11.11.2026
‘Remembering catastrophic loss of life must shape how we live today’ – Remembrance Sunday
President Catherine Connolly attended the Service of Remembrance in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on Remembrance Sunday. For the first time since she took office, President Connolly joined Lt Col Ken Martin, President of the Royal British Legion Republic of Ireland to lay a wreath at the war memorial in the North Transept.
Dean William Morton presided at the service of Choral Evensong which was sung by the Cathedral Choir and the preacher was Canon Gillian Wharton, Rector of Booterstown and Mount Merrion. The lessons were read by Captain Ian Robertson of the Irish Guards’ Regiment and Louise Marshall, Principal of St Andrew’s College, Dublin.
In the congregation was the Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr Daryl Barron, and Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann Verona Murphy along with representatives of the Government and Opposition, the Diplomatic Corps, the Judiciary and the Defence Forces as well as members of the Royal British Legion Republic of Ireland.
The catastrophic loss of life in the First and Second World Wars was brought to mind by Canon Wharton in her sermon. She noted that in just 31 years, between 1914 and 1945, 80 million people (and some researchers think it might be closer to 100 million) people died as a result of conflict.
These figures, she said, are not just 80 to 100 million casualties. Each is an individual human story – children who never grew up, parents who never returned home, families destroyed, futures extinguished and generations left to carry the consequences.
“Today, we come to remember those from this island, who died in World War I and World War II… And it’s important that we come to remember, on this day, as we also come as a state to remember, on the National Day of Commemoration in July. Because these weren’t just names or numbers, each was a person, a human being. Most of those who died were men, but there were some women, including Florence Balfour Olphert, a parishioner of one of my churches, St Thomas’s in Mount Merrion, who was in the nursing corps.
“Those who died were someone’s son, or daughter, a brother or a sister, a husband, a grandchild, a parent, a friend, a colleague, a comrade. Behind every name was a family whose life was changed forever. We must never allow the scale of the numbers to make us forget the humanity of the people behind those numbers,” Canon Wharton said adding that 42 young people from her parishes died in World War I and five in World War II. These included four Lee brothers who fought in the first war, with two surviving.
She said they display the images of those who died in the churches each year. Now, however, we get so many images and if we don’t like them we can switch it off or swipe on. While images can blur and fade into the background Canon Wharton shared two images that had stayed with her: the girl in the red coat in the film Schindler’s List; and the image of three year old Aylan Kurdi whose body washed ashore at Bodrum in Turkey on September 2 2015. He and his five year old brother and their parents were trying to escape the war in Syria and were in an inflatable boat hoping to make a new life in Europe. Only their father survived.
“So, it’s important that we remember, and that we allow those images to touch the very core of who we are as human beings. Because when we deny that humanity, when we dehumanise war, then somehow, in some way it becomes acceptable. And war and conflict can become abstract and remote… disconnected from us. We can hear and read about campaigns, military objectives, strategic games, territorial advances, and casualties. We can look at maps, follow the movement of armies, hear statistics of those killed, wounded, or displaced. And that can lead us to dehumanise war and conflict. And when we do that, I believe we do something of our own humanity. We lose something of the God within us, the God who in his Son, Jesus Christ, gave us one very simple, yet challenging command, to love one another,” she stated.
But she said it was not enough to come and remember, it must also shape how we live and the kind of world we seek to build for those who come after us. It was extraordinary to think after the unimaginable loss of almost 100 million people, that people were still being sent to conflict and war rather than negotiation and words, she said, concluding that we must commit to working for reconciliation in whatever way we can, to resist hatred and to refuse to dehumanise others.
