Had you taken a sleeping draught a mere 10 years ago, and finally woken up this month, you would not know the Ireland before you. Of all the countries in Europe, none has changed so much as this one; no fabric has been so sundered and resewn as that of Irish life, into patterns and designs we none of us would have thought possible in 1990.
Nor does any event so mark the changes in Irish life as did Remembrance Sunday in St Patrick's Cathedral last weekend, attended by the President with the ease and confidence which suggested that the symbols and the sacrifice represented on that day had been hers all her life. Yet we know this is not true: she and the mainstream Irish nationalism she personifies have both had extreme difficulty in the past with all that Remembrance Sunday meant. It is a measure of the extraordinary broadening and growing self-confidence of Irish nationalism that it can now so generously embrace that day, and yet not feel itself compromised. For it is not: indeed, it is strengthened by its goodness.
Enlarged vision
A few days earlier, the Taoiseach, who in his undemonstrative way has been a dynamic architect behind the enlarged vision and reach of Irish nationalism, launched Keith Jeffrey's Ireland and the Great War. It was, alas, an occasion which I was obliged to miss, being detained by comparable, if less substantive, business elsewhere. A decade ago, it would have been a major sensation if our Taoiseach had presided over such a ceremony. This November, the event passed without mention in the press, though to be sure, the weather played its part, not merely obliterating much of Ireland, but also hijacking most of the news reportage the following day.
That is a shame. Keith is a delightful scholar with a dry and elegant humour, which reveals itself even in a wise and beautifully researched study into the most sombre period in Ireland's history of the last century. It is an essential guide which steers a careful political and military path, reminding us, among other things, that the cult of blood-sacrifice was not Pearse's alone. "We believe," declared the Church of Ireland Bishop of Meath, "that this fiery trial will prove to be a purifying discipline. If it lead to a moral and spiritual renewal of our nation the loss will end in gain."
It is extraordinary that we still don't know how many Irishmen (or women) died in the Great War. The figure of 49,000, based on Eva Bernard's Ireland's Memorial Records of 1921, is as risible as it is much bruited. Keith Jeffrey suggests that someone go through the Bernard figures. Someone has. Me. It is from the savage slaving at the saltmine of those figures that I came up with the figure of 35,000 Irish dead of the Great War. I do not intend ever to engage in such a project again.
Political taboo
One of the problems about assessing Irish losses in the Great War is that so many Irish recruits were not living in Ireland when they enlisted. Some 10 percent of the 4,500 Dublin Fusiliers killed in the war were Irishmen who enlisted in Britain; the comparable figures for the Connaught Rangers would certainly have been higher. And of course, very many Irish joined the Canadian and US forces. We may very well never know how many Irishmen died in the Great War - and nor, now, does it greatly matter. The subject has finally been liberated from political taboo and historiographical censorship. All that we can do is ask honest questions, and answer them as honestly as possible.
We have not yet completed the journey of rediscovery - nor can we, for that is a journey without end; but we have at least started. In the context of that journey, why does John Hume, whose father served in the Royal Irish Rifles in the Great War, not represent the SDLP at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday? Why does our ambassador does not attend that same service? For if Mozambique, paradoxically, never part of the British empire but now a member of the Commonwealth, can lay a wreath, why not us? Was Ireland not part of the United Kingdom for the first World War and, although neutral, part of the Commonwealth for the second?
There are, of course, anomalies in such matters; but the relationship between Ireland and Britain is so anomalous anyway as to defy the normal rules of identity or protocol. After all, what other country would have sent an Irishman here as its military attache but Britain? And was not an Irish Catholic officer in the British army Prince Charles's ADC a few years ago? And no French parliamentarians discuss the future of Scotland or Wales as TDs routinely do in Edinburgh or Cardiff.
High notes
Irish and British relations are now amenable to resolution over coffee and biscuits, and where those elixirs do not work their miracles, time probably will. But here follows a heartfelt request to the choirmaster John Dexter of St Patrick's. Though I welcome I Vow to Thee My Country (words by an Irishman who was British Ambassador to the US and whose daughter smuggled guns to the Irish Volunteers in 1914: is that not anomaly enough?), when reaching for the high notes last Sunday, I severed a ligament which had already been mortally strained in the vertiginously pitched Oh Val- iant Hearts.
Please, please, next year, John, both those lovely hymns in a lower key? Otherwise, it's me for the knackers' yard.