Irish Examiner view: Statues not the only way to mark the past

The decade of centenaries

It is a sign of the challenging times that Cork City Council last week voted down proposals to erect statues of Tomás Mac Curtain, Terence MacSwiney, and Michael Collins on St Patrick St because they did not include any female representation. Picture: Clare Keogh

Commemorating a difficult past is always challenging. We saw that at the start of the year, when Government plans to memorialise the Royal Irish Constabulary provoked widespread public anger and debate. 

In a global context, the Black Lives Matter movement forced an ongoing discussion about how figures implicated in some of the wrongs of the past continue to be honoured in the cityscapes of the present.

It is easy to see, then, why the subject of statues and how they connect — or fail to, as the case may be — to the public consciousness continues to generate heated discussion. It is a sign of the challenging times that Cork City Council last week voted down proposals to erect statues of Tomás Mac Curtain, Terence MacSwiney, and Michael Collins on St Patrick St because they did not include any female representation.

At last, there is growing recognition of the need to represent women and their achievements in our built environment, although that laudable project is not without its bitter controversies. Witness the furore over the unveiling of a statue honouring Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century ‘mother of feminism’, in North London last week.

There might have been agreement of the need to pay public tribute to the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but the sculpture by Maggi Hambling drew vehement criticism. 

Hambling’s sculpture showed an idealised ‘everywoman’ emerging from a mass of abstraction. She is tiny — and naked. Critics said it was an insult to Wollstonecraft’s legacy.

The debate, however, is very welcome. First, it brings the name Mary Wollstonecraft back into the public arena and it may encourage people to find out more about her life and work. It might also help us focus on the need to think about new ways to commemorate the past, particularly as we venture into the most difficult phase in this decade of centenaries.

Erecting a statue has become something of a default response when we speak of ways to honour, commemorate, or celebrate the life, work, and experiences of those who have gone before us, but it is far from being the only — or indeed, most engaging — choice.

The excellent and thought-provoking Atlas of Lost Rooms project shows what other options are possible. It is a 3-D digital reconstruction of the former Magdalene laundry on Sean MacDermott St, Dublin, which is overlaid with excerpts from testimonies of the women who lived there compiled by the Magdalene Oral History Project in 2013 by University College Dublin.

Funded by Queen’s University Belfast and designed by architect Chris Hamill, this online commemoration is a powerful, and nuanced, way of giving voice to a section of society that, for too long, had no voice. Many complain that statues are a waste of public money but there are so many other ways of acknowledging all aspects of our cultural identity that are inclusive, accessible, and affordable.

We might consider them some of them — poems, pieces of theatre, bursaries, plaques, light shows, online projects, the naming of estates, parks, and streets — and continue the debate on commemorating the past.