Col Neil Salisbury used the 110th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme at the Islandbridge commemoration in Dublin to frame the day around shared loss across Ireland, a message that cut through the heat and the formalities. The annual service, listed here for readers checking the UK TV guide angle of the commemorative coverage, drew hundreds of Irish and British army veterans.
Hundreds at Islandbridge
Hundreds of Irish and British army veterans attended the annual event, which was organised by the Royal British Legion in Ireland. Scouting volunteers handed out cups of water to invited guests as the service focused on the Irish who died in both world wars, with wreaths laid by Cllr Daryl Barron, Róis-Máire Donnelly, Emily Little-Pengelly, Kara Owen, David Gill and Robert Troy on behalf of the Government.
The ceremony also placed two volumes of the Ireland memorial records on the Stone of Sacrifice. Those books list 49,400 men from Ireland or Irish regiments killed in the First World War, turning the memorial into more than a ritual display: it is a roll call of losses that still shapes how the dead are counted and remembered.
Col Neil Salisbury’s warning
Col Neil Salisbury said the battle was a reminder that there was one island but many stories bound by a shared duty to remember those who came before us. He added that men from every part of Ireland served, suffered there and died there, and that they should be remembered not simply as a part of history, but as men with names, families, hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled.
His point landed against the harder arithmetic of the Somme itself. More than 2,000 men from the 36th (Ulster) Division were killed on July 1st, 1916, and another 400 men from other Irish regiments perished the same day. The commemoration presents the Somme as a shared story across Ireland, even though the battle also produced sharply different wartime experiences and casualty levels across divisions.
Ginchy Cross on display
The rarest object in the ceremony was the Ginchy Cross, erected to remember the men from the 16th (Irish) Division who died in the Somme in September 1916. Made from oak beams recovered from a destroyed farmhouse in the region, it is put on display only a few times a year because of its fragile state.
Rev Peter Rutherford said the Battle of the Somme was not just an Irish and British tragedy but “a wound shared across many nations, many of whom are represented here today”. He also said the memorials across Ireland, along with the memorial books and memorial gardens, came into being so that people might not forget the sacrifice made by so many from this land in the Great War.
That leaves the Ginchy Cross as the clearest symbol of the day’s message: remembrance here is broad, but it is also selective, limited by the condition of the object and by the scale of the losses it stands for.
