'My mother was Irish - I will honour that at her funeral'

On Monday, my mother in Dublin passed away.

My dad died just before Easter.

The reason for the haste is that Irish Catholics, like many cultures in the world including Islam and Judaism, bury their dead within days.

For me, there is a paradox, because although Ann and Michael conceived me, it was an early 60s crisis pregnancy and, as was the experience of 750,000 other babies between WW2 and 1976, I was adopted.

In my case, into a non-observant Anglican family in South London.

I did not know of any Irish genetic background for another 33 years.

On Thursday, for the second time this year, I will be in Dublin.

That day is Ann’s wake, an experience unknown to me until Michael’s passing just before Easter.

The casket will be open.

At Michael’s wake, and doubtless at Ann’s, people sat around the coffin and conversed with each other, and blessed the departed.

It was of course alien to me, and yet seeing so many people making their final peace was obviously cathartic, and moving.

As some readers may know, my adoption reunion story was something of a jackpot.

The young Ann and Michael, terrified of the stigma of illegitimacy in 1961, had fled London leaving a baby me behind, cared for as best as they could by my adoptive parents.

In 1994 we were reunited, when I found out that they had married and had four more children, Liam, Maeve, Barry and Shane, my full-blood siblings I have known now for thirty years.

At Ann’s funeral, I will be yet again something of a curiosity, a man who looks exactly like these four siblings, but sports an English accent.

And at this time of year, when a little Guinness is on the table at the end of Friday, this dual identity matters.

There has been a difficulty for the last eighty years between Ireland and the UK over the former’s role in WW2, which was to declare explicit neutrality.

The reputational damage was made worse when the Irish PM, Eamon de Valera, sent condolences to the Irish Embassy in Dublin on the death of Hitler.

Churchill did not let Ireland forget that.

Ireland had its reasons for neutrality, the main one being that as WW1 began it believed it was promised full independence for the whole island.

War distracted that being fulfilled, but over 200,000 Irishmen served in WW1 of whom 35,000 were killed.

When the survivors returned to what soon became the partition of Ireland, hundreds of thousands vowed never to trust the British government again, hence in large part their refusal to join the allies twenty years later, although tens of thousands of American military personnel of direct and recent Irish descent did, and died across the globe fighting fascism.

I’ll be at the church in Colyton for Remembrance Day, commemorating all the British who lost their lives in conflict.

But I’ll be remembering the Irish too, and the hundreds of thousands from across the then-Commonwealth who helped.

History is complicated; it’s always best thought of not in patriotic absolutes, to my mind, but remembering the complexity and the courage in the tragedy of war.

That freedom to think is what our ancestors died for.