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ANY discussion of the historical veracity of my film, Michael Collins has to be predicated, I suppose, on the fact that it is a film. Film is a medium which in the space of two hours, can enact a drama - or be set within a drama - that took place over the three decades of the individual's life. Film is not history, cannot be history, but every now and then makes use of history for its gown purposes.

So the only real kind of assessment can be a comparative one, one that compares different, filmic versions of the same subject with others. To make an assessment of the veracity of different versions, I have gone back to the archives, so to speak to discover what other treatments there have been of Michael Collins - even what other mentions of Michael Collins - in the archives of cinema.