On Tuesday, 23rd and Wednesday 24th March, 2010, following Turkish Victory Day on 18th March and as part of a Pilgrimage to the Dardanelles to commemorate the 95th Anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign (Çanakkale Savaşlari), the Somme Association held two unique Services of Remembrance for the 10th (Irish) Division in the First World War. This afternoon, with senior colleagues from the Somme Association and the Chairman of Dalaradia, Robert Williamson, I attended A Service of Commemoration to mark the centenary of the Campaign in Christchirch Cathedral, Lisburn.

The Gallipoli Campaign was initiated on 25th April 1915 (ANZAC Day) and lasted until 9th January 1916, with the British objective of capturing the Ottoman Capital of Istanbul and relieve Russia. It was badly organised and resulted in a Turkish victory but losses on both sides were enormous due to the exceptional fighting abilities of the opposing armies. Half a million men fought in each and casualties for both were a quarter of a million men.

Following the failure of the Anglo-French naval force to drive a passage through the Dardanelles in order to capture Istanbul, the allies decided to capture the Turkish forts overlooking the straits by a land invasion. At dawn on 25th April 1915, troops of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force landed on the Gallipoli peninsula. The plan was for the 29th Division and the Royal Navy Division to advance rapidly north from Cape Helles, and for the Australians and New Zealanders (ANZAC) to land on the west coast with the intention of crossing the peninsula and so preventing Turkish reinforcements from moving south.

The landings at Cape Helles did not go well because of strong Turkish resistance, the Ottoman Imperial forces including Kurds and Armenians, and the initial targets of the village of Krithia and the high ground of Achi Baba were never achieved. The Australians and New Zealanders fared little better. Because the Royal Navy commanders had underestimated the effect of the tidal current on the west coast, they were landed some 2,000 metres north of their proposed landing place and came under intense fire from the Turkish defenders.

After three months of bitter fighting the allies at Cape Helles had made little headway against determined opposition, while the ANSAC were pinned down by a series of of Turkish attacke, augmented by constant accurate sniper fire, one famously by a woman soldier. The British Government reluctantly decided to break the stalemate by making a fresh landing at Suvla Bay using the 9th Army Corps.. The 10th (Irish) Division was in this force and it included units from all the Irish infantry regiments. They made an opposed landing at Suvla Bay in early August.

Immediately prior to this attack the Australians and New Zealanders made a determined attack to capture the high ground at Chunuk Blair. The Wellington Battalion captured this high ground and held it for 48 hours before being overwhelmed by a Turkish counter-attack. The New Zealand attackers were the only troops of the entire force who caught sight of their ultimate objective – the Dardanelles – whilst holding Chunuk Blair.

The Gallipoli Campaign resounded profoundly on all nations. In both Turkey and Ireland it was a defining moment in history and laid the foundations of the Turkish and Irish Wars of Independence. For Turkey it meant the rise of the great military commander, Kemal Atatürk, who fought here and is justly considered the Father of the Turkish Nation. It was also the first major battle of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and marks the birth of national consciousness in both countries.

On 23rd March at Green Hill Cemetery, Gallipoli, the Somme Association’s President , His Royal Highness The Duke of Gloucester, KG, GCVO in the presence of Civic Dignitaries and Old Comrades’ Associations from throughout Ireland laid a single wreath to the memory of all those who fought in the Gallipoli Campaign. He then planted and dedicated four Myrtle trees, one for each of the Provinces of Ireland from which they came, to the 12,000 Volunteers of the 10th (Irish) Division, of whom more than 4,000 lost their lives. Throughout the Mediterranean World the Myrtle is a symbol of Love and Immortality, its scent the scent of Paradise. The area would henceforth be known as the Duke of Gloucester’s Grove. Following this, His Royal Highness unveiled the Association’s Memorial to the former combatants.

On 24th March at Green Hill Cemetery, Gallipoli, a second Service of Remembrance was held in the presence of Her Excellency, Mary McAleese, President of Ireland. Her Excellency dedicated a plaque to the memory of the individual Regiments who formed the 10th (Irish) Division, their Comrades-in-Arms and their brave Turkish adversaries. The nine Regiments were the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Inniskillen Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Connaught Rangers, the Leinster Regiment, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment.

Speaking at the events, as the Chairman of the Somme Association, I said that I was delighted that both HRH The Duke of Gloucester and Her Excellency the President of Ireland had accepted the invitation to attend the ceremonies. The Duke, as quondam Earl of Ulster, had agreed to follow his late mother, The Princess Alice, as President of the Somme Association, and he was Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Anglian Regiment, the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps, a true ANZAC. Princess Alice was fondly remembered in Northern Ireland because of her visit there following the Befast Blitz of 1941. President McAleese was well known for her work in bringing the two communities in Northern Ireland closer together, particularly through the establishment of the Irish Tower at Messines in Belgium. In attending this ceremony in Gallipoli she had proved herself to be a truly great President of Ireland.

