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Let ‘history’ become history

Published in Issue 4 (July/August 2014), Letters, Volume 22

Sir,—In most places, history is just history—but not in Ireland, it seems, where history is primarily politics. I find myself nonplussed by your editorial comment about a [British] royal presence in Dublin two years hence—in a journal that calls itself History Ireland? If history must be politics, let me call to mind that French President Chirac invited German Chancellor Schröder to the Normandy beaches for the 60th commemorative celebration in 2004. This in remembrance of a conflict in which millions of French and Germans died, hardly a minor skirmish of European history. Both sides saw the necessity of making friends with neighbours; many former combatants were shaking hands and nothing was being forgotten: Chirac recalled that the Chancellor’s father had been one of the millions killed in the war and Schröder explicitly referred to German atrocities. The act itself was political but the event being commemorated was being consigned to history.

In a world context, Europe is a small place. No matter how vivid Irish memories might be, our fore-fathers merely went through historical and political processes that were common enough at the time throughout the Continent: wars, revolutions, repression of language and culture, border revisions, loss and restoration of independence, all par for the course. Maybe it is time for us to separate ourselves from the ‘unique victim narrative’ of our Irish past and to stand proudly side by side with our closest neighbours, facing into the 21st century. Shouldn’t we now let ‘history’ become, well, history?—Yours etc.,

Dr GERARD P. MONTAGUE
Germany

On this Day

April 25

1922 Commandant O’Neill, 3rd Cork Brigade IRA, was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area over the following four days.
1920 RIC Sergeant Cornelius Crean, brother of the explorer Tom Crean, was killed by the IRA in an ambush near Upton, Co. Cork.
1870 Daniel Maclise (64), history and portrait painter who worked for most of his life in London, died.
1719 The life and strange adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published.
1819 Vere Foster, philanthropist and educationist, born in Copenhagen, where his Irish-born father was British minister.
1987 Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed by an IRA bomb as they crossed the border south of Newry, Co. Down.
1917 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer, born in Newport News, Virginia.
1922 Commandant O’Neill of the third Cork Brigade IRA was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area between 26 and 29 April.
1915 During the First World War, Allied troops landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign, ending in January 1916, cost 46,000 Allied lives, including over 2,295 Irishmen.

Let ‘history’ become history

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 25