Ignore history and the past will come back to haunt us

A TEACHER of mine in secondary school believed the only way to revive the Irish language was to ban it. Maybe he was right, because making Irish compulsory in schools appears to have done very little for its revival.

Most people have a natural reaction to compulsory rules — it goes against the grain. Giving people the freedom to embrace or to refrain from embracing is the most wholesome approach to the promotion of any cause, to the changing of habits or to the promotion of learning. However, when I read of the decision by the Department of Education to remove history as a compulsory subject for the Junior Certificate, I was somewhat taken aback.

Obviously if students don’t study history for Junior Cert, they won’t study it for Leaving Cert. It is a great loss. Expecting young people to face life with no knowledge of the story of their tribe, the tribes around them and humanity, in general, is like sending them out without a sense of balance or direction. It’s condemning them to a life-long dose of cultural vertigo.

At the risk of being trite, if we don’t know where we’ve come from, we will have no idea where we should be going. Without some knowledge of our past, we are be bound to repeat its mistakes. Some would argue that history is for historians, it is a subject that should be left to them, to the professional custodians of our past.

However, in democracies, our struggle to make sense of our society and our world is characterised by a shared ownership of the past, by attempts to have a common understanding of the present and a constant straining to hammer out a common purpose for the future.

Past, present and future shape our choices in relation to the political, social and economic reality we want to inhabit. Making good choices involves knowing something about the successes and failures of those that went before us. Having a collective memory, even a folk memory of what made us or unmade us is vital.

What is happening with Brexit graphically illustrates this. Those of us with any knowledge of the history of our island and the story of our relationship with the neighbouring island will know that this history has been long, tragic and riddled with war, famine, upheavals and broken promises.

The final decades of the Troubles were among the most painful of times and the best of times. A new age dawned when politicians from all sides of the political divide, and both sides of the Irish Sea, struggled line by line and word by word to forge the Good Friday Agreement.

When they got it across the line, we heaved a sigh of relief that echoed through the tragic centuries we put behind us. We had peace on the island for the first time, the economies north and south prospered, social and cultural connections flourished, our relationship with Britain improved beyond our wildest dreams and, most of all, the guns were silent, the bombs were defused and nobody was being killed.

Then came Brexit, driven by people who are either ignorant of history, want to forget it, choose to ignore it or are happy to repeat it. Karen Bradley, the Northern Secretary, charged with implementing and overseeing the Good Friday Agreement is to be found on the ignorant end of this continuum. It is astounding that she did not know there was a sectarian divide from the cradle to the ballot box among the people for whom she has political responsibility.

In the wake of Brexit, our island will sustain the worst collateral damage and our tragic history could repeat itself. To make sure that does not happen, it is vital to know the history, it is vital that there is a collective memory about it and a collective determination to move on. It is not good enough to leave that collective memory in the hands of professional custodians.

There aren’t enough of them to sit on barstools and chat about these things, to stand around water coolers and remind us, to hang around the marts or to stand at school gates and talk to parents about the