David Rieff: The Road to Hell is Paved

That Ireland is a country seeped in memory is a commonplace. The annual commemorations held in every year in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin on the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising against the British seems like the embodiment of this consensus view. It is comparatively modest, unlike Bastille Day in Paris, or the greatest public military ceremony of all, the Beating the Retreat in New Delhi that is a celebration of India’s Republic Day, though like them largely military. But in its combination of modesty and sternness, the ceremony is deeply affecting. The crowds, while not enormous, are dignified and respectful, and at least on April 1st of this year, when I was in Dublin, this very much seemed to include people from what the Irish government calls “the new communities”—immigrants from the poor world. I saw a sprinkling of people from the Indian sub-continent and West Africa, and, from what I could see, they were a bit puzzled but also more than a bit engaged.

The entire ceremony seems beyond politics, as if it were inscribed on the DNA of independent Ireland and always had been. In fact, this is far from the truth of the matter. It is true that official commemorations, complete with a military parade, began soon after Irish independence. But it is anything but clear that these commemorations seemed of great importance to most Irish men and women in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Writing of his own childhood in the thirties and early-mid forties, the writer John McGahern insisted that “I think that the 1916 Rising was not considered to be of any great importance in the country I grew up in.” Because Easter 1916 was not that far away, he added, “it probably was too close in time for the comfort of mythmaking.”

But whether they appealed to a majority of the Irish people or not, commemorations of the Rising soon became a context for the mobilization of insurgent Republicanism, above all in Northern Ireland. Even today, when the IRA seems like largely a spent force in the Republic of Ireland, one still can read flat statements like the one posted by a Belfast blogger who wrote that the Easter Rising is traditionally “the most important time of the year in the Irish Republican calendar” and condemn the Irish government’s official commemoration, from the days of the Free State to today, as “tokenism.” And it is a fact that the Irish Republic banned official commemorations (not to mention IRA military parades in Dublin) for most of the three decades of the Troubles in the North. Military parades in front of the Post Office only resumed in 2006, which may have had more to do with the waning of Republicanism and the fact that Ireland, as a nation—and, more precisely, a nation in the midst of what seemed like a boom unseen in all of Ireland’s history, but turned out to be a huge property bubble, not to say worse (the full damage to the Irish economy of those mad years has still not been fathomed, but it is all but incalculable)—could afford such celebrations because the country had moved on.

Bertie Ahern, the prime minister who reinstituted the military parade is now infamous in Ireland for having said, “the boom is just getting boomier,” which led an Irish finance official to joke recently that today “the bust is just getting bustier.” But what all this illustrates, as McGahern well understood, is that mythmaking is good for political mobilization and when it poses no risk, but that it is anything but an inherent part of a nation’s soul—if, indeed, it is not pure Romantic twaddle even to claim that nations have souls. Echoing the great French scholar of Ireland, Maurice Goldring, McGahern thought that it was only the political defeat of the pragmatic Irish nationalism of O’Connell and Parnell that turned the Irish independence movement toward Romantic nationalism. Only in the context of that turn can the cult of political memory in Ireland be understood.

The mythical Ireland is no more a real place than the mythical America, the mythical France, or the mythical China. Instead it is a political idea and serves specific interests and specific ideology, though of course its genius is to put itself beyond ideology—a fact of nature, rather than a politics that is fair game for attack (the contemporary human rights movement plays a rationalist version of the same self-manumission from believing any critique of its principles to be legitimate). In the Irish case, there is also the Romanticism of the Diaspora—a powerful force, even today. In Miami a year ago, at the wonderful Coral Gables bookshop, Books and Books, the Irish writer Sebastian Barry gave a reading followed by questions. A (self-identified) Irish-American questioner asked Barry if he worried that Ireland’s new prosperity would ruin the Irish soul. To which Barry smilingly responded that “well, we in Ireland don’t have to worry about that anymore!”

Perhaps we will one day learn to “remember in a different way,” as a very smart friend of mine put it in reacting to my last blog post. The problem with historical memory, as exercised by groups, anyway, is that it tends to be high on grievance but low on forgiveness. As the great Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote, “it is possible that there is no memory except the memory of wounds.” And that is the problem.