Lidice is a village outside Prague with a particularly traumatic history (Tait 2020). When the Deputy Leader of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, was assassinated in 1942, Hitler ordered Lidice to be destroyed and all its men killed in retaliation; its women and children were sent to the concentration camps. In 2020, Czech historian Vojtěch Kyncl discovered police documents which proved that a Jewish resident of the village, Štěpánka Mikešová, who had been sheltered in the community during WWII, was given up to the police two days before Heydrich’s assassination. That revelation prompted the then Czech Minister for Culture Lubomír Zaorálek to demand that historians and the museum curator in Lidice continue to unequivocally convey a sympathetic history of the Lidice massacre and to emphasise the victimhood of Lidice’s inhabitants during WWII. The subtext was clear: to the extent that historians document and write history, they are free to do so if they do not, in the process, in any way challenge narratives such as the one of Lidice as a site of wronged Czech people. The moment that historical inquiry made that self-perception more problematic it violated the legitimacy of the national narrative of survival and heroism in absolute distinction from the Nazi adversary.

This glimpse into the position of Vojtěch Kyncl in exposing a more complex historical heritage at the interface between the historical record and popular memory is far from limited to Lidice. Suppression and control of the historical record occurs vigorously and increasingly in our time. For instance, on 28 January 2018, the Financial Times reported on “a planned Polish law that would make it illegal to suggest that Poland bore responsibility for the crimes committed on its land by Nazi Germany during the second world war” (Shotter 2018). Lawmakers from Poland’s Law and Justice Party were forced to resile from the legislation as a result of pressure from Washington. Further afield, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now deemphasise the legacy of the ecumenical “Father of the Indian Nation”, Mahatma Gandhi, and instead memorialise his assassin, Godse Gyan Shala, in an effort to revise history to service a future in which the past is remembered differently (Ellis-Petersen 2021).[1]

These efforts to erase the record and manufacture public memory can and should be resisted. One example of resistance to governmental attempts to control the narrative of the past came in response to a law Jacques Chirac’s government passed in 2005, forcing French school teachers to teach French history in a way that emphasised the “positive role” France had played in such places as Algeria. When historians and citizens mobilised to oppose the diktat, Chirac relented. Repealing the law, Chirac stated: “Dans la République, il n’y a pas d’Histoire officielle. Ce n’est pas à la loi d’écrire l’Histoire. L’écriture de l’Histoire, c’est l’affaire des historiens”/ “In the Republic, there is no official history. It is not for the law to write history. Writing history is the business of historians” (Samson 2025; my translation). Similarly, Okinawans have been routinely forced to protest to remind successive Japanese governments, particularly during Junichiro Koizumi’s tenure as prime minister, that the decision to hold out against surrender to the Allies in WWII – involving unspeakable suffering among people sheltering in caves from flamethrowers in the archipelago – came from Tokyo.

The collision between these contrary motives in representing the past neatly encapsulates the dilemmas facing writers and historians who explore the Irish Troubles as well. In historiography, the historicity of our knowledge of the past is knowledge that is based on fact and demonstrable actuality – historical evidence displaces myth. Yet for political mythology to survive it must outface historical evidence that undermines it. Consequently, there is a vigorous debate among analysts and erstwhile actors of the Troubles about how to frame what happened in the recent past in Ireland. On one end of the spectrum are narratives sympathetic to Irish Republicanism, articulated for example by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey when she stated after the IRA’s 1994 Ceasefire: “the war is over and the good guys lost” (Rooney 2017). Gerry Adams, by contrast, stated that “the IRA was never defeated” (Moriarty 2015). More accusatorily, Bernadette Sands-McKevitt, sister of the hunger strike leader Bobby Sands, averred: “Peace is not what our people fought for. They fought for independence” (McKittrick 2008). Historian Richard Bourke provided a more matter-of-fact assessment of the Troubles: “A jurisdictional war had occurred leaving all jurisdictions intact” (Bourke and McBride 2016: 14).

A gradualist approach to new relationships and evolving political structures countervailed the absolutism of the IRA’s campaign (1969-1994) and its siren song of “United Ireland” and “Brits Out”. After the ceasefires and the negotiations towards peace, the IRA leadership recruited historical revisionism as an ideology to cloak the counterrevolutionary significance (from the point of view of the Provisional IRA’s campaign) of the peace process. That is why its supporters have gone to great lengths to mystify and weaponise the narrative of the history of the Northern Irish Troubles (Fitzpatrick 2018). As Fintan O’Toole has argued:

For Sinn Féin and the IRA, the current phase of the conflict is about the definition of the conflict itself. For the self-esteem of the so-called republican movement, and for the political future of Sinn Féin, it is vital that its 30-year campaign of violence be remembered as a just war, a regrettable but necessary method of achieving a legitimate aim. (O’Toole 2005; my emphasis)

