The significance of wearing a poppy – a source of great antagonism – is torn apart and re-litigated every November in Ireland. In spite of this, there is little evidence that reconciliation around the symbol is drawing any closer.
We can easily understand all the reasons why an Irish person would not wear a poppy. It is a British symbol, and just as we do not expect the English to brandish the Tricolor, Paul Mescal had no obligation to flaunt one on The Graham Norton Show last week. Similarly, footballer James McClean chooses not to follow his team-mates in Wigan Athletic, instead eschewing the customary poppy armband.
His explanation eight years ago was perfectly compelling. He respects those who fought and died in the two World Wars. But, for a man from Creggan in Derry – where memories of Bloody Sunday in 1972 still loom large – the poppy is simply anathema. As an argument it is neither contentious, nor is it one that many on this island have a hard time grasping.
If only the poppy was accepted not as a sectarian symbol in the North but as an important totem to many who live there
In 2018 Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald spoke of the “disgraceful” abuse that McClean was subjected to, restating the well-worn line that many Irish people “have experienced the British army as an aggressor”. Speaking to Sky News, she added: “In a spirit of absolute mutual respect ... stop harassing people who choose – for their own reasons – not to wear the poppy.”
That is all well and good. If only equal energy was directed to creating space for people to wear it if they want to, without accusations of indulging in bellicose jingoism. If only so much energy was put into refuting lazy and bad faith arguments that the poppy is no more than a propaganda tool of the British state. If only the poppy was accepted not as a sectarian symbol in the North but as an important totem to many who live there. Until then, so much for that so-called “spirit of absolute mutual respect”.
The poppy’s significance is misunderstood in much of Ireland. Screeds about the poppy’s imperialist, bloodletting, war-glorifying energy are not hard to come by. And with it comes the implication that the tens of thousands who wear one are doing so in some display of boorish machismo, longing once again for the days of a far-reaching empire. As if, somehow, to say that bloodshed is good and in fact they want more. This kind of thinking is at best the product of a profound cultural blind spot, at worst it is base prejudice.
It hardly needs to be said that the loss and sacrifice experienced by Britain during both wars was towering. Many thousands of Irish people gave their lives too. And these conflicts are not celebrated (tell me, what part of Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est explains how wonderful it was for men to choke on gas in a trench?).
No. Far from glorifying war, Armistice Day invokes its horror. And those who pay heed do so in solemn acknowledgment of that fact. To cast such commemoration as jingoistic is an act of cruelty unbefitting to a modern cosmopolitan country like Ireland. It is especially inappropriate given the 43 per cent of Northern Irish people who identify as British, or to those who lost family members in the wars. It is completely counterproductive for anyone with the ultimate ambition of reuniting the island.
There has, however, been much progress. Leo Varadkar wore a “shamrock poppy” badge – a red poppy inside a green shamrock – in the Dáil in memory of the Irish who died in the first World War in British uniforms, to only a flash of criticism from the usual suspects. He explained those who fought with the British army would have been Protestants and unionists, but also Catholics and those who sought Home Rule. As a gesture it displayed greater understanding of the sensibilities required to create the conditions for a united island than those who denigrate the poppy outright.
Sinn Féin have made steps too. In 2018 its presidential candidate Liadh Ní Riada said she would be open to wearing a poppy, invoking a mature republicanism that is open and unhostile to complicated symbols of identity. And in July this year Michelle O’Neill, the party’s vice-president became the first Sinn Féin leader to lay a wreath in Belfast in memory of those who died at the Battle of the Somme. She spoke about shared grief and shared history.
As Ireland cleaves closer to unity it needs to continue, slowly and inexorably down this path. Much chatter is given to respecting all traditions, thinking about what a new Ireland might look like, creating a new state accommodating the island’s acute differences. Not so much of that bears out in reality.
So yes, there has been progress. But the national anxieties the November commemorations still manage to provoke prove that there is a lot further to go. If something as passive and inoffensive as the poppy is just one litmus test among many, it does not yet point to an island psychologically ready for reunification.