With Michael Collins Ireland was gifted a figure to rank alongside other 20th century leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, British peer Lord Puttnam told about 500 people who gathered for the annual Collins commemoration in west Cork yesterday.
Speaking in Béal na mBláth to mark the 85th anniversary of Collins's death, the film producer said it was an "enormous privilege" to be asked to deliver the oration by the Collins family.
Lord Puttnam, who lives in west Cork, said he was particularly proud that he was able in 1987 to commission Neil Jordan to write the original screenplay for what, 10 years later, became the film Michael Collins.
He said all of his reading about Collins had led him to the conclusion that what he felt worth fighting and dying for was at the very minimum a nation "culturally and socially better, and fairer than its historical oppressor".
"He wanted to help build something that was, in his words, 'not like other nations'; an Ireland that could be 'a shining light in a dark world'; and that in the raw human material, forged out of 700 years of bitter experience, Ireland had the capacity to be exactly that."
Lord Puttnam said Michael Collins was the most wonderful example of a life suspended somewhere between history and myth.
He said society needed its heroes in order to "sustain our dreams of a better and more secure future". He compared Collins to John F Kennedy insisting that like the US president Collins represented the future - a brighter and better future.
He said he would go to his grave believing that had he lived Michael Collins would have forged his own place alongside the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi - "men who, having freed their own people from the shackles of oppression, became icons for peace and reconciliation everywhere."
He said history suggested that "sometimes we need our leaders to die in order to fully appreciate their importance to us".
Lord Puttnam said the challenge facing Ireland in general and the rural community of West Cork in particular, was how to carve out a "special future" for itself while never betraying its crucial human values, those generous social assumptions that have made this society a little bit different and more harmonious.