I quoted the famous statement of Kemal Atatürk in 1935 to the mothers of the Allied soldiers:

“Uzak memleketin topraklari üstünde kanlarini döken kahramanlar:
Burada dost bir vatanin toprağindasiniz.
Huzur ve sükun içinde uyuyunuz.
Sizler Mehmetçiklerle yan yana, koyun koyunasiniz.
Uzak diyarlardan evlatlarini harbe gönderen analar;
Gözyaşlarinizi dindiriniz, evlatlarini,bizim bağrimizdadir.
Huzur içinde rahat rahat uyuyacaklardir.
Bu toprakta verdikten sonra artik bizim evlatlarimiz olmşlardir.”

“Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives…
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country- therefore rest in peace.
You lie side by side here in this country of ours with Turkish soldiers…
You, the mothers, who sent their sons
from far away countries, wipe away your tears;
your sons are now lying in our bosom and will rest in peace.
After having lost their lives on this land
They have become our sons as well…!

Echoing the words of the former President of Turkey, Süleyman Demirel, 15 years previously, when the Somme Association first came to Gallipoli I went on:

“Bir zamanlar birbirine karşi savaşirken
Hayatlarini kaybetmiş yüzbinlerce genç insan
Topraklarimizda; Gelibolu Yarimadasi’nda
Mehmetçiklerle kucak kucağa kefensiz yatmaktadirlar.
Bu ibret ve hüzün dolu tablo insanliğa
‘Barişin değerini bilin’ diyor.
Ne mutlu anlayana;
Ne mutlu Insanlik ve Bariş için canlarini feda edenlere…”

” Hundreds of thousands of young men fought and gave their lives here in the Gallipoli Peninsula. It presents a picture of sadness beyond belief. So we must tell the world that they must appreciate Peace so that these men will not have lost their lives in vain “.

I finished by addressing the 10th (Irish) Division itself.

To the sons of Ulster and to the sons of Ireland we say:-

“Sons of Ulster, soldiers of Ireland. Do not be anxious. The War is over – both here and in your beloved Ireland. The Western Front is no more and Ireland, at last, is at peace with herself and with her people. But we will always remember you, so long as the sun shines and the rain falls and the wind blows on Suvla Bay”

And in Ulster Gaelic:

Inniu, deir muid le fir Uladh agus le fir na hÉireann:-

“A Fheara Uladh agus a Shaighdiúiri na hÉireann, ná biodh imni oraibh. Tá an Cogadh thart-ni amháin san áit seo, ch in bhur dtír dhílis féin in Éirinn. Níl an Fronta Thiar ann níos mó, agus, sa deireadh, tá tír na hÉireann fàoi shíocháin léi féin agus len a pobal.

Ach cuimhneochaidh muid oraibh go deo, fhad is a shoilsíonn an ghrian agus a thiteann an fhearthainn agus fhad is a shéideann an ghaoth ar Bháigh Suvla”

Today, as Vice-President of the Somme Association, President of the Ullans Academy and Patron of the Dalaradia organisation, I attended, with a senior colleague, the State Commemoration of the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. I had been invited by Heather Humphreys, T.D. on behalf of the government of the Irish Republic, this being the start of the official  calendar marking the 100th anniversary of the events of 1916.

The Irish president Michael D. Higgins, prime minister Enda Kenny, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Chriona Ní Dhálaigh and government ministers took part. Although he died in exile in 1915, the Fenian leader, who fought for Irish independence, was buried in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. His original funeral is seen as a pivotal moment in Irish history. Several of those who attended went on to take part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Fifteen hundred members of the public who applied for tickets attended. Members of the diplomatic corps, including from the UK, were in attendance as well as members of the extended O’Donovan Rossa family whose ancestor spent long periods in British jails for his activities. Large screens showed the event outside the cemetery where there was a public viewing area, with spaces for up to 5,000 people.

In the 1850s, O’Donovan Rossa was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) known colloquially as the Fenians, a reference to Na Fianna, the legendary band of Gaelic warriors who had conquered Ireland from our Cruthin and Belgic ancestors in Irish mythology. The IRB was a small, secret, revolutionary body committed to the use of force to establish an independent Irish republic.

O’Donovan Rossa was imprisoned in various jails in England for his activities and later moved to New York following his release, continuing his efforts to oppose British rule in Ireland. After his death, his remains were brought to Ireland by the American liner St Paul from New York to Liverpool. They were then transferred to the steamer Carlow, which carried them to Dublin.

At the original funeral, the Easter Rising leader Padraig Pearse delivered the oration as follows and this was enacted beautifully by Jim Roche today.

It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have laid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa, that one among us should, in the name of all, speak the praise of that valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I, rather than some other, rather than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme. I propose to you then that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that, here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa.

Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in to-day’s task and duty, are bound together and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom: it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition. Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and their definition.

We stand at Rossa’s grave not in sadness but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given to us to come thus into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael. Splendid and holy causes are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. O’Donovan Rossa was splendid in the proud manhood of him, splendid in the heroic grace of him, splendid in the Gaelic strength and clarity and truth of him. And all that splendour and pride and strength was compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Ireland, to all that was olden and beautiful and Gaelic in Ireland, the holiness and simplicity of patriotism of a Michael O’Clery or of an Eoghan O’Growney. The clear true eyes of this man almost alone in his day visioned Ireland as we of to-day would surely have her: not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well.

In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before or perhaps ever again, in a spiritual communion with those of his day, living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons to-day, and speaking on their behalf as well as our own, we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate. This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 are coming to their miraculous ripening to-day. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

In his welcoming speech, John Green, Chairman of the Glasnevin Trust put these words in context, as O’Donovan Rossa later thought differently about his role as an “unrepentant Fenian”, repudiating violence and supporting the John Redmond ideal of Home Rule for Ireland rather than that Pearse ideal, based on Gaelic nationalism, which seems so out-of-date today.

The Manapians or Menapii were a tribe of Belgae (Fir Bolg in Gaelic) originating in northern Gaul in pre-Roman and Roman times. According to descriptions in such authors as Strabo, Caesar, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy  their territory had stretched northwards to the mouth of the Rhine in the north, but more lastingly it stretched along the west of the Schelde. In later geographical terms this territory corresponds roughly to the modern coast of Flanders, the Belgian provinces of Oost and West Flanderen. It also extended into neighbouring France and the river deltas of the southern Netherlands. They may well have been a Germanic-speaking people with Celtic over-lords. It was the Manapians along with the Morini and other Northern tribes who maintained an independent Gaulish area following Caesar’s campaign of 57 BC, when he massacred 50,000 Belgic warriors at the earliest recorded Battle on the Somme.

Peter Shirlow is a Professor in the School of Law at the Queen’s University of Belfast, now Professor of Conflict Transformation there and a key member of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice (ISCTSJ), which is linked to the Causeway Institute for Peace-building and Conflict Resolution, founded by my friends Jeffrey and Kingsley Donaldson. Shirlow’s latest book The End of Ulster Loyalism? was published in 2012 by Manchester University Press. In this book he advises that “Using their experience as a deterrent, Loyalists can show the motivations behind violence and how these were misplaced, and the burdens imprisonment placed upon family members. Doing so is an invaluable way of transmitting lessons about the past, dispelling myths and falsehoods and discouraging its repetition.” “One myth located within loyalism is that the Cruithin as (sic) the original stock of Ulster driven out by the Celts. Therefore the Plantation of Ulster was a reclaiming of a homeland. Much of that work has been produced by Adamson (1991).There is no archaeological evidence for such a people”

The growing economic and political power of the new republicans in  British North America prior to the Revolutionary War proved threatening to other sections of American society, who stayed decidedly Loyalist, including many Catholic Jacobites from the Highlands of Scotland, who had fought the House of Hanover in the 1745 rebellion and remembered the defeat of 1715, but who became staunch Loyalists because of the generous treatment they received in America from their former adversaries. Various “cultural minorities”, fearful of an increase in the power of the majority, often sought British help or protection – New Rochelle, for example, the only place where the French Calvinists still spoke French, was an area of substantial Huguenot Loyalism.

As the American Revolution gained momentum, the Indian peoples made some attempt at neutrality, but generally they favoured the British Government. They had no enthusiasm for the westward-pushing, uncontrollable colonial settlers who coveted their lands, and believed that the British Government, rather than the Americans, would be the most likely to seek restraints over this movement. Nothing highlights this allegiance better than the careers of the prominent Loyalists who emerged from among the Mohawk people, such as John Deserontyon, Aaron Hill and Joseph Brant, who commanded the Iroquois nations with great skill on the British side during the Revolutionary War. Even today Chief Earl Hill of the Tyendinaga Mohawk Nation, whom I met with Ed Kenny of the Ulster Accordian Band in Canada, still professes that his people “were proud of their status and designation as United Empire Loyalists”.

A delegation from the Mohawk nation came to Ulster in 1990 to attend the tercentenary celebrations of the Battle of the Boyne. During their visit they were no doubt made aware of the divisions which still run deep within Irish society as a consequence of that battle. This division must have seemed quite unnecessary to them, for in their own communities – in which Orange Lodges sit alongside self-help workshops – Protestants and Catholics are fully integrated and work together as Mohawks. It is surely high time that the communities in Ulster began that same process of integration, so that a new generation might finally escape the burden which our past history has for too long imposed upon us. As Chief Dan George has reminded us: “What wonders are children expecting while we hand them our problems? What hopes do we nourish in them while we are leading them into despair?”

