12.11.2012
President Joins Act of Remembrance in St Patrick’s Cathedral
President Michael D Higgins, joined hundreds of people, including many veterans, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, for the annual Remembrance Sunday Service on November 11. Among those remembering Ireland’s war dead, were the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson; the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Naoise Ó Muirí; Heritage Minister, Jimmy Deenihan; and the British Ambassador to Ireland, Dominick Chilcott. The service was led by Dean Victor Stacey.
The address was given by the Revd Nigel Crossey, Chaplain to St Columba’s College, Dublin and a former army chaplain for 16 years. He cautioned against forgetting. He said that in this age of information overload and instant media it was very easy to forget. “There is a real danger in such facile and fragile forgetfulness because in that we lose the most important things about us as people, as nations,” he said. “We have the freedoms we enjoy, the liberties we share, the choices we make precisely because others served and suffered and laid down their lives so that we might have them.”
Mr Crossey said remembering helped us to cherish the past and reach out to the future and to build on what we have gained at such a cost to find new ways of dealing with each other as human beings. He recalled the Enniskillen Bombing 25 years ago. He said that the incident had shocked the world and observed that Ireland had come so close to spiralling into civil war. However, he said recent incidents had seen the tragic return of violence which it had been hoped would never return. “They are not the servants of this country but it’s greatest enemies,” he said adding that the President’s attendance at the service in St Patrick’s Cathedral and the presence of the Taoiseach and the Tainaiste at acts of remembrance in Northern Ireland were greatly appreciated and of the profoundest importance in building trust.
During the service, the Last Post was played and the remembrance exhortation was read by the President of the Royal British Legion in Ireland, Major General David the O’Morchoe who also read the Kohima Epitaph. President Higgins and Major General O’Morchoe laid wreaths at the War Memorial in the North Transept of the cathedral.
The lessons were read by Pam Roche, the county manager of the Royal British Legion in Ireland and the British Ambassador.