We’ve never been shy about pulling down old statues – but we can’t rewrite history
Revising our past so it can better fit the standards of the present is a dangerous game
SHOULDwriter George Bernard Shaw, an admirer of Stalin, probably the most prolific killer in history, be left on his plinth in the National Gallery in Dublin?
Or should the Irish public tolerate a memorial to a Nazi collaborator?
Seán Russell, a former chief of staff of the IRA who consorted with top-ranking members of the dreaded SS in Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, stands with his arse to Fairview Park, with the full endorsement of the country’s third largest political party, Sinn Féin.
Standing proudly in O’Connell Street, the main thoroughfare of our capital city, is William Smith O’Brien, a Young Ireland patriot and child molester if reports from his incarceration in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) are to be believed.
In a rather lurid statement, a local constable swore he saw O’Brien, born in Dromoland Castle in Co Clare, behaving abominably with Susan Lapham, the 12 or 13-year-old daughter of a benefactor.
So is any memorial safe after crowds in Bristol, England, tore down the statue of Edmund Colston. Despite the prosperity he brought to their city in times past he was a slave trader who made his fortune in the odious business of ‘people trafficking.’ Now there are calls for Cecil Rhodes, an appalling colonial adventurer who pillaged and despoiled Africa, to be dethroned in Oxford.
As all manner of statues are being looked at with a jaundiced eye, what about the vile King Leopold who raped the Congo and is commemorated with statues all over Belgium?
Closer to home some people are attempting to jump on the bandwagon by questioning the provenance of British aristocrats and colonials, like Westmoreland, Elgin, Grafton, Raglan and others, whose names adorn some of the leafiest boulevards in central Dublin. Are we going to be reduced to digging through their family history to find skeletons in their cupboard that will justify erasing them from history?
Even Admiral Browne, the Mayo ‘founder’ of the Argentinean navy who we regard as “one of our own” and is commemorated with a statue in Dublin docks, spent his life fighting bloody engagements with various enemies and playing the pirate off the coast of South America.
So where do you begin and end this quest for political correctness in public memorials?
Will we eventually start scouring graveyards for unsavoury characters to dig up and purge from our collective memory?
We’re lucky in Ireland that our era of ‘moving statues’ happened in the wake of the War of Independence, when many vestiges of colonial rule were either taken or fell at the hands of the night bomber.
Nelson, of course, is the most famous. All that remains of the English admiral who looked down on Dublin from on high until 1966 is his head, which is in a Gilbert Library in Pearse Street, inscrutable among the books and papers of the Dublin City Archive.
Most statues of earlier times were put up to commemorate kings and queens, military leaders and religious zealots. Apart from the bookish Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke at the front gates of Trinity College, most of the street names and statues erected in Ireland in the 18th and 19th century are memorials to war-mongers of one kind or another, many with blood on their hands.
William III, or King Billy on his horse Sorrel, by Grinling Gibbons was blown up and decapitated in 1928. George I was sold by Lord Mayor Alfie Byrne in 1937 to the Barbar Institute in Birmingham for £500. George II, erected in St Stephen’s Green in 1758, was blown up in May 1937. The 15-ton statue of Irish-born Field Marshal Hugh Viscount Gough of Lough Cutra Castle, near Gort, Co Galway, had his head sawn off on Christmas Eve 1944 and after an attempt failed to blow up the statue the indestructible Gough was sent into exile and now stands in Chillingham Castle in Northumberland.
A statue of Viscount Fitzgibbon, presumed killed in the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, on Sarsfield Bridge in Limerick was blown up by the IRA in 1930. In a neat piece of recycling the plinth was re-used for a 1916 memorial including Tom Clarke that stands there today.
Queen Victoria sat in stately isolation in the grounds of Leinster House until 1948 when she was put into storage. In 1986, she was packed off to Sydney, Australia, as a present to the city “from the government and people of Ireland”. Ironically her German husband Prince Albert remains on Leinster lawn.
Should history be rewritten, officially or – in many cases – unofficially? We don’t think so, it is what it is and we’re judging the past by the standards of the present, which is often dangerous.
That said we wouldn’t mind seeing the back of Seán Russell, whose hatred of the British blinded him to the depravity of the Nazi regime. He may be part of our history but no matter how Sinn Féin excuse it, his collaboration with Hitler was vile in the extreme. And anyway, it’s a very ugly statue.