CENTRES of memory schools, businesses, churches, newspapers, governments, political parties are important things. They remember events, the otherwise forgotten collisions of the molecules, and can remind us that on such and such a day, this or that happened. People passed this way; history in its tiny way was made; time marched on and the event concerned has largely been forgotten, so these little centres of memory may whisper: Let us remind you of this en du ring but simple truth.
We are made up of what history has bequeathed. Sometimes, at the behest of those individual units of memory, we may take out a brick on the road to the present, examine it and say: this brick helped to bring us here, and wherever else we may go in the future, that brick is part of our common journey.
Next Saturday, June 7th, sees the 80th anniversary of the deaths of Willie Redmond and Henry Gallaugher at the Battle of Messines Ridge. Their deaths symbolise the passing of two distinct old orders, for Willie Redmond represented the old Parliamentary Party and its replacement by Sinn Fein the byelection for his seat was won by de Valera. The sun of Fianna Fail was rising.
Ulster partitioned
The tide may be said to have turned in one sense in East Clare in 1917; but in another it turned on the rising ground south of Ypres where Willie and Henry were mortally wounded 80 years ago next Saturday. Henry was from the other, other Ireland. Whereas Willie was a member of the 16th Irish Division, drawn largely from the Irish National Volunteers, Henry had been a member of the old Ulster Volunteer Force in Manorcunningham in Donegal, and was serving with the 36th Ulster Division that day.
Not merely Ireland was already being partitioned; so too was Ulster. Not just the Ulster of nationalist Ireland was being sundered, with all the injustices that entailed, but so too was unionist Ulster, with, to the minds of the loyalist populations of three Ulster counties, a comparable injustice.
Willie was too old to be fighting on active service that day. Henry was in his prime, a superbly brave young man who during the first day on the Somme had helped rescue 28 wounded men from no man's land, as well as putting six German snipers out of action.
The two divisions went into action alongside each other 80 years ago, and more naive observers at the time thought that the example of camaraderie and courage they set together in battle could serve as the basis for a settlement at home. But old disputes are not so easily resolved when they are returned to their native hearths. The genial banter of trench and estaminet is a mere passing affection which will long not survive the furious engines of dissension which exist townland by townland, parish by parish, barony by barony wherever identity is disputed.
But the battle and the victory of Messines Ridge on June 7th, 1917 was one of the greatest assemblies of Irish soldiery in history. Henry Gallaugher died in the battle and has vanished from larger memory of Ireland. His senior by nearly 30 years, Willie Redmond, also perished, but his memory lingers on, not Just in Redmondite Ireland, but also in Belgium, in particular in the Ypres area.
Corporate memories
Their loss deserves to be remembered, if only in passing, before we proceed to other events, other memorials, and to this fictional thing we call the present. Once upon a time a company like Guinness, with its centre of memory, could have been relied on to keep its little sanctuary lamp burning for its version of the truth, for its own corporate memories, for its little residues which lingered there after the tides of history had swept them away from elsewhere.
Over the past few months, some Flemish people decided to arrange a memorial to commemorate this Irish politician who gave his life that Belgium might be liberated from its invader - much as he sought the same liberation for Ireland. Through Willie Redmond's life and death, a part of Belgium would also remember the thousands of Irishmen - and a good few Irishwomen - who now nourish Belgium with their bones.
The committee approached Guinness and, perhaps naively, Bord Failte in Belgium for sponsorship to pay for a lecture by Jane Leonard of Queens. University at a memorial ceremony on the anniversary of Redmond's death. No better person: Jane is one of the few people in Ireland who knows what she is talking about in this area.
After a long delay, Guinness declined the invitation to assist in this matter, from Bord Failte, no reply at all. By then it was too late to arrange any other sponsor, and much of the ceremony, including Jane's lecture, has been cancelled, and a plan to build a memorial for Irish soldiers - "to build one or two small stone walls, with Irish stone bricks, and in the way Irish stone walls around the fields are builded," as one organiser wrote - has been postponed.
Ah. So this is the new Guinness, is it? The Guinness which has forgotten the past and proceeds to the future regardless of what lies in its history? Scores of Guinness employees left their bones in Flanders and thousands of men who served with Willie Redmond and Henry Gallaugher that day returned home to work with Guinness Ireland. And for years afterwards, Guinness remained the Irish owned company, with its heart in Ireland, and its future in Ireland, which could be relied on to give jobs to veterans of the war which claimed Willie and Henry and so many others.
No longer. Guinness might open its Irish theme pubs in Belgium where young Belgians can drink through the night, just as the young Irishmen once consoled themselves in the Belgian cafes of 80 years ago. But Guinness will soon be GMG; the centre of memory is gone; and the Irish dead of the Flanders plain lie already unremembered in GMG's corporate halls in Park Lane London and its still useful suboffice in St James's Gate.