The love triangle was real. Although Harry Boland didn't die as he did in the movie, by being shot swimming in the river Liffey, he was shot by Free State soldiers in somewhat mysterious circumstances in a hotel, dying a few days later. The triangle itself however played out somewhat similarly to the movie in terms of timeline, although Collins seems to have made a move on Kiernan before Boland went to America.

Like many other things in the revolutionary period in Ireland, there is an an aura of mystery about Bloody Sunday. Many of the participants didn't speak of the day again, including future Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Sean Lemass. One participant even ended up permanently scarred and in a mental institution, but their name escapes me at the moment. But I wouldn't say the scenes took any liberties with killings by Collins' squad on Bloody Sunday, in fact if anything the killings were far more gruesome and ruthless than portrayed in the movie. As far as I'm aware, the details of the killings officially only note bullet wounds, but there are reports of a sledgehammer having been used on the faces of some of the victims, the scene in the Gresham hotel was apparently particularly gruesome also. But the film left out a lot of other interesting details the planning that was done by other leaders other than Collins for Bloody Sunday, the fact that the original hit list had 50 men marked for death, was reduced to 35 (meaning over half the targets failed), British allegations that none of those killed were truly involved in intelligence operations in Ireland. The scene in Croke Park does take liberties however, as has already been mentioned before me. This contrast shows the bias in the films narrative.

What the film doesn't show about Collins was that all in all he was a book man. His work in procuring a national loan as Minister for finance to fund the new state is often overlooked as one of his best achievements. He made canny political decisions such as the use of film propaganda, he gambled on running political prisoners as election candidates and won landmark seats for Sinn Fein, and of course, his intelligence network was among the best in the world at the time. He had several double agents inside Dublin Castle, the head of the British administration in Ireland, who would pass messages to Collins' office which was hidden in a lawyers office just a few hundred yards away. His intelligence network penetrated so deeply that his second cousin even worked on decoding IRA messages for the British, passing any relevant information back to Collins of course. It also leaves out the fact that Collins'inner circle itself was also penetrated by a British agent by the codename of Jameson, who was the first to identify Collins as the driving force of the revolution to the British.

In terms of the personality, it's more true to history than most other aspects of the movie. He had the same energy and charm as he has in the movie, and Neeson does a very good job of portraying this, it doesn't feel like he is playing a younger man once the film gets going.

Overall it does get a worse rap than it deserves, the script is very unsatisfying considering it could have very easily been an intelligence thriller or have been done in more of a political setting, but it's a decent film that gets much of the narrative right without all of the facts being quite right.

A few scenes or characters in the movie would be considered historically inaccurate:

• The rebels didn't surrender outside the GPO but on Moore Street instead.

• Ned Broy ( the double agent detective) in real life was not killed by the British for burning documents. He actually went on to serve as Commissioner of Gardaí from February 1933 to June 1938.

• The armed car driving onto the pitch and firing at the crowd was for dramatic purposes. In real life it was the police who shot at civilians in the crowd. The police had claimed that IRA sentries had shot at them first, but there is no evidence to suggest that.

• The movie implies that De Valera was implicit in Michael Collin's death. While there have been many theories about this over the years, there isn't any definitive evidence that proves De Valera's involvement in Collin's death.

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