Remembering the boy from Tralee

By Robert Fisk (from the Irish Independent 17/04/06. Click entry title for link to original article)


MORE than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with an Irish friend.
She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped around Padraig Pearse's neck for the militarily hopeless but politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916.
But she displayed an equally admirable suspicion of British - or "English" as she would have put it - intentions towards Ireland, north and south. Her mother once recalled for me a British military raid on their home in County Carlow. "I was a little girl and one of the soldiers patted me on the head and I told him: 'You keep your hands off me.'"
But at Ypres one evening, beneath the great Menin Gate - upon which are carved the names of 54,896 First World War British soldiers whose bodies were never found - my friend faced a real political challenge.
She had noted, among those thousands, the names of hundreds of young Irishmen who had died in British uniform while their countrymen at home were fighting and dying in battle against the same British Army. She looked at one of the names. "Why in God's name," she asked, "was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?"
And it was at this point that an elderly man approached us and asked my Irish friend to sign the visitors' book.
She looked at the British Army's insignia on the memorial volume with distaste. There was the British crown glimmering in the evening light. And the Belgian firemen who nightly play the Last Post beneath the gate were already taking position. There was not much time. But my friend remembered the young man from Tralee.
She thought about her own small Catholic nation and its centuries of suffering and she realised that the boy from Tralee had gone to fight - or so he thought - for little Catholic Belgium. She decided to inscribe the British Army's book in the Irish language. "Na tiortha beaga," she wrote "For little countries."
All this happened years before an economically powerful and self-confident Irish Republic would face up to the sacrifice its pre-independence soldiers made in British uniform; the estimated 35,000 Irishmen who died in the 1914-18 war wildly outnumber the few hundred who fought in the Easter Rising.
The total of dead, wounded and missing among Irish Protestants in the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Somme and at Ypres came to 32,180. The same statistics among soldiers of the 10th and 16th Irish Divisions - most of them Catholics - amounted to 37,761.
My own father was to fight alongside the Irish on the Somme in 1918 although - a fact I used to keep quiet about when I was 'The Times's' correspondent in Belfast in the early 1970s - he was originally sent to Ireland in the aftermath of the Rising.
I have a faded photograph of Bill Fisk, then in the Cheshire Regiment, kissing the Blarney Stone, and some pictures he took of the front gate of Victoria Barracks - now Collins Barracks - in Cork, its stonework plastered with appeals to Irishmen to join the British Army.
It was only when I was invited to give the annual Bloody Sunday memorial lecture in Derry - the first Brit to be asked to honour the memory of the 14 people who were killed by a Parachute Regiment in 1972 - that I talked about my dad's fight against Sinn Fein.
If Padraig Pearse had not raised the flag over the Dublin Post office in Easter Week of 1916, I told my audience, Bill Fisk might have been sent to die in the first Battle of the Somme three months later - and his son Robert would not exist. So did I owe my life to Pearse? I'm still not at all sure how to regard the men of 1916.
The very best book on the Rising - George Dangerfield's magnificent 'The Damnable Question' - proves that the "rebels" (as my father called them) were very brave as well as very dismissive of their own and others' lives. They were not to know the deviant way in which their "blood sacrifice" - which was not exactly the first in Irish history - would be adopted by later armed groups who sought their mandate in blood shed before those 1916 British execution parties.
Had they not been so cruelly shot down as punishment for their armed assault on British power, would they have been so honoured in the long, dark, stagnant Ireland of the 1920s and 30s and then in the terrible and much later years of the civil conflict in Northern Ireland? Do you have to be a martyr to have honour?
I was much struck by this thought five years ago when I was searching through the British National Archives at Kew for details of the execution of a young Australian soldier in the British Army whom my father was ordered to shoot at the end of the First World War.
Bill Fisk refused, so another officer performed the dirty deed. But there in the documents of British military executions - routinely filed under 1916 - were the names of Pearse and Connolly and McBride. The exemplary punishment accorded to them and their comrades in Dublin turned public scorn to sympathy and admiration. But to the Brits, it was just another act of military law.
And now the minister for defence tells us the military Easter Rising pomp in Dublin this weekend symbolises the end of the war in the North. Maybe.
But who will remember the boy from the Station House, Tralee? ©Independent news service

Addendum

The Photograph above is the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial Messines, Belgium opened jointly by President McAleese, Queen Elizabeth II and King Albert II of Belgium in 1998, Messines was the site of the only major engaement in WWI where soldiers from all parts of Ireland fought and died together.

President McAleese's comments at the opening are quite poingnant for someone such as myslef whose father and grandfater served in WWII and WWI respectively:

"Today’s ceremony at the Peace Park was not just another journey down a well-travelled path. For much of the past eighty years, the very idea of such a ceremony would probably have been unthinkable. Those whom we commemorate here were doubly tragic. They fell victim to a war against oppression in Europe. Their memory too fell victim to a war for independence at home in Ireland."

Click here for more information on the Memorial Park