Fisk on the Easter Rising

More than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with an Irish friend. She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped around Padraig Pearse's neck for the militarily hopeless but politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916. But she displayed an equally admirable suspicion of British - or "English" as she would have put it - intentions towards Ireland, north and south. Her mother once recalled for me a British military raid on their home in County Carlow. "I was a little girl and one of the soldiers patted me on the head and I told him: 'You keep your hands off me.'"

But at Ypres one evening, beneath the great Menin Gate - upon which are carved the names of 54,896 First World War British soldiers whose bodies were never found - my Irish friend faced a real political challenge. She had noted, among those thousands, the names of hundreds of young Irishmen who had died in British uniform while their countrymen at home were fighting and dying in battle against the same British Army. She looked at one of the names. "Why in God's name," she asked, "was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?" And it was at this point that an elderly man approached us and asked my Irish friend to sign the visitors' book.