President hosts “Machnamh 100” seminar

“Of Centenaries and the Hospitality Necessary in Reflecting on Memory, History and Forgiveness” - Centenary Commemorations Address by President Michael D. Higgins

4 December 2020

The decades through which we are living have been referred to as ‘decades of centenaries’. It is inevitable that some centenaries be emphasised more than others, thus creating a challenge of understanding as to how memory, history and symbolism have been used or invoked to suggest difference, distance from ‘the Other’, as it were.

The act of ‘commemoration’, I believe, need not, indeed should not, add to that distance from ‘the Other’. Indeed, I believe that, approached with a sophistication as to the uses of memory and recall, and a willingness to share the discipline of evidence-based historiography, it is possible to transcend such distance as was engendered, amplified, and is being sustained between communities on this island and with our nearest neighbour of whose empire we were a part just over a century ago.

We are in new times and in a shared context of struggling to defeat a virus that has taken the lives of citizens without discrimination as to any boundaries between us. I want to suggest that we should take the opportunity of transacting, that is to say, confronting and working through, that which establishes the distance between us in terms of different narratives of violences recalled, the absolutisms that drove those impulses to violence, the careless and dangerous assumptions of ‘the Other’ which may have driven such violence.

In previous considerations of public memory, I have suggested that amnesia as to painful events of the past is not an option. I was drawing, inter alia, on the work of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, and Richard Kearney to indicate the necessity of coming to terms with recalled outrage, the essential ethical foundations of the appropriateness of memory, and the practical use of such procedures as would enable, to use Kearney’s phrase – “a hospitality of narratives”, that it to say, an openness to different narratives of the historical experience.

It may be difficult to personally experience the recall of the different forms that the sources of violence took, but there is a real gain in reflecting on, and confronting, the assumptions as to how and why there was recourse to violence, the further development and infliction of new forms of violence, what purpose was sought or served by these sources, proximate or ancient.

What is at stake in making the reflection, I suggest, is not the offering of a set of competing rationalisations of opposing violences, but rather a recovery of contexts that need to be understood, whatever purposes may have been served by such rationalisations.

Such recovered contexts must include in addition to a consideration of violence, adequate recognition of the efforts of those who sought peace in the face of emerging conflicts. They include the trade union movement North and South, pacifists, feminists, individual clerics such as Archbishop Clune of Perth. Their presence in the historiography tends to be understated. Violence, and recall of it, dominate.

Yet peace matters. It is possible, for example, to see 1920 as a year of the lost opportunity for a peaceful transition, a loss that emerged from a series of opportunities not taken in the immediate years preceding. It is necessary, too, however uncomfortable, to hear the views of those who believe that, even with all the tragedy that emerged, perhaps a greater loss of life was avoided by the making of compromises and new accommodations, later to be the subject of contestation, even rejection.

Even more important is the need to recognise that what was perceived by some, for example, as a loss to empire was for others, such as nationalists, a moment of emancipation, of a freedom long-delayed, and based, too, on remembered, deeply layered humiliation, loss of respect; an indomitable search for independence, the pursuit of which was a value inherited and an aspiration for freedom recovered from past failures, and the expression of a diverse but indomitable people. That aspiration, of course, accommodated within it different versions of freedom.

The result of excluded narratives or perspectives led for too long to the domination of a sealed, as opposed to an open, version of history. An evasive forgetting was as important as remembering in this selective approach, for both remembering and forgetting are utilised in the case of collective memories that generate exclusive narratives of ‘the Other’.

Paul Ricoeur refers to this in his suggestion of the tendency of such an abuse of memory to be justified as loyalty, or faithfulness, an approach from which history in the pursuit of fact has to distance itself. This indeed might suggest that there may be an unavoidable tension between history and memory.

History is important as an evidence-based framework for what public remembering we choose to do. We are fortunate on this island, I believe, in having sharply relevant new contributions from historians drawing on newly available sources, new considerations of context, scholars who are addressing neglected themes, others revising or deepening previous scholarship.

Undertaking responsibility for the building of a capacity for achieving a hospitality of narratives is a task for us all. I particularly want to commend the work in this regard here in Ireland of Johnston McMaster and his colleague Cathy Higgins, and others, who are giving such a lead in developing cross-community courses in ethical remembering which run a timeline of historical events as a background to the contested contexts of differing public memories. I believe great results can flow from such engagement. If I may quote from a recent paper of Johnston McMaster on this topic,

“History requires ethical analysis which in turn requires appropriate attention to contexts. […] Attention to context means that we cannot read history uncritically from the contemporary standpoint or current ethical perspectives. The perceived wisdom of the time needs to be engaged.”

 

Why Commemorate?

As we set about the task of ethical remembering, it may be useful to ask why do we commemorate, for whom do we commemorate, and why has it become such an important ritual over the centuries? Heather Jones, in her contribution to the superb Atlas of the Irish Revolution, asserts:

“there have been complex historiographical debates about the nature of collective memory and war remembrance, but the term ‘commemoration’ has been less clearly analysed.”

John Horne argues that the practices of commemoration “have their own history, which is that of traces left behind by the episodes that caused them and the changing awareness over time of their importance.”

In his book Commemoration, historian Seth C. Bruggeman calls commemoration “the lingua franca of public memory”, encompassing the various ways we have imagined—in monuments, ceremonies, festivals, pageants, fairs, museums, re-enactments—to register deep regard for the past by those in the present.

Unlike history, which is concerned primarily with circumstance, commemoration dwells predominately in feeling. It could be argued, as Bruggeman does, that the diversity of rituals, objects and customs that we associate with commemoration are all intended to give public feeling to what are otherwise often private memories.

Commemoration therefore offers the opportunity to reflect, to look deeply at change over time, to provide an understanding of where things have been, where they are today, and why.

The idea of commemoration is always, correctly, rooted in agency and the intent to accord importance to an aspect of the past. It is therefore an active concept, encompassing social and cultural functions, and serving, for example, as a bonding tool for enhanced social capital, employed for pedagogical purposes to spread awareness of historical events and, for some, acting as a form of retributive justice to honour those perceived to have been the victims.

Commemoration brings to the fore a consideration of how the study of the past and our collective memory may be valuable to individuals, communities, and a wider society. Through commemoration, history helps create and nurture active, engaged citizens.

I want to suggest that we should use the present context of the shared experience of struggles with the COVID-19 virus to be radical in our acknowledgement of what we have excluded and that there is value in seeking to work towards an ethical task together, one of inclusion and respect, one that brings us beyond – relieves us of the burden of – sectarian tendencies past and present.

Ethics of Memory

In this decade of significant commemoration, we continue to be challenged to engage with our shared past in a way that is honest, authentic and pluralistic. The complex events we recall and commemorate during this decade are integral to the story that has shaped our nation in all its diversity at home and abroad. They are, however, events to be remembered that will be retold from many different standpoints, and it is through respecting these differing perspectives in all their complexity that we can facilitate a more authentic construction, not only of our intersecting shared history, but of our post-sectarian possibilities for the future.

While memory can be both constructive and re-constructive – that is to say, it is developed over time, built upon by age-old acquisition of the distant senses, imagination and thought – yet central to the concept of ethical remembering must be the notion of authenticity. This in turn is nuanced by what Professor Ciarán Benson describes as,

“the ever-present warning that remembering, whether individual or collective, is always shadowed by uncertainty and, from a responsible, moral perspective, ought to be accompanied by a knowledge of that possibility.”

The act of remembering invites of course risk of an emotional kind, even if executed in private. If executed publicly, as commemorations, it has a wider impact. If the commemoration is to be hospitable to multiple narratives, to a plurality of interpretations, ground has to be given, from earlier, even comforting, foundational myths upon which one’s own personality and communal shared beliefs have relied.

It seems to me useful to reflect on the purpose of the act of remembering as one prepares to issue an invitation to what is an increasingly diverse public to engage in the more public act of commemoration. Issues of the fullness of context, in its being taken into account, or being excluded, cannot morally be avoided. For example, when during our memorial services for the dead in the two wars of the twentieth century we state ‘we shall remember them from the break of day to the setting of the sun’, are we celebrating their lived and lost lives together in the conditions of war as fellow vulnerable human beings, or are we allowed also to see them as the human carnage of conflict, of a clash of imperial aspirations? What is the intention guiding our invocation?

“To fail to remember”, is to “kill the victims twice”, Paul Ricoeur has written. Yes, it is undeniable that in the intimacy of trenches, under terrible bombardment, some of the greatest extensions of human courage, compassion and bravery have been delivered, but at a terrible cost. Acknowledging the context of what we recognise as the heroic should not be a problem.

Who could not be moved by the inscription on a tombstone? But then, if we are to have an authentic act of public memory, should we not be moved in an ever deeper way at what a field of graves tells us of the failure that the slaughter of war has represented, not only in the twentieth century, but in all centuries?

An ‘ethical act of memory’ has to be a critical act of memory, I suggest. There should be an engagement with the issues of context before the act of public memory is transformed to commemoration in any narrow sense. Commemoration is not only a public invitation, it is an act predicated on selection.

