From: special.care03@gmail.com   
      
   The absence of any serious responses to the original post is disappointing,   
   but perhaps inevitable.    
      
   Michael Collins - the man - died 92 years ago on this date.    
      
   But Micheal Collins THE LEGEND was born on that date, 22 August 1922, and THE   
   LEGEND OF MICHAEL COLLINS has lived in the hearts and minds of the Irish   
   people for 92 years.    
      
   When I said the most likely explanation of who shot him is that he did it   
   himself..... I'm killing him all over again, by killing THE LEGEND.    
      
   Nobody wants that.    
      
   THE LEGEND casts him as a superman, shot down in his prime by another   
   Irishman, to our everlasting shame, while Michael Collins, the legend, is   
   canonised.    
      
   He is still my hero.    
      
   But he was human. Great men are often highly sensitive emotionally. Try to   
   imagine the effect on him of the reception he got when he came home to Dublin   
   after December 6th 1921... Try to imagine the emotional toll on him of Cathal   
   Brugha's performance in    
   the Treaty Debate, as Cathal Brugha mouthed the filthy abuse which everybody   
   knew Eamon de Valera scripted for him, but Dev wouldn't say it to Michael's   
   face...    
      
   Then Dev in the election campaign: "The Volunteers may have to wade through   
   Irish blood, through the blood of some members of this government, in order to   
   get Irish freedom!"    
      
   His visions of the future for twentieth century Ireland.    
      
   Finally, his own beloved IRA trying to kill him, in the guise of teenage   
   recruits who 'couldn't hit the side of a barn,' and who then ran away from   
   him............... and that was what had become of his beloved IRA....    
      
   Great men have intense emotions. That can include a deep sensitivity to   
   rejection and vilification from those he had loved and served with all his   
   might.   
      
   My educated guess is that at that moment at Beal na mBlath, Michael was   
   overwhelmed emotionally and just didn't want to go on and he put a bullet   
   through his brain with his own hand.    
      
   In short, MICHAEL LEFT US BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DESERVE HIM ANY MORE.    
      
   We all killed him.   
      
   And that kills the legend and reshapes and redirects our perceptions of   
   Michael Collins.    
      
   But it does not make any less my hero.   
   ===================================================================   
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7zV9PDBCog   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)