Alex Pomeroy | Lancaster University
“I thought the Garden of Remembrance was to have been opened in November. I pray that ‘politics’ have not intervened”.
Sir Edwin Lutyens, designer of the Irish National War Memorial (INWM), to the planning committee, 4 December 1937.
In a sense, the delay was political; builder’s unions had been on strike in Dublin throughout 1937 and were the latest disruption to the opening of Ireland’s national memorial to its citizens killed during the Great War, the Irish National War Memorial Gardens within Islandbridge Park, Dublin. The actual ‘politics’ Lutyens was referring to, the Irish government’s general unease towards commemorating ‘British’ veterans, hindered a state-led opening ceremony for a further sixty years. In a March 1927 Seanad Éireann debate (the upper house of the Oireachtas, Irish parliament), Senator and famed poet William Butler Yeats argued:
‘I do not think we should take too seriously the interests, the fancies or desires of even those admirable men who want a great demonstration upon Armistice Day […] These men will not live for ever.’
Yet the original planning committee, formed in July 1919 to fund an ‘all-Ireland war memorial’ soon raised £50,000 to preserve the memory of those citizens before the Irish War of Independence (21 January 1919 – 11 July 1921) shelved initial plans to place a memorial in Merrion Square within the heart of Dublin. A monument to the 49,000 Irish citizens killed in British uniform was deemed in bad taste as that same uniform attempted to viciously suppress Irish nationalism. Indeed, the Croke Park massacre (21 November 1920) of fourteen civilians during a Gaelic Football match by Crown authorities occurred only a few kilometres from the proposed Merrion Square site.
The Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 – 24 May 1923) complicated matters further as the Irish Free State fragmented between the pro-government National Army and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). By late 1924, a new committee was formed to identify a suitable memorial site, yet six more years passed before ‘Longmeadows Estates’ was chosen, situated between the Inchicore railway works and Kilmainham Gaol. Now known as Islandbridge Park, it is much further from Dublin City centre than any other proposed site, away from the heart of the independent Irish state. However, W. T Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Free State, recognised that widespread pride in Great War service had survived the trauma of independence:
‘This is a big question of remembrance and honour to the dead […] a project so dear to a big section of the citizens should be a success’
The government also gave additional funding towards the construction of the memorial, which commenced in 1932 with the labour itself undertaken by Great War and National Army veterans to provide employment during the depression of the 1930s. Part of the work involved selecting separate English and Irish inscriptions to the dead, the English inscription reads:
TO THE MEMORY OF 49,000 IRISHMEN WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR. 1914-1918.
The Irish inscription bares a subtle but notable difference when directly translated into English:
I ndil-chuimhne ar 49,000 Éireannach do thuit sa Chogadh mhòr. 1914-1918.
In memory of 49,000 Irishmen who fell in the Great War. 1914-1918
The change from ‘gave their lives’ in English to ‘fell’ in Irish is intriguing, as a verbatim translation is possible. However, this would infer that by fighting with Britain, they died for Ireland, which clashed with the preferred national memory that placed the martyrs of the Easter Rising (1916) and the victims of the 1919-1923 period as those who truly died for Ireland. The wording also implies that the Great War dead lacked agency, as if they were passive victims who were forced to their deaths by colonial overlords. Seán MacEntee proposed both inscriptions, then Minister for Finance as well as a veteran of the Easter Rising and the defeated Civil War IRA forces, to Senator Andrew Jameson, one of the INWM’s key trustees. The inscriptions represented the government's stance towards these veterans, acknowledging their existence without accepting them as part of national ‘Irish’ folklore and identity.
In the meantime, the ‘Garden of Remembrance’ was opened in 1966 as part of the Easter Rising’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations in the central Dublin location of Parnell Square to commemorate not only Easter week 1916, but all citizens killed in pre-independence revolts and with the Irish Defence Forces. However, the opening of such a site was not without its own controversy due to the wounds left over from the Irish Civil War. The veterans of the defeated Irish Republican Army (IRA) and their relatives remained adamant that a memorial ‘to secur[ing] Independence’ could not exist without the existence of an independent 32-county Irish state. Nevertheless, inscriptions within the garden make for an interesting comparison to those at the INWM:
GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE – DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE CAUSE OF IRISH FREEDOM
Clearly, those who ‘gave their lives’ for Ireland did so in either nationalist rebellions or the Irish Defence Forces, not the British military. The fact that the opposing Irish language inscription is a literal translation of the English is also pertinent; all viewers receive the same message regarding the purpose of the memorial regardless of which inscription they read, which is not the case at the INWM.
The decades following 1966 were marred by an outpouring of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, the period known as ‘the Troubles’, which inevitably affected life within the Republic. The British Embassy in Dublin was torched on 2 February 1972, in response to another ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972) in Derry, where British troops killed fourteen Northern Irish civilians, whilst both Nationalist and Loyalist paramilitary organisations carried out a series of attacks in the Republic from the late-1960s onwards.