The act of selection is challenging, and poses choices, as to what is appropriate as even a temporary excursion into collective memory. Such choices can never be neutral nor is there any way they can be claimed to be objective. Thus, assumptions that guided inclusion and exclusion are best stated.

What can be achieved, I believe, is a transparency of purpose, an honesty of endeavour in keeping open the possibility of plural interpretations and future revision based on new facts or original analysis.

This is put very well in relation to 1916 in Ethics and the Easter Rising again by Johnston McMaster and Cathy Higgins, where they write,

“Remembering ethically is not just about remembering inclusively, honouring all the dead in the mystery of their humanness, it is about taking responsibility ourselves for the present and the future. We cannot afford to be controlled or dictated to from the grave, but as human beings, take responsibility ourselves for our own distinctive time, place and world.”

Thus, the challenge is, for example, to take the peace that we have put on paper in the Agreement we achieved over two decades ago, and use it to achieve peace in communities, a peace that will make dividing walls redundant, allow our children to share schools, read history with respect for difference and, moving through such a shared respect, achieve the ability for a shared fulfilment together in the future, encountering on the way such understanding as is necessary, and such forgiveness as is made possible.

Trading of Atrocities

Commemoration itself can therefore be an important aspect of ethical remembering. However, discretion is required with regard to how we mark important historical events, particularly those that may be exploited for narrow political or partisan purposes. Indeed, some historians have rightly warned us against the perils posed to historical truth by any backward imputation of motives, any uncritical transfer of contemporary emotions onto the past. Time and again, we have seen how history can be used and abused for insidious, morally dubious, purposes. As historian Roisín Higgins puts it,

“[The] fractious nature of the revolutionary period has created many possibilities for commemorative events, as well as a great deal of potential for division.”

That it not to say that we should censor memory of painful events. To do so would be, at best, amoral, I suggest. For example, during the War of Independence the acts of aggression unleashed by Crown forces and administered by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries in particular were often in the form of exemplary collective punishments and reprisals. Such horrors would be contrary to the modern-day Geneva Conventions and would be considered illegal under international law.

Being as they were, an escalation of state-approved violence, these acts became the mark of a policy and strategy of holding control. They were aimed at subjugation, installation of fear in a public that had in its midst those that sought and were fighting for independence.

There is little doubt that the infliction of economic damage by both the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans was not merely a spontaneous series of acts by the uncontrolled, or the drunken. Rather it was a key strategic tool, a response of empire, employed in an attempt to quash support for any separatism that constituted a threat to that empire.

The move by the British forces towards attacks on business and co-operatives, including rural creameries – which were major employers and sources of essential foodstuffs – marked an escalation in both the wider socio-economic impacts and the sophistication of reprisal tactics, harming local economies and livelihoods by punishing the civilian population through the destruction of a cherished public utility or key employer.

Reprisals and collective punishments were a key aspect of empire rule by the different forms of empire that were increasingly coming under opposition from below. Empire was challenged, along with its imposition of colonial power, laws, attributes and ideologies. Such violent tactics were already an established strategic tool of imperialist military strategy by the time they occurred in Ireland during the War of Independence. Such acts, and anticipation of them, drew a violent response in turn from a repertoire of responses, be it in relation to land, language or poverty, responses and innovations, too, that were available to Irish nationalists motivated by both new and recalled humiliations of which there was no shortage.

The changed nature of the RIC, it having been augmented by a newly arrived force, some inexperienced in terms of discipline, and recently discharged, perhaps unemployed, soldiers, others officers ideologically driven, meant that its Irish-born members were now at risk of being constituted as part of the enemy forces. Those, and there were many, who may have joined for security of job and pension, or for housing or educational opportunities for their children, who were embedded in a community in previous times, were now in changed circumstances, targets, and the killing of them was often the instigation of forays from barracks by the new forces, burnings, exemplary collective punishments, and further tragic loss of life.

Of course, the British forces were not alone when it came to reprisals and atrocities. Violence breeds violence. Cruelty is learned and, indeed, the history of Irish Republicanism is one in which the callous disregard for human life has been displayed on too many occasions, with civilians often constituting the target, in what is often termed “The Irish Struggle”.

War is always ugly, and posthumous glorification is neither desirable nor morally sound. We must, therefore, I believe, seek to enable all of our citizens to engage with history and commemoration in a way that is inclusive, ethical, pluralist and honest, allowing for the evaluation of motives and of actions on all sides with fairness.

In terms of inclusivity, we have at times fallen short in our duty of public remembering in some significant areas of our shared history – for example, in Ireland, the State’s channelling of grief for those who died during World War I or those who died and suffered in the succeeding conflicts of the War of Independence and the Civil War. Indeed, on occasion, in the later 1920s for example, the State could be accused of being partisan and exclusive and thus divisive.

Such an approach to official remembering, in which the State was often absent or selective, resulted in additional grief for many relatives of those who died in the struggle for Irish independence, owing to the sense that they had not received due recognition for their loss. This adds weight to the argument for State commemoration for all of those who lost their lives in the fight for Irish independence, even as a palliative measure that might aid personal grief.

Recalling frailty, error or weakness is more difficult, it seems, for much of historiography. Speaking of strength in the pursuit of hegemony of narrative seems easier. Yet to achieve a capacity for peace or fulfilment, we need a recognition of weakness as well as strength, of error and failure, as well as of certainties vindicated.

Arriving at such a “narrative hospitality”, to quote Paul Ricoeur, such as I suggest, requires generous effort, and reaching an accommodation with conflicting versions of the past is merely a stage in the journey, via understanding, to what might be the destination that is forgiveness for past hurt, neglect or omission; a destination which, in so many areas of conflict, at home and abroad, past and present, many participants may never reach.

It should be understood that we are concerned here with a very tentative horizon of completion, of a critical historical knowledge aware of its limitations, built on such a reconciliation of narratives as avoids binary opposites:

“Between history’s project of truth and memory’s aim of faithfulness is that small miracle of recognition [that] has no equivalent in history.”

Ricoeur is suggesting, recognising, as we must, that what must come to be shared is beyond any narrow limitation, be it of history or memory.

In order to move beyond the hospitality of narrative, a parity of esteem in the discourse of dealing with past events is necessary. It is an approach, however, that may in time create the possibility of a necessary forgiving.

Remembering those voices who have been forgotten, excluded from public memory, either wilfully or perhaps unwittingly, is so very important if we are serious about nurturing a comprehensive ethical public memory. We must remember, too, as Ricoeur expounded so well, that there is a reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting which affects both the perception of shared, historical experience and the production of historical narratives.

Approaching anew the tasks of remembering and forgetting in an ethical way is transformative. As philosopher Hannah Arendt has written, forgiveness is the only way to undo “the irreversible flow of history”:

“Forgiveness is the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages that result from action. […] Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of consequence forever.”

Thus, it is only through such an ethical remembering, as we now have an opportunity to attempt to undertake, that we can avoid revisiting the blinding categories of censure or denunciation, or indeed revenge and bitterness.

Remembering Those Excluded

Memory of Ireland’s War of Independence is complicated by the fact that it was followed so closely by the Civil War, resulting as it did in certain events and figures from the War of Independence often receiving less attention than the subsequent Civil War.

Ethical remembering requires us to include those who may hitherto have been excluded from official, formal accounts of history, and to shine a light on overlooked figures and actions in an attempt to have a more comprehensive and balanced perspective on the independence struggle. For example, the different social class background from which Volunteers came is important, as is the level at which they had the possibility to participate. Those who participated in the struggle for Irish independence constitute a long spectrum that stretches from academics of emancipatory disposition, through insecure smallholders, agricultural labourers with little rights, to shop boys and the trades. They each sought independence, I suggest, through the prism of their social class experiences.

A central dimension of ethical remembering is a refusal of any kind of conscious or unconscious amnesia, not only of persons but events. Indeed, to reject important, if painful, events of the past is to deny those affected by them recognition of their losses or the right to have memories of those losses. I repeat that I believe that to do this would be counterproductive and potentially amoral.

Moral Vacuum and Gender Violence

Ethical remembering entails, too, the inclusion of the voices of the marginalised and the disenfranchised in our recollections of the past. It must show a willingness to do justice, for example, to the essential roles played by women in this period that we now commemorate.

Sinead McCoole has written that women were the “eyes and ears” of the conflict, providing safe houses, procuring arms, visiting prisons, spying and relaying vital intelligence and messages. While we have details of this in their pension applications in the 1920s, and in other decades, too, their work in the struggle for independence was, for too long, neither recognised, nor treated with any parity, in terms of respect, with male counterparts.

Ethical recall should also include an examination of under-researched or avoided areas, such as the violence against women that occurred during this period. The examples of sexual violence that occurred during the War of Independence and later the Civil War can be viewed, as Professor Linda Connolly of Maynooth University has argued, “[as] a dark secret of the period’s historiography”. Commemorations should not ignore horrific acts, such as head-shorning and sexual violence including the raping of women.

