Soldiers shot at dawn in the first World War should be honoured as well as pardoned, argues Gerald Morgan
The new British defence secretary, Des Browne, has shown moral courage in seeking to put an end to the continued suffering of those heroic families in Britain and Ireland (and elsewhere) who have endured for so long the stigma of the summary military executions for desertion and cowardice of their fathers and uncles in the first World War.
The courage of many (if not most) of those in the trenches in Gallipoli, France and Belgium must often have failed, and in the midst of so much heroism and brutality one must wonder why fortune should have picked out for such singular ignominy the 306 "shot at dawn".
If we wish to pass judgment today, 90 years after the event, we shall surely not wish to do so on these young men but rather on the callousness and indifference to justice of the field general courts martial that sentenced them (in the briefest possible space and with a patrician disdain for evidence) to their deaths.
In my view these men deserve not merely a pardon but an apology. They were, after all, volunteers, not conscripts, and they had already suffered more in the service of their country than any of us today would care to be called upon to suffer (however patriotic we may consider ourselves to be). I hope it will now be possible to honour these men in the way they deserve by the restoration of their medals of war, and also in some way their families, who have endured such humiliating grief with dignity and fortitude.
Among the 306 names, 26 are from Ireland, and they are (like their Irish comrades in the first World War as a whole) drawn from all parts of Ireland. The history of Ireland has been much altered by the execution of the rebels of 1916, and it is ironic indeed that other Irishmen at the same time met their deaths in front of British firing squads by virtue of a patriotism of a different kind.
Their names may not now be so famous as those of Thomas Clarke and Patrick Pearse, but they deserve to be as well remembered, for their example is also a lesson for us in Ireland today. At a memorial for the dead at the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, on June 21st 2001, I had the privilege (in the absence of the families) to sponsor five of the young Irishmen (two from the Dublin Fusiliers, two from the Munster Fusiliers and one from the Royal Irish Fusiliers).
I need hardly say how fitting the name of one of them is: Private Thomas Davis (1 Royal Munster Fusiliers, shot on Gully Beach in Gallipoli at 5am on July 2nd, 1915). It is a name expressive of all our best aspirations.
The 1 Royal Munster Fusiliers was a regular battalion of the 29th Division and I imagine that Thomas Davis must have been one of the lucky survivors of the Munsters who came ashore from the collier The River Clyde with unparalleled heroism into a withering Turkish fire on that catastrophic day at V Beach on April 25th, 1915.
Of the two Dubs, one, Private Albert Rickman, turned out to be English, the son of a farm labourer from the village of Hordle in Hampshire. That too is fitting, for many Englishmen were proud to fight with the Dublin Fusiliers, and indeed the Hampshires were on The River Clyde with the Dubs and Munsters.
It would be a profound error of judgment to regard the concern for pardons as a sentimental attempt to rewrite the past in the light of our present predilections. Our lives in Ireland (like those in Lebanon and Israel) are shaped by the past, and for the worse by an imperfect understanding of our past.
We must put an end to the habit of dismissing Irish sacrifices in the first World War as the produce of a mere adventurism or of poverty (as if the poor lack the capacity for moral idealism). The deaths of these young men remind us of the price that political leaders are prepared to pay to keep their bases of power intact.
There is no doubt that in 1914 the hearts of many in Ireland were moved by the sufferings of those in Belgium, as today they are moved by the sufferings of the Middle East. They were inspired by the writings of Tom Kettle (who was in Belgium at the time of the German invasion) to stand up for the sovereignty of Belgium (as today we send peace-keepers to the Lebanon), as well as for peace in their own land.
The people of Belgium well understand their debt in the way they have lovingly tended the grave of Willie Redmond in Loker to this day. We ourselves may choose to honour the memories of these 26 men (all of them heroes by any reasonable definition of the word) by striving unceasingly for the peace and reconciliation in Ireland for which they sacrificed their own lives in so lonely and unacknowledged a way.
• Dr Gerald Morgan is a senior lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin