Commemoration is an inherently and intrinsically conflictual act, being both a product and a reproducer of society’s unequal power relations; what we choose to commemorate and how we do so are under constant (re)negotiation (Graff-McRae 2010, pp.1-2). Since its introduction in 1921, the so-called ‘Flanders poppy’ has perhaps been the most contested commemorative symbol in the independent Irish state (Myers 2013, p.64). During the interwar period, the poppy was sold by the British Legion as an emblem of remembrance for those who died during the First World War, but for many in the newly-founded Irish Free State, it instead signalled one’s support for British oppression and imperialism in Ireland (Myers 2013, pp.64, 88-90; Fallon 2020). This division over the poppy’s meaning frequently spilled over into actual conflict each year on Armistice Day, also known as ‘Poppy Day’, with poppy-wearers being met with cries of ‘No poppies will be worn in this city!’ and violent efforts to remove the alleged symbol of British imperialism from their lapels (Fallon 2020; Leonard 1996; Irish Independent 12 November 1932).

The dispute over the poppy in the interwar years was ultimately bound up with the Free State’s attempts to negotiate its post-independence identity and define its relationship with Britain and the Empire — was Ireland a true willing and able participant in the British Empire or a victim and eternal opponent of British imperialism? The poppy conflict has served, and continues to serve today, as a proxy for this wider debate, with decisions concerning poppy-wearing being understood as an implicit statement of one’s relationship not only with Britain and the Empire, but also the independent Irish state (Canavan 2004, p.60). As long as the links between Ireland, Britain and the British Empire or Commonwealth are contested, the poppy controversy will therefore remain a live one in the Republic.

I. Armistice Day in the 1920s and 1930s Free State

The main theatre for conflict over the poppy in the interwar Irish Free State was naturally the celebration of Armistice Day on November 11th each year. A popular historiographical narrative posits that until recently, independent Ireland did not remember WWI, with its people suffering from a mass collective ‘national amnesia’, as put by F.X. Martin, over Irish participation in the conflict (Martin 1967, p.68; Bowman 2020). In reality, the interwar years in the Irish Free State did see a great deal of active, albeit unofficial, war commemoration, and it was precisely this fact which led to extensive public clashes over the poppy (Jeffery 2013, pp.117-118; Leonard 1996, p.100). At least 200,000 Irishmen are estimated to have joined the British armed forces during the war, excluding any Irish who joined units in Britain or elsewhere (Pennell 2013, p.39; Leonard 1997, p.60). Many of those who returned as ex-servicemen, and the families of those who did not, wished to commemorate Irish involvement in WWI in an open way – and they did, with the anniversary of the armistice each year becoming the major day for WWI commemoration (Jeffery 2013, p.118).

The first peacetime Armistice Day in the newly-founded Irish Free State in 1923 saw thousands of ex-servicemen attend remembrance masses and services across the country, with a large crowd made up of veterans and members of the public assembling at a temporary cenotaph in College Green in Dublin to observe the two minutes’ silence, a cornerstone of Armistice Day events (Cork Examiner 12 November 1923; Freeman’s Journal 12 November 1923; Irish Independent 12 November 1923; Leonard 1996, p.102). Photographs from later years show thousands of ex-servicemen and their families gathered at St. Stephen’s Green or, after 1926, the Phoenix Park, as well as well-attended ceremonies in other main population centres such as Cork (Irish Independent 12 November 1925; Irish Independent 12 November 1926; Irish Times 12 November 1928; Cork Examiner 12 November 1928; Irish Times 12 November 1932). Armistice Day commemorations were also popular amongst the Free State unionist community, which viewed the day as a chance to symbolically express their continued support for the Irish union with Britain and the Empire (Morris 2005, pp.154-156). November 11th each year was one of the few occasions in the new Free State when one would see Union Jacks flying and hear ‘God Save the King’ sung, usually following the two minutes’ silence (Irish Independent 12 November 1921; Freeman’s Journal 12 November 1923; Irish Independent 12 November 1923; Irish Independent 12 November 1924; Irish Times 12 November 1925; Cork Examiner 12 November 1927; Irish Times 12 November 1931). However, those who participated in Armistice Day events claimed that these symbols were used not because of their imperial associations, but rather because these had been the only flag and anthem that the Irish war dead had ever known (Morris 2005, pp.154-156).

