Knocking history off its pedestal is a monumental shame

IT HAS been quite a week in world history. How the mighty have fallen. Most of the statues are remote figures who have no connection to what’s happening today. But such is the power of globalisation now that people in Europe feel propelled by an act of police brutality in the United States to rearrange their own history and urban landscape.

It is bizarre. But it is also ominous. A mob in Bristol pulled down the statue of a local worthy – and slave trader – and threw it in the river. And maybe the teenage anarchist inside many of us had a chuckle at this. But where would this end?

Protesters also defaced World War I memorials and the statue of Winston Churchill, who led the fight against the Nazis.

My late father Edward Delaney would have had some grim amusement at all this. He was both the beneficiary and victim of attacked statues. His Thomas Davis statue in Dublin’s College Green was placed on the very spot from which King William had been brutally removed.

However, in 1971, his Wolfe Tone statue in St Stephen’s Green was bombed by loyalists.

My father remade Tone, arguing mischievously that “there were some things he didn’t get quite right the first time”. Some wags even suggested he did the bombing himself!

But actually the destruction of any statue or public art saddened him.

Growing up in rural Mayo, he loved horses and found it particularly sad, for example, that Dublin once had four magnificent equestrian statues and now had none. They were all removed by the authorities or by militant republicans. It was a strange philistine move by a country so associated with the horse.

Granted these statues were colonial – two of them were King George’s – but they were fine works of art and part of our rich and colourful history. It is the same today with the Wellington monument and other contentious symbols.

A mature society can live with such past icons, and not destroy them the way the Puritans did with religious art in England or the Taliban did when they blew up Buddha statues.

The real causes of racism in our society are in the present and in our social and cultural conditions. The solution is education and accountability. Picking on statues is just a cheap shot and avoids the hard work of changing attitudes.

Do we pull down the Wellington monument because he was a militarist, or not enjoy Georgian buildings because they were built by the elite while the peasants struggled?

This ‘cleaning up of the past’ is an ahistorical view which is looking at the past through a very politically correct and progressive present. The past is not perfect and that is why it is the past. Nor are our heroes perfect.

In the case of very contentious statues, such as of slave traders, a compromise would be to remove them from prominent public view. In India, many of the British Raj-era statues were collected up and put in special parks.

Either way, the mob should not be allowed to just pull them down. They are objects of public arts, cultural artefacts and most of all, part of our history, however ill.

It is interesting that statues are being targeted but not the street names which honour similar colonial figures. This is because the public has got used to these names and are fond of them and the associations they bring. Near me in north Dublin, we have a Bengal Terrace, a Waterloo Street and a Fontenoy Street, all evoking far-off battles and lands.

Also beside me, near the Phoenix Park, an old cast iron post box with Queen Victoria’s initials was clumsily taken down by the council. Until the residents demanded that it be restored.

Ordinary people know the value of historical artefacts and public art. It brightens their day, and is part of their landscape. It reminds them where they have come from, and how far they have come. To deny this is to deny history itself.

A mature society can live with such past icons, and not destroy them like the Taliban or the Puritans