Following the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of France’s Bourbon Dynasty, Talleyrand, who had kept his head through Revolution, Empire and Restoration, held that the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
In this alleged Decade of Remembrance it seems to me that the Tanaiste, Leo Varadkar, never learned anything of history in the first place, and can never be accused of forgetting it.
Here’s how sophisticated Britons reacted on meeting Collins in London during the 1921 negotiations, according to C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, a former Liberal MP, friend of Lloyd George and confidant of John Redmond and John Dillon.
Scott’s Political Diaries between 1911 & 1928 are a mine of information which I’ll return to presently:
“I found him a straightforward and agreeable savage. He was intent on the (British) Government’s claim to hold the Irish ports as a naval base and I could hardly get him to get off that portion of the subject.
……….I pressed him on the question of allegiance, but he was not for giving anything away……………I pointed out that Lloyd George was fighting their (Irish) battle hard and had done wonders in bringing over the Tories…and had a right to expect some help from those he was helping, ‘I know nothing of your politics, I have only to think of Ireland.’ “
“I reported to Lloyd George what Collins had said…’Collins, he said, was a little uplifted.(Hammond mentioned that when Collins was visiting the prisoner’s camps, since the truce in Ireland, he had talked so loudly and blatantly of the police he had murdered that the guards revolted and threatened to resign if they were called on to escort him again.’) “He fancied he had met and defeated the whole might of the Empire. But, if the necessity came, he would find out his mistake. A country which had raised six million men for a great war was not to be easily defeated.”
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