Remembering D-Day - Our chance to live a good life

Seventy years ago today 7,000 ships crossed the English Channel to invade German-occupied France. They, and thousands of planes or gliders, brought a first wave of 150,000 Allied troops to Normandy’s beaches — more than 10,000 became casualties on that first day.

Years of planning, unwavering moral and personal courage, culminated in what were the opening scenes of the final destruction of the greatest evil seen in the world in the last century or, quiet possibly, any century. Europe was about to escape from Nazi Germany’s reign of terror, a deep, unfathomable violence and evil all but incomprehensible to those who did not experience it.

World War II was not won on D-Day — that victory was secured by the Russians in the East, but at a cost of tens of millions of lives — but the successful invasion made the Allies’ victory certain and brought it forward by some years.

That invasion, a meticulously planned victory for logistics and espionage, is one of the cornerstones of the Europe we live in. Without it, and the all-but-impossible to underestimate Marshall Plan, the 28 member states of the EU might still be fractious, bickering rivals, jealous and uncooperative. That they are not, that those disparate and often bellicose nations have become a unified — if increasingly challenged — community of democracies is testimony to the fact that we actually have the capacity to learn from our mistakes even if the lesson has to be of the very harshest kind.

In the closing moments of Steven Spielberg’s great and genre-defining film, Saving Private Ryan, the character played by Tom Hanks — Capt John Miller — demands, with his last breaths, of Private Ryan (Matt Damon): “Earn this”. The “this” was his life and the opportunity to lead a good one, a simple expectation denied to so many millions during WWII. That challenge resonates ever louder across the decades and this is as good a day as any to ask ourselves if we as a country — despite our neutrality — and if we as Europeans have honoured the sacrifice of WWII’s dead, estimated at anything between 50 and 70 million.

We are all, despite our terrible current and persistent difficulties, better off, healthier, better fed and enjoy a psychological security unknown to the majority of previous generations of Europeans. Social inclusion and multiculturalism, health and education rights, governments’ obligations to the vulnerable and the environment are now centre stage and can never again be set aside because of the largely Christian Democrat, Democratic Socialist and/or humanist ethos alive at the centre of EU policy making.

The economic solidarity shown during 2008 and 2009 may have come at a huge, crushing cost, but it is not hard to believe that our situation might have moved from the very difficult to the catastrophic without EU support.

Of course, the EU is not an entirely blameless or admirable force, as is confirmed each time our Government pays a crippling installment of the utterly immoral private bank debt imposed on this small nation. Unless this untenable situation is resolved on far better terms for Ireland, it is probable that the increasingly strident and electorally successful euro-sceptic movement will find ever stronger echoes in this country. This one issue threatens to undermine all of the great good, economic support and social legislation we enjoy because of our EU membership. It really is that serious. But history moves on and that fact is the strongest card in the hand of those who insist we pay the debts of banker gamblers.

For those celebrating and remembering in Normandy today, the rise of the far right, especially in a country like France that imagines itself so sophisticated and worldly wise, must be more than a little bewildering. How could the very forces, albeit in paler colours, that came so very close to ending millennia of European civilisation be endorsed at any ballot box much less one in a country that spent a decade of the last century under the jackboot heels of Germany? Britain’s UKIP supporters might ask themselves that question too.

History moves on for individuals too and time stills every achievement and sacrifice. The Normandy Veterans’ Association is to disband in November because so few of them are alive. There were 15,000 members at the turn of the century, there are fewer than 1,000 now.

It would be wrong too not to acknowledge Germany’s role, especially since reunification, in building a new Europe. The best way to honour all of those who died between 1939 and 1945 is to make Europe a stronger, fairer, more inclusive and a more democratic place where national interests are recognised as essential elements of the wider European project.