Come Here To Me!

Irish Independent, 17 July 1919.

There was something of a furore this week when Leo Varadker wore a remembrance poppy into the Dáil. Personally, I think it is the right of anyone to wear or not wear any commemorative symbol they choose. I wear a white poppy each year, primarily in memory of my great-grandfather, one of the tens of thousands of Irish victims of the slaughter of the First World War. A white poppy (intended as an anti-war symbol and created in the 1930s) probably annoys both sides in the debate, but that isn’t the intention.

Commemoration of the past in Ireland is a loaded thing. When Sinn Féin TDs wore Easter Lilies into the Dáil in 2013, Charlie Flanagan lambasted them on the basis that “some members of this House may find the wearing of such emblems offensive.” When Fine Gael TD  Frank Feighan wore a remembrance poppy into the Dáil, nobody from the otherside of the floor objected. Why would they bother?

There has been a lot of work in recent years by historians, academic and otherwise, on remembrance of World War One in Ireland. The myth that the First World War was somehow ‘forgotten’ in Ireland is surely laid to rest by now, thanks to work highlighting Remembrance Sunday’s attended by tens of thousands in the capital, and the phenomenal public appetite for films like Ypres and The Battle of the Somme. In an account of childhood in working class Dublin, Brendan Behan remembered the importance of the memory of the war in parts of the city:

When the singing got under way, there’d be old fellows climbing up and down Spion Kop til further orders and other men getting fished out of the Battle of Jutland, and while one old fellow would be telling how the Munster’s kicked the football across the German lines at the Battle of the Somme, there’d be a keening of chorused mourners crying from under their black shawls over poor Jemser or poor Mickser that was lost at the Dardanelles.

It was in the very immediate aftermath of the war that the question of how it should be remembered was first being asked of course, and one interesting intervention was the Irish Nationalist Veterans’ Association (INVA), founded at a meeting in Dublin’s Mansion House in May 1919.

With some 2,000 to 3,000 men refusing to march in the 1919 victory parade through the city, the body claimed that “they did their part to resurrect ancient nationalities and to redress grievances in other oppressed nations, and on return they find in Ireland a larger occupation than Germany found necessary to keep down Belgium.”

July 1919 advertisement.

The War after the War:

Certainly, significant numbers of ex-servicemen did enlist in the ranks of the Irish Republican Army, the Citizen Army and other separatist bodies during the War of Independence, most famously men like Tom Barry and Emmet Dalton. Paul Taylor has noted that “the witness statements of IRA veterans contained in the Irish Military Archives refer to 109 ex-servicemen serving in the IRA….They include 24 commanders (almost all on active service),34 instructors (at least 15 on active service), 42 other Volunteers on active service and eight intelligence officers.” There were several hundred such men across the country, a frightening prospect for the authorities.

Yet for many veterans of the war, their fighting days were behind them. At the first meeting of the INVA the anger in the room was palatable, something captured in contemporary newspaper reports. Widows, the maimed and others demanded Irish nationhood be recognised, with war veteran Brigadier General Hammond in the chair. Men who had followed the Redmondite line that the interests of all of Ireland were served in the War now found themselves feeling abandoned, as “they believed honestly in the adhesion of the democracy of England to the just claims of Ireland when they entered the war, and they now told English statesmen that the eleventh hour had struck.”

Among veterans themselves, there were questions of what form Irish self-government should take. Some shouted ‘Up the Republic’, while a Captain Sheehy was booed for proclaiming his belief in “Colonial Home Rule”. The widow of Tom Kettle, who had been a founding member of the Irish Volunteers and an Irish Parliamentary Party MP in the years before his death on the Western Front in 1916, proclaimed boldly that “the men who went to France have been betrayed.”

Spreading beyond Dublin,the INVA had a presence in Belfast too, where Richard Grayson notes “in 1920 it took in political events such as a May Day labour rally in Belfast, but it was increasingly concerned with representing its members. In particular, it lobbied the local War Pensions Committee.” Beyond demanding recognition of Irish nationhood, the INVA in Dublin also made financial demands, with Mrs Kettle insisting “there should be an increase of all existing pensions and gratuity rates”, while there were demands that “work be started to give employment to ex-service men.” In the 1920 local elections, a 21 year old veteran of the war, Alderman Harkin, President of his local Nationalist Veteran’s Association, was elected in Belfast. He “romped home by a huge majority in a division hitherto exclusive to the Orange party.”

Letter in Freeman’s Journal, May 1920.

After independence, the question of remembering World War One was a complex one. Foolishly, some IRA men chose to attack those who participated in remembrance services, while on the otherside some uniformed British Fascisti used the day to provoke republicans and the left. The Gardaí themselves complained that the day was being exploited for “imperialist displays”. In the middle of all of this were tens of thousands of people who just wanted to remember their own dead with dignity.

On Remembrance Sunday 1934, an appeal to Irish ex-servicemen was issued, claiming that “the Armistice Day parades under the British Legion have been proved for the last ten years to be an insult to the dead and a mockery to the living.” Frank Ryan, one of those who had been prominently involved in shutting down earlier Remembrance Sunday events, shared a platform with Irish veterans of the war who marched through the city. Patrick Byrne of the Republican Congress remembered years later that “I had urged this new approach because of the disgust I felt when I saw some ex-servicemen being set upon for wearing their medals and poppies on their ragged coats.”

The men and widows of the INVA should not be forgotten. When the war was over, a conflict between empires, it left tens of thousands of people without fathers, husbands and sons. People had the right to mourn,to be angry, and to remember.