eye and that some information which is also in The Great Cover-Up was left on the cutting floor. The programme makers brought in Dr Audrey Whitty from the National Museum which has the custody of the Collins artifacts to discuss them, which she did. Dr Clara Boland of Forensic Science Ireland, who found the entry hole in the cap, then said that she looked forward to examining the artifacts Dr Whitty spoke of. She mentioned his greatcoat and his death mask as well as the cap. However, the latter two never surfaced in the programme again, suggesting perhaps that she did examine them but that the programme makers decided to let them out of the final cut. The death mask is uncontroversial and was briefly commented on though it could have been used to dismiss the idea – often mooted and even hinted at in the programme – that Collins might have been shot through the forehead. But the greatcoat is important.

Yet it was ignored by the programme. However, there may have been a good reason for this. Because what the coat – which is on public display in the National Museum – shows, is that there are bloodstains still visible on the right shoulder and on the collar and the epaulettes on the right-hand side but none at all on the back or on the left. Even a cursory examination shows that most, if not all, of the bloodstains are to Collins’s right. This of course corresponds to the holes in the cap and to the direction the bullet was travelling but it should really have been dealt with.

Likewise, there is no mention of the two photographs of the site taken by Agnes Hurley the morning after the ambush which clearly show the track of Collins’s blood along the road where he went down. The bloodstain lies parallel to the direction of the road and is around two metres long and demonstrates categorically that the bullet that killed him must have come from someone who was further up along the road from where he was standing, rather than from the IRA men who were firing from across the hill. It also confirms exactly where Collins went down, so there should be no further debate on that point – and yet one of the contributors still placed the spot he died as some twenty yards to the south of this.

I can see why the programme makers decided to leave out these details, however. Because if the bullet came down the road from someone who was some distance to the south of Collins but at roughly the same elevation as his head then it cannot have come from any of the IRA men across on the hill. In fact, the bullet was coming from where no IRA men are supposed to have been hiding, if IRA accounts are to be believed. This also fits the scenario described by Joe Dolan, Collins’s personal bodyguard, who told a newspaper the following day that he noticed a sniper crawling on his hands and knees down the road towards Collins’s immediately before he was shot.

To give that evidence – which seems to me to be incontrovertible – would be to open up a whole new can of worms and the programme declared at the beginning that it would not do that. However, the can of worms does exist, whether the programme made reference to it or not. Instead, they sort of waffled that the bullet must have come from across the hill when even their own evidence said that that could not have been the case.

In summary, the documentary was worthwhile, even if it was selective – though with the Florrie O’Donoghue ‘episode’ it did leave the matter open to interpretation, which I think is fair enough. There is more to this than meets the eye. I was happy enough with the programme though I would have made it differently – as a straight documentary with none of the mock-ups. The Great Cover-Up was vindicated, even if no such a vindication was even hinted at. As someone once said you can achieve anything so long as you don’t try to claim credit for it. Also of course the last word has not been written on Bealnablath. But least the right questions are now beginning to be asked – and I’m sure people are busy trying to answer them.