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from The Guardian, Tuesday November
10, 1998
Republic honours forgotten war heroes
 Stephen
Bates on Belgian memorial to Irish who died for Britain on Western front
IT HAS taken 80 years and the Northern Irish peace
process to do it, but tomorrow in a quiet corner of western Belgium the Irish Republic
will finally remember tens of thousands of men who fought and died for Britain in the
first world war.
In a ceremony to be attended by the Queen and the king and
queen of the Belgians, the Irish president, Mary McAleese, will inaugurate a peace
memorial in the form of a celtic tower.
It will be the republic's first official recognition that
men from the south of Ireland took part in the war. For many years their contribution was
written out of history, overshadowed by the struggle for independence from Britain at the
same time. Ireland is only now coming to terms with its role in both world wars, although
in the second world war the republic was officially neutral. Maurice Biggar, first
secretary at the Irish embassy in Belgium, said: "This is a profound and significant
event. Even five years ago it would not have been possible."
In a gesture heavy with symbolism, the 100ft high round
tower was built by citizens from each side of the border using stones from each of the 32
counties.
One of the moving spirits, Paddy Harte, a veteran former
Fine Gael member of the dail, said: ''I have always thought the southern Irishmen who
fought in the war have been forgotten and treated like pariahs. It was wrong for the South
not to recognise their contribution.
"We are saying particularly to the North that these
men also fought and wore the khaki uniform. And to the South, that they never had the
chance to come back and prove their Irishness."
The tower is at Messines, now known as Mesen in Flanders, a
few miles outside Ypres, where divisions from both southern Ireland and Ulster fought side
by side for the only time in the war during the opening stages of the battle of
Passchendaele.
About 30,000 from what became the republic are thought to
have died on the western front, compared with the 1,300 killed on both sides in the Easter
rising and the 3,000 said to have died in the civil war. Some of the Irishmen who fought
subsequently joined the IRA to fight the British, such as Tom Barry whose guerrilla
campaign later won him fame.
The number killed from the South is also higher than the
20,000 Ulstermen killed in the war although Ulster Protestants have always used the
sacrifice of their men, particularly on the Somme, as evidence of loyalty to Britain.
The tower's supporters are quoting the words of Willie
Redmond, a nationalist MP killed on the western front, who claimed that if Irishmen could
fight and die together, they could also live together.
Redmond wrote to the novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
"it would be a fine memorial to the men who have died so splendidly if we could over
their graves build a bridge between North and South." His death caused a byelection
at East Clare which saw the hard-line nationalist and future taoiseach, Eamon de Valera,
elected to Parliament.
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