It is important, too, to recognise the complexity that arises in seeking to differentiate between what were strategic acts of a military campaign and what were, in particular situations, acts carried out from a mixture of motivations, acts of cruelty, old hatreds, envy or greed.

It is imperative that the Irish Revolution is not perceived as a war solely about or achieved by men. The civilian impact, where women come decisively into play, is so often neglected in the historical narratives of the period. The experience of women must be considered comprehensively, together with an examination of social class, if the commemoration of the War of Independence is to address seriously the most difficult questions of the past.

Gender-based violence occurred and was inflicted with cruelty. It is an aspect of the revolutionary period that has been hidden, suppressed and denied for too long. It deserves a proper contextual examination. The assumptions as to what was to be the role of women in Irish society was of course to become a slow-burning issue that would reveal so much of what was bad and exclusionary rather than what might be good and inclusive right into our own times.

We must face the exclusionary nature of the State that emerged a century ago. We must muster the courage to face the role played by institutions, including religious institutions, in providing the fuel and the exclusionary language for what became confessionalisms that fostered division, not cooperation.

The ‘Other’

The ethics of commemoration entails inclusivity being placed centre-stage, an openness to dissonant voices and stories of ‘the Other’, the stranger, the enemy of yesterday.

We must also, through commemoration of the Irish centenary, face up to, acknowledge, and come to a form of reconciliation with some of the thorniest aspects of the struggle for independence, and the later practice of that independence, including the lingering sources of violence – be they land-based, local disputes, gender-based, treatment of prisoners – and particularly those based on stereotypes of ‘the Other’ from both sides.

I have written elsewhere as to how, in the British case, the stereotypes that related to the Irish and other colonised peoples involved the ‘othering’ of people, cultures and ideologies, their being regarded as inferior. Stereotypes were employed as instruments that rejected or ignored the humanity and dignity of those being colonised. I have also written of what a powerful moment it would constitute if a number of European societies made a public recognition of this, particularly in relation to Africa.

By way of response, in the Irish case, there was no scarcity of figures responsible for past horrific acts of abuse, humiliation and indifference to poverty that could be drawn on as figures to describe and depict present opponents.

‘Othering’ was rooted in ideological assumptions, of superiority and inferiority in terms of race, culture or capacity, in the notion of the collective as a disloyal, hopeless or threatening version of the ‘Other’. The ‘othering’ of particular cultures, particular nationalities, particular attributes and particular ideologies served, for example, as an insidious rationalisation of, and distorted logic behind, British Crown Forces’ acts of violence, such as the collective punishments and reprisals to which I referred earlier. We must also be cognisant of stereotypical depictions of ‘the Other’ by some of those on the nationalist side as a process of generating a form of Anglophobia which has been utilised and exists in some quarters to this day, and is perhaps being fuelled by the worst aspects, and feared consequences, of Brexit.

Hibernophobia, as it is sometimes called, was a deep current in late-19th and early-20th century Britain. But prejudice against the Irish, particularly as a migrant people, or as members of particular religious denominations, was not just confined to Victorian Britain, but was also evident in the United States, centred on the stereotyping of the Irish as inherently violent, alcoholic and unintelligent. It was a depiction that continued into, and throughout, the twentieth century. The response to it helped fuel actions that were horrific and were delivered against a civilian British public, with whom they should have been able to see a common culture. Thus, one form of hate reinforced another.

There existed, it has to be recognised, a supportive intellectual tradition of pejorative attitudes towards the Irish by sections of British scholarship, which had been well-formed by this period. It includes, for example, Scottish philosopher David Hume who, having made a distinguished contribution to philosophy and its methods, that, as an intellectual of influence, could have made a significant contribution to upending such stereotypes. However, he was to write regressively in his History of England:

“The Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the most profound barbarianism [sic] and ignorance; and as they were never conquered, even, indeed, by the Romans from whom all the Western world derives its culture, they continued still in the most rude state of society and were distinguished by those vices to which human nature, not tamed by education, nor restrained by laws, is for ever subject”.

Indeed, two centuries later, Winston Churchill, claiming a distance from Irishness based on an assumed superiority, would write,

“We have always found the Irish to be a bit odd. They refuse to be English.”

The ‘othering’ of Irish people and their culture was undeniably ingrained at significant levels of British society during the revolutionary era, and in Ireland this drew in turn a deep, hostile and comprehensive ‘othering’ of what might be considered English or British or alien. Clearly, the challenge we face all comes down in our present use of commemoration to the necessity of us making a new journey together based on better principles in terms of recalling history and memories.

Such a task was well-described by His Royal Highness Prince Charles on the occasion of his speech at a central remembrance ceremony in Berlin. He ended his remarks with the words:

“As our countries begin this new chapter in our long history, let us reaffirm our bond for the years ahead. Let us reflect on all that we have been through together, and all that we have learned. Let us remember all victims of war, tyranny and persecution; those who laid down their lives for the freedoms we cherish, and those who struggle for these freedoms to this day. They inspire us to strive for a better tomorrow – let us make this our common cause.”

Not Merely Celebrating the Actions of the Victors

For too long our understanding of the decade 1912-1922 and the surrounding period was hindered by an assumption that we can more easily make sense of events, and indeed our own sense of individual and national identity, if we keep historical narratives brief, simple and homogenous. We must challenge the urge to over-simplify as we commemorate. Embracing complexity is important. Complex events demand a scholarship that respects complexity, that seeks to unravel perceived contradictions rather than invest in, or rely on, simplistic reiterations that lead away from any deep knowledge and that may go on to assist in accommodating ideological manipulation.

We must recognise, too, that, in the context of commemorating, understanding and even empathising is not the same as endorsing or valorising. It is not about celebrating merely the actions of those who won. In seeking to gain a fuller picture of the events occurring during the decade leading to independence itself, we have to recall not only the participants of war and rebellion, but also to recognise all of those who suffered in its midst and in its wake. As Declan Kiberd has written, “the stories of the past had celebrated the wrong people: the smiters of the world rather than the smitten.”

Reconciliation and Forgiveness

If I may, in summary then, return to the tools we might use in our new journey together, I have referred in other speeches to the work of Richard Kearney in this area of ethical remembering, and to his astute observation that engagement with the plurality and diversity of various narratives could, over time, contribute to a culture of forgiveness. Forgiveness, reconciliation and healing must remain important and necessary objectives. They constitute our best, realistic hope of coming to terms with the past.

Forgiveness is difficult but not impossible. The purpose of forgiving, as Hannah Arendt saw it, was to diminish a past event’s capacity to deprive one of the realistic possibilities of the present or the imaginative possibilities of the future. Forgiveness is not an abstract act, summoned up by an individual to address a particular wrong. It is a conscious, even painful, act and it can be the genesis of a new relationship forged between the forgiven and the forgiver.

Engaging with the past is often not easy. On the contrary, it involves a complex negotiation of the manifold stories, memories, hurts, legacies and emotions, for example, of all who recall the revolutionary period leading up to independence, or were or are affected by what is too lightly called ‘the Troubles’.

Finding a fair and comprehensive way of dealing with the past, one that will win the confidence and support of all, is a daunting challenge – however, it is a challenge that on moral grounds cannot be, should not be, I believe, shirked. It is the basis for us all not only of hope, but for the achievement of a new version of a life, one of fulfilment for all on our island and for all in our neighbourhood. For the sake of the future, we must break loose from the snares of the past.

Looking to the Future

In facing up to that challenge, let us ensure then that our approach is characterised by a desire to remember ethically, to view forgiveness as a true release from the past, and to move forward to a new chapter unburdened by any bitter memory of that past, free to make of our imagining an emancipatory, inclusive achievement in laying out conditions for an enduring peace.

In that process of re-engagement, we on this island of Ireland we share can, across a distance of a century, understand the events of a century ago as being about so much more than military or political actions. They also of course represented an act of imagination, a part of a social as well as a national revolution, whose leaders were inspired by the idea of creating a very different, much-improved Ireland founded on the old republican values of equality and liberty.

All of this was done in the context of a turbulent time in empire history in which global challenges were being mounted to relations between those who ruled and those who were being ruled. It was a time of a mass destruction, of a pandemic, the wrongly named Spanish Flu of which people were afraid, too numbed, too busy in conflict, to speak. It was the aftermath of World War I, empires were being re-forged, and across the world an urge for self-determination, including across the colonised world, was stirring. In Ireland, too, popular mandates, power realities, economic and social forces, choices, actors and passions all became key contextual components of our struggle for independence.

Opportunities for peaceful transitions were forfeited. Cold military measures were invoked rather than the making of any sophisticated or informed, meaningful, diplomatic or institutional responses to the stated will of the people, as had been expressed through the ballot box.

While in the best of its rhetoric, and in the hearts of its most selfless participants, it was an Ireland of equality and social justice that was sought, an Ireland of democratic citizenship and of collective participation, succeeding institutions would contradict rather than deliver such outcomes.

