The View
Martin Mansergh
November is the month of remembrance, with All Saints’ Day on the 1st, followed by All Souls’ Day on the 2nd, in the Christian calendar. It is also the month when on 11 November 1918 an Armistice was called which brought the main fighting in the First World War to an end.
Remembrance is about respect for the dead, for those who served and fought with courage and self-sacrifice for a cause beyond themselves. Their memory matters to their families and communities. Remembrance needs to go further, to a resolve not to allow that needless level of sacrifice of human life to recur. That is best achieved by reconciliation.
One definition of reconciliation given by the Chairman of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, Barbara Walshe, at a discussion marking German Remembrance Day on November 19, is “learning to live with radical difference”. The definition certainly applies to peace in Northern Ireland, nearly 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement.
Survivors
All survivors of the First World War have passed over the horizon. Even the next generation of their families is now elderly. Inevitably, remembrance is extended forward in time to include those in uniform, who died performing their duty. In Thurles Cathedral last Sunday in a Mass presided over by the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly Kieran O’Reilly and a subsequent wreath-laying in St. Mary’s Garden of Remembrance, those who died on UN peacekeeping duties trying to prevent radical difference spilling over into violence were especially remembered.
On Saturday, November 11, the Annual Armistice Day Commemoration hosted by the Glasnevin Trust, took place with the support of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the Royal British Legion (Republic of Ireland branch). It consisted of an Ecumenical Service in the Church of the Resurrection at Glasnevin, the blessing and unveiling of four additional Victoria Cross commemorative plaques, and a wreath-laying ceremony at the Cross of Sacrifice.
The new memorial gifted by the French Government beside it with the tribute to Irish soldiers by Marshal Foch inscribed emphasises that on the Western Front they were fighting alongside French and Belgian soldiers to free occupied territory, and not just for a British Empire promising Home Rule.
Public attitudes to the First World War and to the victims of it have much evolved. There is now a full acknowledgement of the part played by members of many families from practically all communities in Ireland. Recruits did not come mostly from one minority religious, political and class background. Yet there was a time when patriotism was regarded as the preserve of much smaller numbers who had fought in the independence struggle.
The best comment on all of this was made by one such person, Taoiseach Seán Lemass, in 1966, the 50th anniversary of the Rising, when he said on 18 February: “In later years it was common – and I also was guilty in this respect – to question the motives of those men who served the British armies formed at the outbreak of the war, but it must, in their honour and in fairness to their memory, be said that they were motivated by the highest purpose, and died in their tens of thousands in Flanders and Gallipoli, believing they were giving their lives in the cause of human liberty everywhere, not excluding Ireland.”
Home Rule, at one time supported by both Pearse and de Valera, was seen as promising freedom, but the ongoing difficulties in delivering it on any basis, even after decades of it being demanded by a large majority of Irish MPs and voters, meant it was superseded by rising Irish expectations of a post-war new world order founded on self-determination.
Lessons
There were two lessons from the First World War. One was the dangers of brinkmanship on all sides, there being several crises pre-1914 that were only narrowly averted. The second lesson, only fully learnt (one hopes) after a still more disastrous world war ending in 1945, was one already apparent with the defeat of Napoleon.
As French historian Thierry Lentz concludes, “without consciousness that the abuse of power ends in failure, the hegemonic adventure invariably ends by the constitution of a vast coalition, which, given a modicum of determination, skill and patience, always finishes by being victorious”.
There remains one area of controversy, the symbolism of wearing the poppy. In order to show respect to the dead, it is not necessary to wear any symbol. People should not be pressurised into wearing one, or not wearing one. If one is worn here, there is much to be said for confining the wearing to the day of attendance at a particular event or ceremony, and not for weeks on end.
As part of the UK then, Ireland was involved in the First World War, with official political, clerical and media encouragement in the opening stages, but with strong resistance to conscription. The meaning that we invest in commemoration may well differ to some extent from what takes place in Britain.
Commemoration
There was something deeply wrong with a mind-set that considered a Remembrance Day commemoration in Enniskillen a legitimate target 30 years ago in 1987. Repudiation of that attack that ultimately cost 12 lives helped prepare the way for peace.
The Germans have their own emblem for remembrance, a blue forget-me-not, given by wives to husbands leaving for the front.
They have their own German War Graves Commission. Speaking of World War II in particular, reference is made to shame and humiliation, but also to quiet heroic acts of defiance by individuals who risked their lives to save others by disobeying orders.
At Glencree, a wreath was laid by a senior French Embassy official, emphasizing Franco-German reconciliation and their deep shared commitment to the European Union as the best way of preventing the return of a tragic and blood-soaked past. Ireland remains part of that project, with the exact consequences of Brexit for Northern Ireland and North-South trade yet to be clarified.