I thought of the Loyalists when I stood at the memorial in Philadelphia to the unknown British Soldier of the Revolutionary War, which I was shown by my friend Paul Loane. For as many as one in three Americans had remained Loyal to George III. But in 1783 Britain finally signed a treaty with its rebellious American colonists, abandoning tens of thousands of people who were still deeply attached to the British crown. To the 12,000 refugees who had fled from the Rebels to make a new home in the swamps of Florida it was a disaster. As it was, too, for the 20,000 Black slaves who had rebelled against their masters to fight for the King. From the Southern ports of Charleston and Savannah alone, fearing dreadful reprisals, more than 20,000 loyalists, slaves and soldiers were evacuated by the Royal Navy. In New York City, originally Iroquois Mohawk territory and the heartland of Loyalism, 30,000 people left for new lives in the Maritimes and Nova Scotia, while 2,500 travelled to Quebec and the Bahamas. This was the largest civilian evacuation in American history. There they created their “own imperial answer to the United States” and a “Loyal America in contrast to the republican America they had fled”. It became known as Canada, which in Iroquois Kannata means Village or Settlement.

In 1872 Lord Dufferin of Clandeboye became the third Governor General of Canada, bolstering imperial ties in the early years of the Dominion, and in 1884 he reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic career as eighth Viceroy of India. His statue, with a Canadian Trapper on one side and an Indian Sepoy on the other, sits in the grounds of the City Hall Belfast. I used to look out at it from my office as Lord Mayor of Belfast and latterly from the High Sheriff’s office. My friend, Lady Lindy Guinness, the last Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, is very proud of her ancestry from him. I have visited her often to speak of matters historical, and it was at her home many years ago I first met Van Morrison, Robert Kee and her then Chef Stephen Jeffers… She is descended, of course, from the ancient Cruthin kings and queens of Iveagh and the ancient British kings and queens of Albion, that country of perfidious renown.

In Africa, Loyalist exiles also established what was meant to be a utopian settlement, built by 1,000 Black slaves who had escaped to Canada, but who wished to built a new life in the land of ther ancestors. Partly organised and funded by Abolitionists, the new settlement of Freetown, however, eventually became yet another British Colony, Sierra Leone, run by white men for their own benefit, its history stained by endless riots and rebellions. Yet Freetown’s story was more than a chronicle of broken promises and false hopes. For the people who settled there achieved a greater degree of freedom than they could have had or probably still have in the United States of America. In a sense the American Loyalists were victors after all.

Perhaps one of the most important pieces of myth-making in recent history has been the article by the Irish-American scholar J.P. Mallory, formerly of the Department of Archaeology, Queen’s University, Belfast..This article named Two perspectives on the problem of Irish Origins appeared in Focus on the Origins of the Irish, Bulletin of the Navan Research Group, Number nine, 1991.The article is extremely clever and subtly executed.

Mallory states immediately “ that Irish is employed throughout this paper in a purely linguistic sense to identify both those who produced our earliest Irish records and those who spoke a language immediately ancestral to our earliest recorded documents and in no way implies any particular ethnic, racial or archaeological group”..Fine, but not strictly true..for the language itself is called Gaeilge and the “Irish” epithet for it is a relatively modern one.

But having defined “Irish” as a language he goes on to contradict himself, saying that “The Irish arrived in Ireland with a mixed agriculture-stockbreeding economy which is indicated both by the names of plants and animals and by terms associated with the technology of farming”. So we were moved from an article on Gaelic linguistics to a people whom he defines as “the Irish” who spoke “Irish” and he continues to speak of “the Irish” throughout the rest of his article.

Mallory gets over the obvious inconsistency of all this by referring to those inhabitants who constituted the bulk of the population of Ireland before the arrival of “the Irish” as “Irelanders”, thus creating an ”Irish/Irelander” myth and denying the epithet of “Irish” to the original inhabitants..His problem was that those inhabitants are actually the ancient British Pretani or Cruthin. This constitutes a form of cultural imperialism which would be accepted nowhere else in the world. Yet, because of it, the Northern Ireland Office here instructed its operatives to treat my views on the subject as “eccentric” or “loyalist”.

But it goes further than that. Mallory’s colleague in the Navan Research Group, the Englishman Richard B. Warner, formerly of the Department of Antiquities, Ulster Museum, Belfast, tried incessantly to downplay the Cruthin. In the radio programme The Cruthin.- A Common Culture, BBC Radio Ulster 12.07.89 he stated that the Cruthin were “rather minor and they are rather unimportant and they made very little influence on Irish power or politics”, a remarkably inaccurate statement for any academic to make and “rather” stupid. And in his retirement interview for the Belfast Telegraph he revelled in his opposition to the Cruthin.

 What more can you say.?  I rest my case.