Irish Examiner view: Without context we are trapped

Kilmichael ambush anniversary march led by Commandant General Tom Barry (right) in November,  1934.  Picture: Irish Examiner archive

Context is everything; unless we can weigh one set of circumstances against another with real, hard-nosed perspective, we are engaged in an exercise of the imagination rather than worthwhile analysis. Context, despite an understandable and powerful instinct to live in the moment, can lift, inspire, and forearm.

Today we publish a series of short interviews with people experienced enough to offer valuable context, sometimes in ways that chide us in the gentlest ways, for imagining that the challenges of our time are unique and beyond human experience. 

They remind us that the anxieties brought by the pandemic may be very real but they are not in any way novel. The details and the implications of today’s difficulties may, in terms of recent decades only, be unique but humanity has always faced ready-or-not challenges. 

Our world has been defined by how we respond to those threats and will continue to be so defined.

Today marks the centenary of an event regarded as a part of the foundation story of this Republic — even though that context, and the blow-by-blow details of the event, is sometimes challenged even 100 years after the event. 

A century ago today, the IRA killed 17 Auxiliaries at the Kilmichael Ambush and changed the context of Ireland’s struggle for independence. 

British prime minister Lloyd-George told his cabinet these killings were of a “different character” from previous IRA operations as rather than “assassination”, the attack “was a military operation”. The context, from a British view, had changed and eight months later a truce was agreed.

The Kilmichael commemoration closely follows last weekend’s events marking the centenary of Dublin’s Bloody Sunday. Events planned to mark the day were, with some justification, described in some quarters as an example of “partial remembering”. 

Though it is unlikely that those who might celebrate the Kilmichael centenary today will be overly perplexed by that assessment it is unlikely that their ceremonies will have any context beyond remembering those who, under the flag of the IRA, attacked occupying British forces.

It seems at least sensible to fret that as the centenary of that most divisive event — our Civil War — approaches that efforts to weaponise our past be rejected. 

Rather, it might be seen in the context of what it helped us achieve. That would be the very best celebration of all the sacrifices made a century ago and put them in a context everyone can honour.