Acting on lessons of the past - Talk not war brings real, lasting peace

History breathed a heavy sigh all around us yesterday, both in solemn, grateful acts of remembrance and in the repetition of violence as a savage articulation of failed politics.

Even if it is sometimes difficult to make the catastrophic, sepia-tinged events of a century ago — when Irishmen were among the first to die in what we now call the First World War — resonate in a globalised digital world, those events, that generation-hollowing tragedy, defines the way western societies live, work, and co-exist like no other.

Indeed, there is hardly an aspect of our modern world that cannot be directly traced to the decade of political, social, cultural and nationalist turmoil that began almost exactly a century ago when the first salvoes of World War I opened four years of industrial-scale slaughter.