Some of those who attended the opening of the memorial tower at Messen/Messines last November for the Irish dead of the Great War feared that it would be a one-day wonder: that the celebrities would gather, the bands would play, the toasts would be consumed, and everyone would congratulate themselves that a great wrong had in some part been put right. And then when the captains and the kings had departed, the tower and the site around it would be neglected, that weeds would prosper where once there was grass and the trees would go rank or die. Then it would become a mystery object on the great Flanders plain for strangers to gawp and wonder about.
And so it has come to pass. Just as the memorial gardens at Islandbridge were permitted to fall into a disgraceful neglect, and suitably symbolised the general political amnesia over the fate of those tens of thousands of young men who volunteered for service in the Great War, so, within the passage of a single season, the tower at Messines is already a sad and sorry travesty.
Mouldering wreaths
According to a friend just back from Belgium, it looks as if nothing has been done there since its opening last November. The wreaths from that day are blown around the site and moulder; litter is everywhere; and there is not a single plaque to inform the visitor of the purpose of the tower and that it symbolises the enormous sacrifice made by the men from the two traditions of Irish life.
In a way, the neglect is appropriate. It symbolises the nature of memory and ceremony in Ireland; a perfunctory and token genuflection in the right direction at the right time will suffice. Real meaning is ignored; truth is an inconvenient obstacle in the path of the lazy. We had our day. We opened our tower. Now let us get with what we do best: forgetting.
We who campaigned so long for the Irish nation to acknowledge the sacrifice of the dead and the maimed of the Great War did not do so merely for a single day or a single tower. What we wanted - what we want - was for the truth of that time to be reintegrated within the popular memory of the Irish people.
This is not done by a single service involving two heads of state on a sunny afternoon in November, magnificent though President McAleese was on that day (and the great and incomprehensible tragedy is that no television recording was made of her heartfelt speech in Messen town hall). The sad truth is that in substance nothing has really changed since November 11th, 1998.
A friend who is attending a Protestant school recently showed me her Leaving Cert history book. It reports that the Irish volunteers split in 1914, and several thousands of those who were loyal to Redmond joined the British army. Now this is a travesty of the truth of precisely the kind generations of Irish schoolchildren were raised to. It made participation in that great European catastrophe a deviant departure from nationalist norms, when the reverse was the case.
Irish participation
The entire elected body of nationalist Ireland supported Irish participation in the war. We were lawful belligerents, and though less enthusiastic participants in the war than other parts of the United Kingdom, the men who went from these shores did so with the blessings of the churches and the political establishment and with the cheers of enthusiastic crowds ringing in their ears.
I mentioned the religion of the school because even Protestant schools, which at the time would have been largely unionist and pro-war and would have encouraged their boys to enlist, seem to have managed the heroic achievement of forgetting the truth of that time. To remember is not to applaud, but merely to acknowledge certain truths of Irish history.
In one sense, we are worse off with the monument at Messen than we were before it. Now we have a monument on mainland Europe to show everybody how we neglect the memory of our war dead. The consolation is that it is so badly marked that it would require a fair bit of sleuthing to find out what this round tower was doing there.
Yet I am not altogether surprised. So much energy went into the high-publicity opening day, with a great big glossy brochure containing half-a-dozen photographs of Paddy Harte, the driving force behind the construction of the tower. But none at all has gone into the maintenance since. That absence of activity once the initial energy was expended and the resulting glory enjoyed suggests that an enduring determination to right the great wrong that was done these men is still absent.
It is not difficult or expensive to maintain this site; gardeners on contract to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission could mind the plants and lawns at minimal cost, and it should be possible with minimal effort to complete what was only half finished or not finished at all last November. The larger question is this: is there the political will in Government to properly maintain this tower and the site it is on? Or will it become Islandbridge II, a source of baffled dismay for those who care?
Shared history
Europe has embarked upon a path of convergence, and that route is not merely one of the future, but is set in the past too. No convergence would be possible without our shared history and our common travails. Last November, British, French, German and Belgian together commemorated the dead of the Great War. Our Army was not allowed to participate in the shared ceremony at Menin Gate by order of the Department of Foreign Affairs, though many of our soldiers were present in uniform to participate informally.
No great principle is compromised by soldiers of different nations, including ours, commemorating in common ceremonial the dead of the Great War at Menin Gate, where passed so many Irish soldiers on the way to their graves. And there is certainly no justification for the Messen tower being neglected. If we are to do these things, we must do them right: to allow such a place fall into ruin does not merely dishonour the 35,000 Irish dead, but dishonours this State also.