As we re-engage with the ideals that lay behind this period in history, we are also invited to revisit our conceptions of what constitutes a real Republic – a Republic that would have solidarity, community and the public world at its heart; a Republic fit for a shared island of diverse tradition, hopes and loyalties, a Republic that would acknowledge the State not only as benign, but as active, as a shared responsibility, and recognise, too, its vital role in actively improving the common welfare of all citizens.

This conception of a shared island, of the State and the Republic is so much richer than any narrow, individualistic definition of citizenship – and it is also, I suggest, closer to what the more idealistic leaders of this period of a hundred years ago had in mind. They in their generation included advanced thinkers, selfless women and men, who took all the risks to ensure that the children of Ireland would, in the future, live in freedom and be fulfilled with their fair share of Ireland’s cultural, social and economic advancements.

The passage of one hundred years allows us to see the past afresh, free from some of the narrow, partisan interpretations that might have restricted our view in earlier periods. We have a duty to honour and respect that past, and retrieve the heroic idealism that was at its heart. We have an even greater duty to imagine and to forge a future illuminated by the unfulfilled promises of our past.

This requires reviving the best of the idealism of this period so that coming generations might experience freedom in the full sense of the term: freedom from poverty, freedom from violence and insecurity, and freedom from fear.

May I conclude by suggesting that the time has come for such an ethics of narrative hospitality as might replace our past entrenchments on this island; that we make possible all the best of our futures together. We have in the past experienced lost opportunities in the context of reconciliation from our violent struggle for independence and what followed it, but we now have an opportunity, as we mark the commemorative centenary, to seek true, lasting reconciliation on this island and build a bright, emancipatory future for all of us with our diverse histories and memories respectfully taken into account.

As we continue to mark these pivotal moments in our nation’s history, let us together cultivate memory as an instrument for the living so that we may realise a collective memory at peace, unburdened, reconciled; an ethical remembering with its special energy and capacity to replace our past entrenchments, as well as offering an openness to others. Let us together strive to nurture memory and remembrance as a strong foundation of a shared, agreed future.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir is beir beannacht do’n tógra sin.

‘The Past’ & ‘Ethical Remembrance’ A Context for Historical Commemoration by Ciarán Benson

3rd December, 2020

If you don’t aspire to and, as a citizen, work to affirm, ideals of forgiveness, reconciliation, harmony, equality, justice, inclusiveness and a generalised orientation to a common good, then collective acts of remembrance of an ethical kind will not appeal to you. To understand why and how ethical memorialisation – in contemporary Ireland’s present case, acts of commemorating the War of Independence (21 Jan 1919 - 11 July 1921)  and the Irish Civil War (28 June 1922 - 24 May 1923) – we need, as the President argues, to frame our thinking about these acts within critical contexts.

My colleagues, as historians, will contextualise the details of those momentous events for this island. These last centenaries of our ‘Decade of Centenaries’ are especially difficult precisely because of the kinds of division that the events of those few years seared into the structures of Irish political and civic life for the last hundred years, cleavages within the Republic, fractures within Northern Ireland, ruptures between the Republic and Northern Ireland, and between both and Great Britain.

What I want to outline this evening, as footnotes to the President’s call, are some philosophical and psychological contexts for the ethics, and for the practice, of ‘memory’.  For brevity’s sake I rely on an argument for an ‘ethics of memory’ from the Israeli philosopher, Avishai Margalit.[1] Margalit writes against the backdrop of remembering that most extreme example of historical evil, still within living memory, the Holocaust. Tested against this extreme, his case for ethical memory, I think, fits our present purpose.

Just one caveat: In what follows the answers to the questions I pose are the conclusions of arguments reinforced by the findings of contemporary research. Their details are for another time, but these conclusions are, I believe, robustly supported.

This period of commemoration is a period of reflection on where, as a State, we have come from and indeed, had things been different, where we might have gone. Two strands fabricate ‘the past’ for us: history and memory. In critical history, colder and more detached, as Margalit sees it, “there is no backward causality. We cannot affect the past, or revivify the past. Only descriptions of the past can be altered, improved or animated.”[2]

In sharp contrast, memory in the form of “stories about the past that are shared by a community are as a rule more vivid, more concrete, and better connected with live experiences than is critical history.”[3]

So how should we understand ‘the past’? Let’s take a brief detour through the findings of contemporary psychology before returning to this idea of commemoration viewed through the lens of ethical memory.

‘The Past’, Its Remembrance, and its Possible Futures

Our ideas about the past, about time and memory, shape our assumptions and prime our expectations of what is possible to change in our relationship to the past. Reflections on the idea of ‘The past’ challenge our common-sense notions of time.  Here are some questions the answers to which prompt both caution and optimism.

Is  ‘the’ past  ‘in’ the past, or should we think of ‘The past’ as having a future?[4]

The eminent German historian, Reinhardt Koselleck, titled his magnum opus Futures Past.[5] Here, I would like to briefly reflect on the idea of ‘The Past’s Future’. Can we anticipate our past?

Concepts of time are central to how we order our experience, both personally and collectively. But concepts of time vary greatly from one historical period to another, from one culture to another, from one language to another, from one discipline to another.

In our everyday language we actually think of time spatially. The present is ‘here’, the past is ‘behind’ and the future is ‘in front’. In other words, we think of time using the metaphor of space.[6] This allows us to think of time as being short or long, and of events receding from us or approaching towards us.[7]

The point here is that our ideas of the past, and our metrics for temporally ordering those remembered or recalled events and experiences (eg., clock time), are constantly open to change and revision. Consequently, ‘The past’ is constantly open to change and revision, be it personally remembered or historically constructed.

The more we learn from newly discovered materials in archives or letters, the more we can anticipate changes in ‘The past’, just as the more we create new frameworks of understanding, and attend to newly noticed domains of neglect in an existing canon, the more, that is, ‘The past’ can be reinterpreted and reconfigured.

To say that ‘the past’ arises from the present is not in any way to deny cause-and-effect in the unrolling of events that have run their course.  It is to emphasise that ‘The past’ is a set of ideas whose use depends on memories and imaginings that function in the present, and that reflect the concerns of the present.  For the issue of commemorations, then, we should pay detailed attention to the demands and dynamics of our present time in order to decide upon the purposes of historical remembrance.

A key point is this, as the Northern Irish writer and poet Gerald Dawe has pointed out: in our present reflections one of the things we know is the ‘outcome’ of the past.[8] Dawe can later ask “how a common past can now be achieved or even remembered,” and he goes on to say that “The past is not an ethereal thing, but is contained ‘in’ things and actions.”[9] We have here again the idea of a commonly agreed past being formed as an ambition, as a future goal.

Seamus Heaney wrote of the past as “the ghost-life that hovers over the furniture of our lives,” where, to an imaginative person, such furniture “becomes a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging.”[10]

Let me make two points here. Dawe and Heaney are not in disagreement in their respective uses of the words ‘not ethereal’ and ‘ghost-life’ in describing our senses of the past.

Modern  psychology and neuroscience confirms that when we remember, whether individually or, arguably, collectively, we do not retrieve some fixed and immutable ‘trace’: We constantly re-construct and re-imagine, subject to present demands. The past is endlessly edited and re-edited.[11] My second point is this: should our commemorative objects and events aspire to become what Heaney called ‘a point of entry into a common emotional ground of memory and belonging’?

I have long liked the American philosopher John Dewey’s preferred use of the phrase ‘warranted assertibility’ to our everyday reliance on the word ‘truth’.[12]  Should we think of the contested past less in terms of what is ‘true/false’ and more in terms of what can be asserted with a good guarantee or warranty, such as one that comes from rigorous historical methods?

From this perspective, ‘The past’ will always be an unfinished project. That is its nature. Historical truths, it seems to me, just like mnemonic ones are asymptotic, getting ever closer to the baseline of ‘what happened’ but yet never quite getting there. Much of our remembering is imagining, and as such is subject to radical uncertainty. This, like so much else in our psychology can be unsettling, but we also have our powerful rationality at our disposal to correct our potent tendencies to error and distortion.[13] A goal of history is surely to diminish conjecture.

If ‘The past’ is what is remembered, what can we say about the kinds of way there are of remembering? This is a vast and ever-expanding field of study, so let me just list a few bullet points.

There are many kinds of memory. Two of the most important are the ways in way we can each travel back to episodes in our own past (episodic memory[14]), and the ways in which we can recall what we know (semantic memory). If episodic memory is a unique capacity of humans, it also lasts only as long as that human is alive. If episodic memories are what make witnesses, they also die with those witnesses. Insofar as they are part of collective memory their lifespan is about two generations. [15] And what they then are, as historians like Jay Winter remind us, are ‘memories of memories’ or ‘post-memories’.[16] Some psychologists would prefer the use of the more precise term, ‘distributive memory’, to that of ‘collective memory’.

This is significant for commemorations, for the purposes to be achieved, and for the national and local vulnerabilities to be navigated, in acts of commemoration.  It is fascinating to compare the kinds of preoccupation in play in staging the 1966 commemoration of 1916,[17] with the issues facing commemoration of the Irish Civil War, the legacy of which darkly shadowed official thinking in 1966.[18] The episodic witnesses to the events of 1920-23 are now gone, and if their memories found a record they now become available to be remembered as knowledge (that is, as semantic memories).

