1916 (15 page)

M
EMORY

The study of ‘memory’ and ‘commemoration’ has become quite a growth industry in recent years. This has not by any means just been restricted to Ireland, but it has a peculiar relevance on this island, where ‘history’ and the commemoration of historical events have an applied political dimension, which frequently stimulates lively debate and often robust disagreement.
³²
This is certainly true of the 1916 Rising and the First World War, not just in this particular anniversary year of 2006, but from the very start.

In the centre of the Irish midlands town of Birr there is a fifty foot-high mid-eighteenth century Doric column, which used to be surmounted with a statue of the duke of Cumberland. It was erected to mark his victory over Catholic Jacobite forces at Culloden in Scotland in 1746, a victory that secured the Protestant monarchy in Britain. Sometime in the late nineteenth century the statue was removed, ostensibly because it was in a dangerous condition, but reputedly after having been damaged by men from a Scottish regiment barracked locally.
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In the early autumn of 1919 this unusual and unexpected memorial – no other monument to Culloden exists beyond the battlefield itself – came under discussion in the town. Looking to put up a war memorial, the Birr ‘Comrades of the Great War’ (an ex-servicemen’s association later subsumed within the British Legion) applied to the Urban Council to use the site for this purpose. Simultaneously, and evidently as a response, the local branch of the Transport Union applied ‘for the site for the erection of a statue to the late James Connolly’, who had been executed as one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising.
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Neither application succeeded, nor has either a Great War memorial or a statue of James Connolly ever been erected in the town.

The vacant space at the top of the Birr column illustrates one theme that emerged in the years after 1918: the mutually challenging commemoration of what might collectively be called Irish war dead. The empty column, which survives to this day, epitomises another Irish response to the painful legacy of 1914–18: a willing, perhaps even a wilful, suppression of the public ‘memory’ of those years. This national ‘amnesia’, however, contrasts sharply with the fervent celebration of the war effort by Irish unionists, especially those in the north of Ireland, for whom the losses sustained by the 36th (Ulster) division at the battle of the Somme in 1916 represented a sealing with blood of the political union with Great Britain, a kind of parallel ‘blood-sacrifice’ (if that is what it was) to that of Easter 1916.
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In Ireland the ‘memory’ and commemoration of the Great War has been inextricably bound up with that of the conflicts at home. This is above all exemplified by the strikingly different place of 1916 in the unionist and nationalist traditions. But even here there are ambiguities. While the Easter Rising serves as an iconic event for Irish republicans, and the first day of the Somme, 1 July, has become a sacred point of reference for Ulster unionists, 1916 also saw the first engagement on the western front of the Redmondite 16th (Irish) division, also in the battle of the Somme, though not until September. The service of the two divisions – one the ‘child’ of
the UVF and the other John Redmond’s ‘pets’
³⁶
– alongside each other in June 1917 at Messines ridge, in what for that stage of the war was a notably successful attack, has provided another evidently fruitful possibility for commemoration (though the two divisions’ participation at Langemarck two months later in a more conventionally catastrophic battle has
not
).
³⁷

