It's that time of year again when television breaks Equality Commission guidelines and compels its employees to wear poppies, the time when the so-called 'loyal' orders, the north's military establishment, the native militia and the dozen or so competing unionist parties all combine to embarrass nationalists into participating in Remembrance Day ceremonies. Will the SDLP or SF turn up to 'their' ceremony? The politico-military combination does not exactly brim with joy as not just the SDLP, but Sinn Féin politicians turn up to ceremonies, admittedly in the case of Alex Maskey last year to one of his own design.
It's all change in the last decade. It used to be unionists had a monopoly of talking claptrap and codswallop about Remembrance Day, but now nationalists have joined in, much to unionists' annoyance. They're miffed because they used to have exclusive ownership of Remembrance Day and all associated with it.
For 70-odd years they'd turned it into a demonstration of their version of Britishness, as opposed to the greasy cod and chips version David Trimble and his party prefer, though real Brits prefer chicken tikka masala. Unionists had successfully politicised remembrance. Some of the veterans marching might have been commemorating old comrades and revisiting old memories, but for unionist politicians and loyalist bands it was about demonstrating their conditional loyalty to Britain.
The way they see it is remembrance of their ancestors' blood sacrifice, mainly on the Somme in 1916. In 1914 John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, had urged his followers to go into the British army and fight whole-heartedly wherever the firing line extended. He did so because he was fully aware that Carson and the Ulster Unionists were going to use the war as a touchstone of loyalty and that if Irish nationalists didn't fight, then the prospect of Home Rule would be fatally damaged – Ireland couldn't be trusted. The majority of the Irish Volunteers followed Redmond's call but the minority who broke away and followed Eoin MacNeill confirmed Redmond's worst fears at Easter 1916. Three months later came the Unionists' blood sacrifice. They believed their loyalty made Home Rule impossible. In fact it was the Easter Rising that killed it.
The nationalists who participated in the same army at the Somme were written out of history both north and south. They were also written out of Remembrance Day commemorations which were conducted as celebrations of the unionist northern state. Any vestige of Irishness was expunged as it had been from any official expression of the north.
Much play is made of the poppy as a symbol of all who died in both wars. You even hear nationalist politicians who know no history repeating that claptrap. It's not. The poppy is the symbol of the Royal British Legion and it's for raising money for ex-British service personnel. Canadians also wear the poppy and it may have been the idea of a Canadian Colonel McCrae who wrote the poem In Flanders Fields. So it is useful for nationalist and republican politicians to muscle in on unionist ownership of Remembrance to reclaim their own forebears' memory. But they shouldn't just be 'taking part'. They should be requiring that the arrangements and procedures used be changed to suit the peculiar sensitivities of the north. Some local nationalist politicians claim a right to participate because their own grandfathers or great-grandfathers were in the British forces. Fair enough. But does it have to be in the ceremony unionists have perfected since the 1920s? Now don't let's have the claptrap that it is a universal ceremony conducted in the same fashion throughout the world. It's not. Furthermore, where else do you have cenotaphs desecrated by pro-union terrorists marching around them laying wreaths in their own private ceremonies?
In their confused minds they imagine they're following in the tradition of loyalist blood sacrifice inaugurated at the Somme. It's all a matter of ownership you see. Until now remembrance was a militaristic unionist thing. Nationalists standing there look a bit sheepish, awkward. Not, mind you, as incongruous as a Taoiseach wondering why he's standing at Islandbridge. If they want to keep turning up to please or frustrate unionists OK.
But if they want to participate genuinely as equals, then the way to resolve it is to plan a ceremony in which nationalist politicians can legitimately commemorate Irishmen and women who died in the two world wars, not act out a part created for a British politician. It's not going to happen for a year or two, but it will.
