DICK SPRING is at the moment the busiest man in Ireland, daily striding purposefully down long red carpets rubbing his chin with a statesmanlike rub as he listens to the panjandrums of Europe almost at the same time as he is attending three different conferences - one on the imminent war between the China and Japan, one on the threatened evaporation of the seas of the world, and the third on the comet Seamus, destined to hit Earth tomorrow week.
Yet on Tuesday during the filthiest night of the year, he hurried from Ostend to attend the opening on the exhibition of the Dublin Fusiliers in the Great War at the Dublin Municipal Museum in South William Street. On that night to have crossed Dublin would have been courage itself, but to have come bounding all the way from Belgium bespeaks a decency which is seldom honoured. Dick had nothing to gain from his loyalty to that appointment. No votes were wooed, no constituency cosseted, no vital personages emolliated by his presence.
Look at it whatever way you like; on this most dreadful of nights, as lakes formed over much of Dublin and cyclists were being swept off to Anglesea, and as he faced a schedule which makes Tony O'Reilly's year look like a day in the life of Jemima Puddleduck, he still dropped everything to present himself at a museum opening.
Lost in admiration
I am, quite genuinely, lost in admiration. Maybe I've got politicians wrong. Maybe they are simply forthright, selfless people, concerned solely with other people's needs and quite indifferent to their own. I have put the Dick Spring at the Dublin Fusiliers exhibition under the magnifying glass and examined it in all sorts of cynical and distrusting ways, and I have come up with two possible explanations. One is that he has had a tip off that the 4,500 men of the Dublins who died in the Great War are shortly to be reincarnated as adult voters in Kerry. The other is that he is a decent man who keeps his word, no matter the weather, no matter the work.
As it happens, he was rewarded by being able to see a quite splendid presentation of the memorabilia of some of the 45,000 men who served in the Dubs in the Great War. Tom Burke who organised this exhibition has done us all a great service in giving us an insight into the lives of the plain soldiery of Dublin - and those of you further interested in the subject should contact Schull Books, Schull, Co Cork, which has recently republished Neill's Blue Caps, a history of the First Battalion the Dublin Fusiliers, in which over 20,000 plain Dubliners served.
Rescued from oblivion
Tom has helped recover from oblivion the hitherto neglected soldiery of the Dubs. Newspapers of the time wrote largely about the officers, but the simple, unadorned privates are not mentioned in battalion diaries, their medals were issued without published commendations, and often the first and only time we encounter details of them as individuals, with families and homes and native streets, is on the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery registers.
The tens of thousands of Dublin Fusiliers who did not die returned to a country which really did not want to hear about them; all memory of their deeds seemed to die with them. A couple of years ago I was asked to speak in Athy about the Dublin Fusiliers. Over 200 men from Athy had served with the Dublin Fusiliers in the Great War, yet there was no general knowledge or memory of this at all. Similarly, I had earlier been asked to speak about the Dublin Fusiliers to a women's group in Killester, where a large number of Dublin Fusiliers settled in ex servicemen's houses in the post war years. None of the women had any idea they lived in an area which had effectively been founded a generation before by veterans of the Great War.
As acts of amnesia, these are no ordinary feats; such forgetfulness requires careful examination. How was participation in something so awful, so colossal, so incomparable in world history disposed of in popular memory? This elision from the record requires careful surgery; whose the scalpel, and why? We do not have to go back to De Valera's time to seek the uncharity to account for this scalpel; the debate which drearily resumes each year, each November, about the wearing of the poppy serves as fresh reminder of an undercurrent of censorious self righteousness which runs through Irish life.
Last Saturday, for example, Eddie Holt in his television column in this newspaper said, quite baldly, that people who wore poppies were intentionally or otherwise glorifying imperialist war. Well now. Well now indeed. To glorify war is bad enough; but is there anything worse among, say, right on Temple Bar republicans than glorifying imperialist war?
Argument clinching terms
Imperialist" is, like racist or fascist or reactionary, one of a handful of argument clinching terms. There is no come back, no recovery, and certainly no discussion after its awesome might has been deployed in a debate. It is over. It spells moral superiority for whoever uses it, and doom for whomever it is used against. The normal processes of dialectic cease. It is a neutron bomb. It assures victory, and it is the right on, super kool equivalent of the old dismissal of any argument because it was "contrary to the teaching of the church". And it is not good enough.
The bemedalled old men and women who wear poppies each Remembrance Sunday need nobody to tell them why they wear them. Nor do others who also wear the poppy. We glorify nothing in doing so, but simply publicly remember the worst days in the history of the world, and most especially commemorate the Irishmen - and Irishwomen who were participants in the events of those days. The freedoms which millions gave their lives for and which we enjoy today include the freedom to be right on and kool. They even include the right to wrongly accuse those who wear the poppy each Remembrance Sunday of glorifying imperialist war. The one people who do not glorify war are the ones who have known it.