10.11.2025
Applause for President Higgins at Final Official Engagement
Annual Service of Remembrance at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.
President Michael D Higgins concluded his time in office almost as he began it 14 years ago, by attending the annual Service of Remembrance at St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin yesterday (Sunday November 9). The service was his last official engagement as President of Ireland and he attended with his wife Sabina. The Remembrance Sunday Service in St Patrick’s was among his very first public engagements following his election to his first term in office in 2011.
President and Mrs Higgins were greeted on arrival by Dean William Morton who introduced the service recalling their attendance at the beginning of his Presidency. The Dean wished the President and Mrs Higgins a long and happy retirement at which the large congregation broke into a spontaneous and warm round of applause.
During the service President Higgins and Lt Col Ken Martin, President of the RBL Republic of Ireland laid wreaths at the war memorial in the cathedral’s north transept. This followed the Exhortation read by Paul Stephenson, Chairman of the RBL Republic of Ireland and the Last Post, a minute’s silence and The Reveille and Kohima Epitaph.
This year marks the centenary of the British Legion Southern Area which came into existence in January 1925. In his sermon, the Revd Peter Rutherford, Chaplain to the Royal British Legion, Republic of Ireland District, explained that the remit of the Legion was to respond to the trauma of the Irish veterans of the Great War by facilitating the remembering of those who had fallen and to enable effective welfare for those left and their families.
Mr Rutherford noted that over 200,000 people from Ireland had fought in the Great War and about 49,000 of them had perished. There had also been the Easter Rising in 1916 and the War of Independence and the Civil War in 1919 and 1922. An Garda Siochana was formed by the merger of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Civic Guard I 1925 and the border between Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State was finally agreed in the same year.
“So it is not unreasonable to say that Ireland 100 years ago was in a state of national trauma, with many individuals having been damaged physically and psychologically by international and national trauma, and struggling to try to exist in a world where the very word ‘trauma’ was not yet in common usage,” he said.
There were around 100,000 Irish veterans of the Great War 100 years ago and the preacher said that remembering the names of those who had died was part of the way of dealing with trauma. Ireland was unique in creating memorial books with the names of all those who died, he explained adding that the original eight memorial books are kept at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge. Volume eight was processed into the service following the President. The work of the Legion continued after World War II.
“Today we look back with thanksgiving to those who endured trauma in times past. We give thanks for the example of service and sacrifice that we remember. We celebrate and give thanks for the work of the British Legion here in Ireland. Sadly as we look around us today, both at home and abroad, we see trauma and anguish in so many different directions that we look. Today in this sacred place we are invited to listen afresh beyond ourselves so that we might bring… something of God’s peace, justice and truth to this land and the world around us,” he concluded.
