DUBLIN REMEMBERS TOO

Kevin Myers accounts for Sunday's southern

Irish Remembrance Day Service; but for some the poppy is orange

FIFTY YEARS ago last May, a death notice of Brigadier W.A. Shiel DSO of Clonsilla, Co. Meath, appeared in the Irish Times. The circumstances of his death were not cited; natural causes, one might think, for the same edition carried news of the death in action of Lt Alan Brooke, son of the Northern Ireland prime minister. In fact, both men had been killed in the war against Nazism, but the policy of the Dublin government then was to censor even death notices so as to conceal the presence of large numbers of southern Irishmen serving in the British army. So, bizarrely, full obituaries in Dublin newspa- pers of Northerners killed in action — but not of Dubliners — were officially tolerat- ed. Seldom have local newspapers been so avowedly non-local. Consciously or otherwise, the Dublin authorities were generating a myth which has enduring resonances to this day. For the creation of myths about a nation is as much about getting your history wrong as it is about forgetting what is inconvenient, and in the spring of 1945 official Ireland was industriously forgetting a great deal indeed. Jerry — as he was known — Shiel was one of many such subjects of official amnesia.

A southern Irish Catholic who was under no obligation to join the British army, he crossed the Irish Sea in 1940 and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. He was awarded an immediate DSO at El Alamein. He won a bar to it in Sicily. He took part in the D-Day landings and served with distinction through the Euro- pean campaign, adding an OBE to his dec- orations. Two days before the war's end, while the Belsen and Buchenwald were revealing their crawling skeletons, Jerry Shiel swapped his usual place with his driv- er. Their jeep hit a landmine. The driver, sitting in Jerry's usual seat, survived. None of this was made known to readers of the Irish Times because death notices were as vigorously censored in Ireland as was news of Germany's death camps. In the Dail, a pro-Allied member asked for official confirmation that death notices were being censored. `The answer to the deputy's question is, yes,' said Frank Aitken, the Minister for Defence, whose IRA unit 23 years before had been busy in the revenge killing of Protestants in his native South Armagh. `Propaganda has been deleted from obituary notices.' His questioner, Mr Dockrell, replied, 'I do not see how the place of death could be regarded as propaganda. Does the minister pretend that half of the sen- tence: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" is all right, but the other half of it is propaganda?' For indeed, that was what the Irish cen- sor was doing, even in 1945, by removing the words 'that a man lay down his life for his friends' from the death notices of the many Irishmen killed in the war.

This sort of stuff makes most Irish peo- ple today vastly uncomfortable, and to be reminded of de Valera's wretched visit to the German ambassador to offer his con- dolences upon the death of Herr Hitler still causes an exquisite embarrassment. Only the most unregenerate de Valera apologist attempts to offer an excuse for his behaviour.

Yet what he was doing was — by his standards — understandable. He was asserting an Irish distance from the policies of the British Government; nor was he alone in cherishing that distance. The majority of the Irish people — with no air force, no navy and an infantry-only army understandably supported the Irish neu- trality during the war. The destruction by the Luftwaffe of an RAF-defended Belfast thoroughly justified that policy to Irish nationalists — then, and to most historians since. That neutrality aside, most Irish peo- ple favoured the Allies; though the IRA, with its wonderful blundering aptitude for getting things wrong, was in alliance with the Nazis, and certain sections of de Valera's party, Fianna Fail, were certainly sympathetic to Germany.

With his eye fixed firmly on history, no doubt de Valera was hoping that his policy would be understood solely as an expres- sion of defiant national identity. His fool- ish, misguided visit to Herr Hempel — which even the latter found embarrassing and ridiculous — and his public posturing have served wonderfully to confuse the reality of Irish neutrality, which was pro- Allied, Allied planes were permitted to overfly Ireland. Downed Allied aircrew were returned to the United Kingdom. Large numbers of Irishmen and women were allowed to join the British forces. Sundry intelligence, from the weather to U-boat movements, was reported to the British, and a U-boat decoder which was washed up on the west coast was immedi- ately handed over to the British naval attache in Dublin. It proved vital in defeat- ing the U-boat threat.

Nonetheless, the relationship between Irish nationalists and British commemora- tions of war dead remain tortured and uneasy, despite their historical intimacy. A few facts: the first shots fired by a British soldier in the Great War came from the carbine of Corporal E. Thomas of Tipper- ary; the first chaplain to be killed in that war was Father Fynn, an Irish priest; the first Victoria Cross went to a Lt Dease, like Jerry Shiel 30 years later, an Irish Catholic from Meath; the first RAF VC of the second world war went to an Irish Catholic, Flight Lt Donald Garland of Dun Leoghaire; the first army VC went to another Irish Catholic, to Captain Ervine- Andrews from Co. Cavan, in 1940; the first Fleet Air Arm VC went to Lt Commander Eugene Esmonde, yet another Catholic, from Tipperary; the only VC to be award- ed to a Northern Ireland man in the sec- ond world war went to Leading Seaman James Magennis, a West Belfast Catholic.

