It was generous and courageous of Alex Maskey to lay a wreath to commemorate the Ulster dead of the Somme: and by that single deed he went considerably further than John Hume has ever done to commemorate Irish soldiers of the Great War, though John Hume's father served in that war, writes Kevin Myers
Alex Maskey was also present at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham for the National day of Commemoration last Sunday. It was remarkable to see people such as The Ó Morchú, Major General David Ó Morchú, CBE, and John Gormley, MC, mingling in the same company as the former IRA prisoner from the New Lodge Road. He and I shook hands. He was courtesy personified, though I dare say the republican part of his soul is now shrieking that he should sink his contaminated mitt into a boiling deep-fat fryer, before his entire body becomes impure.
It was my first visit to the National Commemoration Day: I was initially invited only last year - which might tell you something about how governments work - but alas I couldn't make it then. No matter. Sunday's service was moving and sincere; but shag the peace process, we might as well be honest: Irish Catholics are contemptible singers in groups. I've never in my life heard such a pathetic public performance of strangled whimpers and embarrassed sighs masquerading as song. Tadpoles polishing their toenails would have made more din.
Such feeble whimpering might have been excusable if everybody had been singing a real-life confession about how they'd contracted VD from their fathers- or mothers-in-law. This - according to my hymn-sheet: I cannot speak for others - was not the case.
Inferiority complex
It seems that most Papes have as much confidence in public singing as my chum Alex Maskey might have if asked to sing the third verse of God Save the Queen while standing in the nude at a garden party at Buckingham palace. This pathetic inferiority complex was hardly lightened by the full-throated warbling of Bernadette Greevy. This is no criticism of her; quite the reverse. It's just that your average Catholic's vocal self-esteem curls up and dies like a salted slug after just a brace of semi-quavers from that thermonuclear set of bellows she stores just north of her (no doubt delightful) belly-button.
When she comes back next year, mightn't it be a good idea to sprinkle a few score well-primed Prods around the audience to stir the failing will of the cringing, whinging left-footers? And Bernadette could also unship the odd solo, without the tuneless and incoherent whines that the Romans managed to unleash on Sunday.
Complex loyalties
Listen. This is a serious business. Throughout the 20th century, Irishmen and women laid down their lives for what they believed to be right; and most of us now know about the complex cat's cradle of loyalties at work in Ireland between 1914 and 1922.
Equally, we know about the sterling work done by our Defence Forces in the cause of peace and freedom in the service of the UN.
Less is known about the Irish who died in the second World War, not just in the British army, but in the RAF and Royal Navy. One of the British bomber pilots shot down and killed over Germany in the very first raid of the war, only hours after it was declared in September 1939, was Pilot Officer William Murphy of Mitchelstown, Co Cork. He was 23.
I choose at random. Sgt Peter Furlong, Killincarrig, Wicklow, shot down March 31st, 1944. Flight Sgt Francis Byrne, son of Patrick and Mary Byrne of Belfast, killed in action, his body never found, February, 1945. Cpl John Patrick O'Neill, of Tullow, Co Carlow, killed in France that same month, as was Flight Sgt John Burke Aherne of Tralee, killed over Germany. On April 1st, Daniel Brendan O'Brien of Marino, Dublin was lost, aged 21, in the Mediterranean, and his body never found.
Even with war ended, Irish RAF men continued to die, presumably from injuries. Aircraftman Gerry O'Rourke, from Bray, died in November, Patrick Bernard Behan, 21, from Crumlin, died in December. Michael O'Sullivan, an RAF flight engineer from Newcastle West, had died in January 1945. Was he kin in any way to Aircraftman 2nd Class Timothy O'Sullivan, aged 20, of Kilfinane, who died, presumably from injuries, that September?
Many Irishmen served in the Royal Navy. One of the first sailors to be killed in the war was Stoker Thomas Murphy, of Newtownstewart, Co Tyrone, whose ship, the Royal Oak, was sunk by a German submarine in 1939. Stoker Patrick O'Leary, from Wexford, went down on HMS Exeter, and Cornelius Sullivan was just 19 when he died aboard HMS Duchess on the same day, December 13th, 1939.
Boy 1st Class Brendon Murphy from Youghal was 17 when he was lost on HMS Galatea in 1941. Marine Commando Samuel Wallace, from Dublin, was shot by a German firing-squad for his role in a canoe attack on German shipping in Bordeaux in 1942. Sister Catherine Mary Fitzgerald, of Douglas, Co Cork, a member of Queen Alexander's Imperial Nursing Service, was killed, her body never found, in February 1944. James O'Reilly, an orphan from Waterford serving with the Special Air Service, was killed in Normandy in June 1944.
Rebel county
One name, however, speaks volumes for the complexity of the military tradition between our islands - that of a 19-year old sailor from Cork, killed when the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk by U-boat in June 1940. This sworn servant of the Crown had been born in the rebel county in 1921, just as the Irish Free State came into existence; and he died as Royal Naval Able Seaman Patrick Pearse Murphy.