Sanitation of time and memorial — this is Hell reinvented as Disney

LAST Sunday, the 100th anniversary of the armistice of the war to end all wars, our news was full of quasi-religious, militaristic memorialising, writes Gerard Howlin.

It stirs me, which worryingly speaks of its efficiency. But it also puzzles me. Why do we remember the appalling, in so sanitised a way? In a calendar of memorial, to which has been added the Irish fallen in World War I, an alternative answer was found. I saw it not in Paris or London or in Lutyens Irish War Memorial Gardens at Islandbridge, but in the Leith Theatre beside the Firth of Forth on the edge of Edinburgh.