THERE IS an extent to which commemoration and celebration are inevitably one. And a sense then in which there are bound to be particular challenges to collective remembering when conflicting, contradicting narratives crowd in on each other. As indeed they do when we look back on the decade ushered in by 1912. Yet, if we can’t commemorate without celebrating, how can we remember without becoming mired in retrospective recriminations on causes that still retain a potency and salience in the politics of today?
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has rightly spoken of engaging with commemoration through “the prism of peace”. What that requires is a determination by what could be called the stakeholders of each contesting narrative – constitutional nationalists of various hues, republicans, unionists, socialists, women ... – to respect firstly historical truth and context, and then each other’s right to hold differing perspectives. Parity of esteem, they call it in peace-speak. Without triumphalism. Both the North’s Community Relations Council (CRC) and the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht who are co-ordinating “official” commemorations are treading on eggshells to observe such a code.
Although there are big commemorative icebergs ahead, it can work. Who’d have imagined a few short years ago First Minister Peter Robinson agreeing to give a lecture in honour of Edward Carson in Iveagh House? It was an important exercise by both Dublin and Belfast in extending the hand of friendship through commemoration. And an unusual, not altogether convincing, exercise in rebranding of both DUP and Carson as champions of political ecumenism, Robinson reminding his audience of the latter’s final words to party colleagues as he relinquished its leadership: “From the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority. Let us take care to win all that is best among those who have been opposed to us in the past. While maintaining intact our religion, let us give the same rights to the religion of our neighbours.”
But part of the challenge of doing justice to that time, to make it live again for another generation, will be not to rewrite history, to remove the blunt edges, or shy away from controversy. On the contrary. John Bruton and several correspondents have already robustly taken this paper to task for its assessment of John Redmond or neglect of William O’Brien, and not in either case for academic reasons. Bruton is engaged in an argument about now, specifically about the political legitimacy of Sinn Féin, its attempt to claim ownership of 1916, to wrap the Green Flag proprietorially round itself – and indeed about the place of 1916 in the national myth. More power to him, no matter how wrongheaded.
The point is not that engaging with these issues with brutal candour and frankness will threaten us. Not any more. The point is that we in 2012 can talk of Easter Week and Covenant Day with confidence that the peace we have agreed is sufficiently robust, and will actually be strengthened by the process of contesting perspectives. Roll on 1913, 1914, 1916 ...