Today is the proudest in my professional career; and if I am henceforth assigned to prising impacted chewing-gum from the pavement outside The Irish Times with my teeth, I will remain a happy man. For this day, this Armistice Day, 80 years after the killing on the Western Front finally ended, this State and this country are recognising the sacrifices of upwards of 35,000 Irishmen - and not a few women - who fell in the Great War.
I wrote my first article on this subject for The Sunday Independent 20 years ago this week. I had been interested in the Great War since childhood, but my true sense of the missing dimensions of Irish history came from a letter in the Belfast Telegraph in the early 1970s written by a survivor of the 36th Ulster Division, who deplored the silence surrounding the equally brave soldiers from the South.
In October 1978, I went down to Tipperary to interview Jack Moyney of the Irish Guards, the last surviving Irish Victoria Cross winner. His week-long patrol, stranded in no man's land in Ypres in the winter of 1917, was a true epic of endurance and courage; but he said that he was never as scared then as he was during the War of Independence, when, he thought, it was the Victoria Cross which had kept him alive.
Ex-servicemen
I didn't know what he meant. Because just as the fact that hundreds of thousands of Irishmen had served in the Great War had been elided from official memory and from all history courses at school and university, so too had one aspect of the Anglo-Irish and Civil wars of 1919-1922, during which ex-soldiers were convenient victims. Indeed, this aspect was regularly headlined "the campaign against ex-servicemen" by this newspaper; yet despite this, no historian of the period ever referred to it. Jack Moyney felt his VC made him too famous to murder; many others in Tipperary were not so fortunate.
Murder was not the only tool used against these hapless men. Some county councils effectively introduced an employment boycott on them, even banning their children from county scholarships. Crowds of veterans wandered the country looking for work, and many were shot as "spies". Yet history books ignored their plight though the evidence was there to see, even in the unrepentant memoirs of IRA men.
What had they done to deserve this? They had followed the advice of their elected leaders who had supported participation in the war, urging young men to enlist. In all, including the Irish in Britain, some 300,000 Irishmen did, and they left Irish ports to cheering crowds and bands playing The Wearing of the Green and Let Erin Remember.
Erin didn't. A huge shutter came down in public memory, and the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who had served in the war and who had not emigrated stayed silent. War service was not to be discussed, ever. When I determined to revive the memory of these men, I wrote to every provincial newspaper in Ireland, asking for ex-servicemen to contact me, hoping that I could collate their memories. Just three did.
Memorial Gardens
I went to the Memorial Gardens in Islandbridge, built to honour the Irish dead; and their condition was an artistic and moral scandal. After they were completed in the 1930s, de Valera had refused permission for them to be opened. When I saw them first in the spring of 1979, they were a vandalised tiphead, covered in weeds and grazing horses, the great stonework festooned with graffiti.
So I started writing about the Irish in the Great War in this newspaper. I truly was a lone voice. Some people teased me; some mocked me. I got unexpected support from the late Eileen O'Brien, a republican through and through, who told me that in her Galway village, children, unreproved by their parents, used to throw stones at shell-shocked veterans.
Another sympathiser was the late Brian Clark, newly appointed secretary to the British Legion, who was determined to broaden the memory of these Irishmen, which was now largely retained solely by a largely Protestant community which furtively commemorated Remembrance Sunday each November. Brian's ambition, like mine, was to see the ordinary Irish people and the Irish State acknowledge the Irish dead, but most of all, to see the Army of Ireland officially do so.
The late Campbell Heather began his gloriously successful campaign to restore Islandbridge. David Fitzpatrick's history workshop produced an entire volume of local essays about the Great War. One of his students, Jane Leonard, has since emerged as a pioneering historian of the period. In St Patricks's Cathedral, Dean Victor Griffin was determined that the memorial service should be uncompromisingly Irish.
Remembrance Sunday
But even the process of spreading the message brought a harsh backlash. Brian had to endure obloquy that he was in MI5; and indeed, so had I. The Army was in the habit of sending a couple of officers along to Remembrance Sunday as a military courtesy. When the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, discovered this, he ended the Army presence. Indeed, there was one ignoble year when the Army was represented at the memorial service for the German dead of the second World War, but not at the service for the Irish dead of two world wars.
There is a tide taken in the affairs of men; and let us add, women. I wonder if the great events that are taking place today would have happened at all without Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese; would the humdrum run of conventional male presidential candidates have had the courage to transform Remembrance Sunday as they have done? Unquestionably not.
In this, the two Marys - whom I have traduced, God knows, often enough - have truly performed a signal service to the State, to the people of this country, and to our Irish dead who only did their duty. Thank you, Marys. At last, at last I can truly say: Ireland remembers, and my heart bursts with pride.