“Every nation,” she growled at the BBC, “should honor its dead… we should all be able to stand and honor them in peace.” Margaret Thatcher, already clad in mourning black for the dead of two World Wars, described the incident as, “a blot on mankind”. Loyalists paramilitaries in Belfast swiftly retaliated the next day by shooting a Catholic and a Protestant they mistook for a Catholic. The Protestant population of the Irish Republic was in steep decline, the immediate relatives of the dead were dying off and those who returned from fighting Hitler in 1945 encountered such stigma that they hid their medals. The death of over three and a half thousand men from southern Ireland during the Second World War did little to revive interest in the day. Once the main national commemoration had been moved outside of Dublin city center to Phoenix Park it almost gave people permission to forget about the event: it was out of sight and therefore mostly out of mind. Ultimately Dev sat out the ceremony - citing the looming threat of the conscription in Northern Ireland should a Second World War break out - but he certainly wasn’t alone in that observance of Remembrance Day in southern Ireland was increasingly on the decline. Namely no British songs, no three cheers for the King and there shouldn’t be a Union Jack in sight. His attendance, his office made clear, was conditional on, “the absence of anything which might tend to create ill-feeling or resentment or to embarrass the Government in the slightest degree”. The poppy continues to be sold worldwide to raise money and to remember those who lost their lives in the First World War and in subsequent conflicts.In 1939 Dev, however, made it known he would attend the opening of the much delayed Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin. White poppies, for example, symbolise peace without violence and purple poppies are worn to honour animals killed in conflict. Other charities sell poppies in different colours, each with their own meaning but all to commemorate the losses of war. Selling poppies proved so popular that in 1922 the British Legion founded a factory - staffed by disabled ex-servicemen - to produce its own. They were supplied by Anna Guérin, who had been manufacturing the flowers in France to raise money for war orphans. She campaigned to make the poppy a symbol of remembrance of those who had died in the war.Īrtificial poppies were first sold in Britain in 1921 to raise money for the Earl Haig Fund in support of ex-servicemen and the families of those who had died in the conflict. In 1918, in response to McCrae's poem, American humanitarian Moina Michael wrote 'And now the Torch and Poppy Red, we wear in honor of our dead…'. It was first published in Punch, having been rejected by The Spectator. The flower provided Canadian doctor John McCrae with inspiration for his poem 'In Flanders Fields', which he wrote whilst serving in Ypres in 1915. They flourished in the soil churned up by the fighting and shelling. Poppies were a common sight, especially on the Western Front. It is strongly linked with Armistice Day (11 November), but the poppy's origin as a popular symbol of remembrance lies in the landscapes of the First World War. The poppy is the enduring symbol of remembrance of the First World War.
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