So mackers will be at St Patrick's Cathedral tomorrow. Good. Would she have been there if the IRA ceasefire had not been in place?
One wonders in passing, that is all. Robbo wasn't there last year when the Proves were back in the killing mode, but maybe that is just a coincidence. It would be an awful reflection on the political courage and priorities of our leaders if their agenda were set by that cabal called the army council of the IRA Army. It hasn't gone away, you know.
The President's presence at Remembrance Sunday tomorrow signals a remarkable shift in the consensus about ceremonial and about the tangle of traditions which goes into the making of this thing called Ireland. Not long ago, it would have been inconceivable for a Fianna Fail President to make such a concession to those outside the Fianna Fail tribe.
Generosity of vision
It says something about the confidence and generosity of vision of those who now lead Fianna Fail, that this is so. Now the consensus overwhelmingly supports the President in her presence at the commemorations of the tens of thousands of Irishmen - and, be it remembered, Irishwomen - who twice in this century left these shores to fight on the mainland of Europe. It wasn't always so: I immodestly like to think I helped a little.
This is a uniquely Irish debate. No other country in the world would so freely and willingly engage in such memorials and enter such conversations about those who died in the service of another power, and most especially the former imperial power. The Indians, the Pakistanis, the Algerians do not remember their hundreds of thousands of dead from the two World Wars, and I cannot believe that they are the better for the amnesia.
But I can understand the distance that some keep from such memorialising; it can sometimes be a narrow distance indeed between the commemoration of the dead of an extinct empire and the glorification of the empire itself. Today, whatever about the past, one can enter St Patrick's on Remembrance Sunday and be assured this is no celebration of war or empire, but a public memorial for those killed in two World Wars and in the service of the United Nations.
Yet, like it or not, one of the features of memorialising the dead of the World Wars has been, for some, a celebration of identity as well. For decades, the unionists of southern Ireland gathered in secret memorial on Remembrance Sunday, not just to remember their dead Nigels and Mervyns, Reggies and Berties, but to celebrate that sense of self which had vanished from public display in the years after independence. Remembrance Sunday was a day which linked them with a past union which their people had once so fiercely cherished and which enabled them to repeat the antiphons of a lingering (but over the years, dwindling) loyalty.
Loyalty was mocked
They sang God Save the King (or Queen) and wore their medals as a token of a loyalty whose affections seemed unreturned, and therefore all the nobler. This loyalty was once widely mocked, and perhaps understandably; to those who have emerged from a long-despised union, affection for that union must seem at best risible, at worst treacherous.
In the Republic, we have since had the time, the space and the peace to reflect on the perplexing nature of loyalty, and we have learned the patience and tolerance necessary to cope with the complexities of identity. We are the better for it. But we should not be surprised if the people of Bellaghy, after nearly 30 years of intense and local conflict, are not at ease with such differing senses of self. In Dublin those differences could be expressed in largely concealed and invariably peaceful ritual; but not so in Bellaghy.
In my heart I know nothing whatever of the emotions that exist in the hearts of the opposing protagonists there. It is probably impossible to engage in any act of memorial in that part of the world without arousing deep, bitter and genuinelyfelt differences; and lecturing people about the impropriety of what goes on in their hearts seldom has the desired affect, least of all when those hearts are emerging from three decades of terrorist war.
So the local British Legion might argue that it marches solely to commemorate the dead, both nationalist and unionist, of two World Wars; and no doubt that is true. Yet how many local nationalists would want to take their place in that march? I suspect that local Catholics/nationalists would argue that the British Legion march is in fact an Orange march masquerading under the bogus flag of anti-fascism; and the accuracy of that perception is irrelevant.
Perception is everything
In disputes about conflicting identity, perception is everything, and perception about the motives and intentions of one's opponents will seldom err on the side of charity.
A decade has passed since Enniskillen; and those Northern nationalists who still nurture grievances over Bloody Sunday speak little, and then only softly, about the evil that was done 10 years ago tomorrow. It was not done by Martians. It was done by an organisation represented at the Stormont talks. Wands will not wave that memory away. However much the nationalist Ireland which applauds its new bridge-building President might forget Enniskillen, unionist Ireland does not. Tomorrow, of all days, we might remember that.