Acknowledging the Empire

The last few days have put in wide circulation two unlikely, if very backhanded, compliments to Imperial Britain from key figures in the Irish Republican Army lineage: Michael Collins (yes, the one played by Liam Neeson) and Joe Cahill, just deceased after most of a lifetime spent in the IRA.  A historian has unearthed the teenage scribblings of Collins, who seems to have been trying to impress the examiners in a British Civil Service exam by writing:

Without a knowledge of history we could not tell how such an island as Great Britain came to be the greatest power on the face of the earth, how her small armies won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt, of Quebec and Plassey and how her fleets destroyed those of all the great European powers in the time of Napoleon, and how this general was in the end defeated by Wellington.
 
And then, an aphorism of Cahill's, which featured in his many obituaries, and reflected his birth in Belfast in 1920 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland:

I was born in a united Ireland, I want to die in a united Ireland

In fact, the British have insinuated themselves even more successfully amongst the present day Irish leaders, with none other than Taoiseach Bertie Ahern having Bass Ale as his favourite alcoholic beverage.   But whereas Collins and Cahill had to face truly difficult choices about when the violence should end, Bertie's weakness for England will at most force him to decide whether he wants to pick a fight with Belgian brewers (see the linked article for details).  History can be kind.