But it is another kind of memory that seems particularly important at the present time and that is emotional memory, and especially negative emotional memories which we know play an outsize role compared to positive emotional memories in our lives. Whatever kinds of positive emotions, of pride and admiration, there might be in nationalistic opposition to imperialist or colonialist ideas, the kinds of negative emotion that attach to the fratricidal divisions of the civil war are of a different order (bitterness, resentment, humiliation, irreconcilability).[19]  One concept for instance, that or reprisal – a species of collective revenge – lies at the heart of some of the most egregious events of that time (for example, Bloody Sunday? The assassinations? The home burnings? The execution of the 81 Republican prisoners? Ballyseedy?).  The question ”How could they?” transmuted into a more enduring and troubling question, “How could we?”[20]

As Margalit points out, it is caring that marks out what is important to us, and caring is emotional. Emotional memories are strong determinants of adversarial allegiances and

Identities, of who we are and of who we are not, of who is with us and of who is against us, and indeed of the kind of person we must not become.[21]

So what are the purposes and uses of memory, individual or collective? [22]

Memory is fundamentally prospective.[23] It is evolutionarily oriented to the future. It supplies what we need to imagine what is to come, to imagine what ought to come, and to imagine what, if at all possible, should not come to be. A difference between history and ‘collective’ memory is the difference between arguments and chronicles.[24] Each kind feeds the construction of identities. These involve choices, and memory informs decision-making. Memory guides the construction of possible futures, and insofar as those futures concern those with whom we are most connected (our families, friends, comrades, fellow citizens, fellow members of commonly imagined communities, and so on) then we are in the realm of ethical memory as argued by Avishai Margalit and the President.

Ethically Memorialising Ireland 1920-23?

Given the malleability of ‘The past’, its openness to review and to reinterpretation, its imaginary scene setting, its changing potency over historical time-scales, its transmissibility in object and action, there is for us now a great opportunity to deliberately shape our own responses to the foundational events of Modern Ireland. Our acts of remembrance can become – without denial, distortion or suppression –  instruments for an even more ethically-oriented Ireland, one that is open to difference, and to conviviality in the best sense of that word.

Here are Avishai Margalit’s conclusions about ethical memory. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, Margalit observes that “A nation has famously been defined as a society that nourishes a common delusion about its ancestry and shares a common hatred for its neighbors. Thus the bond of caring in a nation hinges on false memory (delusion) and hatred of those who do not belong.”[25]

His concern is to diminish the extent to which wounding emotions, the scars of painful memory, can motivate political action.[26] By contrast, what binds an ethical community together are positive emotional bonds. These may be forged in the solidarity of testing times and indeed in hostility towards a common enemy. That sense of solidarity is crucial.[27]

Our knowledge of the past is rooted in credible witnessing, in a hierarchy of those we trust.[28]

He goes on to argue the case for the redemptive power of forgiveness, but of a forgiveness that is based “on disregarding the sin rather than forgetting it.”[29] Here the idea of ‘disregarding’ and  of forgiveness is of both as voluntary actions and chosen policy. He offers the idea of remorse as “a nonmagical way of undoing the past” by changing our interpretation of that past.[30]

Here I am reminded of that letter in 1970 from the commandant of Beggars Bush Barracks, Sean Irwin, which Anne Dolan uses to such powerful effect in her book Commemorating the Irish Civil War. Irwin was charged with executing his former comrades. All those years later his anguish and anger, as the mandated executioner carrying out orders of the new state, is still poignantly raw:

“It is impossible to describe the harrowing and the anguish of the soul, of having to see  one time comrades in arms brought out and shot to death by a firing squad. And to be        aware that these men did not really know what it was all about.’[31]        

And perhaps the strongest reason for forgiveness is this: that those who find themselves in the position to forgive are also the beneficiaries of the act since feelings of resentment, coupled with desires for revenge, poison those who hold them.

I finish with this thought from Gerald Dawe who, when writing in 2004 of his poem Quartz (about his great-grandmother in Belfast) says:

“Maybe from these hidden, uncanonical sources a  common culture will emerge or resurface, out of which the next generation can mind diversity of background as a bulwark against (my emphasis) deadly and deadening division, and not the other way around.”[32]

This, as I understand it, is what the President is also arguing for.                                                                                      

Paper by Professor Anne Dolan - Machnamh 100

3rd December, 2020

A coat can tell a lot about a man; not just whether he was clean, or he was careless, but with Thomas McGrath’s coat we can see that he was loved and that he’d be missed.[1]  Someone had sown a medal into the lining at the collar; someone had taken the trouble, someone wanted him minded, but the sainted medal didn’t bring him any luck.  A marriage certificate in his pocket said he had a wife for all of two months; while a scrap of paper pinned to his lapel said he met his maker knowing she would bear the burden of the letters that spelled out SPY. 

And we can know all this only from a coat. 

Torn pages found nearby show the attempts it took to write those three letters, S, P, and Y.  The crossed out, thrown away tries might say much of an unpractised or of a nervous, unsteady hand, but there is something more in all the times it took to get such a short word right. 

Bits of paper and a coat, like so many of all the other things that we can find, all the mixum gatherum of so very many lives in the Irish revolution, leave us with a choice.  It is a stark one perhaps for those who come to the period with the weight of a centenary, with the onus to commemorate, or to ‘cultivate memory as an instrument for the living’ as the President said.[2]  But it is a familiar one for most historians of the period: how do we choose to handle the violence at its heart?

The President’s plea for ‘ethical remembering’, is perhaps a timely prompt for historians of the period to reflect on their own priorities and practice.[3]  If we can get inside one man’s pocket, under the lining of his coat, we are clearly spoiled for the choice of pasts that we can bring into the light and we should be acutely conscious of the consequences of putting them in its glare.  We know we make mistakes; we come to the wrong conclusions, we doubt, and doubt drives us back again and again with none of the certainty of commemoration’s promise of remembrance, none of the urgency of a centenary’s one chance to get it right.  We worry away at the past whether it is the ninety-seventh, ninety-eighth or ninety-ninth anniversary; and we’ll still be there when most everyone else has forgotten the hundred and first. 

The Irish revolution is now a very different place to the one I first learned about; the students and historians I see working on it, driven by the richness of what we can now know, are undertaking thoughtful, engaging, challenging research that certainly doesn’t shy away from dealing with the hardest questions this past makes it possible for us to ask.  There are fewer who aspire to be ‘keepers of the flame’, more who think in terms of a global revolution than ‘who shot who in Cork’, and more who take their cue from the methods of a Stathis Kalyvas rather than the memoirs of a Tom Barry or a Dan Breen.[4]  Which is why the President’s paper gave me considerable pause for thought.  The challenges of commemoration he identifies seem older than I expected; they reflect or touch upon debates the historiography already knows are fundamental, debates that are already inherent and even somewhat outgrown, yet they still clearly underline current commemorative concerns.  We need only look to the vandalism at Glasnevin Cemetery’s commemorative wall for a second time in February 2020 for proof,[5] or to some of the ‘more than 200 messages’ the then Taoiseach received, one telling him he was ‘a treasonous Tory piece of ___’ well you can fill in the rest, when there was mention of a possible commemoration of the Royal Irish Constabulary in January this year.[6]  Which perhaps begs the question, if, as the President suggests, history is the ‘framework for what public remembering we choose to do’, could history be doing a slightly better job?[7] 

            The tension between history and commemoration is an old and hoary chestnut and I don’t intend to roll it out again here.  I know as the historian, I’m the luckier one: I’m not compelled to see if the past can fix us, and I’m blunt enough to think we only have ourselves to blame for what happens now.  But that said, even I can see how faded those wreaths laid in the Garden of Remembrance by President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth seem, how long ago those visits by Enda Kenny and David Cameron to Messines, to the Menin Gate now feel, and how all that talk of ‘shared histories’ and being ‘close as good neighbours should always be’ has been clamoured out by sharper, harsher sounds.[8]  Brexit, Brits and border polls are part of the vocabulary of a very different time.  

So, maybe history’s job is to make it harder to be so certain and so shrill.  Part of the problem is the register that commemoration seems to work in.  The President’s paper ends with reference to our ‘duty to honour and respect that past, and retrieve the heroic idealism that was at its heart.’[9]  Again, the historian has the easier task: I just have to try and see it for what it was.  The President has to forge his ‘hospitality of narratives’ but many of our narratives still seem tied to a centenary calendar packed with dates and events that a Countess Markievicz or a Michael Collins might have picked.[10]  If someone had marked the centenary of, say, the introduction of the old age pension in 2009 we might have actually found a moment of shared history, a moment that improved the lot of every person on this island and the next.  But in the centenary stakes the old age pension doesn’t set pulses racing and the anthems singing.  While that may seem a rather contrary point, it is a sort of fundamental one all the same: whose pasts are we interested in commemorating, and just how inclusive are we really prepared to be? 

