"Hang Up Your Brightest Colours..."
Michael Collins accomplished what none of his ancestors could after 700 years of struggle against the British Empire. 98 years after his death, his memory endures.
If you had to describe my definition of conservatism, it would be much shorter than our RPV Creed:
Pay your bills.
Get off my lawn.
Leave my tribe alone.
Notice that my version has advantages to marathon sessions the Republican National Convention puts on with the publication of its GOP Platform. Thankfully, the RNC mercifully truncated the process this year to simply adopting 2016’s 67-page tome that no one actually reads or follows; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that.
Yet there’s something a touch different between American republicanism — think Thomas Jefferson and John Randolph of Roanoke — and Irish republicanism.
For starters, republicanism has a long tradition. Originating with the Romans, it fell into disuse until the Renaissance. Prior to, the rule of law was backed by the force of the dux or leader whose authority was imparted by an imperiator (or king). That was changed by an unlikely candidate: Niccolo Machiavelli.
Machiavelli argued for written constitutions as a substitute for unwritten constitutions or the fiat of divine right in his Discourses on Livy, but more important than this was the recognition of faction and the need to provide checks and balances in any written constitutional framework (an idea Livy himself borrowed from Plato’s Laws).
Unlike monarchy, aristocracy or democracy then, republican forms of government not only pitted faction against faction, but implemented kratos — quite literally, brute force — of law rather than the kratos of the one, the excellent, or the people that could not be changed at whim without the consent of all three.
Michael Collins was born in County Cork in October 1890. His father was born in 1816, making him 74 years of age and the third of eventually eight children. Collins gravitated towards the wisdom of old hands even as a child, and his life took him from Cork to London and finally Dublin where he participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 — a tradition of “an uprising in every generation” — against the British government.
Collins was imprisoned for a short time before being released and renewing the fight of the Dail Eireann or the Provisional Irish Assembly for a free and united Republic of Ireland.
Yet the dream was not to be. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 gave the Irish a 26 county “free state” and not the 32-county Republic that they had fought and bled for. Winston Churchill threatened “immediate and terrible war” should the Irish delegation refuse to sign the treaty offered by British Prime Minister Lloyd George. Lord Birkenhead would remark that he had signed his political death warrant; Collins responded that he had signed his actual death warrant.
Collins voted for the treaty he had signed in London, stating that he viewed the treaty as “giv[ing] us freedom, not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it.”
Collins’ idea of republicanism and the foundations upon which the Republic of Ireland was built upon centered around a handful of principles.
First and foremost was the unity of the country and Ireland’s place among the nations as equals (his tribe). His determination that Ireland would be ruled by the Irish — “give us the future; we have had enough of your past” — was indomitable (his lawn). Finally, the masterful play during the treaty negotiations that the British would not fob off their debt to Ireland but rather pay Ireland for 700 years of rape, theft and torture gave the new nation a clean fiscal slate with no debt at all (his bills).
One can hear the echoes of John Randolph of Roanoke’s definition of republican values as he staked out the principles of the Tertium Quids:
"Is it necessary for men at this time of day to make a declaration of the principles of the Republican party? Is it possible that such a declaration could be deemed orthodox when proceeding from lips so unholy as those of an excommunicant from that church? It is not necessary. These principles are on record; they are engraved upon it indelibly by the press and will live as long as the art of printing is suffered to exist. It is not for any man at this day to undertake to change them; it is not for any men, who then professed them, by any guise or circumlocution to conceal apostasy from them, for they are there -- there in the book. . . What are they? Love of peace, hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the state governments towards the general government; a dread of standing armies; a loathing of public debt, taxes, and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizen; jealousy, Argus-eyed jealousy, of the patronage of the President."
-- John Randolph of Roanoke, speech before the U.S. House of Representatives regarding the "Tertium Quids" Republicans as reported by the Richmond Enquirer (1813)
Jefferson and Collins shared a great deal in common in this regard. But one hears the echoes of this sort of republicanism elsewhere: Vaclav Havel’s resistance to Soviet oppression in 1989, de Gaulle’s restoration of Christian France in 1945, Collins and the Easter Rising of 1916.
In this, I suspect, is the great lesson of Michael Collins. Not so much for the fight for Irish freedom which he undoubtedly won, but for the fight for true independence — economic, moral, agricultural — that Collins believed the Irish nation could achieve in due course.
This is the true secret of any republican. Monarchists desire prosperity for themselves, oligarchs for the few, democrats for the many. Only republicans desire prosperity for everyone under the law — fairly and freely applied, made with the consent of the governed and guaranteed by the people.
More than this, Collins was willing to fight for the freedom of the Irish nation in a manner his compatriots were not, instilling in those who would fight for the Irish cause as sense of selflessness apart from the mercenaries and Black & Tans paid a pound a day to wipe them out.
One senses that there are very few of us who think of ourselves as republicans anymore — perhaps as liberals or conservatives or even nationalists, but not republicans in the way that our forebearers understood the term.
Most of us no longer really can consider ourselves self-sufficient much less self-governing. Mortgaged to the hilt, straddled with debt, wedded to retirement funds without much socked away in a savings account much less our pantry — we tend to live life in a manner understood by the Greeks as δοῦλος (doulos) and typically directed towards our passions and desires, the sort of δοῦλος that arises from a lack of discipline, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance impossible to find outside the πόλις (polis or community) precisely because it is chained.
In Prometheus Bound, the Greek tragedy opens with Kratos instructing Hephaestus to chain Prometheus to a rock. Hephaestus feels sorry for Prometheus, but Kratos begins to ridicule him for his mercy:
Kratos: “Everything is burdensome, except ruling over the gods; no one is free but Zeus!”
Hephaestus: “These bonds prove to me that this is so, and I cannot argue otherwise.”
K: “Well hurry up and put the bonds on him, so that Zeus doesn’t see you idling!”
. . .
K: “Put it around his arms and with all your strength, strike and nail it to the rock!”
. . .
K: “Strike harder! Squeeze him! Don’t leave any slack!”
. . .
K: “Pin the other arm down as well, so that he will learn — this intellectual — that Zeus is cleverer than he is!”
Aeschylus does this to demonstrate that power (-cracy) is stronger than law; stronger than the designs of men.
Thus one becomes a δοῦλος — a slave — through chains of our own design. Thus monarchy, oligarchy, and yes even democracy chain us to the sort of brute force that becomes its own law.
Republicans fight that impulse, whether they are Jeffersonians, Tertium Quids, or the brave souls who tore down the Berlin Wall and threw the Soviet Empire out of Eastern Europe.
Michael Collins died at the age of 31, yet the scale of his accomplishments were perhaps brought on by the spirit of youth that does not understand what impossible means. That he offered these talents in the service of republicanism should be a credit to those of us who carry that same torch of self-government in the face of brute power today. Prometheus might be proud of that.
My Dear Miss Collins- Don't let them make you miserable about it: how could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to the shot of another Irishman — a damned fool, but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland — 'A Roman to a Roman'? I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal as to snivel over his valiant death. So treat up your mourning and hang up your brightest colours in his honour; let us all praise God that he did not die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.
— George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to Collins' sister Hannie on 25 August 1922
…and if our smaller creed of “Pay Your Bills, Get Off My Lawn, and Leave My Tribe Alone” ever takes off? I’d be rather grateful, never mind the credit.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.