The so-called ‘Flanders poppy’ soon joined the Union Jack and ‘God Save the King’ as a major element of Armistice Day rituals, to the extent that the date itself acquired the nickname ‘Poppy Day’ (Cork Examiner 12 November 1926; Irish Independent 14 November 1927; Myers 2013 p.64). The newly-formed British Legion launched the first Poppy Appeal in 1921 to allow individuals to
remember the war dead while also donating money for struggling ex-servicemen (Myers 2013, pp.88- 91). The main Irish veterans’ organisation, the Legion of Irish Ex-Servicemen (which eventually amalgamated with the British Legion in 1925) quickly began to run their own Poppy Appeal, raising money in the run-up to and on Armistice Day itself through church collections and on-street sale of poppies and poppy wreaths (Myers 2013, pp.89-92). Within a few years, the poppy had arguably become the primary symbol for war remembrance in Ireland — as early as Armistice Day 1921, the (unionist) Irish Times remarked on the numbers in Dublin wearing the ‘little scarlet flower’, with similar comments featuring in various other newspapers in subsequent years (Irish Times 12 November 1921; for similar comments, see Freeman’s Journal 12 November 1923; Irish Independent 12 November 1925; Cork Examiner 12 November 1926; Cork Examiner 12 November 1928). Exact figures for the number of poppies sold in the Free State are hard to come by. A reported 150,000 were sold in 1923, of which 35,000 were distributed in Cork alone (Cork Examiner 12 November 1923;
Irish Times 12 November 1923); the British Legion claimed to have sold 77,000 poppies to Dubliners in 1928 (Irish Independent 12 November 1928). General take-up of the poppy was apparently quite high, with poppy-selling in the Free State soon developing into a significant operation involving thousands of street-sellers (mainly ex-servicemen and female relatives of dead soldiers), fleets of distribution vans, and several depots where stocks of poppies were sold (Irish Times 12 November 1923; Irish Independent 13 November 1925; Cork Examiner 12 November 1926; Irish Independent 12 November 1928; Myers 2013, p.91).

II. Historical Opposition to the Flanders Poppy

The Poppy Appeal in the Irish Free State did somewhat resemble that of mainland Britain; in 1924, the Irish Times proudly declared that in Dublin ‘the display of Flanders poppies was not equalled by any city in the British Isles’ (Irish Times 12 November 1924). Yet the rituals of distributing and wearing poppies in the Irish Free State differed from those in Britain in key ways: Irish poppy depots were closely guarded, with locked doors and passwords restricting access, and the vast majority of Irish poppy-sellers were women because the Legion thought them less likely to be attacked (Leonard 1996, p.104). These precautions were prompted not by official governmental opposition; both the Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fáil interwar governments avoided acting against the poppy or other Armistice Day events and symbols in the hope that these seemingly pro-British imperial displays would die out over time (Morris 2005, p.160). Rather, it was republicans’ resistance to the poppy and what it allegedly stood for, as well as their wider hostility to the commemoration of Armistice Day itself, that made the flower such a contested symbol in this period. Many republicans in the Free State viewed their fellow countrymen who had fought in WWI as dupes at best and traitors at worst (Canavan 2004, p.58). They also believed that Armistice Day as a whole was much more about celebrating British imperialism and rule in Ireland than remembering the Irish killed in WWI (Leonard 1996, p.104). These views led republicans to reject the poppy, as well as the other rituals and symbols of Armistice Day, as imperialistic displays of support for the maintenance of the link between Ireland and the Empire (Morris 2005, p.156).

