EIGHTY years after the Somme, 80 years after the Easter Rising, and this State publicly commemorates nothing. Is that what we want, a country without public memory, in which history is merely a ladder which got us this far, and can be pushed away at our convenience?
It doesn't work like that. Because we can't manage it, no matter how we try. We push at the ladder, and it clings to our feet, causing us to land where we do not choose to. Certain rungs are evident, big rungs which are indisputable in their effect on us and how we reached this point, this past, this present. We are in Europe; and Europe is in us.
This is not new. We have been a European people for one and a half thousand years. We have taken waves of different peoples, and sent fresh waves - out in return; and none went so catastrophically, or so forgotten in this State as the people who 80 years ago began their journey into the heart of Ulster Protestant mythology, and who now are as officially forgotten in this State as are the men of Easter 1916.
Fireside Myths
One set of myths, around which this State was formed, now embarrasses the other remains too closely embedded in the identity of the British of the Ulster loyalists for us to embrace with comfort. We prefer agnostic amnesia to the perils of commemoration.
Myths not told at the hearth gain no currency in adulthood, no matter how often repeated and the story of the Ulster Protestant Henry Gallaugher is certainly unknown. For he was the wrong kind of Ulster Protestant. He was from the Ulster which lost the sundered three counties, betrayed by greater loyalism as the nationalists of Northern Ireland were abandoned by the greater Irish nationalism.
Henry Gallaugher was company commander of the old Ulster Volunteer Force in Manorcunningham, and was commissioned into the Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914. Despite the Six County myth which has been perpetuated about July 1st 1916, many of his men were from Donegal, Wicklow and Dublin (including Andrew Fox the great uncle of Mildred Fox TD for Wicklow).
All his fellow officers were killed or wounded early on the first day of the Somme battle in 1916, leaving Henry to carry on alone. Noticing German snipers firing on his wounded he took a rifle and shot six of them. By the time he reached his objective, the appropriately named Crucifix, only nine of his platoon were still with him. He erected a barricade, and went out to no man's land to collect wounded men. He came across several parties of German and was able to kill or capture them all, bringing back the prisoners and wounded to safety.
Appalling Violence
He was relieved at the Crucifix by his commanding officer, Major Peacocke, from Cork, and by an officer from Belfast, Major Gaffikin - whose contribution that day was as much to myth as it was to war. Henry Gallaugher then carried a wounded officer back from the German wire to his own lines.
This account is bald. It does not convey the appalling violence that was consuming lives in vast number all around him. Twenty thousand British soldiers - at least 2,000 of them Irish, including Richard Fox - died on the front where Henry Gallaugher had spent the day in combat and rescuing wounded men.
Two nights later he offered to rescue the men who were still stranded, screaming and in despair in no man's land. He led a small party of volunteers into that terrible place and rescued 28 wounded men.
Amongst the dead was Major Gaffikin. The colour of his company of about 250 men - happened to be orange. Like a tourist guide today, to keep his men in touch with him, he waved a large orange cloth. According to the survivors quoted in Philip Orr's splendid account of the 36th Ulster Division, none of the men were aware that July 1st, before calender changes, was the date of the Battle of Boyne.
Major Gaffikin's orange pennant was transformed by the myth machine, whispered at the hearth and crooned over the cradle, into an orange sash and the orange sash was mythologised into hundreds of sashes, until the legend came to exist as it stands today, imperishable and enduring, of the men of the 36th Ulster Division proudly wearing their sashes as, in their loyalty to their crown and their creed, they went to their deaths.
Letters Home
Our witness to the untruth of this was Henry Gallaugher. He wrote home in reply to queries from his family in Manorhamilton, saying he certainly had not seen any sashes, and if anybody had been wearing them, he would have known about it.
That part of the letter bears upon history. The rest of it bears upon the man he was, the Irish farmer asking about the Donegal fields, and wondering how the crops were coming on. He made no mention of what he had done, of his journeys into no man's land to rescue dozens of wounded.
He was recommended for a Victoria Cross, but the 36th Division had already won four posthumously. There was a ration to these things, and another would have been above the quota, though his deeds matched or exceeded in bravery anything known during that battle or that war.
Henry Gallaugher was killed at Messines Ridge the next year, the same day and place as the Irish nationalist Willie Redmond MP. The by election in Clare which followed Redmond's death was won by Eamon de Valera; fresh myths were being minted, ones which were to exclude Willie Redmond, Warren Peacocke, murdered by the IRA in Inishannon in 1921, and the extraordinarily brave Henry Gallaugher, rescuer of over 30 men before Thiepval Wood, and now totally forgotten in his native county of Donegal.