The Army Band helped inaugurate the President with resigned good humour amid some dreadful weather
ON FRIDAY, Frank J Walshe was laying a wreath of poppies in St Patrick’s Cathedral on behalf of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment Association. He was on his own. It took a while to get the camera working, so his picture could be taken by obliging cathedral staff.
Similar wreaths were being laid, Walshe said, at Islandbridge Memorial Park and at the military cemetery in Grangegorman. Friday was Armistice Day. As the rain belted down outside, Walshe sat on one of the small chairs in St Patrick’s and explained that his great grandfather, Thomas Francis Walshe, had fought in the Maori Wars in the mid-19th century. Thomas’s son, Henry William Walshe, had gone to the second Afghan War, 1881-1882, and on the Nile Expedition of 1884-1885.
Thomas Walshe had been the eldest son of a farmer who had 90 acres in Cahir, Tipperary. Given his happy place in the birth order, the family doesn’t know why he joined the British army. “He must have had a row with the father,” says Walshe, who is 74 but looks 20 years younger. It was Walshe’s aunt who told him about this family history. “I was staying with her in Tipperary and she sat me down in the kitchen and said ‘Listen here, Frank Walshe, this is who you are.’ I was about 10.” Military service remained a family tradition, as Walshe’s father worked for the British Control Commission in Germany after the second World War, helping thousands of mostly Latvian refugees. Walshe himself served in the Air Corps here. Two of his children now work for the United Nations.
The 18th Royal Irish Regiment Association was formed again in July this year. It is made up of about 20 people like him, Walshe said – people who have served in the Irish military. “Because we are concerned about the honour of military service and of these men. It’s mostly about these fellas,” said Walshe, looking round the memorial plaques in Saint Patrick’s, “and remembering . . . what they did.”
A short and unpleasantly wet walk later, the Army Band was to be found huddled against a building on one of the rear approaches to Dublin Castle. Friday was also presidential inauguration day, and this was referred to by the ceremony’s organisers as “The Outside Band”. Sgt Colin Lang and Sgt Pat Egan, after some calculation by Sgt Lang, explained they were playing at their eighth presidential inauguration. This time the rain fell on their black uniforms and on the instruments they clutched to their chests. Their music sheets, propped up smartly behind protective cellophane, was hammered by rain. The notes for Mise Éire, listed on their programme as the first piece of the recital phase, were barely visible behind all the raindrops which clung to the plastic coating.
Some members of the band, rather heroically, were trying to smoke through the deluge. Everyone was laughing, or at least shaking their heads, at the dreadfulness of the weather. With the perfect uniforms, shining instruments, hammering rain and resigned good humour as they stood close together at the entrance to the modern building – trying to get out of the rain while remaining part of this important State occasion – the Army Band looked like something out of an old Czechoslovak film. I mean a Czechoslovak film which was made while the country was under Soviet occupation: The Firemen's Ball.
The Army Band is an amalgamation of older bands, like the band of the First Southern Brigade, or that could be the Fourth Southern Brigade – my notes are still smudged with rain. I couldn’t raise anyone in the Defence Forces press office after 4.30 on Friday afternoon. Definitely the Western Brigade was in there.
Sgt Lang (trombone) and Sgt Egan (E flat Bass, or tuba) joined when they were 16, in 1972. Sgt Egan is from Doneraile in Cork. Sgt Lang has been in the Irish Army since before he was born. He came into the world in the married quarters of McKee Barracks in Dublin, where his father was stationed.
“I played at Dev’s funeral. At Erskine Childers’s inauguration and funeral. At [Cearbhall] Ó Dálaigh’s inauguration and funeral. [Patrick] Hillery had two inaugurations. I played at his funeral. Mary Robinson. And Mary McAleese had two inaugurations. And now this one.”
Afterwards, I started to wonder whether the swearing in of a president for a second term could be described as an inauguration, but I suppose it can. At the time, and to general amusement, I asked the band what they were doing later. I had imagined a jolly lunch for the bedraggled Outside Band, after they had been marching up and down, playing in this deluge. Not at all, they said – they would be taken straight back to their various barracks, after having a quick cup of tea.
Most people watching President Michael D Higgins’s inauguration would have been surprised at this. I also think the President himself would have been surprised. That our soldiers got no hot meal, or hot whiskey,or even a pint at Dublin Castle on the day of his inauguration. Perhaps there was something celebratory organised back at barracks.
A source close to the band later confirmed that, after their recital in Dublin Castle they had been given simply “A cup of tea and an old scone”. It does make you wonder about military culture really, and the treatment of the ordinary soldier.