Michael Moynihan: Living in a time of greater diversity than could have ever been imagined

A good few hours were wasted in sixth year taking in the opposite view — looking up through the windows at the back of the classroom at the distant Barracks: as a distraction from the antics of Gearoid Mór Mac Gearailt or French irregular verbs, we stared out at the distant buildings and wondered what was going on up there.

Well, I found out last Sunday. The event which brought me up Summerhill North, to begin with, was the National Day of Commemoration, which was held last weekend in the Barracks.

This is an annual ceremony dedicated to all Irish men and women who have died in past wars or on service with the United Nations, and last weekend was the first time the ceremony was held outside the capital, which meant the big hitters were on hand.

Members of the Cabinet and the Council of State, the Lord Mayor, the diplomatic corps, the Taoiseach, the President — all were much in evidence. Yours truly was present along with na maithe agus na mór uaisle, to use a term favoured by a good pal of this column, though usually delivered with tongue firmly in cheek.

I ironed the good shirt and like to think I didn’t bring the tone down.

The weather held so the ceremony didn’t suffer because of rain or wind, though the big tricolour snapped ominously overhead a few times. The vast square wasn’t too crowded, so the officer’s orders as Gaeilge to the guard of honour were audible, as was the stamp of their feet when they marched through to be inspected by the President.

What was particularly affecting about the commemoration was the lack of lengthy speeches. There was a brief flurry of protocol-related niceties and introductions — the Taoiseach had to invite the President to place the wreath formally, for instance — and then the representatives of various faiths and beliefs spoke briefly on the matter at hand: remembering those who died.

In that context, it was good to hear Private Sean Rooney being remembered by more than one of the speakers last Sunday.

Last December Private Rooney was killed on duty with the UN in Al-Aqbiya in Lebanon, and his colleague Trooper Shane Kearney was seriously injured in the same incident. 

It occurred so recently that it underlined the importance of the ceremony and brought the fallen of past decades into sharper focus. In the audience, listening to Private Rooney being mentioned, were plenty of men with the medals and bearing to suggest they had seen foreign fields themselves, and could remember others who had fallen while wearing the bright blue of the UN.

(There were closer connections all around the audience, of course. Trooper Kearney’s home unit is 1 Cavalry Squadron in Collins Barracks, somewhere behind the VIPs in the main square.)

Those who spoke to commemorate the dead struck the right note, then, and not just in acknowledging the sacrifice made by Sean Rooney a long way from home.

Representing the Jewish faith, Maurice Cohen articulated the eternal tension between the wish for peace and the reality of conflict, saying: “We are internally conflicted on the cost of our conflicts. As idealists, we wish there were never any need for Defence Forces. Yet as pragmatists, we know that we could not do without them: As dreamers, we wish only that nation not threaten nation, and humankind not know war. Yet as realists, we accept that there are circumstances where force must be met with force.”

The parade square in Collins Barracks was a particularly appropriate place to hear that point being made, of course. Just over a hundred years ago it had another name and the uniforms being worn by its occupants were very different.

So was their outlook. I’ve written here before about Vive Moi!, Seán Ó Faoláin’s memoir, which deals in some detail with his early life in Cork. Sitting in the huge square in Collins Barracks last weekend I was reminded of one of the more evocative passages in the book, which details particular Sunday mornings in the early 1900s when Ó Faoláin’s father, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, would muster his sons for a particular outing.

“On these special mornings, my father would lead the three of us up our all too familiar Saint Luke’s or Wellington Road, and on beyond it to Wellington Barracks, under the arch, into the barrack square, there to join other loyal citizens watching the church parade of whatever regiment was quartered on us at the time.

“I have forgotten now what form of drill took place. All I remember is that either the Union Jack or else the regimental flag was shown, and that at the end the regimental band solemnly played ‘God Save the King’.

“As we walked away my father would be completely silent, or he would touch a stone in a wall bearing the broad arrow and the carved letters WD (War Department) and nod at us sagely and proudly. We belonged.”

The irony will not be lost on any reader, of course, that within a few years, Ó Faoláin himself would be in the IRA and fighting in the War of Independence against the very forces his father represented. Or that the awesome, overwhelming power represented by the rendition of ‘God Save The King’ and the flying Union Jack would be removed from the square in the Barracks, and replaced with a different flag and a different anthem.

That change, in a relatively short period of time, isn’t just a matter of changing the colour on a passport. The difference in outlook over the course of a century ranges over a wide field — from an anthem booming out in triumph in Ó Faoláin’s time to the gentle acknowledgement of loss we heard on Sunday.

That change also encompasses a greater diversity than could have been imagined when the Ó Faoláin brothers were making their slow way uphill through St Luke’s. On Sunday, Maurice Cohen’s comments came directly after the Imam Sheikh Hussein Halawa shared verses from the Quran and asked Allah to bless Ireland: a long way from God Save The King, and a marker of a different, better country.

It wasn’t all about seismic, generational change either last weekend. After the ceremony, a couple of people ahead of me recalled another musical interlude they’d enjoyed in the Barracks — the summer evening back in 2005 when Andrea Bocelli entertained over ten thousand people in the great square.

“It was just one of those great Cork nights,” said one of them. “You know what I mean?”

I did. We had just had a great Cork day, after all.