The chronological proximity of Remembrance Sunday and the annual pilgrimage to Bodenstown, with their different tales and their different martyrs, remind us of this single enduring truth: that myth and amnesia stand side by side in the creation of this thing called popular identity, each scissoring and shaping the other within the narrative of a tribe.
There can be scarcely a more powerful indicator of how these twin forces surge through societies, dictating senses of self and of history than that provided by the twin identities of this island, which so ardently collaborated with each other to produce two mutually complementary, mutually exclusive and mutally fictional accounts of their tribes.
Facts, and even abundant literature, will not obstruct the power of myth when it is politically endorsed and if it suits the needs of the tribe. And that is the paradoxical truth about the folklore of the Great War within the collective memory of the twin tribes. No ethnic group which served in the Great War was as well served by its scribes as nationalist Ireland.
Literary base
There's a Devil in the Drum, by John Lucy, of the Royal Irish Rifles; Stand To - A Diary of the Trenches, 1915-1918, by Francis Hitchcock of the Leinsters; The Pals at Suvla Bay, Henry Hanna's account of the Dublin Fusiliers in Gallipoli; War Letters to a Wife, by Rowland Feilding, a lieutenant colonel with the Connaght Rangers, 1916-1918; Kipling's History of the Irish Guards; the novels of Patrick MacGill and the poety of Francis Ledwidge, Tom Kettle and Thomas McGreavy: these constitute a formidable - and one might have thought an ineradicable - base on which to build the collective memory of the first World War.
No such base came into existence; nor did any such memory. Cultural forces far greater than the mere written word swept these works into the broom cupboard under the stairs, where they lay unseen for generations. Simultaneously, Northern unionists created an equal and opposite myth, though the laureates of their warriors were poorer by far, and less numerous. Yet out of a relatively threadbare literary base, they created a myth which enlivens loyalist gable ends to this day, with the Somme of 1916 as its centrepiece.
And what power has fact when confronted with the juggernaut of myth? Here is the sort of fact which should have fatally undermined those twin mythologies. According to Soldiers Died in the Great War, the official list of casualties now available on CD-ROM, 548 Belfast-born soldiers died in 1916, the mythic year for both tribes; 937 Dublin-born soldiers died in the same period.
The figures for the rest of the war tell a similar story. Some 3,520 Dublin-born soldiers died during the course of it; the figure for Belfast is just half that - 1705. Yet Belfast was able to appropriate the memory of sacrifice, totally and entirely; and not just Belfast, but loyalist Belfast alone, though Belfast nationalists were recruited in numbers almost proportionate to Belfast unionists. It was some feat.
Buried truths
As we know, the tide of myth has turned; and in that turning, all sorts of buried historical truths are now emerging from beneath the receding sea. In recent years publishers such as Schull Books of Cork have republished hithero forgotten histories of Irish regiments, and done a vital service to the recreation of a broader, more inclusive collective memory.
Another publishing house, Spellmount (The Old Rectory, Staplehurst, Kent), recently published one of the great masterpieces from the Great War - Rowland Feilding's War Letters to a Wife. An Englishman, knowing nothing about the Irish before he joined the Connaught Rangers, he soon grew to love and respect them, both for their piety and their refusal to be bullied or coerced into doing anything. He discovered, however, that they were the bravest of the brave when asked ) to do anything.
At times his attitude towards his soldiers borders on the condescending; but this was as much a matter of class as nationality. The overall impression he gives is one of admiration for these Irishmen, not least for their refusal to complain, no matter how trying the circumstances, and their curious inclination to cheer all the more heartily, the heavier the enemy barrage.
Impressive study
An even more extraordinary insight into the Irish of the Great War has come from Dubliner Patrick Hogarty, who has published his own account of the Second Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers, 1911-1918. He is by vocation neither publisher nor journalist, yet he has produced a deeply impressive study of the men of this regular battalion of Dubs. They are not an anonymous mass, which they tend to be in Feilding's nonetheless splendid account, but real individuals, with homes and hearths which they have left far behind, in the Liberties, on the Curragh, or the low hills of Carlow. Copies of this work are available from Patrick himself, c/o the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association, Dublin Civic Museum, 58 William Street, Dublin 2.
It has required the generosity of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, to help restore some of the truth to our history books, and to a common perception of the journey this country has made to the present, not merely in the events it has passed through, but how it remembered those events. Yet for all that generosity, it is striking that apart from the President, no senior politician was present at the Remembrance Day Service in St Patrick's Cathedral last Sunday. Some hurdles remain too high. I do not doubt that one day this one too will be crossed.