See below my letter of the day from the Irish Times.
There has been an ongoing debate on the letters page about the issue of poppy wearing or the lack thereof, which I couldn’t help but notice given that one of the contributors was someone who once offended me greatly about the same issue.
When I was in my final year of college, I had a lecturer teaching Irish history who, let us be polite about it, wasn’t very interested in the Irish perspective on said history. Around this time of year, he arrived in for our class sporting a poppy (or possibly three, he would happily have covered himself in them), which is marginally noticeable in this country but not much besides. But then he sat down and spent the first 25 minutes of his class moaning about how a few people had given him a dirty look for daring to wear something so honorable.
After months of this kind of attitude I finally snapped that day and am yet to regret for a moment having done so.
I think it happened mainly because I had finally lost all respect for him as a historian and/or professor. The whole point of studying history is to gain perspective, to appreciate the need for it, so see that there are always multiple perspectives etc. And yet this ignoramous was forcing a poppy down our proverbial (or not so?) throats just because it was what he believed in a purely personal capacity.
Anyway. The letter below covers what should be said in response to such ignorance.
WEARING THE POPPY
Madam, -
My late father served in the British army in the second World War. He never wore a poppy and anyone I knew who served with him never wore a poppy.
They regarded it, and the British Legion, as symbolising all that was worst, most jingoistic and reactionary in the British establishment.
I suspect that this was the attitude of most second World War veterans, because it was the votes of three million servicemen that put Churchill out of office in 1945 and Clement Attlee’s Labour government in.
I appreciate that times change and the poppy means different things to different people.
But I think it is important not to impose contemporary views of the significance of wearing, or not wearing a poppy, on past generations.
It would certainly be wrong to assume the poppy had, or has, the same significance for all British veterans and their families. - Yours, etc,
PÁDRAIG YEATES, Howth.
