Remembering

Victims’ Remembrance in Northern Ireland

In November, 2023, I Remembered for the first time.

On a gently sloping hill, about fifty people gathered in a churchyard in Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh. Most were dressed for the occasion, sporting poppies, in the British style with a green leaf symbolizing hope. As the warm autumn sun bathed my face, a chill wind on my back foretold the approach of winter.

I would have to say I arrived with mixed feelings. Though about 200,000 Irishmen fought in WW1, Remembrance and the poppy have long been treated with disdain in the Republic because of their association with the British military. “Ah no, the poppy doesn’t work down here,” I was told in the Republic.

By contrast, Northern Protestants treat the occasion with the utmost seriousness. It also felt to me, as it does to many others, that in their effort to honour those who fought, those who celebrated were glorifying war itself. Moreover, as a confirmed atheist, I thought myself above the religious overtones of such occasions.

This ceremony caused me to rethink things. Organized by the South East Fermanagh Foundation, it was as much a memorial to victims of the Troubles—Catholic, Protestant, green, orange—as a recognition of those who fought in two world wars.

The crowd shuffled and murmured. A group of schoolchildren in blue uniforms, quietly chattering, assembled around the memorial. At 11:00, prayers and bible readings began, intoned solemnly to mumbled Amens.

I followed the prayers on the pamphlet, noting the repeated reference to “who have lost their lives in war or acts of terrorism” —not just those who fought, but those who suffered in pointless conflict. The forlorn bugle and tearful bagpipes echoed across the graves; two minutes of silence, then the laying of wreaths, first by families of victims. One approached in uniform, rigidly saluting before the memorial; most were sad civilians, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters of victims of the Troubles. Each of the schoolchildren laid a wreath in turn.

In this scarred community, there was no glory, just pain. In a world that makes no sense, who could blame them for turning to their shared faith to make sense of it all?

Unprompted, W.H. Auden’s lines from “As I Walked Out”, a poem about love and the ravages of time, popped into my mind,

O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

We stand not alone, but together, crooked, flawed beings in this tearful world; all we have is each other; all we have to give each other is love.

The ceremony ended. The crowd shuffled down to the church hall for hot soup and buttered wheaten bread. Outside, I struck up a conversation with an older man, grey, wrinkled, but proud, eyes shining with his faith in Jesus. He was a retired ambulance driver, he told me. I said he must have seen some terrible things.

“I’ll tell ye, I’ve seen many things,” he said, “but there’s one thing I’ve never seen: orange blood. Or green blood.”

He then told me how God so loved the world that he gave His only Son. But that’s a story for another day.