With these articles commemorating the sinking of 'Titanic', in April 1912, 'The Irish Times' begins its decade-long Century project, marking a series of major centenaries, writes PATRICK SMYTH
Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
Niccolò Machiavelli
LOOKING BACK ON the decade of 1912 to 1922, a period that decisively shaped our island, we commemorate our history to remember and honour those we see as giants and the countless ordinary mortals, many of them our relations, who brought us to where we are, to steer a course for the future and, importantly, to learn from our mistakes.
But we also live our history again and again, sometimes, with luck, to better effect. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.”
And the delicacy with which politicians in Northern Ireland are treading around the commemoration process, exploring it with the new “peace-speak” language of inclusiveness, is eloquent testimony to its living force today, its potential for continuing mischief.
As my colleague Stephen Collins put it here recently, improbably quoting from Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
And decades where centuries are compressed. The 11 years from 1912 to 1922, bookended by the introduction, 100 years ago next Wednesday, of the Third Home Rule Bill and by the start of civil war, in the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin, was just such a decade.
Not one event but a series of events that shaped each other in turn, in which each assumes its real importance only in relation to others, a process of unfolding and interwoven revolution and counter-revolution. To remember the decade we must recall that process in its entirety and not just episodically. We should not remember it, as people have done in the past, in terms only of what many wish to see as its apogee, or uniquely special moment, the Rising.
The Irish Times is today marking the launch of its own commemoration coverage, our Century project, with a number of articles on the sinking of Titanic, itself an extraordinary metaphor, as Fintan O’Toole observes in this supplement, for the turbulent events that would come, the shaking of old certainties and, with them, the old order.
Later this month, to complement our coverage of the many events being held up and down the country to remember these times, we publish a supplement on the Home Rule Bill and the Ulster resistance, and will follow it this autumn with one on the women’s suffrage struggle.
Between now and then, features will recall the founding of the Labour Party in Clonmel in June 1912 and the signing of the Covenant in Ulster in September, and examine the extraordinary new mine of information that the digitised military pension files reveal. Next year sees the commemoration of the Dublin Lockout, then it’s the first World War and on through 1916 to Partition, the War of Independence and the foundation of states north and south.
Patrick Smyth is co-ordinating the Century project; century@irishtimes.com
