Time For The Irish Republic To Remember

Mick Fealty writes:

There are no McDevitts on Menin Gate (Belgium) but there are thousands of other Irish names amongst the 58,000 for whom there is no grave. The Irish Peace tower stands on a hill over the final battleground where the 16th and 36th divisions pushed the German lines back in June 1917. There are some wonderful inscriptions as you walk in. They say different things but have a single message best summed up in the words of Tom Kettle:

To dice with death, and, oh! They’ll give you rhyme
And reason; one will call the thing sublime,
And one decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the Secret Scripture of the poor.

The drive from Flanders (Belgium) to the Somme (France) takes you along the western front’s most famous sites. Arriving in the Somme valley, seeing the 74,000 names at Thiepval and acknowledging the epic achievements of the 36th Ulster Division, remembered at the Ulster Tower is thought provoking and utterly sobering. The blood sacrifice of the huge international army is everywhere.

Irishmen are everywhere. In the 16th Irish Division the fallen from ‘nationalist’ Ireland lie side by side with comrades from the UK, India, South Africa, Morocco, France, Belgium, Canada and many more. Many of the states have since decided to erect their own memorials to the soldiers of the Great War. The finest is undoubtedly in Vimy where Canada built the most wonderful monument to its war dead.

I first arrived there from the living memorial that is the National South African monument at Devilles Wood. A wonderful circular building it makes no bones about South Africa’s own difficult history since the first world war. It’s a monument to everyone who went to war for the African state. From the Afrikaners in the Somme trenches to the ANC activists who fought for democracy, the building quite literally squares the circle and allows the modern republic to remember without undermining itself in any way.

The South African shrine stands in stark contrast to the only monument to the 16th Irish Division in the Somme. Nestled in the church grounds in Guilemont is a Celtic cross. Do cum gloire Dé agus onora na hEireann (for the glory of god and the honour of Ireland) is the epitaph to the thousands who fell between the 3rd and 9th of September 1916 on the green fields of France. It is dwarfed the Ulster tower built within two years of the establishment of Northern Ireland and opened by the embodiment of the new jurisdiction, Edward Carson. The North was quick to remember, it seems the ‘Free State’ was in a hurry to forget.

The flags of so many nations still fly today in France and Belgium. Some are still in the commonwealth although many are not [how “many”, exactly?]. The empire is gone, Europe is at peace and still the flag that is missing is that of Ireland. Nowhere is the Republic of Ireland remembering its dead as a sovereign and independent state. The peace tower at Messine is wonderful and a fitting tribute to the first battle in which the two traditions fought side by side but it is ultimately a monument to peace and reconciliation on the island of Ireland.

It is surely time the Republic of Ireland, free, confident and proud take its place amongst the modern states to honour its sons who went to war and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Meanwhile, a flurry of emails this week from Sinn Feiners demanding to know why I oppose the banishment of the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their historic role in the schools of Northern Ireland. The answer is that that is only the dry run for the banishment of the Catholic Church from the schools throughout Ireland. The Sinn Feiners fully concur with that analysis, and strongly endorse that objective. Well, say I, let's see how many on the Green side in the Six Counties, or how many people in the Twenty-Six, will so endorse at the ballot box.

As the Tories are about to discover in Northern Ireland, there is no point voting Tory if there is no Labour (or, in some areas, Lib Dem) to vote against, or vice versa. Likewise, there is no point voting Fianna Fail if there is no Fine Gael to vote against, or vice versa. Either of the latter parties is, as an electoral option, irrelevant to anywhere not formed politically by the Civil War in and over the Free State. I had assumed that, whereas the Tories' takeover of the UUP was motivated by nothing more or less than the desire for one or two extra seats next year, Fianna Fail's was about placating such meaningful Republicanism as there may still be at activist level.

I still do think that. But I also think that there is more to it than that. Mindful of those who "haven't gone away, you know", and having given up (who hasn't?) on the SDLP, London and Rome are echoing their contrivance of that party, of the Irish Labour Party in its present form, of the merger that formed Fine Gael, of Fianna Fail's secession from Sinn Fein, and of the placing of the Sinn Fein leadership openly onto the British public payroll under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

They are contriving for Northern Nationalists an alternative to voting for a Leninist party. An alternative which does not sit as part of a viciously anti-life, anti-family and anticlerical Group in the European Parliament. And an alternative which most certainly does not wish to abolish Catholic schools. Any more than it has any real interest in the Thirty-Two County Republic of 1916, serious advocates of which it has a history of hanging.