If we accept that commemoration is largely concerned with the more obvious political moments, then the real challenge of ‘ethical remembering’ revolves around the violence of this past.  Who are we prepared to listen to when it comes to the violence of the period, and what are some of the consequences of that choice?  If we can make our way into the pocket of Thomas McGrath’s coat what does history and commemoration do with that?  So much of the evidence seems to suggest that the very basic things we take as certainties might be wrong.  In April 1922 John Gunn was disbanded from the RIC on a Thursday, made it back to Ennis, where he had been stationed for 27 years, to Ennis where he was to be married, and by Sunday he was shot dead.[11]  There were others killed like Gunn; others like John Haughey, given five days to quit the country who fled to London leaving a wife and eight children behind.[12]  For them and for many more, for those who fled and those who were fled from, there was none of the clarity about where one war ended and another began that we now seem so sure of.  The more we see of the records the more the distinctions begin to blur.  Irishmen killed Irish men and women throughout the period from 1916 onwards; there is a quality to the violence of the civil war that is clearly to be found in the years that had just gone before.  The truce period as we traditionally know it – those months from July 1921 to June 1922 can only be conceived as peaceful if we turn a blind eye to the continued use of violence, if we over look those who go missing, those shot and killed, those driven out, those local settlings of old scores.  Also, the sequence of events we accept from 1918 onwards – through the war of independence (and we cannot even agree on a title for that), through the truce, through the civil war – makes no sense if we follow what becomes Northern Ireland’s trajectory of violence.  Violence increases there during the truce period; it eases but continues through 1922 and 1923; but it never really gets included in what we define as the Irish civil war.  There is a messiness about the whole period, a quality to the violence that makes for many civil wars, civil wars that bleed beyond the margins we have largely drawn for a kind of chronological convenience, so we can set our wars apart, classify them all neat and tidily away.  And that is just the margins of the easy parts. 

The history of violence, the kinds of questions historians have been asking of violence for many years now, take us more and more to the experience of violence itself, to its meanings, to the sense of what violence asked of those who fought, to what it did to those who suffered in its wake.  And the Military Service Pensions Collection is showing us, as we have never really seen before, the participants’ sense of what was done and at what costs.  In August 1924 Michael White wrote to W.T. Cosgrave to remind him ‘I have lost a lot by fighting for my country’; and while it would serve to put his sentiments down to anger and frustration with the state of poverty he found himself in, there is the history of something else here at work, the history of the used up and the disappointed, the history of something, perhaps a feeling, that the best of everything is behind you, and that you deeply want it to be someone else’s fault.  In May 1935, at the age of thirty-eight, Edward Devitt put it this way: ‘During the years 1918-1923 I gave all my attention and time to the cause of the Republic.  The most important years of a man’s life, between the age of 21 & 26, I let slip without thinking of my future, depending on my country to look after me in case of need’.[13]  And thirteen pounds, one shilling and a penny per annum was all he got for what he thought he’d lost.  Maybe I’m suggesting a history of resignation, maybe even a history of regret, but regret, not so much for what had been done or with what they had been asked to do, but rather with what life after had not gone on to become.  Decades of ambivalence is a much more interesting force to reckon with than the public stories of heroics shined up like the medals for every Easter parade.  Ambivalence is much more difficult to commemorate.

Inclusiveness is not just about who we are prepared to hear but also what we are prepared to hear them say.  Charles Dalton is a fascinating example of the nature of telling, of what he felt he could and couldn’t say, of how versions evolve, of the compunction to tell over and over again.  And he certainly had plenty of chances to tell: Dalton was interviewed by Ernie O’Malley, he gave a Bureau of Military History Statement, he made his pension application, and he wrote a memoir, With the Dublin Brigade, published in 1929.[14]  While his memoir acknowledged the overwhelming impulse to flee what had been done on Bloody Sunday morning – ‘I started to run.  I could no longer control my overpowering need to run, to fly, to leave far behind me those threatening streets’, that later, as he put it, ‘before the altar, I thought over our morning’s work, and offered up a prayer for the fallen’, his public Bloody Sundays were very different to his private ones, that for all he did not want to tell, there was more others did not want to really hear.[15]  But the challenges of the sources go beyond that.  Charles Dalton comes to us from the pages of his pension application, where we find him for a time a patient in St Patrick’s and Grangegorman hospitals, as a victim of what he was made to do, barely even an actor in his own wars.  But while he strikes a sympathetic figure in his own application, so too do the parents of Eamonn Hughes when an application was made on their behalf for a dependents’ allowance.  Described as ‘both broken down completely physically and mentally’, Mark Hughes was the clerk who could no longer work, Annie Hughes the music teacher who could no longer teach, because their teenage son had been killed, possibly by Charles Dalton, on 7 October 1922.  In 1933 the Pension Board was requested not to even send letters about the application to their home because over a decade after they still could not bear the mention of their son’s death.[16]  Is commemoration agile enough to accommodate all the hurt in all of that? 

The President’s plea for the inclusion of marginalised voices, is particularly striking in terms of how he frames the inclusion of women.  (As the only woman here among five men, I feel obliged to say that there are far more women then, as well as now, to find.)  Do we want to know of Mary Herlihy who helped keep Mrs Lindsay captive in the weeks before she was killed by the IRA;[17] of Annie Watters as she recalled before a military court in June 1921 how she watched her two sons die, how she heard the shots fired into their bodies?  Do we want to hear her voice as she identified their remains, confirming their ages – nineteen, twenty-one – is it easier to let her voice fade away and stay with the politics of whose side the Watters boys were on?[18]  Do we want to know of Kate Maher because she was used up by a group of British soldiers in December 1920 and left for dead on a patch of waste ground?[19]  Will we remember all the women dragged into things they had no desire to be part of, by husbands, sons, brothers, by being in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time, like Kate Burke hit by the shatter of a bomb while on her few days’ holidays in Dublin in April 1921?  Can we include the many more men and women who lived in a world around revolution, who avoided it when they could, who worked and lived in its midst, who can be readily found in its records if we choose to look?  What of Alexander Allan, a 50-year-old widower with eight sons, who was killed in Belfast keen to get to the second house performance, rushing to the Empire Theatre after a week in the shipyards, after a week with all those boys.[20]  What of the commercial traveller who took his own life because the Belfast Boycott had left him without work?[21]  It is in their midst that we might have the best chance at finding that which is shared, that which is most ‘hospitable’ about this past.  Even if it is because of the records generated by violence that we can find them, it is the many ‘mundane amicable interactions’, the ‘everyday accommodations’ people made across the things that divided them that, when it came to it, meant that our wars were never as bad as they might have been.[22]  Sometimes in a history of violence, as E.P. Thompson says, ‘it is the restraint, rather than the disorder, which is remarkable’.[23]  It might be time to give the history and commemoration of restraint a try.

Machnamh 100 - Michael Laffan

3rd December, 2020

I appreciate the opportunity to join in responding to President Higgins’s wide-ranging and stimulating address.  In particular, as a historian, I welcome the chance to illustrate, or to elaborate on, a few of the approaches he has outlined.  Prominent among these is his insistence that, although some centenaries are more esteemed than others, commemorations should be open to different narratives of historical experience.  In particular, they should include the narratives of ‘the other’, the ‘enemy of yesterday’.  They should not censor the memory of ‘painful events’ – even though aspects of the past can often be embarrassing or distasteful. 

In our commemorations we should take heed of Eric Hobsbawm’s shrewd warning: ‘it is not a question of the people constantly remembering: they remember because someone is constantly reminding them.’[1]  We should try to ensure that those who ‘remind’ – normally governments – do so in a generous and inclusive spirit.  As Emmet O’Connor wrote recently, annual state commemorations ‘normally focus on one or two big events, chosen not for their historical weight, but because they are deemed emblematic of how the regime would like to see itself’.[2]  Commemorative rituals have become historical forces in their own right; [3] they can provide occasions for inventing traditions.  It is even possible that there are too many commemorations.[4]

Whenever we find historical distortion, whether by the state, by groups, or by individuals, it is the task of historians to point this out – even at the risk of making themselves unpopular. 

Historians have a dual role: one is to try to understand what happened, why, and with what consequences; to discover what the past was like; to see it in its own terms (often strange, and even alien); to avoid tidying it up, gentrifying it, projecting back into it some of our own ideals or fantasies.  History is a record of what one age finds interesting in another,[5] but in looking at our ancestors we should avoid ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’;[6] we should not mock the dead by distorting them and their beliefs; we should not search the past simply in pursuit of reassuring things we want to find; and we should avoid a Whig interpretation of history in which everything leads naturally and inexorably towards the present.  But, on the other hand, we also have to try to understand how the past relates to the present – in effect, how we came to be what we are, and how others came to be what they are.  And it is for this purpose that history is used (and sometimes abused) for purposes of commemoration.  

