Newton's optic: In which Newton Emerson finds Bertie Ahern is Somme operator
Saturday's Battle of the Somme commemoration will reflect "the history we share on this island with the people who do not wish to share this island", Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has claimed.
The 1916 battle is generally regarded as a futile and callous waste of life, which is why the Irish Government has chosen it as a means of outreach to the unionist community.
The 90th anniversary has also been marked with the launch of a new postage stamp, suggesting that unionism can be licked, and a specially commissioned line of dialogue for the new Ken Loach film, in which the Black and Tans claim that they were brutalised during "the first World War" - although it was only after the second World War that this became apparent.
"What makes this battle so poignant is that almost equal numbers of Southerners and Northerners died," explained Mr Ahern. "This means that proportionately more Northerners died, which is something all of us should be happy to acknowledge."
The Taoiseach's desire to link the Somme to the Easter Rising of that same year is a clever move, according to Dr Pat Answer, who lectures in reconstructive history at Dublin Sunday Business College.
"The only thing these two events actually had in common was that Britain screwed both of them up," he says. "But by attempting to connect them in the public mind, Mr Ahern is suggesting that a British sacrifice of Irish Catholics and a British sacrifice of Ulster Protestants can only be separated by the thickness of a postage stamp."
Two Irish divisions fought at the Somme, representing each side of the one Irish division in question.
The 16th (Retrospectively Misguided) West Brit Fusiliers suffered an almost total loss of narrative credibility while defending the right of small nations to leave the empire they had left their small nation to defend. The 36th (Ulster) Volunteer Force endured an equally lethal barrage while doing exactly the same thing for precisely the opposite reason.
Historians now agree that everyone lost the Battle of the Somme except Bertie Ahern, although it will only be after the weekend that this will become apparent.
Saturday's events will begin with the symbolic digging of a trench between the Islandbridge War Memorial and wherever Sinn Féin decides to hold its commemoration instead. Both sides will exchange a ritual volley of rhetoric condemning the military adventurism of everyone except their own preferred version of the IRA.
An Ulster-Scots bugler will then play The Last Postage Stamp Wae Hay (traditional) while a wreath is laid on the spot where the DUP representatives would have stood if they had bothered to show up. This will be followed by readings from the Taoiseach, who will thank himself on behalf of the nation, and the Church of Ireland Archbishop, who will thank God on behalf of four generations of schoolchildren for wiping out the Ulster Division before they wrote any war poetry.
Finally, a representative from the British embassy will lower himself to half-mast. President Mary McAleese is unable to attend the UVF portion of the ceremony as this clashes with her UDA engagements. "We must all honour the heroes of the Somme," Mr Ahern urged yesterday. "They represented both great traditions in Ireland - and they were shot down together going over the top."