At the weekend, as you no doubt know, the statue of Edward Colson in Bristol had a rough experience. First they pulled it down, then they rolled it to the water’s edge, then they dumped it in. Much rejoicing – they’d had enough of living in a city where a slave trader was honoured by a statue.
Yesterday I tweeted: ‘Debbonaire (Bristol West MP) said: “Having statues of people who oppressed us is not a good thing to be saying to black people in this city.” Take out the word ‘black’ + change ‘Bristol’ to ‘Belfast’ – any statues in need of toppling??’
Yesterday I got various responses, including “Queen Vic @RVH for starters”, “I would like to replace Carson with a 1798 statue, maybe Henry Joy McCracken” and “If we tossed every unwanted statue in Belfast into the Lagan it would overflow”.
In the present heated Black Lives Matter atmosphere, you’ll not get many people defending the preservation of Colson’s statue. Slavery always was a vile humiliation of hundreds of thousands of black people. But there are other crimes and criminals from the past whom we continue to honour. Should we?
It’s tricky. We must acknowledge our past, whether it was happy or downtrodden. At the same time, we don’t want to honour people who, like Colson, were oppressors.
There’s a pretty strong case against the several Queen Victoria statues in Ireland : during an Gorta Mór, she didn’t actually send a fiver for the relief of the Irish people, she sent £61,000, which is a sizeable sum. On the other hand, she presided over a blood-soaked Empire and didn’t raise much of a ruckus as Irish people in their hundreds of thousands died on the roadside.
There’s a strong case against Edward Carson too, in that he helped bring into being the UVF, and through the Ulster Covenant, vowed that unionists would if necessary use force if Home Rule were introduced in Ireland. In short, he brought. the gun back into Irish politics.
The case for maintaining Queen Victoria and Edward Carson statues is also strong. For many people, HM Queen Victoria was a revered British monarch and deserves every inch of statue she has in present-day Belfast. For many others, maybe even a majority, she is the woman who sat idly by while hunger and disease destroyed a huge number of Irish lives. Likewise Carson: heroic unionist figure, promoter of violence against his own government? Take your pick.
There will be many in Bristol today who will lament the unhappy fate of Colson’s statue, but there’s probably a majority who in their hearts are glad to see the end of a monument to a champion of slavery. Just as, in 1966, there were those who were horrified by the destruction of the statue of Nelson, which sat atop its pillar in O’Connell Street. The majority of people quietly were happy to see him go, and The Dubliners were so happy, they wrote and recorded a song about its destruction, which was a hit.
We should never disown our history, or try to present it in a warped fashion. But maintaining statues suggests that these are people most of us respect and honour. With the passage of every day, more and more Irish people are wondering why those opposed to Irish independence and even Irish lives continue to look down on us.
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