the forgotten south

Fighting amnesia

Myles Dungan on what happened the soliders from the south of the island and how they are remembered today

I first visited my 19-year-old grand-uncle Joe in Picardy, in France, on a sweet summer day in 1994. The conversation was one-sided as he'd been blown to pieces by a stray shell on the Somme in September, 1916. JP O'Reilly's grave was in a small cemetery in the middle of a cornfield. It was within sight of the huge Thiepval monument to the 70,000 missing-in-action of the Somme offensive. The well-kept graveyard held many Irish dead but there was not one southern Irish signature in the visitor's book provided by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Every second entry seemed to come from Northern Ireland but the log was unembarrassed by evidence of visitors from the Republic.

This was part of a pattern that had endured for almost 80 years. Unionists honoured their Great War fallen while Nationalists paid homage to the dead of the Irish revolution. But where did that leave the thousands in between - the Nationalist dead of the 1914-18 war? Precisely nowhere.

Reaction against the brutal British response to the 1916 Easter Rising, followed by the conscription crisis and the Sinn Féin domination of the 1918 general election fashioned an entirely restructured polity in the 1920s. The new dispensation excluded many southern Irish veterans of the Great War. They had left as champions of nationalist Ireland, they returned as objects of suspicion to nationalists of a very different stripe. Service in the British Army was only acceptable if, like Tom Barry, you put your military training to good use in the struggle against the British. The depredations of the ex-servicemen who composed the bulk of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and the risk of being identified as an informer meant that it was not wise to advertise your war record during the War of Independence.

The Dead of the Irish Revolution project cites examples of ex-soldiers like William McPherson of Mallow, Co Cork or John Donohoe of Ratoath, Co Meath, both of whom had served with the Dublin Fusiliers. McPherson was bundled into a car on July 7th, 1921. His body was found two miles outside Mallow with a bullet in the chest. A piece of paper had been pinned to his coat with the legend "Convicted Spy. Spies and informers in Mallow beware. We are on your track. IRA." Donohoe was taken from his home by a masked man on June 14th, 1921 and shot four times. Either or both might have been informers. Alternatively they might have been shot pour decourager les autres. Then again, many non-political long-festering personal feuds have been settled in Ireland in times of violence. Whatever the reasoning, they encouraged Irish Great War veterans to maintain a low profile.

During the 1920s many former soldiers claimed to have experienced discrimination when it came to getting jobs on public service projects. In 1927 the Committee on British Ex-Servicemen examined submissions from individuals and from organisations like the British Legion. The committee's files in the National Archive reveal an abundance of anecdotal evidence pointing to institutionalised bias, but this was effectively rejected in the committee's 1928 report. (In fairness, it should be pointed out that most Irish ex-servicemen's grievances were against the British government.)

As Belfast-based historian Jane Leonard has shown, Great War commemoration had a place in post-Independence Ireland. Armistice Day was celebrated throughout the Irish Free State by the British Legion. Poppies were sold openly. This continued for a decade but the incidence of attacks on British Legion premises and harassment of Armistice commemorations meant the memorialisation of the Irish involvement in the Great War was in decline well before the election of the de Valera government in 1932 finished it off altogether.

And then . . . amnesia. The elimination of memory. The victors wrote the history and that history was the tale of an unstoppable nationalist dynamic lodged in the Irish spirit from the day after the arch-traitor Diarmuid MacMurrough introduced the Normans to Wexford. The most Irish Great War veterans could hope for was the fool's pardon of anonymity. At worst they were as treasonous as MacMurrough himself, at best they were misguided dupes of Empire. Service medals were locked away. Old uniforms were surrendered to the moths or the bonfire. No one attached much significance to the letters sent from Gallipoli or the Western Front. An entire social historical archive was thrown out with the corsets and the tea cosies.

Then Roy Foster and Gerry Adams changed everything. Not together of course. Nor on their own. Not even intentionally. Historical revisionism (which amounted to little more than thorough, professional historical research rather than the continued acceptance of received wisdom and myth) laid the foundation for the rehabilitation of Irish nationalist Great War veterans. Sinn Féin's desire to do business with the British government and engage with Unionism caused a minor flurry in the search for common ground. The appearance of Sinn Féin ardchomhairle member Tom Hartley and Unionist MP Ken Maginnis at a Dublin 1914-18 commemoration provided an indication of the reconciliatory possibilities. How had the Irish experience of the first World War emerged from suppressed memory to provide one of the first major photo opportunities on the road to Good Friday?

Rewind 10 years. For many Patrick Mason's 1985 Peacock Theatre production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme by Frank McGuinness was a benchmark. I was a contemporary of McGuinness at UCD where he was a hilarious, scatological presence. He told me in the early 1980s that he was writing something about the first World War. One of his refrains was "We were never told". He was referring to the teaching of history in schools in the Republic of Ireland. I nodded sagely, I'm sure, but I hadn't a notion what he was talking about. Then I saw the play and suddenly July 1st, 1916 would never be the same again. The sight of Craig, Roulston, Pyper and the other Northerners going over the top in their orange sashes (and it doesn't matter whether they actually wore their sashes that day) was an electrifying and chastening experience. Something that meant so much to Ulster Unionists meant precisely nothing to a Southern Nationalist.

I knew that Kevin Myers was writing on the first World War in The Irish Times long before February 1985, but it was only after that date that I, and I suspect a lot of other people, started to take note. Through Myers's impassioned championing of the Irish veterans, thousands of people were exposed to the shocking news that whole nationalist divisions had taken part in the 1914-18 conflict. Who'd have thought?

Thanks to McGuinness and Myers a small hole was punched open in the publishing industry. Academics like Terence Denman and Thomas Johnston provided the initial scholarly underpinning for a revival of interest while Kevin Myers became an emotional battering ram thumping at the doors of indifference and collective amnesia.

Having had half a dozen uncles who, uniquely, all returned safely from the Great War, Gay Byrne must have been exposed to some memory of the conflict even though his father's brothers would have been part of the Silent Generation. He paid his own homage to them in an evocative TV documentary on the restoration of the War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, Dublin.

From opposing sides of the political fence, Glen Barr and Paddy Harte heard the drum beat of renewed interest and, all of a sudden, Great War scholarship and memory linked into the Northern Ireland reconciliation process. The Journey of Reconciliation Trust became part of that movement. The symbolism of the 1917 Battle of Messines, where the 16th Irish Division had fought alongside the 36th Ulster Division under the outstanding leadership of an English general, Plumer, was inescapable. The work of Barr, Harte andothers led to an inspiring celebration on November 11th, 1998 when President Mary McAleese, Queen Elizabeth and Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble officiated at the opening of the Island of Ireland Peace Park.

There was a tipping point in Australian history when the notion of the "convict stain" morphed into a sort of "prison ship chic". A similar point has now been passed in Ireland's relationship with its Great War veterans. We don't see them as traitors to the cause of Irish nationalism any more. We see them as the tragic victims of class genocide and cynical promises. We see them as men who were prepared to make the kind of sacrifices that we no longer have to and, if we are honest with ourselves, are probably incapable of making.

Next time I'm in northern France I must have a look at the names in that visitors' book.

Myles Dungan is an author and broadcaster. They Shall Grow Not Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great War is published by Granta Books