Great War to Gaza: a family story

ON Tuesday of last week in City Hall, Cork, I attended the launch of the book ‘A Great Sacrifice – Cork Servicemen who Died in the Great War’.

With sadness I turned the pages of the book to the name of my grandfather, Christopher Lane, who died on the Western Front in December, 1914. His brother, John, my grand-uncle, died on the same battlefront in October 1915.

My late mother was the only child of the union between Christopher and Margaret Mary Lane; she wasn’t a year old when her father went off to the Great War, never to return.

But to me the supreme irony of the occasion in City Hall was that in paying tribute to my grandfather, I had just learned that morning that his great-grandson, Fintan Lane, was incarcerated in a detention camp in southern Israel. My grandfather died for a propaganda lie – “the freedom of small nations”. Almost 100 years later, his great-grandson was on a humanitarian journey on behalf of the Palestinian nation whose fate was determined by the First World War settlement at Versailles in 1919. All the tensions of the Middle East today arise directly from that war. The “war to end all wars” and “the peace that ended all peace” at Versailles ensured the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history.

The First World War was fought to further the expansion and power of the British empire – and for nothing else.

When Ireland expressed its clear desire for freedom in the 1918 general election what we got was the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. All the latter being ‘Great’ War veterans who burned down our City Hall in Cork and caused the deaths of two lord mayors of our city. Ireland never forgot the dead of the First World War – that would have been a physical impossibility. It just did not celebrate Irish slaughter in Britain’s interest, and it never should.

Loretta Lane-Maloney

Church Avenue

Roman Street

Cork