At dawn on the day that power devolved to the peoples of Northern Ireland, the last living link with John Redmond, the great Irish parliamentary leader, passed away. Redmond Cunningham, the son of John Redmond's election agent and named after the great man, died as the final elements were being assembled for a lasting peace in this island of the kind which John Redmond had sought 85 years ago, through accommodation, understanding and compromise.
Sunningdale for slow learners is how Seamus Mallon famously described this peace process. Sunningdale? All of the ingredients, then and now, of accommodation between the two traditions in Ireland, and between Ireland and Britain, were foreshadowed by John Redmond. He saw Ireland as a part of Europe, culturally, economically, spiritually, historically. Insularity, xenophobia, tribal pride and political violence: he spent his career opposing these toxins, but after the 1916 Rising they were clearly victorious. Ireland withdrew from the world and began a mad experiment in cultural, tribal and linguistic solitude; to no avail. On the day that Redmond Cunningham died, it was clear that political Redmondism was again - and this time finally - triumphant in Ireland.
Normandy beaches
But to go back 60 years: Redmond Cunningham left his architectural studies when the second World War broke out, doing the Redmondite thing and enlisting in the fight against Hitler. So too did 10 of his kinsmen. Redmond himself said: "It was the right thing to do. If Hitler was victorious, there would have been no Irish freedom of any kind."
He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and trained to use special tanks to clear the Normandy beaches of German strongpoints and minefields to prevent the annihilation of Allied infantry following soon afterwards. Redmond's men had the honour of landing first, and thus, also, the honour of dying first.
On the beach, the tank alongside Redmond's was hit and its crew killed, leaving him alone before Ouistreham. Not merely did he clear all of his designated obstacles under intense fire, but also cleared those which should have been tackled by his comrades. We cannot know how many Allied soldiers survived over the coming hours because of his extraordinary bravery; only that many of them were Irish. The lead infantry battalion on the beach made safe by his heroics was 2 Royal Ulster Rifles, led by Ian Harris from Tipperary, who died earlier this year.
Canal lock
Later that night Capt Cunningham held the canal lock at Ouistreham against fierce attack, yet also personally located and removed explosive charges which could have immobilised the canal. Not far away, a young sapper called Glancy similarly disarmed some 50 mines on 10-foot stakes which would otherwise have devastated incoming landing craft as the tide rose. What, I wonder, happened to the bearer of that most uncommon Roscommon name?
What happened to Redmond Cunningham was that his war continued. Almost all the men he trained with were killed or maimed in the fierce fighting during the Normandy landings, during which he was the only Irish winner of a Military Cross. In the Rhineland, as the most senior officer upright and breathing and aged 26, he led a combined infantry-engineer assault on German positions, taking 200 prisoners; for this feat, he was awarded a bar to his MC, and the Croix de Guerre by the French.
After the war, the Major - as he was now always known - returned to Waterford, building up a successful architecture company. He was a legendary figure on the racing circuit, and his hospitality was all-embracing and perfectly lethal. But the combination of the British military title and horseflesh should not mislead. He was not in the least Anglo-Irish, but simply Irish, and deeply Catholic in the old-fashioned sense. Moreover, he remained immensely proud of his Redmondite credentials, at a time when Redmond was to be found in the dictionary of ignorant nationalist diatribe somewhere between reactionary and renegade.
Redmondism is none of these things. It seeks practical solutions to human problems. It sees Catholic Ireland as a partner on this island with Protestant Ireland, and Ireland not as a place apart but a place belonging within the archipelago and within Europe and the world.
World citizen
This was how an Irish nationalist like Redmond Cunningham could repeatedly and freely court death in the cause of world freedom, as a world citizen. Yet in the course of his life which began in 1916, the great tyrannies of the world were born, blossomed, and perished. Predating them and outliving them, it seemed, stood the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone; yet even as the life ebbed out of his old bones, accommodation was finally being reached there too, on the lines urged 85 years ago by John Redmond. So in Redmond Cunningham's lifetime, John Redmond was proved utterly right, and Pearse proved totally wrong.
But aside from the great intellectual, political and moral triumph of Redmondism, there is one imponderable question. Just how many young infantrymen who, but for the unbelievable bravery of Redmond Cunningham, would have left their young bones on the sands of Ouistreham, were able to lead full and happy lives, without ever knowing of the existence of the young Irishman who risked everything in order that they might live? It is perfectly unanswerable; and reason enough for every Cunningham of Redmond's stock and seed to feel unspeakably proud.