Sir, - I write to take issue with Mary Holland's "compelling reasons" for Mary McAleese not wearing a poppy at her inauguration on Armistice Day (Opinion, November 6th). Ms Holland's main reason, it seems, is that the poppy is unfortunately construed as being a Protestant-only symbol and is (wrongly) deemed by many as an "offensive emblem". She goes on to praise Mrs McAleese for refusing to wear the poppy "against this fraught background". Connected with all this is the worrying contradiction Mrs McAleese herself offers for not wearing the poppy: the President her/himself is the symbol and should wear only the shamrock (The Irish Times, November 8th).
Symbols are much more important than we think: they are the roads to our most primary sense of identification with the world about us. Without this identification we cannot, as anthropologists would say "find our feet amongst our own". Furthermore, and contrary to popular opinion perhaps, this necessary identification is always emotionally based and culturally derived. Which is why people in the public eye have enormous ability to shape our perceptions and thus our actions, whether we like it or not. In this sense the President-elect is right to say the presidency is the symbol of Ireland. This means, of course, that through her official actions she has the power to change our expectations, our sense of Irishness, our own collective self-image. Since our collective psyche is still deeply and emotionally embedded in both Catholicism/nationalism and its opposites, Protestantism/ unionism, Mrs McAleese by her own (cultural) person impinges on all these images and is thus in a unique position of influence. She thus "owns" a very particular type of potential power that could be wisely used to constructively broaden and deepen our national identity towards a maturing cultural consensus.
Furthermore, the defence for not wearing the poppy - or the sub-text upon which Ms Holland and Mrs McAleese have unknowingly agreed - may be far from constructive. In her column Mary Holland, however unintentionally, has relegated or reinforced the idea that the poppy is Protestant-only. Mrs McAleese has retreated into a very safe place by saying the only fit emblem to wear is a shamrock. By doing so, both have ensured that both the poppy and the shamrock and all they symbolise remain static. Static symbols, by definition, cannot "build bridges".
Bearing in mind that Tuesday is actually Armistice Day, the wearing of the poppy by Mrs McAleese would have wrested it from the Protestant-only falsehood and provided it with its true symbolic substance: the explicit acknowledgement that both Catholics and Protestants died defending another country. This time I feel she has failed to use her power wisely - to build (deep-rooted) bridges. - Yours, etc.,
Woodbine Road, Blackrock, Co Dublin.