An Irishman's Diary, Kevin Myers, Irish Times, 25 01 2005

With a spellbinding optimism, Eneclann, the Trinity publishers, planned to have the launch of the CD-ROM publication of Ireland's Memorial Records 1914-18 in the open air at the Memorial Gardens, Islandbridge.

In Ireland. In January. So, with a gale dumping the Bermuda Triangle on our heads, the launch was rushed to the bottom of the park, to the Trinity Boat Club, home to rowers for the best part of 150 years.

The hallway of the club is lined with team photographs of oarsmen back to the latter decades of the 19th century. I searched out the picture of the rowers of 1905, a century ago. The team captain back then was E. Julian. Ah yes. This was a name I knew.

Ernest Julian subsequently became Reid Professor of Law at Trinity, a post held in later years by both Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, who did so much to further commemoration of Ireland's dead from the Great War - and poignantly so. For their distant predecessor went on to become one of the first soldiers of the 10th Irish Division to be killed in action in Gallipoli, in August 1915, having abandoned the safety of academia to do his duty as he saw it. And but for the optimism of Eneclann, and the weather outside, I would not now have been looking at his face.

In the cosmos, cogs click: synchronous waves ripple through dark matter; events jostle to arrive at the same place at the same time. There are 49,400 men listed in Ireland's Memorial Records. The Eneclann press release, written long before our retreat to the boat club, chose to cite the stories of three of them as samples of the real men whom the volumes commemorate. One was Ernest Julian.

What changes Ernest's earnest face has witnessed since it first arrived on those walls 100 years ago. From being a mere rower he went on to become captain and coach, and then, with so many of his class and caste, in August 1914 this young professor marched to Lansdowne Road and enlisted in D Company of the 7th battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He was mortally wounded in Gallipoli during the advance on Chocolate Hill just a year later. Within a further year, the Easter Rising unleashed new forces on Irish life, creating new historical perspectives which were owned by those who were either ignorant of, or actively hostile to, the cause which Prof Julian had served.

So though the new State in time did permit the construction of a memorial park to those who had perished on the Allied side in the Great War, it did not permit its schools to teach a rounded history of that dark time, from 1914 to 1922. One single narrative emerged, which rigorously excluded more than 200,000 Irishmen who followed the call of their elected leaders and their churchmen and enlisted in British or Allied colours.

As Taoiseach, De Valera refused the park a formal opening, and over the coming decades, from his celluloid vantage-point in the hall of the Dublin University boating pavilion, Ernest Julian could observe that the fate of Islandbridge symbolised the eradication of his generation of soldiers from the popular memory. Officially under the State's care, the gardens were, with a brutal neglect, allowed to fall into a shameful desuetude. By 1985, they were a scandal: Lutyens's ornamental triumph had become a vast, rat-infested rubbish dump, his cupola walls mere granite-pages for graffiti, and wild horses grazed where dead men should have been honoured.

Julian could not then have believed that then, galvanised by the splendid and now departed Campbell Heather, the State would finally intervene and rescue the gardens. The tens of thousands of dead Irishmen, and a good few Irishwomen, were thus almost overnight rescued from the dustbin of amnesia, and now there is hardly a soul who adheres to the single-thread version of Irish history.

The memorial records now available on CD-ROM are by no means comprehensive nor entirely correct: some of the Irish dead (and presumably British also) seem to have been overlooked as the official bureaucracy of death failed to match the ruthless efficiency of the machinery of killing. The records were therefore created from imperfect sources - how imperfect, only further research will tell. Moreover, many non-Irishmen who served in Irish regiments are wrongly counted as Irish. The true Irish death toll for the war was about 35,000.

That aside, the records - assembled just after the war by Eva Barnard, daughter of the Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin, and sumptuously decorated by the artistic genius of Harry Clarke - constitute a massive historical and genealogical resource, now for the first time computer-accessible through this magnificent CD. Every college and secondary school in the country, and indeed anyone interested in our history, should have a copy: it costs only €94.90 (see www.eneclann.ie).

The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, gave a generous speech at the launch, observing - and fairly - that across the way in Kilmainham Jail, another tradition, dear to his heart, was also commemorated.
Quite so. And without wishing to fetishise the dead, is it not right for this State finally to assemble an official list of the IRA/Free State dead of 1916 to 1922? Only bigots benefit from ignorance, and those men and women of that time also did their duty as they saw it.

They deserve better than an anonymity which the men of Islandbridge, and Ernest Julian, oarsman, Reid Professor of Law, and 1st Lieutenant, Royal Dublin Fusiliers in particular, know about, all too well.

END

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