Sir, - Your "On the Town" columnist (November 1st) points up the incongruity of a British executive attending the opening of the Irish branch of Debenhams with a red poppy on his lapel, and even goes on to say that this was enough to set her teeth on edge. The red poppy does not commemorate British victory in the first World War and is not peculiar to any single nation; it is an international symbol of remembrance for the millions of soldiers who died in a conflict that brought the justification of war, under any circumstances, into question for the first time in European history.
Among those who died were many thousands of Irish fighting in Irish regiments (more Irishmen fell in an average day of fighting at the Somme than in the whole of the Easter Rising). For Ms Harrison, however, the poppy is somehow an emblem of "Britishness" and she clearly considers the British executive carelessly insensitive for wearing it in Ireland.
We, as a nation, do not commemorate the Irishmen who fought and died in the first World War because we are taught that the conflict was not "our" war. It is this piece of nonsense we have to thank for turning the Irish dead into non persons, and their remembrance into some kind of social faux pas. - Yours, etc.,
Merlyn Park,
Ballsbridge,
Dublin 4.