Today is Armistice Day. David Norris writes of the meaning of the poppy
This Sunday morning I will be on duty as a steward at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. I will be wearing a poppy.
The service of Matins in the cathedral will include a minute's silence at 11am and the playing of the last post. Remembrance Day services were part of my youth and I remember them with affection - the colour, the pageantry, the bravery of those ex-service men who, in a climate in Ireland that was hostile to the memory of the two world wars, bore loyal witness to their fallen comrades.
Gen Sir Eric DeBurgh of Bargy Castle, a brisk diminutive figure, his breast gleaming and rattling with medals, frequently read the lesson. For a child it was a thrilling spectacle, although nowadays I prefer the more reflective, less military commemoration that the cathedral provides.
In Ireland, the poppy has always been contentious, and when I see it nowadays on British television, worn as a jingoistic fetish for weeks before the anniversary, I can understand why.
As a boy I experienced some of this hostility. When I cycled around Dublin 4 wearing a poppy on my school blazer, I got showered with pebbles from corner boys. I salute the courage of those poppy sellers, mostly women, who braved insult and the threat of violence on the streets of Dublin in those narrow days. It was a stinging realisation that the simple flower I wore in my lapel in memory of my father and uncle, who had each been decorated in both wars, could innocently provoke such antagonism.
The cultural battle lines seemed to be drawn along sectarian lines. Protestants by and large wore the poppy on Remembrance Day, Roman Catholics by and large did not. In the 1950s and 1960s it would have been easy to conclude that participation in the two world wars was in Irish terms the aberration of a cultural minority. This was confirmed by DeValera's shrewd policy of neutrality in the second World War.
Were it not for courageous figures like Gay Byrne, this paper's former columnist Kevin Myers, Paddy Harte TD and also the playwright Frank McGuinness, whose play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme electrified our dormant conscience, it might have been conveniently forgotten that the overwhelming number of those Irish men and women who gave their lives for what they genuinely saw as a battle against tyranny were ordinary decent Roman Catholic Irish people.
The first World War marked a watershed in the European consciousness. It was the last time that the horrors of war could be successfully masked under the blanket bravado of chivalry. Pádraig Pearse was not the only European figure in the early days of the last century to be infected by an heroic blood lust.
Poets such as Brooke, Sassoon and Owen, who came to be known collectively as the war poets, charted the shift from bombastic imperial rhetoric to a full realisation of the indiscriminate misery and terror of modern mechanised conflict.
The proud waving of a Union Jack was torn away to reveal the chemical foam issuing from the froth-corrupted lungs of bewildered young soldiers. Those who had a quick death from a bullet were lucky. Many survived for 60 years or more still suffering from the effects of chemical weapons. The 1920s saw the streets of London swarming with crippled Tommies begging for sustenance from those who benefited from and had largely forgotten their sacrifice.
It was in an effort to sustain these innocent victims that the Earl Haig Poppy Fund was established, and it is in memory of these victims that even antiwar activists like myself can wear the poppy with pride.
The exigencies of the conduct of war often conceal great injustice. Some years ago I was contacted by the Shot at Dawn Committee seeking justice for a group of young Irish men summarily executed for cowardice or mutiny in the first World War. There was a class and ethnic bias in these judicial murders, clearly shown by the disproportionate number of Irish people affected. Many of them were teenagers, terrified, shell-shocked and court martialed simply because they had not instantly obeyed the peremptory orders of the officer class after mind-numbing days in the foot-rot filth of the trenches. I very much welcome the fact that in the last week the British parliament has belatedly conferred a pardon upon these men.
There has been movement in both directions. President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth together attended the unveiling of a monument in France to victims of the slaughter of the European wars, and the Government has at last restored the war memorial garden designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens at Islandbridge.
War memorials themselves have sadly been the target of attack. To many, the worst of these assaults was the atrocity at Enniskillen in 1987 after which that decent figure, the late senator Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was killed in the attack, emerged into national prominence.
I well remember the subsequent meeting of Seanad Éireann during which a shocked house considered the impact of this dreadful act. John Robb, a Northern surgeon appointed to the Seanad by the Government, wore a poppy into the house even though the wearing of emblems is precluded under standing orders. He walked solemnly from the back benches to the speaker's podium, removed his poppy and placed it on the desk in front of the cathaoirleach, Charlie McDonald. We all waited to see what would happen. With simple dignity, McDonald took up the poppy and placed it in his lapel, where it remained for the rest of the day. It was an act of dignified reconciliation.
In war we are all victims. When I look at the tragic situation in Iraq, the devastating impact of war upon the civilian population there, the sad accumulation of allied casualties and the cretinous folly of the so-called war on terror, I think of Marlene Dietrich's husky voice singing, not Lili Marlene, but Where have all the Flowers gone. The last line of that song runs: "When will they ever learn".
When indeed.