PRESIDENT MICHAEL D Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar have both attended Remembrance Sunday events today.
The Taoiseach took part in part in the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh and laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in the town this morning.
DUP leader Arlene Foster and UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Julian Smith were both also at the event.
This year mark’s the eight year in a row that the Irish government has been represented at this event. The ceremony in Enniskillen also marks the 32nd anniversary of the Enniskillen bombing.
Tánaiste Simon Coveney attended a remembrance ceremony in Belfast which the Department of Foreign Affairs said was to “commemorate our shared tragic history and pay respects on behalf of the Irish government”.
President Higgins and his wife Sabina are attending the National Service of Remembrance in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, which began at 3.15pm.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan is representing the government at the event.
Readings will be delivered at the service by both the British and Polish ambassadors to Ireland. Both serving members of the Defence Forces and veterans are alo part of the congregation.
President Higgins diary notes that he will be in attendance “in honour of those who died in war”.
The service is being led by Dean St Patrick’s Cathedral William Morton and the Archbishop of Dublin Michael Jackson.
Canon David Oxley delivered the main address during the service and noted that in his own family Remembrance Sunday is “a delicate affair” due to a “cocktail of national identities”.
Oxley went on to say that “there’s room for neutrality in the conflict between truth and falsehood”.
Whatever about the politics of national neutrality, from the moral point of view it was hardly possible to remain neutral in the face of the kind of evil represented by fascism. Many individual Irish men and women did in fact take sides and volunteered to oppose Nazism in arms, and we commemorate their sacrifice this afternoon.
“And I suppose what I want to say to you is just this: in the conflict between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, neutrality is not an option,” he added.
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