DULCE et decorum est pro patria mori? Well yes, but then again, only up to a point. "Will you die for Ireland boys?" says the drunken father in Angela's Ashes, after another week's wages is squandered in the bars of Brooklyn. "We'll sing Kevin Barry." Wear an Easter lily for Ireland's dead, a red poppy for those who fell in Flanders fields. They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old. It is a sweet and becoming thing to remember them, but dangerous too.
Over the past two weeks we have seen an orgy of remembrance in Britain and parts of Northern Ireland for old, sad wars. The ceremonies have been longer and more ornate than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the second World War.
The British media have been filled with pictures of politicians, fiercely solemn, bearing wreaths of poppies to lay at the cenotaph. It is said that it was on such a Remembrance Sunday that Michael Foot sealed his fate and that of what must now, I suppose, be described as Old Labour. He wore a loosely cut, flapping overcoat which did not shape up to the sharp, military cut of Margaret Thatcher's jib, and was judged to have shown a lack of respect for those who fell in two world wars. Let nobody ever suggest that these occasions are not political.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that this year's ceremonies have played to the debilitating nostalgia for a period when Britain was both great and at the heart of Europe, which has marked the dying days of this Conservative government. This is, after all, an administration which this week threatened to disrupt the European Union rather than accept a directive giving shorter hours and better conditions to its own working people.
I don't want to be misunderstood here. The fact that Paddy Harte and other politicians from this State joined Northern loyalist leaders in a journey to France to honour those Irish men and women who fought and died in both world wars was a generous, if belated, recognition of their place in our history. One of the most poignant public occasions I have ever attended was the ceremony a the War Memorial at Islandbridge, when the Taoiseach paid tribute to these forgotten Irish soldiers.
What made it particularly moving was the presence of Sinn Fein's Tom Hartley. That was because the leadership of the republican movement had taken a voluntary decision to demonstrate its respect for another tradition and to offer a historic gesture of reconciliation.
But Paddy Harte knows, and has said quite explicitly, that the Remembrance Day poppy can be a symbol that divides as well as one that draws people together.
In Northern Ireland it is too often worn to demonstrate the superiority, or at least the superior number, of one community over the other. This year the period surrounding Remembrance Sunday has been even more problematical because of the British Legion's appeal to people to revive acustom, abandoned by a war weary British public in the 1920s, of observing two minutes silence at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day, the moment when the first World War is said to have officially ended.
IN Britain, this must have seemed a harmless exercise in communal nostalgia. But in Northern Ireland, where official agencies have worked long and hard to persuade employers to eliminate divisive symbolism in the workplace, the situation has been more complicated. There has been, at the very least, the fear that coercion or the threat of coercion will be involved in observing these tribal pieties.
As one weary nationalist living in West Belfast said to me: "There's hardly a family in this area which hasn't lost somebody fighting in the British army during one of the world wars. The only Northern Ireland VC in the last war was a Catholic from the Falls Road. But the hard political reality is that the poppy is seen as a loyalist symbol. As for Remembrance Sunday, it's getting like the Orange marching season. It goes on for weeks."
We had been talking about the case of Donna Traynor. Ms Traynor is a newsreader with BBC Northern Ireland, an able young woman with an exceptionally sympathetic screen presence.
Last year she told her employers that she did not want to wear a poppy when reading the news. She explained that she would refuse to wear a sprig of shamrock, if she were asked, on St Patrick's Day because in Northern Ireland all symbols of this kind are seen as divisive by one side or the other.
Inevitably, Ms Traynor's appearance, minus poppy, was noticed and there were reports that the corporation's switchboard was "jammed" with complaints about her undecorous appearance. This year, BBC Northern Ireland laid down a line that all presenters who appeared on screen reading the news during the 10 days leading up to November 11th would wear a poppy.
It seemed as if the whole of Northern Ireland was waiting to see what Ms Traynor would do. When questioned, the BBC Northern Ireland press office told me: "Donna is on the roster to read the news. If she does so, she will be wearing a poppy".
And so she did. Her appearance was duly noted by both sides. Nationalists saw it as the BBC telling one of its employees, who happened to be a Catholic to wear a poppy - or else. Unionists did not have to comment. Ms Traynor's photograph, showing the poppy, was featured prominently in both the News Letter and the Belfast Telegraph.
This incident will be remembered about the BBC long after many more difficult programming decisions are forgotten. It is unfortunate because the corporation has often had to resist political pressure to provide an evenhanded and inclusive service to both communities.
It is no secret that there has been a lot of complaints from unionists about the BBC's coverage of David Trimble's leadership of his party. Many people believe that that is what lay behind the decision to enforce the wearing of a Remembrance Day poppy. The BBC in Britain has no such rule. Its London press office told me newsreaders would be encouraged to wear a poppy, but that there would be no question of keeping a presenter who did not wish to wear one off the screen.
THIS has happened at a time when other institutions in Northern Ireland are coming to recognise the importance of getting rid of symbols that offend one or other section of the community.
Ronnie Flanagan, the new RUC Chief Constable, has made clear he believes it is crucial that his force should be seen as wholly impartial and that, to achieve this, he is prepare to curb the display of the Union Jacks outside and portraits of Queen Elizabeth inside police stations. What is needed, he said in a recent interview, is a "politically neutral" environment.
In a society as divided as ours, the treasured symbols of one side are all too often seen as aggressively tribal signals by the other. In time we may be able to embrace them, but that has to be a free decision for each individual.