Bishop calls for single united monument as he honours five Corkmen killed on war’s last day

He said we live in an Ireland today where people talk about the relatives they lost in the war, where the remembering is public, as it should be. And he that that remembering takes on real significance when the victims are thought of in their own locality.

He said there are 53 names on a memorial at Ashton School, including the sons of five clergy of the diocese, that there are 377 names on the diocesan memorial in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral to members of the Church of Ireland or to members of the Protestant church, and that there are 145 names on the Cenotaph.

But he read out the names of five victims from Cork who died this day 100 years ago having almost made it to the end — Gunner D Keating from 233 Blarney Road; Leading Seaman James Donovan, from Wolfe Tone St; Sergeant W Looney, from 143 Bandon Road; Sergeant William Morrissey, 8 Albert Place, Fermoy; and Private John O’Leary, 111 High St, Cork.

“When the bells rang out to signal the end of the war — there was no joy in those homes on this day. And their names are not on this memorial here, or on the memorial in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral,” he said.

“I wonder are their names on any memorial here in Cork?

“Thomas Warren was from 72 Grand Parade — he died 100 years ago last month. Thomas O’Meara lived at 23 Grand Parade. He was just 19. Where are their memorials?

“Of the estimated 4,200 Cork people who died in this war, some are remembered nowhere in Cork.

“Again I ask, is it not time that we should have one memorial where the humanity of Cork, city and county, regardless of religious affiliation, or none, are memorialised together?”

“It was all so local as we see in the names of the people and the places where they lived — they all deserve a local memorial here in Cork.”

He also said those who fought in the war did so for reasons we cannot fully know.

“But for them ‘it was the right thing to do in their time’,” he said.

“When we venture our opinions on it all, we tread on the holy ground of other people’s lives — people like us, and we have to be very careful not to abuse that remembrance by harnessing what we think about them to our own contemporary ends.

“We must not judge them, as I say, from the comfort of our own high moral ground and the omniscience of our hindsight.

“We are here today simply to remember them; to remember the awfulness of it all, the deaths, the wounds, the scars, mental, emotional and physical, the gaps that stayed for ever — in individual lives, in families, in communities, in societies, and in nations.

“Today is not a day for analysis and debate; it is a day for gazing into space in dumb-founded silence and, in our faltering way, from the vantage point of our own human vulnerability, to try to take it in.”

Speaking at the Cenotaph earlier, Lord Mayor Mick Finn, said the commemoration was not to honour or celebrate war but rather to honour and remember all those caught up in it, and to call to mind the “all-so-brittle nature of humanity”.

“For today at this Cork monument as we remember the ancestors of our shared past, we should also think about those around us in the present and plan for what’s to come in the future,” he said.

“Because it is only how we honour those who went before us and draw from their time a lesson that we can begin to dream of our own futures, which must mean avoiding the carnage and futility of another devastating global war.”

In one of the smallest ceremonies, people gathered on Bere Island’s former First World War fort, Lonehort Battery, off the Cork coast, to remember a number of island men who fought in the war — five of whom were killed on the frontline.

And to remember the 14 war graves of Irish and British soldiers on the island, 14 roses were placed in front of the island’s church altar, together with their names.

Bells also rang out at St Fin Barre’s Cathedral and at Cobh Cathedral at 11am yesterday to mark the end of the war 100 years ago.