‘A small difference between parties’

Ryle Dwyer recalls his 1996 Béal na mBláth oration and the views he held then

IN his Béal na mBláth oration last Sunday, Taoiseach Enda Kenny referred to Michael Collins as “the brilliant minister for finance, the outstanding organiser who brought Lenin himself to Ireland to see how the national loan worked, the thoughtful disciplined leader who helped draft the Free State constitution, the passionate ideas man who wrote: ‘What we must aim at is the building of a sound economic life in which great discrepancies cannot occur’.”

I wonder would people have been honouring Collins over the years if they thought he had been involved in any way with the God-less communism that enslaved half of Europe for much of the second half of the 20th century?