Sir Henry Maitland Wilson was a vile man; a capable man, but a vile man nonetheless.
Born in Currygrane in Longford, his early military career was undistinguished. He failed to get into either Sandhurst or Woolwich military academies, and so served initially in the Longford Militia, from which he was commissioned into the Royal Irish Regiment.
It has been the fashion of recent, more inclusive times to emphasise the latter half of the Anglo-Irish tradition. But it is also lamentably true that there were strong elements within Anglo-Irishry which regarded Irish Catholics, and Irish nationalists in particular, with a rank and racial loathing.
Henry Wilson was such a creature. Moreover, he was a schemer, driven by an endless and indefatigable malice.
Curragh Mutiny
Naturally, he featured prominently in the shenanigans which are misnamed the Curragh Mutiny, though it was not quite a mutiny, and nor was it located solely on the Curragh. But then other events came along, and Ireland suddenly belonged to the greater world, and many tens of thousands of its young men joined up, enlisting in some of the great Irish regiments for service - as it turned out - across most of the bloody battlefields of the war.
But within Ireland, the 1916 Rising turned nationalist Ireland in a different direction from that in which those young men, answering the call of their political and church leaders, had gone. In ways more terrible and unpredictable than anyone could have considered possible in 1914 and 1915, nationalist Ireland had begun to redefine itself; and in doing so, began to exclude the thousands of Irishmen who had done their duty as they had seen fit.
From 1920 onwards, the IRA began to shoot former soldiers. Numerous county councils elected to exclude ex-servicemen from employment of any kind, and to make their children ineligible for school grants. An emerging mythology sanctified the men of 1916, and their successors from 1919 to 1921, and steadily, remorselessly occluded the sacrifice and the sense of duty of those men who had gone in another direction, and who had enlisted in the colours.
Irish nationalism had an ardent ally in the creation of this culture of selective amnesia: the Ulster unionist diehards, of whom Sir Henry Wilson was the foremost. He could not influence the shaping of the Irish nationalist pysche from within; but he could institutionally create a world which concurred with theirs. The two extremes agreed upon a certain fiction: that true Irish nationalists had not served in the British army in the first World War.
Disbanded regiments
Wilson's contribution to this fiction, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was to disband the great Irish regiments - the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the South Irish Horse, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Royal Irish Fusiliers and his own regiment, the Royal Irish. He caused the name of the Royal Irish Rifles to be changed to the Royal Ulster Rifles - emphatically against the stated traditions or the desires of the regiment. He even tried to get the Irish Guards disbanded; but that regiment had been the creation of Queen Victoria, and this deed was beyond his powers.
The Royal Irish Fusiliers was saved by the Inniskillings volunteering to lose a battalion. But in all other respects, his attempts to organisationally dihibernicise the British army were successful. It was an act of political vindictiveness and tribal spite, which reached its culmination with the laying up of the regimental colours in Windsor Castle on June 12th, 1922. It was a deeply emotional occasion for all present. Even George V was visibly moved, as he received the colours bearing the battle honours won by those regiments, whose extinction he was now supervising.
It is one of curious paraxodes of history that Wilson, the architect of this studied insult to the memories of thousands of Irishmen, had just 10 days to live. On June 22nd, he was shot dead by two Irish ex-servicemen outside 36, Eaton Place, London. The killing was unrelated to the fate of the Irish regiments: Michael Collins had targeted Wilson because of his role as security chief for the new Northern Ireland government, but the irony remains nonetheless. And his killers, Dunne and O'Sullivan, were themselves soon to die, at the end of the hangman's noose.
Bigoted version
Gradually, over the years, all memory of the Irish regiments of the Great War were enclosed by shadows as deep as those in which the colours rested in Windsor Castle.
Even in death, Wilson's bigoted version of history came to predominate; and it is only in the past years that a broader and more catholic vision of events of that time has emerged from the dark to which it had been banished - for all time, if Wilson had had his baleful, wicked way.
Nearly four years ago, President McAleese made a magnificient - but tragically unrecorded - speech after the opening of the Irish Memorial Tower at Messen, or Messines. It was a formal declaration by nationalist Ireland that it was reclaiming its own history. Since then the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has given State receptions for the Irish Guards and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers' Association.
And so the wheel turns. On June 12th, Irish soldiers from both traditions will be present at Windsor Castle to mark the 80th anniversary of the laying up of the colours of those great Irish regiments. Their presence will show that Wilson's vile handiwork was in vain.
Let us hope that the Government will be officially represented to make that same enduring statement.