An occasion to show solidarity and unity

Tomorrow Enda Kenny will become the first sitting Taoiseach to address the annual Béal na mBláth commemoration in West Cork.

Ironically we can all take great comfort in the event, marking the death of Michael Collins — Civil War leader, subversive, finance minister, inspiring leader, treaty signatory, fallen hero, and visionary or traitor depending on your, or more likely your grandparents’, viewpoint — has become a kind of symbol for a new, more united and focused Ireland. An Ireland still growing more tolerant and at ease with itself.

That process was copper-fastened two years ago when Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan spoke at the event. Though he was not the first Fianna Fáil minister to attend — Jerry Cronin, the then defence minister laid a wreath at the Collins’s monument in the 1970s after then taoiseach Jack Lynch decided that the government and the army should be represented — it would be dishonest and foolish to pretend that the ceremony and all it represented did not polarise generations of Irish people. Within living memory it occasioned vitriol and visceral division, neither of which realised any of the ambitions Collins, or those who killed him, held dear.