Celebrate the past by burying it - History comes calling — loudly
It has, as it so often does, divided societies and there hardly be a better example of dangerous division than the carnage unleashed in Paris by disaffected, deranged French citizens who also happened to be Muslim extremists.
History has also offered this society another opportunity — the Mother and Baby Homes Inquiry— to achieve a catharsis through what may be a shaming and horrifying process, one dependent on co-operation and truthful testimony.
History as television drama has also renewed, if only in a coffee-house way thankfully, old divisions surrounding a dominant, charismatic, and utterly divisive political figure — Charles Haughey— that show no signs of mellowing.
History has tragically shown that, once imposed, the death penalty is a final, irreversible sanction, and recognising the executed person’s innocence decades afterwards may be the most hollow, powerless kind of vindication. In the first acknowledgement of its kind in the history of the State, Harry Gleeson from Tipperary, who did not commit the murder he was convicted of and hanged for in 1940, was declared innocent last week, 75 years after a wrongful conviction — a truth to be accepted in shame more than one to be celebrated.
But, most of all, the last few weeks’ eruption of yesterday into today shows, in a strange, utterly human way, that nothing unites us like our differences. It has shown, too, that how we manage those differences defines whether we are successful or dysfunctional; whether we support each other or undermine each other.
And, in a Republic where senior politicians, some of them Dáil deputies but not all of them members of Sinn Féin, still travel to the North to offer support to dissident republicans brought before the courts, it is important that a cold, dispassionate clarity prevails in how the past is made the roadmap to our future. It is important that when a common past is repeatedly hijacked, as it always will be to serve some cause or other, that we have the confidence and knowledge to honour core truths rather than the fantasies that sustain extremes. As the centenary of one of the founding events of this State looms ever closer, this obligation to mark reality and stymie propaganda, becomes ever more important.
But how might we do that in a country where, nearly a quarter of a century after he last held power, those who believe Charles Haughey was a visionary, a great leader, and a mould-breaker are as ardent in their beliefs as those who regard him as having been a cancer in our body politic, a sleazy, corrupt bully?
The recent difficulties in Stormont, where a bitter past is still such a divisive presence, holding far too much leverage, is another indication of how we cannot, as the song says, trade in all our yesterdays for a single tomorrow. Maybe the best way to mark 1916 would be to ask, in as much as this is possible, the past to leave the present so we can get on with living today and building for tomorrow.