Republican opposition to Armistice Day and its symbols was specifically framed as being anti- imperialist in nature, with an ‘Anti-Imperial Association’ emerging in the late 1920s and holding rallies in the capital just before or on Armistice Day where speakers denounced those who took part in the commemorative events (Irish Times 12 November 1926; Irish Independent 12 November 1927; Cork Examiner 12 November 1932; Irish Independent 12 November 1934). Another meeting was organised by Fianna Fáil in the run-up to Armistice Day 1927 in order to express ‘the protest of the Nationalist people of Dublin against repetition of displays of British imperialist sentiment that are insulting to the Irish people’ (Irish Times 9 November 1927). ‘Poppy Day’ and its symbols thus became a key battleground in the ongoing republican struggle against the perceived continuance of British imperialism in Ireland. The rejection of Armistice Day and its associated emblems was also the rejection of alleged attempts to portray Ireland as a willing participant in the Empire whose war dead had fallen in British uniforms fighting for a British cause. This dynamic was by no means unique to the Irish post-war experience, with the meaning and legacy of WWI also being the subject of opposing politically-contested narratives in countries such as Weimar Germany (Ziemann 2012, pp.226-227). Throughout the interwar period, republicans in the Free State attempted to create a climate of anti- imperial intimidation by acting individually and collectively against British symbols and their display – and one of the main ways they did this was through poppy-snatching (Morris 2005, p.160). After almost every Armistice Day in the 1920s and 1930s, there were newspaper reports of individuals tearing poppies off the lapels of wearers (Irish Times 12 November 1926; Irish Times 12 November 1928; Irish Independent 12 November 1930; Irish Independent 12 November 1931; Cork Examiner 12 November 1932; Irish Times 12 November 1932; Irish Press 12 November 1932; Irish Times 13 November 1933; Irish Independent 12 November 1934; Irish Independent 12 November 1935; Irish Times 12 November 1937). Most of these incidents occurred on the streets of Dublin, where both commemoration and republican opposition were most concentrated, but further such altercations were reported in counties such as Donegal (Irish Independent 13 November 1932) and Waterford (Cork Examiner 13 November 1933). Motor cars festooned with poppies were also liable to having them ripped off upon stopping (Irish Independent 12 November 1925; Irish Times 12 November 1926). Some poppy-wearers tried to thwart attempts at removal by ensuring their emblems were fixed tightly (Cork Examiner 12 November 1932), or in one instance going so far as to hide a razor blade in their poppy to cut the fingers of anyone who touched it (Irish Times 12 November 1932). Those who physically resisted attempted removal of their poppy were frequently met with violence, resulting in street scuffles (Cork Examiner 12 November 1926; Irish Times 12 November 1926; Irish Independent 12 November 1927; Irish Independent 12 November 1930; Irish Independent 12 November 1932; Irish Times 13 November 1933). In 1932, one man who fought back against an attempt by youths to steal his poppy found himself being hoisted over the side of a bridge in an attempt to throw him into the Liffey (Irish Independent 12 November 1932). On another occasion in 1926, an elderly man wearing a poppy on D’Olier Street was beaten by members of a crowd, and a nearby road repairer who tried to intervene was stabbed with a penknife (Irish Times 12 November 1926).

Poppy-snatchers often explicitly connected their actions to the twin causes of republicanism and anti-imperialism. In 1926, a crowd of between 200 and 300 men shouted ‘Up the Republic’ as they stole poppies from a procession of ex-servicemen passing through the junction of D’Olier and Westmoreland Street. In 1934, the evening before Armistice Day, attendees at an ‘anti-imperialist’ Republican Congress meeting in College Green snatched the poppies of passers-by (Irish Times 12 November 1926; Irish Independent 12 November 1934). Armistice Day 1932 in Dublin, the first to take place under a Fianna Fáil government, was one of the most riotous of the interwar period; thousands of youths wearing tricolour emblems and bearing the slogan ‘Boycott British Goods’ marched around the city centre in the evening, shouting ‘No poppies will be worn in this city!’ and attacking poppy-wearers (Irish Independent 12 November 1932). Earlier in the day, a man wearing the same tricolour favour tried to disrupt poppy-selling in College Green, telling people not to buy poppies but rather small tricolour flags. An English journalist wearing a large poppy was harassed by young men who demanded he removed his poppy and, upon realising he was English, attacked him (Irish Independent 12 November 1932; Cork Examiner 12 November 1932). Individuals engaged in poppy-snatching clearly saw themselves as striking a blow against Britain and its colonial legacy in Ireland.

Some republicans took their opposition to the poppy one step further by acting against sellers rather than those who bought from them. Despite the Legion’s belief that having women vendors would help prevent violence, street-sellers were occasionally attacked and their wares destroyed, as in 1928 when a girl selling poppies in Waterford town was attacked by a woman who tore up the box containing the poppies and threw them around the street (Cork Examiner 12 November 1928). Five years later, there were two cases in Leitrim and Dublin where a female poppy-seller was assaulted by a man who tried to destroy the poppies she carried (Irish Times 13 November 1933; Cork Examiner 13 November 1933). A particularly dramatic example of such activity occurred shortly before Armistice Day in 1928, when at least two men forcibly entered a house in Carrigtwohill, Cork, where a woman active in local poppy-selling lived. Upon finding a pile of poppies on a table they declared ‘We have come to stop this trash’ before tipping the emblems into the fire, raiding the cash box for money already raised from poppy-selling and, as they left, tearing a coat in the hall that had a poppy in its buttonhole (Cork Examiner 12 November 1928).

