Easter Medals

The most neutral people in Europe today are the fighting Irish. Last week as two hemispheres held their breath watching the racing brush fire of World War II sweep across the Balkans and Africa, tradition-steeped Irish were very busy honoring the heroes of a strictly private fight of 25 years ago.

To Catholic Eire, Easter time is a historical as well as a religious holiday. On Good Friday, 1014, King Brian Boru lost his life smashing the Vikings, who for two centuries had raided Ireland. On Easter Monday, 1916 (one day behind schedule) began the brief, bitter, bloody rising that was the first skirmish in the rebellion that led to the Irish Free State.

Traditional Easter celebrations in Eire this year saw the end of another tradition: that Eire awards no medals, that her soldiers wear no foreign decorations. As processions ranked themselves around the graves of men and women who died in the 1916-21 struggle, many an Irish soldier wore, and many an Irish civilian prized, the first medal that Eire has ever issued: for service in the 1916 Rising. A second medal was to go to veterans of the years of guerrilla war that followed--which the Irish call "The Trouble."* Of the 2,000-odd fighters in the Rising, many are dead, others have disappeared. Among the survivors to whom the medal went were Prime Minister Eamon de Valera, three of his Ministers, Opposition Leader William T. Cosgrave, Minister to the U.S. Robert Brennan, Protestant Labor Leader Archie Heron, Actor Arthur Shields.

* In Vichy the French Governent was having medal trouble . Finding that it had given out more medals per day in disastrous World War II than in victorious World War I. France revoked all 1939 40 red-&-green-ribboned Croix de Guerre, promised a special new green-&-black-ribboned Croix de Guerre to holders of the old medals who had proven on investigation really to have earned them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.