The real battlef ield at heart of statues row

WHEN the Sisters of Mercy statue, the subject of the unholy row on RTÉ’s Liveline, was put up in Ennis in 2011, the full horror of the Magdalene laundries was not known, but the Ryan Report into the shocking abuse in hundreds of Church-run institutions had been well aired two years earlier.

Those who commissioned the statue must therefore have suspected that it would be divisive, although they may be taken aback at how feelings have hardened over the years.

To those who suffered in the old industrial school in Ennis or, indeed, in institutions like the Tuam mother and baby home, the statue makes a mockery of them and whitewashes history.

To others, it’s a tribute to the order of nuns for educating the poor and nursing the sick, good works which in their view, outshine their undoubted crimes.

It’s the same row, or battle for control, that on a larger and more inflammatory scale is being fought in the US over the removal of Confederate monuments, especially that of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.

NOT surprisingly, Donald Trump has waded in, claiming that ‘history and culture was being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments’. Those who view the largerthan-life depiction of Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army, sitting atop his steed, which was erected not to honour the war dead but to enshrine racial segregation in the Deep South, as a hatefilled symbol may beg to differ.

Like those who feel insulted by the Sisters of Mercy statue, they see the Lee monument not as a mere marker of a distant past but as a living reminder of all that is wrong with race relations in 21st-century America.

The facts of history never change, but our shifting values and norms mean that it is subject to reinterpretation. Monuments that glorify historic events undergo similar twists and turns.

If people of colour feel excluded or belittled by statues that pay homage to slavery, then surely in an equal society, they should be dismantled, and placed in museums along with other relics of the past?

Similarly, if people are offended by a statue of a nun outside a former Magdalene laundry then should that, too, not be put in cold storage?

Rows over public monuments are not a rare occurrence or insignificant in the least.

They are really battles about values or identity and they have the potential to tell future historians far more about society than lifeless pieces of marble or metal.

We had a huge clearout of statues of British monarchs after Independence, to signal the end of colonial rule. A slate of nationalist or republican heroes were erected in their place.

Nelson’s Pillar was blown up by militant republicans in 1966 while the statue of Queen Victoria was removed from Leinster House in 1908 to eventually find its way to a shopping street in Sydney, Australia.

The Wellington statue in Trim, birthplace of the Ascendancy military hero, has raised eyebrows, particularly with visitors who see it as a sign of a forelock-tugging peasant mentality. But the people in Trim regard the statue with affection, as part of their town’s heritage. And if push comes to shove, they can always counter that Wellington secured Catholic emancipation.

England and Ireland’s shared history is more nuanced than either nationalist or royalist credo tells and the Wellington statue in Trim and his monument in the Phoenix Park are reminders of that.

As for the row over the Sisters of Mercy statue, it shows that the hidden history of child abuse is a stain from which the Church is unlikely

to recover.