Opinion

Martin O'Brien: We should honour those who died defending freedom

'There will hardly be a poppy to be seen in any Catholic church or at any GAA match this weekend.'
'There will hardly be a poppy to be seen in any Catholic church or at any GAA match this weekend.' 'There will hardly be a poppy to be seen in any Catholic church or at any GAA match this weekend.'

Today is Armistice Day. Or if you prefer, Remembrance Day or Poppy Day.

It is also the feast of St Martin of Tours, the founder of French monasticism in the fourth century whose life story can assist us in discussing military related matters and issues of conscience.

Whatever you call November 11, it signifies something important and sacred that commands our attention as human beings.

How could it not?

Armistice Day commemorates the signing of the armistice between the Allies and Germany at 11am on November 11, 1918 that signalled the end of World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in recorded history.

In that unconscionable mass slaughter, the centenary of which is being currently commemorated, it is estimated that 17 million people died, that is the population of the Netherlands today.

This comprised about six million civilians and 11 million military personnel, the latter figure is about the population of today’s Belgium, the little country whose invasion by Germany brought the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into the war.

Let’s acknowledge the obvious. Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday do not resonate warmly with that many Irish News readers.

There will hardly be a poppy to be seen in any Catholic church or at any GAA match this weekend.

There are perfectly understandable historical and not so historical reasons for this that we need not go into in detail just now. Suffice to say that although the conflict is mercifully over we live in a contested place with both main communities holding different principal identities and for now at any rate different long term constitutional aspirations.

However, it would be too easy and too lazy to let this remembrance-tide go by without some self-questioning even if some of us were browned off by yet another Gregory Campbell-triggered row over poppies on The Nolan Show.

A few weeks back I realised a long-term wish by visiting the World War I battlefields in Flanders and the Somme, which reminds me that this day week sees the 100th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Somme in which thousands of soldiers from the island of Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, unionists and nationalists, were among the total of more than one million killed, wounded or missing.

This meant, amid all the cemeteries and memorials of the Western Front, one taking more fully on board the sacrifice of those Irish Catholics on Flanders fields and elsewhere who were largely overlooked at national level for many decades after Partition.

And receiving an enhanced insight into the role the sacrifice at the Somme played in the forging and development of the Ulster Unionist identity within the UK which nationalists would do well to learn more about.

“Official Ireland” was slow to properly acknowledge the loss of tens of thousands of fellow Irishmen who died fighting in a British uniform in World War I because it did not fit comfortably into the national post-revolutionary narrative.

There isn’t even agreement on an accurate number yet, such a calculation wasn’t exactly a national priority, and the oft quoted figure of 49,935 inscribed on the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge in Dublin is now considered unreliable and the actual number may be higher.

This non-acknowledgement was not actively addressed until such developments as the opening of the Islandbridge memorial after decades of neglect in 1988, President McAleese’s visit, with Queen Elizabeth, to Messines on this day in 1998 and Mrs McAleese’s later visit to Gallipoli.

Let’s conclude where we began with St Martin of Tours. He was a young soldier in the Roman army who used his sword to cut his woollen cloak in half so that he could clothe a naked beggar he met who was shivering with cold.

Later he turned against the military life becoming in effect the first known conscientious objector and was imprisoned before he was discharged to become “a soldier for Christ” instead.

For St Martin, the free exercise of conscience was important. That freedom should be generally permitted in relation to the wearing of emblems and religious symbols, with people being free to wear or not to wear. And it should be permitted to courageous people such as Colin and Karen McArthur, the owners of Ashers Bakery who should not be compelled to write words that conflict with their conscience.

One would like to think that many of those whose memory we honour, in whatever way, at this time died defending the cause of freedom, including freedom of expression and freedom of conscience.