At a prayer service to mark the D-Day landing in Normandy in June 1944, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Eamon Martin said, “It has been largely forgotten – perhaps conveniently at times – that tens of thousands of men and women from all over the island of Ireland served side by side during the Second World War.”
The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, Dr John McDowell and Dr Eamon Martin delivered their addresses at the Royal Irish Regiment Service of Remembrance at Ranville Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, near Sword beach in Normandy on Friday afternoon. Ranville was the first village in France to be liberated on D-Day.
“As war and violence once more threaten to destabilise our continent and our world, Archbishop John and I stand here together at Ranville, witnessing to peace and reconciliation, to fraternity and common humanity,” Dr Martin said.
Dr McDowell recalled growing up in a housing estate in Belfast alongside veterans of the Second World War. Residents had been left physically disabled, usually having lost a limb. He said he could not remember any sense of bitterness among them.
He paid tribute to the Revd James McMurray-Taylor, a Church of Ireland chaplain who landed on Sword beach, on 6 June 1944.
“Although in every sense a hero, there is nothing of the heroic in his style and manner. He was a man dutifully doing his job. He received no special treatment when he returned to the Church of Ireland in 1947.”
In his address, Dr Martin said, “Fraternity and common humanity: that is what our brave and generous chaplains stood for in 1944.”
He recalled the life of chaplain Fr John Patrick O’Brien from Co Roscommon who joined the Columbans at 17.
Although he planned to serve as a missionary in the Far East, he was unable to take up his assignment due to the war. Instead, he opted to train as an army chaplain and was assigned to the Royal Ulster Rifles to accompany the D-Day invasion, landing with the Allies on Sword Beach, eighty years ago.
“The troops called him ‘the fighting padre’ because Jack had been a boxer in his student days, and several anecdotes are recorded of his positive attitude and good humour.
“They say he sometimes ‘visited the men in their dugouts for a few hands of poker, often with rum scrounged from the quartermaster,’ and once, when a newly arrived officer fainted and almost fell into an open grave during a burial, Fr Jack grabbed him, saying: ‘Now, there’s no need to be in a hurry. All in good time.’.”
After the war Fr O’Brien was sent by the Columbans to Mokpo on the southern coast of South Korea where he was martyred by Communist North Korean forces in 1950 during the Korean War. His body was never found or identified.
