Trinity today commemorated the college community’s fallen soldiers in the two world wars as part of Remembrance Sunday.
Provost Patrick Prendergast laid a wreath at the war memorial inside the entrance of the 1937 Reading Room in honour of the 471 staff, students and alumni of the College who lost their lives in World War I.
A wreath was also laid for the members of the college community who died in World War II. The wreath included a quote from William B Yeats’ poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”: “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.”
Carved into stone inside the 1937 Reading Room is the Roll of Honour, a list of the soldiers from Trinity who died in military action in the First World War, unveiled in 1928.
Some 3,000 of the Trinity community joined the armed forces as part of World War I, with nearly a third of these from the faculty of medicine.
This year’s remembrance service took place over Zoom rather than in the College Chapel, its usual venue. In a tweet, Prendergast said that the service was “memorable in its own way”.
At the service Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson said the wars give us “some sense of such a combination of darkness and light and their essential interplay”.
“The horrors and the relentless devastation of two world wars have played sustained havoc with individuals and civilisations, distorting and disfiguring them and caricaturing them in a downward and a negative direction.”
The Archbishop struck a hopeful note, however, saying that “there rose from the gnarled barbed wire and the curling smoke and the annihilation of trust, the whole concept of human rights and the European Union as we have it”.
“Let us be extra careful”, he added. “Extra careful that our idealism matches our actions. Let us be careful too that our promises match our consistency. Let us be careful once again that our interest in ourselves does not absorb our responsibility for others. Let us be careful that remembering does not fade.”