In the context of the Irish Revolution, the ‘others’ should include innocent victims of violence, such as children; the defeated Irish Parliamentary Party, whose vision of a Home Rule Ireland within the United Kingdom was destroyed between 1916 and 1918; and ‘losers’, such as the minorities in the two new political entities that emerged in 1921-22 – Northern nationalists and Southern unionists.  The ‘others’ should include the triumphant Ulster unionists, and also the British, who had their own perceived national and political interests – in particular, a refusal (at that time) to accept the idea of an Irish republic.  These were often at odds with the interests of many, or most, Irish people, and therefore a particular effort may be needed to understand them.

In responding to the president’s request for openness to multiple narratives we must see the Irish revolution in a wider, international context.  From this standpoint it is striking how mild and moderate were the changes that resulted.  Despite persistent urban poverty there was little social unrest, largely because many Irish grievances had already been resolved.  Under British rule (particularly under Conservative rule) Ireland had already experienced its great social revolution: the change in ownership of most of the land from unionist landlords to tenant farmers.  This transformation, too, deserves commemoration. 

The violence that played a central role in bringing about the new Irish state was limited in scale – especially when it is seen against the background of the Great War.  The toll of violent deaths between 1916 and 1921 has recently been calculated at under 3,000, 500 of them in the Easter Rising.[7]  In the same week as the Rising, the Irish 16th Division suffered 570 killed and over 1400 wounded – and the total number of Irish soldiers killed in the war was over 27,000.[8]  British losses in Ireland between January 1919 and July 1921 were less than those on an average day on the Western Front.[9] 

Irish revolutionaries were fortunate in their opponents.  After the Easter Rising 90 rebels were sentenced to death, but only 15 of them were executed.  This is a modest figure compared with the 15,000 who were shot after the suppression of the Paris Commune; or of the fifteen hundred executed after the failure of the Kronstadt revolt against the Soviets in 1921; let alone the murder or expulsion of one and a half million Armenians by the Turks between 1915 and 1922.

Empires normally fight to maintain their possessions; ‘a Great Power does not die in its bed.’[10]  We should not be surprised that Britain used force to suppress rebellion in Ireland, or that until May 1921 it refused to contemplate the idea of Irish dominion status.[11]  The president rightly draws attention to the atrocities carried out by the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, to their policy of exemplary collective punishments, reprisals and economic destruction.  But, sadly, in all guerrilla campaigns, government forces resort to brutal and bloody measures. Individuals suffered, and their sufferings should not be ignored, but Ireland’s experience a century ago was benign compared with more recent victims, of, for example, the wars carried out by the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, or the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Even the British, who were milder than most other dominant or imperial powers, acted far more savagely elsewhere.  In March 1919, two months after the first meeting of the Dáil, the British shot at least 379 (and probably far more) peaceful Indian demonstrators in Amritsar.  In 1920 they killed thousands of rebels in air and gas attacks in Iraq.  The Irish were lucky to be white, not brown or black. 

We must continue to shun the old, absurd idea that, in Liam Kennedy’s words, the Irish were ‘MOPE – the most oppressed people ever’.[12]  They weren’t.  (In the twentieth century the Jews, the Poles, and the Kurds are among very many whose experiences were vastly worse than those of the Irish.)  The British government could be – and was – shamed into changing its actions and policies; and the Irish benefited from the fact that they were fighting a democracy. 

The centenary commemorations must also acknowledge that very many people did not share the wish to belong to ‘an Ireland of democratic citizenship and collective participation’– if this involved belonging to an independent Irish state.  A quarter of the Irish population wanted nothing more than to remain loyal subjects of the British crown; they wished then (and their descendants wish now) to exercise their citizenship and collective participation within the United Kingdom, not in an Irish republic. 

A century ago, if a war between nationalists and unionists were to be averted – a war that might have been comparable to that which destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s – partition was the obvious, natural solution.  It had been accepted by John Redmond, as a temporary expedient, in 1914.  It was accepted in practice (though of course, not in theory) by the leaders of the Easter Rising two years later.  Any attempt to stage a rebellion in Ulster would have resulted in bloody sectarian conflict – with the unionists as the probable winners – so they confined their plans for insurrection to the three southern provinces.  Ulster would be abandoned, and their northern followers would retreat to the safety of Connacht.[13]  In similar fashion, with only a few exceptions, the War of Independence was fought in the south, and not in the north – although there was much killing in Belfast and elsewhere.[14]      

Without partition there would have been no full independence for what became the Free State.  The British government did not begin to negotiate seriously with Irish nationalist leaders until the Ulster unionists had been satisfied, until after the Belfast parliament and government had been established; only then did a compromise settlement become possible. 

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, on 23 December 1920, the partition of Ireland became embedded in the law of the United Kingdom.  Ulster unionists got what they wanted – the largest possible area that they could control (and as a corollary, the area with the largest possible nationalist minority that could be controlled).  The new entity was a gerrymander, in which the wishes of the people concerned were carefully ignored.  By the standards of the 1920s (the only ones that really matter) it was a repudiation of the ‘spirit of the times’, of the ‘rights of small nations’.  A one-quarter minority, in the whole island, was succeeded by a one-third minority, in the North.  The result was a pattern of discrimination and resentment that endured for half a century, and that ultimately destroyed the Northern Irish state.  The fall of Stormont in 1972 has its origins in the events of 1920 and 1921.

All commemorations of the Irish revolution should include this victory – a Pyrrhic victory – of its determined enemies, the Ulster unionists.

In the south a parallel development occurred.  The British, no longer having to worry about Ulster, abandoned the small unionist minority to its fate.  Embarrassed by the nature of the campaign they had waged, and feeling that southern Ireland now caused more trouble than it was worth, they granted a degree of independence unthinkable only a few years earlier.

The Protestant minority in the Free State, being small and harmless, was treated well, apart from having to make distasteful but minor concessions to Catholic beliefs and linguistic nationalism.  It was lucky. 

In commemorating the revolutionary decade we must appreciate that independence was achieved not only by violence but also by the votes of most of the people – including, for the first time, the votes of women.  The demand for independence was expressed by the second Sinn Féin party, by the Dáil, and by a formidable underground administration.  We should acknowledge the remarkable attempt – partly successful – not merely to wage a guerrilla campaign but simultaneously to set up a counter-state.  To a limited extent, a rebel Irish government was already functioning before the handover of power in 1922,[15] thereby helping to preserve the Irish democratic tradition.  This tradition has at times been neglected in national commemorations, which have often emphasized violence, and it deserves appropriate recognition.  

Commemorations need not revive old animosities.  But they should reveal the past, in all its complexity, both those aspects that we can admire and those that we regret or deplore.  We can choose from the diverse patterns of our history those that we find valuable and constructive, and try to incorporate them in our present and future.  Over time the chosen features will change, to match society’s changing needs.  This can and should be done without ignoring the negative contexts – such as bigotry and discrimination – with which congenial elements were often intermixed.

The Irish revolution involved cruelty, injustice and bloodshed; all revolutions do.  Commemorations, while not glorifying such aspects, should not erase them.  When the time comes to commemorate the Civil War the atrocities carried out by both sides must be recognized, but also put in context; civil wars are normally more vicious than wars between states.[16]

Commemorations held in the spirit of the president’s remarks must be welcomed.  But we should have no illusions; a generous inclusivity will prove controversial in some quarters, and it will provoke resistance.  That should not be a deterrent.  In recent years there has been much to admire in the ways the country has examined and commemorated the events of a century ago, and we should build on this achievement.

Machnamh 100 - Prof. Joep Leerssen

3rd December, 2020

I am delighted to join you from the Netherlands and I would like to begin my comments, which will chime with everything that has been said before, by quoting a few lines from a classic Dutch poem. It commemorates the Nazi occupation of my country and it ends as follows:

Come to me tonight with stories of the war and how it ended

and repeat them a hundred times over

each time tears will fill my eyes.

These lines eloquently bring home to us how the past can be long ago but the emotions are still with us and continue to define us. How memory brings people together in shared remembrance, shared stories, shared emotions and that these stories do not wear with age but remain powerful in each repetition.

The poem is called ‘Peace’ but it teaches us that war continues to resonate even in the peacetime that puts an end to it. At the same time this poem is also about trauma, about the lingering damage of war; even in peacetime the war stays with us. It may haunt us with undiminished grief and horror. That recall can define who we are can prevent us from ever really wiping away our tears. Piety and pity are closely related and history can indeed become a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

This was all addressed movingly and trenchantly in the President's discourse. I should like to add a few side observations in the margin of all that, and I have seven points to make.

The first point is that when we face the past, we face a dilemma: Time sweeps us on towards the future. We inexorably move away from the past. If we lose touch with our past we lose touch with who we are and on the other hand if we get stuck in the past we lose out on what we can become. That's a conundrum.

The philosopher Hegel saw a way out of this and he called it ‘Aufhebung’. In that German word there are three meanings and each of these meanings is necessary to have a healthy relationship with the past. Aufhebung means, in the first place, to abolish, to discontinue.

