Mick Clifford: Past meets present for a life lost and legend born
History caught up with the present at Béal na Bláth.
The division, sowed by a brutal Civil War a century ago, was symbolically closed with the joint orations of Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar at the place where that conflict’s most fabled casualty, Michael Collins, met his end.
The leaders of the two Civil War parties are accustomed to sharing a stage after two years in Government together, but this was different.
They came together to a sacred place in Irish history to remember the Big Fellow, but also to affirm the shared values they claim to have been willed by Collins and his revolutionary comrades.
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As always, remembering the dead was as much about the present as honouring the past.
For all that, the commemoration was a poignant affair conducted with proper solemnity and ceremony.
There have been years when this event had been marked by buckets of rain falling on the faithful.
But with attendance hugely inflated, the climate signalled its approval, gifting hazy sunshine, ringed by a piping of steely clouds to mark it out as a day for the dead.
The crowds matched expectations, arriving in a steady drove from before 1pm, many among them no doubt having sacrificed their Sunday dinner in the middle of the day.
Tight organisation kept disruption to a minimum.
An army of stewards was recruited from local GAA clubs and the gardaí, looking the pure finest in their spanking new uniforms.
All of this was necessary for a gathering estimated to be in excess of 5,000 in an isolated spot at the heart of a web of secondary routes in the interior of West Cork.
One wag noted that this was the biggest attendance before a monument on a country road since the halcyon days of moving statues back in the 1980s.
At the site, the crowd pushed all the way up the bank opposite the monument to the ridge at the top.
Climbing the hill were makeshift railings, giving the whole vista the effect of a terrace in a stadium at a Munster Final in full summer bloom.
Down on the road, there was a definite blue tinge to the crowd.
Simon Harris smiled and had his photo taken here at the foothills of his expected climb towards the pinnacle of his party.
Sean Kelly moved easy among his constituents, as did EU commissioner Mairead McGuinness.
Aogan Farrell, another former president of the GAA, made the journey from Cavan.
Dermot Collins, who had been the organiser of this annual gathering for donkeys years, came a shorter distance from Kinsale.
A few heads wore Michael Collins T-shirts and a grinning little man sold mini tricolours.
Just after 3pm, his entrance hailed by the army band, the Taoiseach began his speech.
Almost immediately a small section of the crowd began to whistle and boo.
One among them waved a banner ‘We the People’ and their aim was to disrupt what they presumably saw as an event exclusive to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
Thereafter, they, now and again, turned up the volume, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful.
Mr Martin spoke of the gathering at this spot of Collins’ sister and a few friends before a simple wooden cross on the first anniversary of the killing.
And then he gave the nod to his nominal hosts.
“For the political tradition represented by Fine Gael, this has long been a place to meet together and to remember a leader who has always provided a special inspiration for them,” he said.
“However, it is also an important site for all who honour and respect our independence struggle and our democracy.”
The point was well made, but it could equally be asked why only two of the various entities which make up the state’s representative democracy today were present to honour the man Mr Martin went on to describe as “one the greatest Irishmen to have ever lived”.
A few minutes into his speech the Taoiseach was interrupted mid-flow when one of the soldiers detailed to flank him collapsed from the heat.
The commotion may have prompted Mr Martin to believe that he would be the next leader to come under fire at Béal na Bláth, but the unfortunate man was attended to and quickly exited stage left.
The remainder of the speech repeatedly referenced centrist values which, Martin asserted, had ensured that the state had maintained its democratic status unbroken over a century and achieved some prosperity, notwithstanding the current “challenges”.
He was followed by the Tánaiste, playing at home but showing generosity to his government colleagues, particularly in a tribute to “my constituency colleague”, the late Brian Lenihan who had addressed the event in 2010, some months before his own premature death.
Mr Varadkar also framed the event in the most appropriate manner.
“On the centenary of his death, we pay tribute on behalf of a grateful nation and join together in this place to say, ‘Thank You’. Michael Collins’s life was Ireland and his legacy is Ireland too.”
The coming together of the two leaders speaking at this event was writ large but it also lent the occasion a tribal rather than national hue.
Until recent years, the closing of century-old wounds would have been hugely symbolic for politics.
Not today, when there is a different division in the political firmament and these two parties are on the same side.
The social contract that glues a democracy together is under unbearable strain, if not already broken, through the housing crisis.
Both of the civil war parties bear culpability.
A younger, disenfranchised generation is looking to Sinn Féin, the party that does not fully recognise the State founded by Collins.
Against such a background, the reaffirming of centrist values on an occasion like this is understandable, but it remains to be seen whether the electorate agrees.
Beyond contemporary politics though, it was, for the bulk of those present, about honouring a man who did his country a major, selfless service.
The poignancy of such events is always more acute when the subject died young.
Would the state that evolved, and its relationship with the northern statelet, be any different if he had lived?
A century of speculation had answered that, but there was also the life unlived. Everything we knew about Collins boomed of vigour and enthusiasm.
Despite all that he had achieved, he was really only getting going when he was cut down 31 years of age, robbed of decades of living.
And when the crowds depart and Béal na Bláth quietens once more, the ghosts may again come out and commune on the lost leader.
The wind will continue to push through the trees high on the bank where a shot rang out a century ago, bringing to an end a life less ordinary and giving birth to a legend.
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