Furthermore, some sections of the Provisional IRA viewed the Troubles through the lens of the IRA’s Civil War defeat and likened the Irish Defence Forces and Garda Síochána (Irish police) to the former Crown authorities of Ireland. This feeling increased after the 1976 declaration of emergency by the Irish state, which enabled military deployments to aid Gardaí officers in keeping the peace. Images of British forces north of the border, coupled with tension between the IRA and the Irish state, brought the past back to life for thousands within the Republic. An estimated 30,000 War of Independence veterans were still alive in the mid-1970s, whilst the ghosts of the Civil War had been brought to light amongst political elites due to the Northern Irish situation. This problematised not only the commemoration of Irish veterans of both world wars but of many key Irish nationalist dates from Wolfe Tone’s failed 1798 rebellion to the conclusion of the Civil War in May 1923 due to fears of paramilitary violence at commemorative events.
Thus, the INWM was slowly reclaimed by nature despite coming under the jurisdiction of the Office of Public Works. Letters to the editors of The Irish Times, one of Ireland’s major periodicals, highlight the continued interest in commemorating Irish sacrifices in British uniform despite the turmoil of the Troubles. Mark McKeever, from Ardee, County Louth, wrote in the 4 May 1985 edition that, ‘it appears that these Irishmen who gave their lives for others have been forgotten and the promise made every 11 November is not kept’. A month later, Darren Fox (also from County Louth) decried the reliance on the RBL instead of an Irish association for commemorating such citizens, ‘Are we so dormant? Are we so psyched that we cannot form our own association to honour and commemorate those who fought in the two world wars’.
The Islandbridge site was restored throughout the 1980s, amidst a Dublin-wide scheme for regenerating the capital city after a period of national economic and social decline. The restored gardens were finally officially dedicated, by Church officials rather than the state itself, on 10 September, 1988. The dereliction of a once-proud memorial was described by Ruairí Quinn (Labour Party TD for Dublin South-East) as, ‘one of the great scandals of our society’ in Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas) shortly afterwards.
Finally, on 28 April 1995, Irish Second World War veterans gathered alongside politicians at the INWM to observe an address by then Taoiseach (Prime Minister), John Bruton. The Irish state officially recognised the sacrifices of the tens of thousands of Irish citizens who contributed to the Allied war effort, with a ‘1939-1945’ inscription added to the memorial. After fifty years of silence, Bruton paid tribute to the 150,000 volunteers from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. He declared, ‘in recalling their bravery, we are recalling a shared experience of Irish and British people. The sacrifice in the last war, and in the First World War, are part of a larger shared experience going back for a thousand years’.
Bruton’s address was the latest example of government representation at a commemorative event for ‘British’ veterans, and the first at the INWM. Mary Robinson began a presidential tradition of attending the Armistice service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1991, which Presidents Mary McAleese and Michael D. Higgins have since continued. This tradition was partly born out of the global atmosphere for commemorative events marking the golden jubilee of Allied victory in 1945, but also from broader Anglo-Irish desires for reconciliation and peace in Northern Ireland after decades of violence. The culmination of this process, which saw the states transition from opponents to partners, was the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Ireland in May 2011. The four-day itinerary included visits to both the INWM and the Garden of Remembrance, where the Queen laid wreaths during, ‘the week that Anglophobia died’, to quote an optimistic Fintan O’Toole. In fairness, it spoke volumes of the normalisation of relations since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that the British Monarch could make such an appearance in Ireland and visit a contested memorial, for the first time since independence, without incident.
Since the 2011 visit, the Irish state has announced ‘Project Ireland 2040’ (launched with the slogan ‘Building Ireland’s future’), which should further aid the connection between the INWM and the public. Part of the plans for national development includes the completion of Lutyens’ original vision to link the INWM to the much larger Phoenix Park via a pedestrian bridge across the River Liffey, granting greater access to the site. A competition to design this structure was won by Ritchie Studio in 2019, whose design poignantly incorporated boot prints along the walkway facing away from the memorial gardens to signify those who left Ireland, only to be buried elsewhere.
Despite the progressive nature of commemorative events in the Republic since the 1990s, the INWM is yet to become a nationally significant site for the Irish people. In a 2018 Seanad debate, Senator Frank Feighan remarked:
“I believe that 95% of the population in the Republic do not know where the memorial gardens are located even though they may drive by them virtually every day. Other countries give a higher profile to such sacrifice […] the gardens were conveniently located in the countryside because people wanted to airbrush this part of our history”.
Shortly before his death in September 1916, Irish Parliamentary Party MP and Irish nationalist Thomas Michael Kettle famously remarked that he would be only remembered as a ‘bloody British officer’ for his service on the Western Front with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. The long shadow of British rule in Ireland is such that the commemoration of Irish citizens in British uniform may never become a mainstream, or ‘popular’, social event. However, the renovation of the INWM and repeated state visits on 11 November go some way to demonstrating gratitude for the sacrifices of those commemorated by the memorial as well as proving Yeats wrong – perhaps the dead will live forever.
Further Reading
Robert Fitzroy Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Penguin, 2001).
Brian Hanley, The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968-1979 (Manchester University Press, 2019).
Bernard Kelly, Returning Home: Irish Ex-Servicemen after the Second World War (Merrion, 2012).
Jason Myers, The Great War and Memory in Irish Culture, 1918-2010 (Academia, 2013).
Alex Pomeroy is joint Co-Ordinating Editor at EPOCH and a postgraduate researcher at Lancaster University. His current research involves investigating histories of memory and cultural identity surrounding the Second World War in the Republic of Ireland., which is sponsored by the ESRC. His secondary research interests involve air power during the Second World War, and the interaction of sport, particularly football, with state and society.
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