Analysis of recruitment during the sec- ond world war is difficult. Northern Ire- land was spared conscription and southern Ireland was neutral; yet certainly at an anecdotal level it seems that, at the very least, just as many Irish nationalists as unionists served in the British armed forces during the war. Half of the Irish army of 1939 was serving in the British army within a year, and Major John Howard, the man who led the famous assault on Pegasus Bridge in Normandy, last year told me he had never come across a unit — including his own mighty Ox and Bucks Light Infantry — which did not have a sizeable contingent of southern Irish- men in it.

So why is Remembrance Sunday seen through much of nationalist Ireland and most assuredly in Northern Ireland — as something vaguely British, anti-national and almost traitorous? Why should a Northern Ireland Catholic decline to wear a poppy to commemorate the dead of two world wars?

Because, simply, no symbol in Ireland survives long without being misunder- stood: if it is embraced by one side, then it is likely to be rejected by the other. So it is with the poppy and Remembrance Sun- day; both have come to be regarded as indulgences in pro-Britishness and anti- Irishness. Whatever the intentions of the British Legion in the matter, for many Irish nationalists the poppy became a sym- bol of Orange domination, and Remem- brance Sunday a coded celebration of unionism.

This partly explains why the nationalist SDLP is the only party in Westminster which does not participate in the Remem- brance Day service in London, though ,its first leader, Gerry Fitt, served in the con- voys to Murmansk and Archangel. Its cur- rent leader, John Hume, never mentions his own father's background: he served in the Royal Irish Rifles in the first world war.

Yet more poppies were sold in Dublin in 1922 than in Belfast. Hundreds of thou- sands of Irish nationalists had served in the Great War and were determined to remember. But others, more determinedly anti-British, were not. The period up to 1939 became one of extraordinary amnesia as the Irish republican orthodoxy, now in government, effectively allied itself with Ulster unionism in the creation of the belief that only a minority of aberrant Irish nationalists served in the Great War and that the first war was an Ulster war. Official Ireland held that true Irishmen participated in the 1916 Rising in Dublin, though the dismal truth is that more Irish nationalists were killed in British uniforms on the western front that Easter week than took part in the Rising.

In matters of nationalism, truth is expendable. Some of the most ardent Irish republicans — such as Cathal Brugha, Ernie O'Malley and Emer O'Duffy — lost broth- ers killed in the Great War. Nonetheless, Irish nationalism undertook the enormous task of rewriting collective memory. The Irish dead of the war were steadily eroded from the national consciousness. True, on 'Be proud of your colour son.' each Armistice Day during the 1920s and 1930s Irish veterans would parade through Dublin and were sometimes attacked by IRA supporters — imprudently, often enough, for these ex-soldiers normally gave a good account of themselves.

In the fiction that Irish nationalists had stood back from the war, Ulster Unionists were eager accomplices. Why not? Did such complicity not conceal the truth that they — and sections of the Tory party had embarked upon a policy of high trea- son in seeking assistance from Germany in defeating Home Rule in 1914? English Tories, Ulster Unionists and Irish Republi- cans informally and without contact agreed that Ulster alone had joined the Great War with vigour.

After 1932, when Eamon de Valera became Taoiseach, the atmosphere towards ex-servicemen cooled. He declined to open the great memorial park designed by Lutyens in honour of Ireland's dead of the Great War, the most handsome war memorial in either Britain or Ireland. When the second world war came along, de Valera shut up shop on ambiguous memo- ries, Ireland commemorated only the republican dead; all else was heresy.

And so it remained until the last decade. As the monstrous dishonesty of the twin exclusivisms of Irish political life — repub- licanism and loyalism — came to be exposed, more and more people began to remember their own family histories: the unmentioned uncle whose bones lay in Gallipoli, El Alamein, Arnhem. I am immodest enough to believe that in my writings in the Irish Times 1 helped in this regard, but my achievements were as noth- ing compared to those of the IRA, whose atrocities, especially their Remembrance Day slaughter at Enniskillen eight years ago, exposed so many of the falsehoods of their abominable creed. To re-examine his- tory became mandatory for many Irish peo- ple, and in the process of this re-examination the Irish dead emerged from their forgotten, far-flung tombs.

That re-examination has caused some odd bedfellows to assemble to remember the Irish dead. Last Sunday, the President of Ireland, Mrs Mary Robinson, attended the Remembrance Sunday service in St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Other politi- cians who attended included: government ministers, Mr Proinsias de Rossa, a former IRA leader, and Mr Emmet Stagg, whose brother Frank starved himself to death in an IRA hunger strike. But the only Fianna Fail politician present was Mr Ben Briscoe, who is Jewish. For Fianna Fail, who still see themselves as the standard-bearers of the Irish nation, Remembrance Sunday cuts uncomfortably close to their identity. It is a genuine taboo, and, like it or not, that taboo is still a powerful reality in Irish life.

Kevin Myers is a columnist with the Irish Times.