JUST as we hear that Neil Jordan invented a scene in the film Michael Collins because of its amusingly murderous resonances with the present Northern Troubles, the censor Sheamus Smith decides to create a special certificate to enable children to watch this filmic anthem to rib tickling homicide. Dear God in heaven, tell me that I am not alone in finding this bizarre and sickening.
The scene concerned shows four detectives, recently arrived from Belfast to make good the losses suffered by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, gathered in the grounds of Dublin Castle. "One of them, MacBride, orders all Collins's associates to be lifted that night. A Dublin detective, Ned Broy (later in life to be de Valera's Garda Commissioner, but in the film to be tortured to death by the British), remarks that it will not be simple.
The four detectives get in the car, and MacBride remarks to them: "A bit of Belfast efficiency is what they need." The driver starts the motor, and the car blows up.
Neil Jordan now acknowledges that this is fiction and is based, not on the Troubles of 75 years ago, but on the more recent ones. "You didn't think it was funny? No?" he asked Philip Johnston from the Daily Telegraph, adding: "I did. Look. It was meant to be ironic."
Funny and ironic
And this funny and ironic destruction of the lives of Northern policemen, with direct and clearly stated associations with the murder of Northern policemen over the past 25 years, has been given a special certificate in the Republic to enable children to see it. Do we wonder that Northern unionists look on this State and this society with perplexed hostility, that such a frivolous treatment of the assassination of Northern policemen, clearly a metaphor for more recent murders, should be in a film which has, been granted a certificate specifically invented so that as many children as possible imbibe its fabrications?
Yet the censor himself admits that the film contains "scenes depicting explicit cruelty and violence along with some crude language not normally associated with, the Parental Guidance classification. Well now, well now: and what if some unionist film maker was to make a film about how the BSpecials "defended Ulster" from the IRA in 1922 and included scenes of explicit cruelty and violence, and also threw in an entertaining though anachronistic reference to killing members of the Irish security forces?
How would the Dublin Government feel if that "major cinematic event" (as Sheamus Smith has described the Collins film) was to be given a special certificate in Northern Ireland so that the maximum number of children in the North could be misled and misinformed by its brutal fictions?
Jordanian version
Neil Jordan can make as many inaccurate films as he wants about Irish history. That is his right. But is it the purpose of the Censor's Office in this land, the very office that decided that uniquely in Europe the people of the Republic should not see Natural Barn Killers, to ensure that as many children as possible in this Republic are exposed to Jordanian distortions?
And not just any distortion; the myths of nationalistic violence - and that includes unionist violence, which in its way is every bit as nationalistic, as foul and even more indiscriminate - are powerful engines today.
No doubt it accords with some general consensus within the Republic that a film about Michael Collins, not withstanding a container load of fictions, should be given special treatment, The Song of Bernadette of our time's. On the Shankill Road, they will no doubt make certain judgments about a society which creates a particular dispensation for a film containing so many patently republican falsehoods.
Film does not lend itself to the complexity of Irish history. It has recently emerged that Dawson Bates, the first Northern Minister for Home Affairs (and widely regarded by modern historians, and indeed bye myself, as a deep died, anti Catholic bigot), in 1922 infuriated Orange lodges and the Ulster Unionist Association by appointing two Southern Catholics as senior officers within, the new RUC, the command of which contained 46 Protestants and 12 Catholics.
`Strong party feeling'
Bates defended the appointments of Catholics over the legendary horrible, and I suspect murderous, DI John Nixon (who had the backing of the Orange Order), of whom Bates said: "He has shown a strong party feeling which is unbecoming in a police officer... He has allowed the feeling to develop that there is only one law - that for the Protestants, and in consequence, the Protestant hooligan element is allowed to interpret in its own fashion the laws of the land."
Nixon had accused the numerous Catholic officers in the RUC of being Sinn Fein supporters, though for the most part they were vehemently anti IRA. But he was proved right in one ease - that of former civil servant Pat Stapleton, who was not merely a Sinn Fein supporter but a spy for Michael Collins. One night, Stapleton vanished with 14 files from the office of the North's military adviser.
What is interesting about Stapleton, a Falls Road Catholic and ex soldier, apart from what happened to him afterwards - for he seems to have disappeared completely - is that he was able to steal the files because he was a member of the A Specials. The myths most of us have absorbed about this time, would have ruled out the possibility of an openly nationalist Falls Road, Catholic ever being allowed in the Specials, yet, it happened. A bit of Belfast efficiency, no doubt. Truth is stranger than fiction: but when it comes to tribal myth, fiction is always preferable.