The way we war
Why it’s high time Ireland faces up to the sacrifices made by its sons in the Great War.
Eamonn McCann, 07 Nov 2006
In a speech at Fermoy on October 8, Bertie Ahern quoted the verse from Laurence Binyon’s ‘For The Fallen’ which is recited every year at Remembrance Day ceremonies across Britain.
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
The Taoiseach was speaking at the unveiling of a monument to 131 local men who had perished in the Great War.
“As a country,” he declared, “we owe it to the many Irish men who fought and died in that war to remember the part that they played.”
It was this which grated on the sensibility: not the fact that the fallen of Fermoy were remembered, but Ahern’s tone of reverent pride in “the part that they played”.
Like all of the 49,000 Irish dead of World War One, the part the men of Fermoy played was as dupes of Empire. They had been lied to to lure them into war, encouraged to view the conflict as an existential death-fight between those who loved and those who hated freedom and human rights.
There wasn’t a syllable in Ahern’s speech to suggest dissent from this view, nothing to hint that those who’d left Fermoy for death in France had done other than fulfil a proper, sacred duty.
“These men were Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist, but their differences were transcended by a common higher purpose.” To die in the service of Britain’s Empire, then, in a slaughtering match against a rival imperial power, was to serve “a common, higher purpose”.
This was the line of the recruiting sergeants who had whooped it up for liberty in 1914, coming now from the mouth of an Irish Taoiseach. Might he have been preparing the way to present the resource wars of our own time as a moral conflict between bright values and glowering evil in which we, too, shall have a part to play?
At any rate, no political figure, North or South, appears to have expressed alarm or even concern at Ahern’s endorsement of dying for Empire.
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