AUGUST 22 2022 will mark the centenary of Béal na Bláth and the death of one of the most significant figures in modern Irish history - Michael Collins.
Collins' death, in an ambush outside the small County Cork village during the Irish Civil War, has long been the subject of mystery, conjecture, and debate, but a new show from Paddy Cullivan will challenge all we thought we knew about the day ‘The Big Fellow’ was killed.
Paddy Cullivan - musician, historian, entertainer, and a passionate, informed, and outspoken investigator into the mysteries and myths of official Irish history, will bring his show, The Murder of Michael Collins, to the Town Hall Theatre on Friday March 11 at 8pm.
This audio-visual show will feature hundreds of images, new research, and a variety of songs, as Paddy seeks to answer questions and controversies around the death of Collins. The controversy arises because the ambush involved 30 combatants. Collins was the only one who was killed. None of the others were in any way even seriously injured.
“Collins died in the company of thirty men, all of whom had a different tale to tell,” as Paddy told me in an interview last year. “His death occurred the same year as the foundation of the State, changing Ireland’s path completely and sealing the partition in stone.”
In the decades since, those who were at Béal na Bláth have spoken about what took place, but all gave different statements as to what happened. Furthermore, key pieces of evidence are missing.
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“The challenge was huge – not least because Desmond Fitzgerald [the then Minister for Defence] burned most of the evidence in 1932, two days before de Valera assumed power,” says Paddy. "The more I’ve looked into our history, the more I’ve seen that the ‘agreed lie’ is just as bad as the wildest conspiracy theory out there. So while I don’t have ‘the answer’. I have ‘an answer’, one I believe to be more acceptable than what we have been fed over the decades.”
Tickets are available from the Town Hall (091 - 569777, https://bit.ly/3IR8Slw ). See also www.paddycullivan.com
