Michael Collins (film)

"Stuart Graham - Tom Cullen"

"Alan Rickman - Éamon de Valera"

"Julia Roberts - Kitty Kiernan"

"Ian Hart as Joe O'Reilly"

"Brendan Gleeson - Liam Tobin"

"Seán McGinley - Smith"

"Gerard McSorley - Cathal Brugha"

"Owen O'Neill - Rory O'Connor"

"Charles Dance - Soames"

"Jonathan Rhys Meyers - Collins's Assassin"

"Ian McElhinney - Belfast Detective"

"[Trying to convince the Dáil to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty] I would plead with every person here. Make me a scapegoat if you will, call me a traitor if you will, but please, let's save the country. The alternative to this treaty is a war which nobody in this gathering can even contemplate. If the price of freedom, the price of peace is the blackening of my name, I will gladly pay it."

"You've got to think of him the way he was. The way he cycled round Dublin in his pin-striped suit with £10,000 pounds on his head. "Why hide, Joe" he'd say "when that's what they'd expect?". But he never did what anyone expected. He got the British out of here and no one expected that. Some people are what the times demand, and life without them seems impossible. But he's dead. And life is possible. He made it possible."

"That's why he died. He knew the risk he was taking when he went down there, but he thought them worth taking. He took them for us, for every gobshite in this country, no matter what side they were on."

"Michael Collins was 31 when he died. Half a million people attended his funeral in Dublin. All parties to the conflict, both British and Irish, were temporarily united in grief. In his brief lifetime, he had fought the British Empire to a stalemate, negotiated the first Treaty of Independence for Ireland and overseen its transition to democracy. He died, paradoxically, in an attempt to finally remove the gun from Irish politics."

"Ireland, 1916. His dreams inspired hope. His words inspired passion. His courage forged a nation's destiny. An epic tale of passion and destiny."

"An epic tale of passion and destiny."

"Liam Neeson - Michael Collins"

"Aidan Quinn - Harry Boland"

"Stephen Rea - Ned Broy"

"At the turn of the century, Britain was the foremost world power and the British Empire stretched over two-thirds of the globe. Despite the extent of its power, its most troublesome colony had always been the one closest to it, Ireland. For over seven hundred years, Britain's rule over Ireland had been resisted by attempts at revolution and rebellion, all of which ended in failure. Then, in 1916, a rebellion began, to be followed by a guerilla war that would change the nature of that rule forever. The mastermind behind that war was Michael Collins. His life and death defined the period, in its triumph, terror and tragedy. This is his story."