Collins ‘would have been frustrated by pact delay’

MICHAEL COLLINS would have been frustrated by the delay in implementing the Good Friday Agreement, a remembrance ceremony heard yesterday.

Fine Gael MEP Simon Coveney said Collins had a deep desire to see a united Ireland and was committed to peaceful means.

“Collins was a stickler for timekeeping and meeting agreed deadlines. The years that have passed since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, while we still wait for its full implementation, would have frustrated him intensely,” he said.

Mr Coveney was the keynote speaker at the annual Beal na mBlath (the mouth of the flowers) commemoration, which was held at the West Cork location where Collins was shot dead on August 22, 1922.

He said Irish people had not done enough to learn about people in the North.

“How many of us know even five people from the North, yet we want it to be part of our country again.

“In a recent conference in Derry, I was struck by the stereotypical views that northerners have of us and vice versa.

“We all must undertake the fundamental change in attitude.”

Mr Coveney said the economic theories Collins outlined in 1922 were far more advanced than the economic protectionism which was popular at the time.

However, he said the price of economic prosperity would not have pleased him.

“What I am talking about lies in the shadows of modern Ireland, only revealed by the staggering suicide rate among young men, the alcohol-fuelled violence on our streets, the growing numbers affected by mental illness and the loneliness of our disregarded and degraded elderly.”

Mr Coveney, whose late father spoke at the Beal na mBlath ceremony 20 years ago, said Collins had been a man of vision, who had spoken in favour of the metric system 65 years before its introduction in Ireland.

He said the Irish government needed to show similar vision by setting up an Institute for Transatlantic Co-operation to repair the damaged relationship between Europe and the US.

Cork County Council was recently forced to order a set of new signposts for the Michael Collins memorial at Beal na mBlath after souvenir hunters stole the old ones.