Kevin Myers: Oh God. Not another diary about the first bloody World War. 'Fraid so. Here goes. When Donal Hall began the project of recording the list of Louth dead of the war, some people joked that he was striving to write the shortest book of the year.
Indeed, initially he was much of the same opinion himself, thinking the project might last a couple of weeks. In fact, it took him four years to record details of the 800 Louth victims of the war, in which at least (and "at least" is putting it mildly) 3,000 men of the county must have served.
Donal's pioneering study is further proof - though none were needed - of the heroic feat of amnesia which occurred in Irish life in the decades after independence. In Louth, the calamity which befell 800 families in just four years was in time virtually abolished from general memory - though according to Donal Hall's research the hostility towards ex-servicemen and Armistice Day ceremonies which was commonplace in other parts of Ireland after the war was almost entirely absent from Louth.
In more recent years, the county has created a freshly poisonous image for itself: it has even elected as TD a man who was a member of the organisation that abducted, tortured and brutally murdered a local man, Tom Oliver. But in 1914, when the Irish National Volunteers split over John Redmond's decision to support the British war effort, only 20 of the 4,000 members there defected to "republicanism". And just 100 Louth men took part in the 1916 Rising - at the very most, some 3 per cent of the number who served in the trenches or on the high seas in the allied cause.
Partition, of course, then created fresh animosities in people's souls. Ireland came to be seen not as a home for different peoples with different loyalties, but solely as an ideologically indivisible geopolitical concept. So nationalist Ireland went into an official, decades-long sulk over the Border, which triggered an almost pathological political amnesia.
The loss of memory is not just a negative force. It can empower people to create the blank page upon which they can then create their own preferred history. So the grey spectres of Flanders and Jutland slunk off to their pages in still unwritten history books, while independent Ireland created the authorised narrative: of the Easter rising, of the martyred dead, of flying columns routing dastardly Black and Tans.
Decades of butchery in the North undermined that tale, thought it lived on in Fianna Fáil souls. And this coming year it is due for a resurgence, as the Government attempts to relocate the Rising back into the heart of our national identity. Why? For it is not simply a matter of history. The Easter Rising, and the foul and unnecessary war that followed, serve today as the template for and the authoriser of contemporary paramilitarism. The IRA has still not gone away. And it is impossible for the State officially to celebrate the Rising, and the beginning of a catastrophic six-year fratricidal war, without effectively endorsing illegal and unconstitutional means to political ends.
And the key term here is "celebrate". For civilised people do not celebrate violence - neither in Dublin in 1916, nor more broadly in the war of 1914-18. Yet this State once again wishes to glorify certain violent deeds, ones that were authorised by a tiny cabal within the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and which started a week-long civil war in which least 300 civilians and hundreds of Irish soldiers and policemen died. To rejoice today at such butchery is both barbaric and imbecile.
Moreover, no glory attaches to the dead of any war, as the 800 or so melancholy Louth stories unearthed by Donal testify. Consider Pte Thomas Denver, late of the Royal Irish Rifles, who was discharged from the army because of his wounds, from which he ultimately perished in Ardee Workhouse after many weeks of suffering. The funeral of this poor wretch in 1915 was sparsely attended, with no military presence. Or Daniel McAuley of Dundalk, who died in 1923 from' wounds incurred in 1916, the same year that Maj Lionel Leland of Drogheda was fatally wounded, finally only succumbing in 1925.
In the 1950s, Tom Harmon of Salterstown was working on a farm when he heard a man calling him. It was a former army comrade of his who decades before had been committed to Ardee mental hospital suffering from shell-shock. After years of confinement, he had broken out and walked 20 miles just to make contact with another old soldier. Nurses came to collect him, and quietly he returned to the Ardee asylum, where he remained until death put him out of his lifelong and officially unregistered torment.
But even in the past decade, as the act of remembering the war dead has become commonplace in Ireland, deliberate acts of amnesia continue: in the 1990s, some worthy, doing his heroic bit for Ireland, removed the memorial plaque to Capt Roger Bellingham, who died on active service in 1915, from St Patrick's Catholic Church in Dundalk. It is now missing. This is censorship of a building's real history, an act of political and cultural vandalism.
Donal Hall has done Louth and us a colossal service with this deeply moving, haunting examination of one county's wartime losses. The Unreturned Army, County Louth Dead in the Great War 1914-1918 is published by the county's Archaeological and Historical Society. It is available in some shops, from Noel Ross at 042-9331679, and from claj@eircom.net.