Republican News · Thursday 4 July 2002

Maskey lays Somme wreath

BY FERN LANE

As symbolic acts go, this one could hardly have been any more, well, monumental.

In laying a wreath to the dead of the Somme on Monday morning, Mayor Alex Maskey made a powerful case for Irish republicanism in its best and purest form, the form which seeks to disregard religion and, ultimately, past antipathies, in the name of unity.

It was also a remarkably graceful, individual act of reconciliation by a man who the British Army tried very hard indeed to kill for 20 years or more.

Mayor Maskey's act was important in a number of other ways. Firstly, on behalf of republicanism, he acknowledged the scale of loss and grief experienced by the Protestant community at the Somme. Secondly, he took a vital first step in the process to enable the nationalist and republican communities in the Six Counties, and on the island of Ireland, to acknowledge those members of their own families who, for very different reasons, fought and died on the British side.

He said: "It is in recognition of the sorrow, hurt and suffering left behind for their relatives, friends and comrades. My objective, beyond this, is to seek to identify common ground for all of us in this generation."

Like Martin Meehan, whose grandfather, Cornelius Clarke, lost his life in WWI, there are a significant number amongst us who can name a father, grandfather or great-grandfather who joined the British Army before 1969. Many of them will have fought in one of the world wars. Mostly, however, we tend, for quite obvious reasons, to remember, and commemorate the grandfather or great-grandfather who fought for the IRA in 1916 and beyond. Action in the service of the colonial occupier, no matter how individually heroic it may have been, is difficult to celebrate.

Of course, central to this difficulty is the fact that the Somme commemoration industry has been so thoroughly and often so cynically appropriated by Unionism that to attempt to engage in any sort of acknowledgement of the contribution made by nationalist Ireland has been rendered completely impossible. Remember those images from Portadown two years ago when Orangemen and their loyalist paramilitary friends consciously set about to recreate images of the trenches on Drumcree Hill and thus present their case as analogous to World War I?

The visual shorthand of the fluttering union jack, mud and barbed wire was presented to the world as if the desire to assert and maintain an imagined ethnic superiority, violently if necessary, on others was in some way an heroic stand against oppression (although, some would say that that is exactly what the British were doing in 1916, so perhaps the Orange have greater insight than we give them credit for).

To commemorate a grandfather and great-grandfather who fought and died on the British side in WWI meant having to buy into that nonsense, and with it the whole imperial and unionist ideology which accompanies it. Standing beneath a union jack and a picture of the queen every July and November is really not an attractive proposition for nationalists and republicans.

Unionism has for over 80 years claimed the Somme as an intrinsic part of its culture of political heritage, offering the image of thousands of Orangemen going over the top, shouting "For God and Ulster" to face the Boche, And so they did. But this image effectively excluded the majority of the people of Ireland and it also wrote out of history the thousands of Irish men who went over the top beside them, men who believed the duplicity of John Redmond when he told them that in joining the war effort they would be fighting to "defend small nations" and that Home Rule would be their reward.

As Mayor Maskey said, depoliticisation of commemoration is the key, establishing a form of ceremony which does not alienate almost the entire population and which allows nationalist Ireland to recognize the sacrifices of previous generations whilst still firmly rejecting the overarching political architecture which impelled them into such sacrifice.