Premises that stored or promoted poppies were similarly targeted by republicans. The most spectacular attack against such a location was a 1926 attempt by four young women to burn out a Dawson Street poppy depot run by the British Legion, pouring petrol on a table inside before setting it ablaze and fleeing; one woman was immediately apprehended by a Garda patrolling outside and later sentenced to six months imprisonment, while the rest escaped (Irish Times 9 November 1926; Irish Times 10 November 1926). The stationing of Gardaí outside the depot speaks to the perceived threat of violence against such places, with special police watches being instituted over poppy depots in the run-up to and on Armistice Day well into the 1930s (Cork Examiner 12 November 1932; Cork Examiner 12 November 1934). This did not stop attacks on depots on Grafton and Pearse Street in 1932, as crowds threw stones at the buildings and smashed their windows (Irish Independent 12 November 1932; Irish Press 12 November 1932; Irish Times 12 November 1932). Such activity was not confined to Dublin or even to the Free State. In 1925, premises in Tullamore that advertised Flanders poppies in their window were vandalised with tar and red paint (Irish Independent 12 November 1925). Eight years later, hundreds of notices saying ‘Don’t Buy Poppies. Remember 1916. I.R.A. Derry’ were posted across Derry shopfronts (Irish Press 13 November 1933; Irish Times 13 November 1933).

Another tactic employed by republics to undermine the poppy as a symbol of remembrance was the creation of alternative emblems, such as the tricolour favours mentioned above and the Easter Lily. These symbols were set up in direct opposition to the poppy – the ‘Easter Lily’, for instance, being created by Cumann na mBan in 1926 as an emblem of the republican martyrs, thus contesting the monopoly of the poppy, and indeed of Armistice Day as a whole, on remembrance of the glorious dead (Morris 2005, p.46; Beiner 2007, p.387). The celebration of perceived British imperialism was to be supplanted by the commemoration of those who had fought against it in the pursuit of the republic. The lily also had the added benefit, from a republican point of view, of indicating the wearer’s opposition to the partitionist Free State and commitment to a united Ireland completely independent from Britain and the Empire (Morris 2005, p.46; Higgins 2016, pp.51-52). Advocates of these alternative republican symbols frequently protested Armistice Day ceremonies and rituals (Cork Examiner 12 November 1926, Irish Independent 12 November 1928, Irish Times 12 November 1930); in 1932, a group of young men wearing Republican emblems appeared at College Green during the two minutes’ silence and told those wearing poppies to discard them in favour of Easter lilies (Irish Times, 12 November 1932). The creation of these alternative emblems essentially allowed inhabitants of the Free State to display their stance on Armistice Day, and by extension on Ireland’s proper place vis-à-vis the United Kingdom and the British Empire, on their very lapels. This development was a highly significant one in terms of the conflict over British imperial symbols, as republicans moved beyond defining themselves in contrast to the poppy and the like to actually advancing an alternative historical narrative of their own, with its own roster of significant dates and fallen martyrs.

III. The Poppy in Modern Ireland – Change and Continuity

Today, almost a century on from the creation of the Poppy Appeal, the poppy remains a controversial symbol in the Republic of Ireland – even as the debate has shifted in a number of key ways. In the wake of the 1988 Poppy Day bombing in Enniskillen and the Good Friday agreement, the Irish state has adopted a narrative of greater tolerance of the island’s so-called ‘two traditions’. This shift has manifested itself in the recent tradition of leading national politicians taking part in Remembrance Day ceremonies, up to and including the wearing of the so-called ‘shamrock poppy’ (O’Carroll 2020; Irish Independent 11 November 2012; Irish Independent 7 November 2017; BBC News 8 November 2020). The very existence of the ‘shamrock poppy’ is itself a significant development in the long- running debate over the symbol. The Irish branch of the Royal British Legion chose the design of a red poppy inside a green shamrock to specifically commemorate Irish involvement in WW1. The badge is considered is an obvious attempt to shed some of the traditional poppy’s heavy political baggage within the Irish context (Irish Independent 7 November 2017; McGreevy 2017; Royal
British Legion, 2013). Irish politicians who have worn the shamrock poppy, such as Leo Varadkar and his successor Micheál Martin, justified their decision by arguing that unlike the regular poppy, which commemorates all British military dead, the shamrock poppy specifically remembers the Irish who died ‘fighting for the United Kingdom’, as Varadkar himself put it, in the First World War (Loughnane 2018; Feighan 2018). The white poppy, created by British pacifists in the 1930s to symbolise remembrance of all war victims and a commitment to peace, is another non-traditional poppy emblem that seems to be entering Irish public discourse (Peace Pledge Union 2018); at least two TDs were pictured wearing the symbol in the Dáil last year (Houses of the Oireachtas 2020; Pringle 2020). Poppies, albeit not the usual red ones, have therefore become more visible and officially acceptable in Ireland in recent years, a contrast to official ambivalence towards the symbol in the interwar period.

