David O'Mahony: More can be done to address wrongs of the past than simple rebranding

History is not always beautiful, and we can retain a brand name while also acknowledging, confronting, and, where realistic, taking responsibility for past actions

Sat, 27 May, 2023 - 02:00

David O’Mahony

WE have serious issues in this country, chief among them a housing crisis for which no end is in short-term sight.

Human rights experts, as reported in today’s edition, have signalled mounting anti-refugee sentiment alongside this as it becomes more and more difficult for refugees to find accommodation.

Homelessness — highlighted again by Jack White in today’s edition — remains more endemic than it ever should in a developed society. To people who have escaped warzones and persecution, and to people who live with their families in hotel rooms across the country, the words of the Taoiseach and others that they are working on solving the problem are just that — words.

People have been warning of a tsunami of homelessness following the end of the eviction ban for months.

Against that backdrop, how did something like renaming a library even come on the radar at Trinity College? I’m referring to the announcement a few weeks back that it was going to change the name of its Berkeley Library because the 18th-century philosopher owned slaves. Now, slavery is always heinous, but throw a stone at a building that was named after somebody pre-2023 and you’ll hit a problem.

Trinity’s largest library was named in 1978 after George Berkeley, the world-renowned philosopher, and former librarian at Trinity. Picture: Trinity College Dublin

The renaming was a bit of an easy win for the university, where George Berkeley was a librarian and published a number of key works in the 1700s. Berkeley’s profile among the general public is quite low, and while the university said students had called on it to deal with the issue — and I have no doubt the name was offensive to some — I’m sure most were oblivious about who the building was named after.

It doesn’t end at Trinity. You have to root through the UCC website to find out who the Kane Building was named after, for example, and the relevance of it being the first president of the university is lost on most. And I write as one who did an undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees in UCC and spent a lot of time in that building for lectures.

Trinity provost Linda Doyle said: “George Berkeley’s enormous contribution to philosophical thought is not in question. However, it is also clear that he was both an owner of enslaved people and a theorist of slavery and racial discrimination, which is in clear conflict with Trinity’s core values.”

Well, I would hope that everybody’s core values involve resisting racial discrimination. Given the reports today about anti-refugee and racist sentiment in the country, that seems more relevant than ever.

It is not an unworthy move, but if Trinity was serious about making a stand against the misdeeds of the past, it would rename itself, because an institution name of “the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin” doesn’t sound inclusive to non-Christians. And what about Elizabeth’s Plantations legacy?

I am being facetious. Slightly.

Renaming a library is a hollow move given that our country has plenty of historic issues that it is nowhere close to resolving. I think here of the horrors to which this State and the Catholic Church subjected generations, but I’m not suggesting rebranding either because it’s just cosmetic.

There are certainly times and places when it’s appropriate. There was true, honest relevance to the protests and pulling down of statues in the US, where the legacy of slavery is very real to the people who live there.

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The problem is that everywhere you look there is something or somebody problematic.

The Athenian philosophers and scientists had acres of free time on their hands because their economy was built on slavery. Cancel Plato! Some Neanderthals were cannibals — let’s strike them all from the record just to be safe. Never mind that they make up a sizeable portion of our DNA.

Do you see how easy it is to get increasingly outlandish in this? How stupid would either of those ideas be.

It is possible to retain a brand name while also acknowledging, confronting, and, where realistic, taking responsibility for past actions.

I don’t see a campaign to stop buying Volkswagen or Siemens products despite those companies’ legacy of using forced labour only 80 or so years ago. Ferdinand Porsche was in the SS. That doesn’t make what previous iterations of what those companies did right. Rather they now stand for something else entirely (Volkswagen co-operated with a 1,000-page report into its past published back in the mid-1990s).

What about literature? Mr Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice almost certainly made a chunk of his fortune from slave-worked estates in the Americas or Caribbean, whether indirectly or directly. My wife’s students may do a double take when she tells them this, but nobody’s saying ban the book. The now half-reversed edits to Roald Dahl’s opus and the overwhelming backlash to the plan show how people are able to tell the difference between present and past perspectives.

A cutting problem for me, as a historian, is that any mutability of the past means the loss of opportunities to actually confront it, discuss it, and learn from it.

History is not always beautiful. When a family friend, a history graduate, heard of somebody who didn’t like history, she asked: “Do they not like context?”.

It’s time to stop paying lip service to the wrongs of history. Renaming buildings neither engages with nor resolves any issues caused by the individual’s actions.

Trinity is, at least, planning some sort of exhibit or commemoration to Berkeley which will reflect his slave-owning. But why not something more substantive, such as scholarships in post-colonial or race studies, where the real contexts and problems are critically engaged with? Or repurpose property to house people in desperate need?

We can do better than changing the brand name on a building. Erasing the past just makes us forget it. We always need to remember it.

David O’Mahony is 'Irish Examiner' assistant editor and a historian

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