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" There&amp;#039;s a whole pot of interesting news from the Motherland these days, all of it having to do with Ireland&amp;#039;s complicated history and its effects both here and on the other side. First of all,there was a remarkable find in an attic in Cork of photos taken of Michael Collins immediately prior to his death, and of the ambush scene at B\u00E9al na Bl\u00E1th the day after he was killed. (Any day with a news story that reminds us that there once was a device known as a &amp;quot;Kodak Brownie&amp;quot; is a good day.) I&amp;#039;ve been to the memorial at B\u00E9al na Bl\u00E1th, which looks like nothing more than a naturally formed Dealey Plaza. (Say what you will about the lads, they knew how to set up an ambush.) The photo of the ambush&amp;#039;s aftermath is of particular interest because, in certain parts of Ireland, there are as many conspiracy theories about the facts of Collins&amp;#039; death as there are over here about the murder of John Kennedy. Another picture shows the scene at B\u00E9al na Bl\u00E1th where Collins was killed on August 23, 1922, the day after the ambush. No photograph of the site where Collins died was known to exist previously. &amp;quot;Aggie went to B\u00E9al na Bl\u00E1th to see what had happened because they&amp;#039;d heard gunshots the previous day. Collins has developed a certain American cachet in recent years, largely due to Neil Jordan&amp;#039;s film biography from several years back. (I wound up in B\u00E9al na Bl\u00E1th because I was working on a magazine profile of Liam Neeson, who portrayed Collins in that movie, which got turned into an essay on Collins&amp;#039; lost legacy because of a dispute between the editor of my magazine and Neeson&amp;#039;s publicist, the basis for which I still do not know.) In Boston, at Doyle&amp;#039;s in Jamaica Plain, a terrific saloon that used to be my local back in the day, but which is now partly a kind of Irish-American political theme park, one of the back rooms is dedicated to Collins, who was, by any reckoning, including his own, a terrorist. We are a strange country that way. Also, the Irish tourism folks have dedicated 2013 to something called The Gathering, which is supposed to be a yearlong celebration and consideration of the Irish diaspora. Actor Gabriel Byrne, who has some serious Irish nationalist street cred, has called bollocks on the whole business. Speaking in Dublin last night, Byrne re-iterated his criticsm and said there was a real need for a proper relationship with the Diaspora. &amp;quot;I think the bulk of what I was saying about nurturing and developing a real relationship with a very complex group of emigrants is absolutely essential. As one guy said to me: &amp;#039;stop calling us tourists. We&amp;#039;re exiles, we&amp;#039;re emigrants&amp;#039;. Who am I to keep people from coming to the country? I was merely reflecting the opinions of people I have met in America.&amp;quot; And finally, Tim Pat Coogan, the historian and author of, among other books, a long biography of Michael Collins, is raising all kinds of hell with his new book, The Famine Plot, which apparently asserts that, by the modern United Nations definition of the practice, the British government committed genocide in Ireland during the years of the Great Hunger in the mid-19th century. (On that same trip to Ireland, I had a memorably merry dinner at Coogan&amp;#039;s house.) This is going to occasion a general hooley among scholars of the events in question, as there has been a lot of work done in recent years to mitigate British responsibility for the horrors that befell Ireland, and which kicked off the first great wave of the diaspora that The Gathering is meant to celebrate. But there&amp;#039;s one part of the story that I don&amp;#039;t understand. &amp;quot;The Famine Plot&amp;quot;, published by Palgrave MacMillan, was released in America last week and Coogan should have been here to launch it but in a separate but equally confounding plot he was denied a visa to come here by the American Embassy in Dublin. What precisely the hell is going on here? (Apparently, at the intercession of Senator Chuck Schumer, the visa was finally granted.) There is no question that Coogan&amp;#039;s sympathies lie with the Nationalist side on most issues, and that the position he takes in this book likely is going to draw heavy fire from other scholars who have studied the events surrounding the Famine. My answer to all that is so what? That&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s supposed to happen here. (And, at the very least, we can use another book that demonstrates what happens when we let &amp;quot;market forces&amp;quot; attempt to solve a national calamity, or what John Mitchel called at the time, &amp;quot;an artificial famine.&amp;quot;) I can&amp;#039;t entirely figure this mess out, but it seems so unnecessary that something beyond bureaucratic inertia might be involved. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16865/news-from-ireland-120512/>