To those Irish people who served abroad in the Great War, we must add those who rallied to the revolutionary side between 1916 and, say, 1923. Some, indeed, like Tom Barry, fought in different armies (though rarely at the same time) in 1914–18, 1916, 1919–21 and 1922–3. The varying ways in which the service and sacrifice of these different groups of Irish soldiers has been marked and commemorated reflect broader political and social circumstances in Ireland, north and south. To the ‘parallel narratives’ of enlistment explored already, therefore, we can add parallel (and sometimes conflicting) patterns of commemoration.
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The Irish landscape is littered with war memorials of one sort or another.
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Many of these are monuments of a familiar sculptural type, but some are not. Who would have thought, for example, that there is in Cork a public commemoration of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915 to 1919? It exists in Haig Gardens, a small ‘colony’ of soldiers’ cottages off the Boreenmanna Road, built in the 1920s by the Irish Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Land Trust.
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In independent Ireland many of the more traditional Irish war memorials are celtic crosses – a quintessentially Irish design, fully in keeping with the gaelic patriotic dynamic of the 1916 rebels, or at least most of them.
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The First World War memorials in Bray and Nenagh can be compared with, for example, similar celtic crosses in Oldcastle and Murroe (Co. Limerick), though the latter commemorate the struggle for national independence. Yet at a distance they look rather the same, appropriately enough since it can be argued that each one of them was put up to commemorate men who died for a high patriotic cause. But the nature of the patriotism involved is not always so clear-cut. Among the inscriptions on the Belfast war memorial unveiled in 1929 are the words ‘Pro Deo et Patria’ (‘For God and Nation’). The same words appear on the statue of Archbishop Croke erected by the Gaelic Athletic Association in Thurles in 1922. While it is just possible that the same god may have been referred to, it is less certain that the ‘nation’ was the same in each case. So it is with the rituals surrounding the memorials. Outside Northern Ireland, for at least thirty years after independence, celebrations of
Irish
military endeavour were frequently accompanied by manifestations of
British
identity. The
Great War celtic cross in Longford was shrouded with a Union Jack just before its unveiling on 27 August 1925, and in the mid-1950s ‘God Save the Queen’ continued to be sung at ceremonies at the Irish National War Memorial in Islandbridge by the river Liffey.
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If we return to Cork, there is another celtic cross close to the university campus: the Royal Munster Fusiliers Boer War memorial sited on Gilabbey rock in Connaught avenue, which was used as the Great War memorial from 1919 until 1925. But this memorial is dedicated to those ‘who lost their lives in the service of the empire’, and it seems very likely that Cork nationalists wishing to commemorate their war dead may have felt uncomfortable doing so at this specific monument. Perhaps reflecting its ‘imperial’ character (as well as its rather isolated location in a residential neighbourhood), the Boer War memorial was also prone to attack. One of several incidents occurred in November 1925 when ‘a very loud explosion’ resulted in ‘only slight damage’.
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Thus a new memorial was erected, closer to the city centre, which significantly eschews any ‘patriotic’ trope, but was dedicated (on St Patrick’s day 1925) by the ‘Cork Independent Ex-Servicemen’s Association’ in ‘memory of their comrades who fell in the Great War fighting for the freedom of small nations’. The location of this monument on the South Mall further illustrates some ambiguities of Irish war memorials generally. Next to the First World War memorial (which now has 1939–45 added), in what has been designated a ‘Peace park’, is a small stone dedicated to those who died in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Fifty yards away is a massive gothic-style monument erected in 1906 ‘through the efforts of the Cork Young Ireland Society to perpetuate the memory of the gallant men of 1798, 1803, 48 and 67 who fought and died in the wars of Ireland to recover her sovereign independence’. It might be asserted that the scale of these three memorials is in inverse proportion to the cataclysmic nature of the international events commemorated, but their size and location no doubt aptly represent the relative political salience of those events to the majority of Irish people (or, at least, to the people of Cork, which may not be the same thing at all).

There are elements in the erection of the new Great War memorial on the South Mall which emphasised the common experience of nationalist and unionist, Protestant and Catholic, and this reflects the emergence of a belief that shared military experience, and the shared human costs of that experience, might transcend local Irish political and sectarian differences. This theme has strongly emerged in recent years, and in the way Ireland’s
involvement with the First World War has been ‘remembered’ and commemorated. But if we look at our more domestic Irish conflicts, the situation has been, and in some cases remains, rather different. In sharp contrast to any notion of common suffering and common experience across the whole community, the northern ‘Troubles’ which flared up from the late 1960s produced an intensified polarisation of society which has helped entrench (a handy military metaphor) political attitudes. One thing largely absent (to our great cost) from what we might call the ‘civil war’ of the past thirty years is any sustained sense that shared military experience on each side of the conflict might have any sort of reconciling potential. And the same can be said of 1916. If we are serious about trying to extract some good from common suffering in 1914–18, then we must also seriously contemplate the possibility that some good might be extracted from an understanding of the common suffering and loss, not just on the battlefields of continental Europe, but also here at home.

