We owe it to lost generation to spend our lives working for perpetual peace

The last few years have shown we can work together

ON Sunday, I will have the privilege of laying a wreath on behalf of the Irish Government at the Belfast Cenotaph in honour of all those from this island who died in the First World War.

We take this moment, a century on from the Armistice, to remember them, to pay tribute to their sacrifice and to mourn their loss. In doing so, we join with people across these islands and across the continent of Europe, and worldwide. An event of impossible human destruction is now commemorated collectively in a powerful symbol of our shared commitment to peace.

On this island, it has not always been so. As Irish Parliamentary Party MP Stephen Gwynn said: “When the time came to rejoice over the war’s ending, was there anything more tragic than the position of men who had gone out by the thousands to confront the greatest military power ever known in history, who had fought the war, and won the war, and now looked at each other with doubtful eyes?”

That doubtfulness foreshadowed later times when there was too much forgetfulness, neglect or ambivalence in too many quarters about the place of those men and women in the history of this island.

However, in the last decades I believe we have seen this transformed. Approaching the centenaries of the last several years, it was by no means clear that we would navigate them in a way that paid proper respect to the part they had in shaping the history, traditions, identities and lived experience of all the people of this island. It was by no means inevitable that we would mark these moments in a way that brought us closer together and gave us a better understanding of one another.

Now we can look back and remember together the quiet dignity and shared purpose that characterised the high ceremonies of state of the last number of years. We remember President McAleese and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth (left) side by side and bowing their heads in respect in both the Garden of Remembrance and in Islandbridge. We remember President Michael D Higgins laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey during his State visit. We remember the Taoiseach and Prince William together honouring the memories of the 36th Ulster and 16th Irish Division under the round tower of the Island of Ireland Peace Park in Messines, 10 decades after those men fought shoulder to shoulder.

Those moments, and the many others like them, were powerful. They opened up new spaces for everyone and inspired us to move into them. Where forgetfulness had built up, they reminded us. Where there was a sense that there was some unseen line that we perhaps should not cross, they swept it away. They left us closer together than we had been.

However, they did not do so in isolation and in fact they did not lead the way. They built on the

imaginative and patient work of a generation of people — professional and amateur historians, community leaders, church leaders, journalists, campaigners, and others from all parts of this island — who had refused to accept the artificial parcelling out of a shared history to different groups and traditions, but wanted us to remember the lives and loss of the sons of Ulster, Leinster, Connacht and Munster all. They built on the work of all those who were not only open to new ideas and stories, new partners and audiences, but sought them out.

I have been glad and proud that the Reconciliation Fund in my own department has been able in a small way to support dozens of projects in that spirit in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

As always, such transformation and such achievements must be built on if they are to be preserved at all. For the island of Ireland, the decade of centenaries of events that shaped our modern history continues. We will again have to rise to the challenge of remembering those events in our shared history in a way that is authentic and honest and rigorous and respectful of others. We have to do it in a way that enhances our understanding of our history, and our understanding of each other.

We have to do all this while finding our way through the political challenges of the moment. I am confident we will. What we have done together in the last few years has shown that we can.

In the Summer of 1916, Tom Kettle wrote to his family promising, “if I live I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace”. Eleven days later he was cut down while leading his men of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers in what was described as a “tempest of fire” in Ginchy in France.

We owe it to him and all the youth of his generation to take up that promise.