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Sir, In relation to a disputed episode in the Michael Collins film, such commentators as Garret FitzGerald, Eoghan Harris and Kevin Myers have asserted categorically that physical abuse of Easter Rising leaders on the night of the surrender did not take place. But there is hardly a book on Michael Collins which does not emphasise this episode, whether as an apparent excuse for a subsequent assassination, or to exemplify his horror at this abuse being perpetrated on men whom he respected.

The episode was common currency among the survivors of the Rising. Even minimal research will find it described, in varying detail, by Tim Pat Coogan, Frank O'Connor, Margery Forester, Kathleen Clarke, Louis le Roux (in his life of Tom Clarke) and Max Caulfield.