Much as a peace treaty brings hostilities to an end; The war is over and we need to put it behind us. In the second place, ‘Aufheben’ means to preserve, to put something in safe keeping, in storage. We do not forget, we even enshrine the traces of the past in poems and monuments and museums, in precious things. And in the third place ‘Aufhebung’ means to lift something, up to elevate it to a higher position.

The past, deactivated as it is, part of what is behind us and preserved in our cultural memory, loses its virulence and its rancour. It can become something that makes us better people, something that we can learn from. We can look back on the conflicts and hostilities of long ago the way we look back on our youth and on our youthful follies; something that made us what we are, something we had to outgrow, and something that enriches our store of experience.

Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’ works best when the past is very long ago. We can look back dispassionately at the disagreements between Daniel O'Connell and Thomas Davis. By now we realise that both men were right and wrong in their own ways, and that despite their differences both were equally part of a higher truth that we have moved towards since then.

But in other cases memories, certainly of more recent conflicts, are more rebarbative. Nonetheless, sooner or later, and this is my second point, we must get over the rancour that all major historical events leave in their wake.

One of the bitterest ruptures to divide a society was that of the French revolution. It destabilised the French state for an entire century, making it lunge from Republic to Empire to Monarchy and back again. But by now only cranks still commemorate the decapitation of Louis XVI, and on the evening of the 14th of July, Bastille Day, all the citizens of Paris happily waltz together, dancing in the city's various fire stations, and that, to my mind, is the best commemoration of all: To be happy and convivial together.

I may on this occasion suggest to the President to identify a happy day for a recurring festivity, because it is not just trauma and high-minded seriousness that makes us a community but also a bit of ‘craic’. Possibly Bloomsday could become an official national holiday, possibly a new day could be instated, maybe the 16th of February.

Why that day? It is in fact a day of glorious memory in Irish history. On that day in 1932 the Cumann na nGaedheal government, having lost the general election, ceded power to the victorious Fianna Fáil - Labour coalition. This peaceful, democratic transition of power came less than ten years after the bitter Civil War. It was, and here I followed Joe Lee's view, an act of astonishing political maturity in the fledgling new state, and this at a time when almost all of these new states of Europe were abandoning their hard-won parliamentary democracies and installing authoritarian strongmen and dictators, from Poland and the Baltic, to Hungary, Greece, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Ireland in 1932, sensible and solid, was a shining exception it had moved to a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’ of its decades of strife and struggle. It is still a lesson for the present when it comes to peaceful transitions of power and that, too, is worth commemorating and celebrating.

But what stays with us are the crises, with their terrible beauty. What people remember are not Gross National Products or shifting demographics. They are the crises. Indeed after a Decade of Centenaries it seems as if the things we commemorate are the very opposites of celebrations, even though an independent and democratic Republic of Ireland eventually emerged from it all.

That is my third point: What we remember in this contemporary, vibrant, successful and modern Ireland still seems to gravitate towards the past, as grievance. The bloody-mindedness of the Black and Tans, the denigration of snooty British aristocrats, seems to blend with the tuberculosis and neglect in mid-century orphanages and with endemic misogyny and child abuse. And we haven't even started the centenaries of the Civil War period. Films like Neil Jordan's ‘Michael Collins’ or Ken Loache’s ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’ have already epically recalled the animosities of that period and instilled them into the popular culture, and this may yet loom larger in public memory than the general election of 16 February 1932.

In gravitating towards the commemoration of crises, Ireland is following a European pattern, but maybe that pattern should be reconsidered. And that's my fourth point: Long ago, all we commemorated was triumphs.

It was what Nietzsche called ‘the monumental view of history’. This changed in the 20th century: People turned to a more critical view. We became sensitised to the fact that each heroic triumph has its collateral damage, its sacrifices, its victims. What used to be triumphalist monuments became sites of mourning. Under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and elsewhere, the ashes of an Unknown Soldier were interred, and triumphalism became tinged with pity and remorse.

Dublin, from the beginning, was part of this European shift from the triumphalist to the traumatic. It has its beautiful National War Memorial in Island Bridge, built in the final days of British imperial rule and now, after many years of neglect, restored to its original dignity and beauty.

This is not about triumph, it's not even about heroism. It's about something that is common to all men and women, irrespective of nationality, race or creed: Our mortality, our vulnerability. Empathy with those who faced their mortality and vulnerability in the crisis of history, that is now the dominant mode of commemoration.

The President built on that insight in his discourse today and part of the ‘ethics of commemoration’ is that it is fitting and necessary as a society to express and to foster that empathy. But I move to my fifth point and that is this: Both in the mode of triumphalism and in the mode of pity or empathy, we tend to approach the past as a collective and we divide the past in collectivities.

When we celebrate our triumphs, we relive the moments when we faced our opponents, enemies, or a catastrophic crisis, and got the better of them. And we see ourselves in what we might call epic terms. And when we mourn victims, and save them from oblivion, we for all our inclusivity, may still empathise with them, for all their diversity, in terms of their group identity. And while we avoid the ham-fisted mode of epic we may over-balance instead into the sentimental mode of melodrama.

In literary studies we define melodrama as the type of narrative that relies on strong black and white contrasts between villains and victims. In melodrama the victims are always innocent and virtuous, and they suffer at the hands of those who are motivated only by wickedness and depravity. This, too, is a black and white view of the world it took a great and original thinker, the frequently mentioned Hannah Ahrendt, to make us see that pure evil is often banal rather than satanic, and takes the face of a dull civil servant rather than a diabolical monster.

Neither epic nor melodrama can do justice to the complexities of the past. They schematise the world into two groups, and they schematise the ethics of commemoration into a group-based contrast: heroes against enemies, or victims against villains.

So what's the problem, you may ask. Well, here comes my point, number six: My colleague Iraklis Milas, an ethnic Greek from Istanbul, has done a classic experiment with Turkish and Greek respondents. As you know Greeks and Turks belong to proverbially antagonistic nations and Milas wanted to see where he could locate that antagonism. So we asked Greeks how they felt about Turks and how they felt about themselves, and similarly for the Turks. The responses were surprisingly even-handed and serene. Sure, there were good ones and bad ones amongst us, as well as amongst them, and after all, the bottom line was that we were all humans, and the others were not all that different.

Milas wondered at this surprising lack of antagonism and he probed further. He asked the Greeks not how they saw themselves, or how they saw the Turks, but how they thought the Turks saw them. ‘How do you Greeks think that the Turks think of you?’ and the analogous question to his Turkish respondents: How do you think the Greeks think of you Turks? The answers to these questions were indeed full of rancour, suspicion and animosity: ‘The others despise us, they do not recognise our civility and dignity as a modern and advanced nation, they begrudge us our independence, they think we are their enemies’.

‘They think we are their enemies’. It was there that the enmity was found, at the level of imputation: What we think that they think.

There is a very important lesson in this experiment: Group antagonism is at its most virulent and at its most intractable when it is in camouflage and when it is unacknowledged. We are not aware of it in ourselves and only suspect it to reside in the other. We see the other as we think they see us. We are rancorous, without being aware of it and we betray our rancour by pretending it is theirs rather than ours. This prejudice of how we think the others see us drains our confidence in each other's intentions, prevents us from expecting or showing generosity, and makes us lonesome and isolated in what we feel is an unreliable world.

It is good and necessary to move away from simplistic celebrations of identity, to include and embrace the groups that have been silenced by history and to emphasise the diversity of the past. But in order to fully achieve a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’, we may need to go one step further, to acknowledge and uproot our rancour, and move towards generosity.

That is how I understand Ricoeur’s notion of ‘hospitality’ as invoked by President Higgins: Whatever the past was it was, as Professor Laffan pointed out, complex. It was not as ethically simple as our epic or sentimental commemorations imagine it, and too contradictory to be pigeonholed into groups.

And this brings me to my seventh and final point. If we acknowledge not only the diversity of the past but also the complexity of the past, we may be able to replace rancour by generosity. The harsh quandaries and the perplexity of the past were most poignantly and relatably experienced at the level of the human individual, facing the turbulent forces of history.  Individuals face the challenge of having to make difficult choices; collectives emerge from the choices that have already been made. That is why collectives are best visible from hindsight to us who commemorate, but individuals, more than groups, can impress us with something that is neither epic nor melodramatic but tragic and dignified and in a Hegelian sense uplifting.

Nowadays we are more aware of individual dignity in our commemorations. Anne Dolan has given very moving examples of this approach. We read out the names of victims, highlight them as relatable humans rather than as representatives of a group, people who hoped and feared and who had their own individual life to lead facing difficult choices. In the Immigration Museum in Paris, migrants and refugees leave personal mementos with stories attached to them. These stories speak to us directly from human to human, and they enriche us. And that's the note I would like to conclude on.

I would like to see the ‘com’ taken out of ‘memoration’. I would like to see a polyphony of personal narratives telling us how complex things were for each one of them. It would be great to see commemorative platforms put in place of people who come to us with stories, as the poem says, that allow us to relate individually to individuals in all their human complexity, rather than reducing them to group identities. And I think this would be a noble task for a future looking State.

Thank you.