Commemoration in Ireland in 2006 seems to be set in a pattern which matches Easter 1916 with the First World War, and specifically the battle of the Somme, as if these are ‘equal and opposite’. They are not. Setting aside the grotesque imbalance of casualties suffered in each set of events – a comparative handful (though no single fatality is casually to be dismissed) on one side as opposed to tens of thousands on the other – the balancing of the Easter Rising and the Somme deftly lets us duck the issue of how to commemorate those Irish soldiers who died during Easter week 1916 fighting
against
the rebels. Without coming to terms with the experience of Irish fighting Irish in 1916, we can scarcely contemplate any resolution (is that too optimistic a term?) of our more recent conflict.

It has to be admitted, however, that the impulse to enlist Ireland’s First World War experience in a kind of benign military mobilisation, occupying a moral high ground where all sections of the community might find a place, has indeed helped undermine the barriers of mutual communal ignorance that sustain much of the continuing social antagonisms on our island. In
Ireland and the Great War
I celebrated the achievement, for example, of the ‘Island of Ireland peace tower’, dedicated at Mesen/ Messines in Belgium on 11 November 1998.
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Although criticisms can be made of the whole scheme, its imaginative harnessing of shared memory and shared experience, and the drawing together of the now fairly distant past with the altogether more contentious and hazardous present, provides an opportunity (to paraphrase General Sir Oliver Nugent’s words at the unveiling of the Virginia, Co. Cavan, war memorial) for differing interpretations of what we may
believe
to be our duty to be accommodated in a creative rather than destructive fashion.
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Ireland’s domestic (and not just recent) past is perhaps so painful that we may require the more remote experience of, for example, the First World War to help us come to terms with it.

While the growing public interest in Ireland’s experience during 1914–18 is illustrated by the official acknowledgement of First World War anniversaries (and the sense that if Easter 1916 is to be commemorated so too should 1 July), it has also stimulated wider cultural developments. Another component of our ‘memory’ of historical events stems from the imaginative transmission and modulation of those events by creative writers and artists. One recent example, which tellingly explores the history of what we might call ‘Rising-cum-war’, is Sebastian Barry’s Booker prize short-listed novel,
A long, long way
, which tells the story of Willie Dunne, son of a Dublin policeman, who enlists in the British army in August 1914.
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For the most part, the majority Irish wartime experience, of Catholic, usually nationalist, soldiers, has been ignored, in historical studies as much as in literary works. This, however, has changed significantly over the past ten years or so, during which some historians have shifted their focus on to the war, and begun to recover the ‘forgotten’ history of nationalist Ireland’s engagement with the conflict. But perhaps we have to go one step further. Even categorising the Irish experience of the war as
either
‘nationalist’
or
‘unionist’ misses the point that
most
people
most
of the time do not act or think in self-consciously political terms. And these are the very people Barry so vividly (and so illuminatingly) treats in his novel.

Willie Dunne is essentially apolitical, at the start of the book following (insofar as he thinks about it at all) his father’s loyalty to crown (King George V) and country (Ireland). Here Barry marvellously recreates an early twentieth century environment where, despite the increasingly urgent political conflict between nationalist home rulers and predominantly Ulster unionists, the majority of people were not bothered by politics one way or the other. That the 1916 rebels were themselves aware of this is reinforced by Garrett FitzGerald’s observation that the men of 1916 acted in part in an effort to ‘save nationalism from extinction’.
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Yet Dunne himself cannot remain unaffected by the seismic wartime shifts in the Irish political landscape. He happens to be in Dublin on leave at the start of the Rising, when what he witnesses unsettles him, and leads to a falling-out with his father.