Fiach MacConghail (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire go dtí an Teach. I welcome the Minister to the House today and thank him for giving us a further insight into his vision and plans for this series of commemorations over the next while. I also congratulate the Minister, in particular, for the Century Ireland project, which is a unique and brilliant way to begin the debate on commemoration. It is wonderful to see the Department leading that, in collaboration with Boston College and RTE.

The Minister spoke passionately about his role and responsibility in this area almost a year ago when we discussed this topic in the Seanad. I would like to add a few thoughts of my own to this debate today and, in particular, to advocate for the role of the living artist in participating in these great events of remembrance that are upon us. To quote the President in a speech he gave a year ago in New York:

We are now in a time which needs new myth-making, including a myth for our Irishness and I believe that this involves both the ethics of memory and the courage of imagination. What should we remember, and how, what might we come to know, imagine, dare to hope and offer such an Irishness for new times as would be authentic and sustainable?

The Minister is asking for this and I commend him for that. The Minister has set out a sense of the infrastructure of how we might commemorate and remember what has happened over the next decade. The participation of our communities, including our artists, in that is to be warmly welcomed and supported.

President Higgins' challenge to all of us is to use the act of memory and remembrance as a way to construct a new vision and a new imagination for our communities and our society. The challenge we have is not so much about commemorating the past but how to use our memory, both actual and fictional, to inform our future. That could be the Minister's legacy in the years to come. We have a wealth of knowledge through our national and local archives about what happened and I congratulate the Minister for supporting various online initiatives in this area. However, we need to use this more to explore the challenges and, through our artists, debate the values of a renewed Ireland.

As I mentioned in a similar debate last year, memory has politics. There is a healthy tension between memory and fact. To tell the story of the Lock-out, the 36th Ulster Division of the British Army, the 16th Irish Division of the British Army, the uprising of 1916, the War of Independence or the Civil War we rely as much on great literature as we do on historical facts. The play by Frank McGuinness, "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme", has as much impact as any archive or history lesson. The same is true of the great play by Sebastian Barry, "A Long Long Way" or, indeed, Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars". I am not in any way diminishing archives, exhibitions or museums as valid forms of remembering but simply arguing that good art or good writing can also serve history. Memory and art will not neutralise emotion or injustice and that is the crux of the challenge of this centenary of commemoration. The Minister has called on us to respond to that challenge.

We should not be worried if one side appears to hi-jack a centenary celebration over another, providing that there is a multiple of those voices. In that sense, I absolutely agree with Senator Ó Murchú's advocation of a celebration of 1916. In the Minister's own speech, he spoke quite poetically about the need to celebrate the Rising. He said that the story of the Rising must be told, making use of all available resources and with a sense of genuine inquiry, open to new analysis and commentary. That is where contemporary artists, be they playwrights, painters, visual artists or film makers, can respond in a way that we in this House cannot.

We have examples from the past where the Irish Government either controlled a commemoration too rigidly, as in 1966, or ignored it, as in 1991.

We should be confident that no one can control memory. In this instance I again congratulate the Minister on his statement. A subjective understanding of historical events should sit side-by-side with an objective explanation - we need both. I quote Professor Richard Kearney of Boston College, who has written a brilliant paper on the ethics of memory:

This ethical task of testimony is not simply an individual responsibility. It is also a collective one. Here, it seems, the ethical debt to the dead joins forces with the poetical power to narrate. And we recall that the two modes of narrative - fiction and history - share a common origin in epic, which has the characteristic of preserving memories on the communal scale of societies.

What I am saying is that the poet or writer of fiction is just as important as the historian in how we might make sense of commemoration or make sense of our history to look towards the future and the value of the future. This is where artists are best placed to address narrative and memory through critical imagination. Memory not only illuminates, it also illustrates and part of that illustration is the use of images to strike, in the sense of striking home, the horror of evil and the grace of goodness.

I had a deeply profound and confusing experience two weeks ago when I visited the battlefields of the First World War in Ypres and the Somme for the first time. I knew through my limited historical knowledge what had happened in the First World War. I knew about the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination on 28 June 1914. In our history lessons we were swiftly moved on to the League of Nations and the peace conference in 1919. However, we were not necessarily told about the role of so many Irish - North and South - fighting in that war and their reasons for doing so. In a way there was a kind of an embarrassment and a misunderstanding over why these young men went to fight in the war. We need to be told that story.

We certainly know about the 36th (Ulster) Division from Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, but we do not know about the 16th (Irish) Division, the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles or the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and how the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division fought together shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches. That is a great image for us. We speak about the Good Friday Agreement and communities, but working-class men from Dublin and working-class men from Belfast together fought.

That is part of history that I was not taught and I look to the Minister to consider how history can be used through schools. Certainly those in my generation - people in their mid to late 40s - were not taught that through F.S. Lyons's course. There is a generation that needs to be reminded. For me it is profound to know that 80,000 people were not conscripted but volunteered in the first year to fight in the First World War and I imagine that the main reason was to escape poverty. They joined the army not necessarily because of any nationalistic or imperialistic reasons but to escape poverty. The fact that the Lock-out occurred the previous winter had much to do with it. Our commemorations can look to how history can unravel certain myths that might not be as true.

We also need to consider the Civil War where more Irishmen were killed by each other than were killed by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence.

I agree with the Minister and commend him on his speech. I am sure the Seanad would support the Minister in providing funding to contemporary artists, writers, actors, playwrights, painters and sculptors to encourage them to make sense of history and memory in order to help to challenge us as a nation to create new myths of Irishness for the 21st century.