One of the most interesting debates over the past year has been about the place of the past in public representations. I remember interviewing Professor John A Murphy about a statue of Queen Victoria in Cork, which he believed should have been kept in its original place of display, Famine Queen or no Famine Queen. “It’s part of our history” he told me with some emphasis.
John A’s view on public monuments is a common one. Nationalist and republican politicians here have always gone along with it. When they have attempted to add to public representation of republicanism, they have been accused of “glorifying terrorism” – see the fuss over the naming of Raymond McCreesh play park. And so we have Queen Vic and several obscure military worthies commemorated in stone around Belfast City Hall. Should we really be grateful that there is the occasional stained-glass window with Irish connections within Belfast City Hall? Belfast is saturated with streets and buildings named after royalty and other reminders of Britishness.
But is acceptance of these monuments on the grounds that they’re part of our history a sound argument? It certainly wasn’t the case in Iraq. When that country was invaded, we were treated to shot after approving shot of a huge statue of Sadaam Hussein being pulled to the ground and destroyed. And while I’ve never checked, I’m willing to bet there aren’t many statues of Hitler or streets named after Rommel in modern-day Germany. If you argue that such markers would simply form part of Germany’s past, you’ll be lucky if you’re not attacked as a half-witted anti-Semite.
But the latest row about icons and the past has come, not from outside, but within. Oxford University has a statue of Cecil Rhodes, and there are students and others who think that an arch-racist like Rhodes should have no place of honour at Oriel College in Oxford. Some people seem to agree. In 2015, a student emptied a bucket of faeces over a statue of Rhodes in Cape Town before it was torn down. You can see the student’s point of view: in 1890, Rhodes as Prime Minister of Cape Colony introduced a law that drove black farmers off their land to make way for wealthy white industrialists. To Rhodes it made sense: he believed whites “were the finest race in the world”.
The trouble is, Rhodes wasn’t on his own – maybe isn’t on his own – in such thinking. The great majority of Victorians would have raised a glass to Rhodes’s views on lesser breeds and the white man’s burden. Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic colonialists, and the Irish don’t need reminding of Oliver Cromwell’s record in this country.
Those who wish to maintain these statues and other tributes to the past argue that Rhodes and Churchill were merely prominent figures in a society which thought very differently from us – on women and homosexuals as well as the need to subjugate non-white populations. So since it wasn’t a question of a few bad apples but of the entire society at the time holding similar views, pulling down the statues of individuals would make no sense
What blows a hole through that theory is Nazi Germany. As I say , you’ll look long and hard before finding any tribute to Nazism in modern Germany. And yet, when Hitler lived, the great majority of the German people supported and even idolized him. Historical fact.
My own view is that we honour leaders from the past when we have statues of them in public places or name streets, halls, bridges, even airport terminals after them (did you know Terminal 2 at Heathrow is called The Queen’s Terminal?). If a more enlightened society no longer feels any debt of gratitude to these people, they should come down. Otherwise, O’Connell Street, Pearse Street and Connolly Railway Station in Dublin should never have been given the names they now bear.
Public statues and monuments and names should reflect the world we live in and its values, not the rejected mores of a past time. Why should the centre of Belfast be dominated by the substantial figure of a woman who so many of its inhabitants care little or nothing about?
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