YOUNG FINE GAEL (YFG) has insisted that the use of an image of Michael Collins with blood-soaked hands in a poster to recruit new members is intended to be ‘satire’.
A recruitment poster for the youth wing of Fine Gael has a picture of Michael Collins’s head photoshopped onto the body of House of Cards protagonist Frank Underwood.
It includes the blood-soaked hands that appear in the original poster which is itself a take off of the iconic Abraham Lincoln monument in Washington DC.
The ‘House of Collins’ poster is an Irish spin on the popular Netflix drama which sees Democratic congressman Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey) connive, manipulate and murder to get to the very top of US politics.
YFG president Dale McDermott defended the use of what he said was the “iconic image” of House of Cards.
“The image is very well known to anyone who watches the series. The objective is that the programme has brought politics into the lives of people who wouldn’t have had an interest, so we want to put that in an Irish context,” he said.
He described the poster, which will go up in over 18 colleges across the country, as “a bit of satire” and insisted the inclusion of the bloodied hands is a “non-issue”.
Collins believed Irish independence could only be achieved by physical force before negotiating and signing up to the Anglo Irish Treaty in 1921.
He is considered to be the founding father of the Fine Gael movement and is an ”extremely iconic person” within the party, according to McDermott who said Collins’s image has been used for recruitment purposes for over a decade.
The president of YFG, which has around 4,000 members, added: “It’s an image people will recognise and it will resonate with them. I hope they’ll get the joke.”
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