Seventy-nine years ago next Wednesday, Michael Collins was killed at Beal na mBlath. Many will celebrate his life and achievements. Some will debate the loss Ireland sustained as a consequence of his death. It is my belief that this debate should eschew Civil War politics.

Michael Collins's life and attitudes reflected the complex and tempestuous times in which he lived. Collins was plainly torn by the truce, the Treaty and the resulting Civil War. For him, as for many others, the Civil War presented no clear black or white, right or wrong, and attempts by any political party to claim him, to fit his thoughts and actions into their thinking and grouping today, are out of place. Michael Collins was an Irishman and belongs to Ireland.

The traditional Fine Gael claim on him seems to me to owe more to the regrettable polar politics thrown up by that conflict than by any concerns with the man himself; not because of what he was, because he had little in common with your average Fine Gael voter, representative or ideology, but because, in the supercharged aftermath of the Treaty negotiations, he stood against Dev. Does that alone align him only with Fine Gael? I think not.

All sides in that terrible conflagration stemmed from the same tradition. Even later the divisions, deep as they may have been on a personal level, were scarcely ideological. We were all at one time in the Irish Parliamentary Party, became radicalised by the Gaelic League, the Easter Rising and the War of Independence.

The Civil War had little to do with ideology. The choice of sides in the war had, in most cases, little to do with politics. Often it had more to do with personality clashes, the manoeuvrings of cliques and the readiness of troops to follow individual leaders.

Sean MacEntee has said: "One gets into these situations, not as a result of cool thought and calm judgment. This was one of those periods when emotion overthrows reason." Indeed, according to the historian R.F. Foster, Dev and Collins each ended up on the wrong side.

Collins until late 1921 was extremist in his attitude to the Republic, while de Valera often appeared more open to a reconciliation of the British and Irish positions. The tragic, difficult decisions which were taken in the name of Ireland cannot easily be moulded to fit film scripts and popular plot structures. So, just because Michael Collins advocated, fought and died for the Treaty does not mean that he has anything in common with any political party in Ireland today.

What about his participation in a Cumann na nGaedheal Cabinet? Does this make him Fine Gael's? The Fine Gael party was founded a full decade after Michael Collins was killed, following the merger of the conservative Blueshirts, the National Centre Party and Cumann na nGaedheal.

While a clear majority of the 26county population accepted the Treaty in 1922, 10 years later Fianna Fail had become the largest party in the State. Thousands had already crossed the old Civil War divide by then.

There are many notable examples of this. Take Patrick Lenihan, father of the late Brian Lenihan and grandfather of the present deputy Brian Lenihan. Paddy greatly admired Collins and took the pro-Treaty side in the Civil War. Later he joined Fianna Fail.

My father, who also greatly admired Michael Collins, always said that, for many, the decision to take the pro-Treaty side was based upon the simple motto: "What was good enough for Mick Collins was good enough for me."

Would Collins have made the same crossover from Cumann na nGaedheal, which many of his colleagues made? We shall never know. But it is certainly unlikely that he, an admirer of James Connolly, would have approved of the Cumann na nGaedheal approach to social policy. As one of our outstanding historians J.J. Lee has asserted, the Cumann na nGaedheal cabinet took the view that the poor were responsible for their own poverty.

The chasm between this outlook and that of Collins is most evident from a letter which he wrote to Desmond FitzGerald on 12th July, 1922. "What we must aim at is the building of a sound economic life in which discrepancies cannot occur. We must not have destitution or poverty at one end, and at the other an excess of riches."

As the 1920s progressed it became apparent that this was a view which was not shared by those in his cabinet. As Michael Hopkinson in his excellent work on the period, Green Against Green, has pointed out, many old volunteers on the pro-Treaty side feared that with the death of Collins their republican ideals would be ignored, and the army mutiny stemmed from these concerns.

My belief is that the Collins side of Cumann na nGaedheal - and by this I mean those concerned with republicanism and social justice - had by 1932 crossed to Fianna Fail. The rest then united with similar conservative forces in the Army Comrades Association and the National Centre Party to form Fine Gael.

Fine Gael is what it is today because Collins died. Had he lived, I suspect the then-repressive law-and-order agenda and the neglect of republicanism and social justice would have been resisted. There are those who will argue that such an agenda was necessary to the times in which they lived.

Most, if not all, political parties have made claim to the great Michael Collins where an occasion that suited them arose. As he was a Volunteer, an IRA man, an IRB man, a Gaelic Leaguer, a Treaty-ite, an anti-partitionist, a minister for finance and much more, that may not be a great surprise. His story is the story of Ireland in which we all now live.

Maybe the inevitable alignment of the political parties in the future will be another milestone to the memory of a heroic Irishman.