Yet amidst this apparent shift, much about the poppy debate remains the same. Irish public figures who do wear a poppy, be it a shamrock, white, or traditional red one, are often sharply criticised. Although the main forum for opposition to poppy-wearing is now social media rather than the streets as in the 1920s and 1930s, the language of criticism mirrors hat of the earlier period. In 2018, the Sinn Féin presidential candidate Liadh Ní Riada pledged to wear a poppy if elected and her party colleague Senator Paddy Mac Lochlainn highlighted his belief that the poppy commemorates ‘all British war dead in every conflict’ (Gallagher 2018; Coyne 2018). A large election poster of Ní Riada in Donegal was subsequently daubed with red paint and the slogan ‘Wear your blood stained poppy’ (Maguire 2018). In November 2020, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín attacked Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s decision to wear a shamrock poppy while attending a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen, writing that by wearing the poppy ‘you are honouring the Black and Tans, the killers on Bloody Sunday, the executioners of 1916’ (Tóibín 2020). Others have made the connection to the poppy clashes of the interwar period even more explicit. A Twitter account named ‘Anti Imperialist Action Ireland’ has specifically called for the revival of 1930s-style poppy-snatching (Anti Imperialist Action Ireland 2020A), while also claiming to conduct ‘poppy watch patrols’ where they ‘burn ‘Brit Imperialist Poppy Wreaths’ left around the country (Anti Imperialist Action Ireland 2020B, 2020C, 2021). A number of poppy wreaths laid at a war memorial in Rosses Point, Co. Sligo were similarly vandalised in November 2017 (Ryan 2017). Therefore, the poppy debate in modern Ireland is arguably marked as much by continuity from the interwar period as change.

Speaking in the Dáil in 1927, Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins, soon to be assassinated himself by members of the I.R.A. for his pro-Treaty actions during the Civil War, stated of the Irishmen killed during WWI:

No one denies the sacrifice, and no one denies the patriotic motives which induced the vast majority of those men to join the British Army to take part in the Great War, and yet it is not on their sacrifice that this State is based, and I have no desire to see it suggested that it is (Jeffery 2000, p.114).

O’Higgins’ words strike at the heart of the dispute over the poppy in Ireland, which is fundamentally a competition over the commemoration of trauma – whose sacrifice do we get to commemorate in an independent Ireland (Beiner 2007, p.387)? Do we honour and remember actual Irish participation in Britain and the Empire, such as Irish involvement in WWI, or do we rather commemorate those who died for the nationalist and republican cause? In this way, the poppy wars are actually the debate over Irish nationalism and independence writ small; in grappling with what the poppy means and whether to wear it, we are also grappling with Ireland’s historical and ongoing relationship with Britain and the Empire. The many methods Irish republicans have used to challenge the poppy over the years, from poppy-snatching to social media comments, speak to their continued perception of the poppy as a quasi-imperial symbol, even as individual Irish politicians have begun to embrace the supposedly detoxified ‘shamrock poppy’ or the more pacifistic white poppy.

The poppy has clearly become more acceptable in Ireland with the passage of time – how else could one explain a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach wearing a shamrock poppy as Micheál Martin has done this year and the year before (BBC News 8 November 2020; Irish Times 14 November 2021)? However, until any lingering conflict over Ireland’s relationship with Britain comes to an end (an event which is unlikely to happen any time soon to say the least), the poppy will remain a highly contested symbol in Ireland.

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