As a child growing up in west Belfast, Tom Hartley remembers hearing the story of Leading Seaman James Magennis, the only person from Northern Ireland to be awarded a Victoria Cross during the second World War.
“He was born in Majorca Street off the Grosvenor Road, so effectively he was a part of the Lower Falls community,” says Hartley, a former Sinn Féin lord mayor of Belfast.
Magennis joined the Royal Navy and was honoured for his bravery while attaching limpet mines to a Japanese cruiser.
“What happened was, they were going to have a dinner for him in the City Hall after the second World War, but then they found out he was a Catholic. No dinner.”
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Hartley emphasises that he didn’t know how true that was, “but that was a common narrative I heard inside the nationalist community.
“He wasn’t remembered by Belfast City Council until October 1999, when a stone was put up outside the front door of the City Hall for him,” he said.
“In some sense that shows you ... the tensions of our politics seeping into the whole politics of remembrance.”
This week, Northern Ireland has again been remembering. On May 8th, 1945, thousands of people gathered at Belfast City Hall to celebrate victory in Europe.
Today the City Hall will again be lit up to mark the anniversary, with a replica Spitfire and brass band to help recreate the feeling of “jubilation”, according to the current lord mayor of Belfast, the Alliance Party’s Micky Murray.
“Eighty years on, the building will once again be a focal point to remember Belfast’s wartime experiences, pay tribute to those veterans who contributed to bringing about peace and look back at how the war shaped our city as it is today,” he said.
[ VE Day: Britain takes a break from its troubles to celebrate 80th anniversaryOpens in new window ]
Similar events are taking place across Northern Ireland. St Anne’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Belfast held a service of thanksgiving on Sunday, while the Northern Assembly marked the anniversary at Stormont on Tuesday.
Local pipers and drummers are to parade through Enniskillen. In Lisburn, the band of the Royal Irish Regiment will lead a beating retreat through the town, while Derry will mark its own unique link with the end of the second World War – the surrender of the German Atlantic U-boat fleet in its port at Lisahally – on its 80th anniversary the following week.
At a bank holiday Monday street party on the Woodstock Road in east Belfast, there was tea, cake and a funfair for the children; union flags marking VE Day and support for Charles III decorated the stage, along with an orange-coloured banner proclaiming “celebrating culture in the broad unionist community”.
For those present, it was about marking the anniversary and the area’s association with British military service, but also, as organiser Stephen Gough put it: “The community coming out and having a good time, putting the smiles on their faces, seeing the children happy.”
“The Protestant/unionist community would feel much more comfortable commemorating the day,” says Dr Niamh Gallagher, associate professor in modern British and Irish history at the University of Cambridge, “because it taps into publicly available memories ... of respect for working for one’s country, fighting and dying for one’s country, and a longer heritage of wartime service.
“Does that mean they were affected more than Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland? Not a bit, in terms of the day-to-day experience.”
As the only part of the island to remain in the United Kingdom after Partition, the North had a direct experience of the war in the way the South did not – be it through rationing, the numbers who signed up for military duty, the bombs of the Belfast blitz in which about 1,000 people died, or the social impact of the roughly 300,000 American GIs stationed in the North.
South of the border, neutral Ireland lived through not the second World War, but the Emergency.
“It’s a very different day-to-day experience,” says Gallagher. “Life continues in the South. The lights go on at night, whereas in Northern Ireland, the lights are switched off.
“But the grey area in between that isn’t talked about so much is that there are actually hugely muddied waters and crossovers between the two.”
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This includes the number of Irish men and women who fought and acted in support and auxiliary roles in the British services in the second World War; the most recent estimate, says Gallagher, is more than 66,000 from the South and 64,000 from the North.
There was also “a huge amount” of emigration from the South to work in British factories.
“Hundreds of thousands temporarily go over, and they’re the ones who are making up a key part of the British war effort,” she says.
“Are Irish nationalists going to be comfortable with that heritage?” she asks. “It’s much more tricky, because the Irish government and public are not comfortable with the second World War.”
Hartley is comfortable with his own “complex” history. His uncle, David Nelson, was a Belfast Catholic who joined the Royal Navy in the 1930s; during the second World War “the story is that he was torpedoed twice off Dunkirk, and he served on the Arctic convoys”.
Nelson’s father – Hartley’s grandfather, also called David Nelson – was a Presbyterian who married a Catholic and fought in the first World War. Further back, “my grandmother was a McGovern from Belturbet, Co Cavan, and I remember my mother saying in her family there was a box of chocolates given to a member of her family by Queen Victoria, because he had fought in the Crimean War.”
On his father’s side, “in that tight space of a family” he had uncles in the IRA in the 1920s, another in the British army, and yet another who joined the Free State army.
When nationalists have begun to engage with such history they have done so, he says, “particularly through families asserting their history, and also through debates and discussions and talking about placing their history into a bigger world history. And unionists, of course, do that too, but I don’t think there is a tradition of street parties inside the nationalist community.”
Yet the reclaiming of complex histories such as Hartley’s, which was such a feature of the Decade of Centenaries and the commemoration of the first World War, has been largely absent from the marking of the second World War.
“I get the sense that Ireland, before the first World War, was a much greyer space in terms of identity. But I think with Partition comes a bitterness in politics.”
The “underlying contradiction” between a nationalist identity and a role in the British armed forces was sharpened by the events of 1916-23.
“I think there’s a political tension as we try and deal with this past as we also move into a future which is in every sense, it hasn’t come to rest yet,” says Hartley.
“It’s much easier to have a reconciled history about the first World War and much more difficult to have it about the Second,” says Gallagher. “Nationalists helped defeat Hitler – many of them would have done so through the British forces – but all of that becomes so much more difficult when you fast forward 20, 30-odd years and you’re in the middle of the Troubles, with the British army on the streets of Northern Ireland in a way the vast majority of Northern nationalists were not going to be in favour of.”
But, says Hartley, the type of reflection that happened during the Decade of Centenaries “has to happen” in regard to the second World War, or “even coming to a point of understanding that we are in a conflicted space ... because of that there is a complexity to our history which needs thought through.”
“So much of this is actually reflective of our political present,” says Gallagher. “Fundamentally, commemoration is about the present; it’s not really about the past, even though we pretend that it is.
“Where are we sitting today? In a world full of populism, uncertainty, the resurgence of the far right ... the second World War is a very good way to remind us what the world was like whenever dangerous, populist leaders came to the fore and people, whether they wanted to or not, were forced to respond.
“There’s a lot that can be learned from this that would help remind us about friends and allies and relationships, and it would also address the politics of reconciliation on this island itself.”
