Republican News · Thursday 4 July 2002

A wreath to Empire's sad legacy

Enormously difficult for republicans this week was Alex Maskey's laying of a laurel wreath at the cenotaph outside Belfast City Hall to commemorate those Irish who died in World War I.

It is difficult seeing a fellow republican paying tribute to those who died in an imperial war, in British uniform, some deluded into thinking that their's was a fight for the liberty of small nations. But then, history can never be reduced to simple binary antagonisms. A lot more is at play.

George Bernard Shaw famously asserted, in 1904, that Home Rule leader John Redmond would be finished if he "set to work to manufacture and support English shams and hypocrisies instead of exposing and denouncing them; if he constituted himself the permanent apologist of doing nothing, and, when the people insisted on his doing something, only roused himself to discover how to pretend to do it without really changing anything."

Redmond, of course, did exactly that. Many young Irish men went out to war in 1914 and after with the fallacious notion that in 'defending small nations', as Redmond exhorted them to do, they were also securing Irish liberty from the Crown.

Of course, that transpired to be a monumental lie; Redmond's discredited movement was supplanted by revolutionary republicanism and many of those who returned invalided, or who defected from the British Army, joined the freedom fighters of the Tan War.

Just as the 1916 Rising was dubbed the 'Poets' Rebellion', WWI, for many a young idealist, was a romantic defence, not of the Empire but of national sovereignty and democracy. They were wrong. Others, who did go out to defend the Empire, including English poet Siegfried Sassoon, would bring home the reality of a brutal, hypocritical, futile war, run by armchair generals:

"If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

d speed glum heroes up the line to death."

How many "glum" young Irishmen died in the Somme and elsewhere, believing to the death that they were defending their native land? How many, had they survived, would afterwards have abhorred every moment spent there?

We cannot condemn them for being naïve, just as we refuse to give sustenance to the imperialist defenders of the Somme massacre.

Nonetheless, we can sympathise with their families and the families of all those Irishmen who died in the futile cause of Empire. We remember their loss as part of Britain's bitter legacy in Ireland.