We in Ireland in November 2014 have been a lucky society. Very few among our generation and community have experienced, at first hand, the full horrors of unleashed war or experienced the massive social breakdown it can bring in its wake. But we must not forget that for almost thirty years such a prospect lay close to our own door until the Good Friday agreement and we must always thankful that it did not evolve worse than it was. So let us be grateful that it entered the hearts of man to find peace in our own country. and let us by good example nurture peace to end all conflict.

Today we meet in a joint ecumenical service of remembrance to recall not just the known who died in past war and aggressions, but to give thought to the many unknowns and forgotten of our town and parishes, who died and were lost by wars scything hand. Let us give thought as well to the grief of all those innumerable families down the long scroll of years, who experienced the deep hurt and loss of loved ones whose lives were not only cut short by conflict, but in most cases never came home for burial.

We need look no further than outside the door of the Arklow Catholic parish church to see a visible sign of these past conflicts encapsulated in the 1798 memorial. A deep reminder that battle and strife echoed in our own beloved town when Irishman fought Irishman, Protestant pitted against Catholic, and perhaps the worst evil in civil war, family members against family. Look closely too on that memorial’s plinth for the scars of later strife, the bomb impacts and bullet damage of the War of Irish Independence and its Civil War background.

There is little on record about Arklow’s participants in the long fought Wars of Napoleon, but we know there were townsmen who participated like Myles Byrne of Castletown Parish, fighting in the service of France, and we know he had his local counterparts in Wellington’s Irish regiments fighting in Spain and at Waterloo, which terrible battle is also commemorating its 200 anniversary this year.

And we should recall those many conflicts lost in the fog of history where it is known some our local ancestors fought, for what ever reason, like The War of 1812, The Crimea, The Indian Mutiny and the many small, now forgotten conflicts of colonialism, that claimed some casualties in places far- flung like India, Burma and Abyssinia

Overawed and forgotten by the shadow of the great conflicts of the 20th century was the vast death toll of Irish volunteers in the American Civil War in which an estimated 175,000 Irish emigrants took part, fighting for both North and South. A disproportionate number of Irish volunteers died on its various fields of battle, Hundreds from Co Wicklow participated in the American Civil War, many died, and be certain that this included some from our parish.

Then comes the Boer War, and there are the military records of participation by several Arklow families in this war, and in several instances their sons too lie in forgotten war graves

The catastrophe of the Great War and its dreadful aftermath, the Second World War need no comment. The list of Arklow men and the women victims, dead and missing, on land and sea speak for themselves in the hundreds of names etched on gravestones, war memorials, keepsakes and in treasured photographs.

It is unjust and dishonest for contemporary society, with all its hindsight’s of history and current morality, to pass judgement on why those who fought in these wars and conflicts acted as they did,. They were not to foresee the political and social future of their time. It also provokes the question for our society. Who among us knows what attitude any critical person alive today would have done if confronted by the moral climate of the 19th century?, or the choices of 1914? , when nurtured in the attitudes of that time, or in 1939 in a Europe dominated by the evils of Nazism?

It is really incumbent for our generation to put aside judgment and admonishment based on modern values and attitude and to remember the fallen of past wars and conflict with compassion, and this is especially true of the military and civilian dead of the two world wars

Let us remember all those forgotten souls of our community, persons of flesh and blood who once walked our streets, socialised cheek by jowl, some living short unfulfilled lives, until cut down by conflict or lost to the sea, a forgotten generation of Arklow’s war dead.

Ireland has now matured and moved on. In the centenary of the Great War it is time that those lost ones whose graves are known or ‘Known only to God’ be reinstated back into the collective memory, both on a local and a national level.

P.Power November 14 2014