A lesson from history - Let’s try not to leave any skeletons

NEARLY every family and society has a few skeletons in a closet and those who insist they do not are usually trying to hide an especially embarrassing one.

These skeletons represent things we might wish had been done differently, but we can never know how we would have behaved had we been in our ancestors’ shoes. We will never know if we would have had the courage, the energy or whatever other quality we judge was lacking, to do other than our forefathers did.

Most of us can think of things that we might have done better had we a second chance; the kind word left unspoken, maybe a gratitude unacknowledged.

Most of us can think of things our country might have done differently; stands we might have taken rather than issues swept under the carpet.

Right now there are people suffering because our health service does not work anything like as well as it should. Maybe we will come to regret our complacency and inaction. Only God knows how, in the fullness of time, the children of people who died because of our shameful health service will judge us.

Maybe there are some among us who now regret the support, tacit or tangible, they gave to the terrorists on either side of the conflict that ruined thousands of lives. That is an especially pertinent question as what has been realised today was, more or less, on offer more than two decades ago and all the lives lost and hearts broken since then were as great a waste as any of the lives squandered during that age-old conflict.

Some of an earlier generation might ask themselves if their active bias towards their neighbours of a different creed can be remembered with pride or shame.

An earlier generation still might wonder why they did not offer refuge to the Jews of Europe when they must have known that such a rejection could have consequences as final as signing a death warrant.

And tomorrow night we will be reminded of the actions of the Irish in America during that country’s civil war and their support for slavery.

Frederick Douglass and the White Negroes (TG4, 9.30) tells of how the Irish, homeless, nationless and impoverished, turned on those standing between them and social and material advancement. They fought and rioted with survival rather than social justice in mind. Some of them defended slavery because ending it would have made life even more unbearable at the bottom of the food chain.

What relevance has a story from thousands of miles away and nearly two centuries ago, from a time of slavery and sepia-tinted cavalrymen in flamboyant hats? From the time of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E Lee, bright uniforms and muskets?

It is a reminder that immigrants and the society they choose as their new home do not always have the same ambitions and that unless the host and the new arrivals work together to agree a common good, things may not work out very well. And unless we do all we can to integrate and welcome the new Irish we will leave skeletons in the cupboard for future generations to mull over.