This narrative resides within a familiar tradition of latter-day converts to political means exploiting the historical narrative as an instrument to justify and to exonerate. There are multiple examples in the 20th century of militant groups revising the ideals by which they killed and were killed.[2]

Controlling the narrative about the Troubles is the closest that any political constituency can come to controlling the public memory of the Troubles. Controlling that narrative is not only politically advantageous for Sinn Féin, but also a necessary shield from the anguish of confronting the reality of lives destroyed and lives lost during the Troubles and a way to avoid weighing the paucity of the political gain achieved in the process. Some former IRA members, unpersuaded by the reversal of the ideals and methods that Sinn Féin now propound, are left with unvarnished anguish. As former IRA volunteer, Dolours Price, said in a searing admission in a documentary about her life, I, Dolours:

I couldn’t live with the failure of what my life’s purpose had been. My life’s purpose had been to fight the fight that had been established and had been conducted throughout my family over the generations. And to realise that it had all been for nothing…[3]

A mutant pathogen of this anguish is the rationale for continuing the “struggle” to unite Ireland through violence. Marisa McGlinchey’s pioneering research on “dissident” Irish Republicans has focussed on, among others, dissidents and their supporters who repudiate the narrative of the Troubles sponsored by Sinn Féin (McGlinchey 2019).

Control of the historical narrative has taken on extraordinary importance in Irish politics to the extent that some commentators candidly state that their objective is to control the way history is written. Gerry Adams, in his funeral oration for former Chief of Staff of the IRA, Kevin McKenna, on June 27, 2019, maintained: “The future is being written now, and as we help to write that future we will not let the past be written in a way which demonises patriots” (McKenna 2020). Adams’ stance puts the rights of the collective (as defined by him) before the rights of the individual. It hardly matters how a sentence that begins “we will not let the past be written in a way which” concludes. The objective to assert the “right” to wrest from the individual the ability to relate the narrative. Thus, an historian or historical documentarian or anyone who is concerned to relate the present with the past in such a way as to postulate conclusions based on the principles of causality and evidence, is almost unavoidably heterodox. There were, for Adams, understandable reasons to recoil from publicly enumerating McKenna’s actions in any detail: it is certain that a former Chief of Staff of the IRA sanctioned terror attacks on innocent people; actions that, if revealed and inspected in detail, will fail to convince any more than a small minority of their patriotic value. Hence the fervour to embrace patriotism in the abstract and to uphold patriotism’s essence. However, to adapt Sartre, there is no patriotism without the deeds of patriotism; no unity, only unifying acts; no heroism, only heroic deeds. In effect, this historical mode asserts that in the narrative of the Troubles essence precedes existence. Those whose practice departs from this are narratological existentialists. To Sartre, they exercise the capacity and indeed the duty to define their own narrative: they view themselves as responsible for their own account of the narrative by their own lights. As Sartre put it:

[M]an is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders […] If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves […] For the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving. (Sartre 1946)

The degree to which this narrative paralyses its adherents from as much as assessing the organisation’s past acts – still less taking responsibility for them – cannot be overstated. The refusal to do so augments the pain inflicted and makes reconciliation much more difficult. Paranoia about the free use of language to describe the Troubles reflects a constraint about confronting the past. Yet unless the past is acknowledged and confronted – unless there is an Irish Vergangenheitsbewältigung (confronting and overcoming the problems of the past) – the possibility of a genuinely shared future is greatly undermined. If it is impermissible to acknowledge a crime committed in history, it is implausible to acknowledge the same crime in the present. A perceptual blockage precludes the acknowledgement and prevents the therapeutic significance of confronting historical wrongs. Unfettered exposure to history is a precondition to clarity about its relation to the present and the future. As Walter Benjamin put it, it “makes possible a critical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data” (Benjamin 2004: 251).

How profoundly the approach to historical enquiry sponsored by Adams differs from John Hume’s earliest description of the nature of the Northern Ireland problem in 1964. Hume advocated the methods required to address it as follows:

In forty years of opposition they [Northern Nationalists] have not produced one constructive contribution on either the social or economics plane to the development of Northern Ireland which is, after all, a substantial part of the United Ireland for which they strive. Leadership has been the comfortable leadership of flags and slogans. (Hume 2020)[4]

To adapt Sartre one final time, there is no potentiality, only manifestation.

A central challenge resulting from the success of the all-party negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, and the strong public mandate given to it in 1998, was for political leaders to actualise abstract formulations that had animated politics in Northern Ireland since its inception. Concepts and bugbears such as partition or anti-partitionism, the sovereign right to self-determination, the constitutional position: all had to be realised within a credible constitutional framework and a legislative assembly. Yet the essence of those discursive positions was revealed to be, in the realm of political action, a great deal more nuanced than how they had been presented by absolutist political actors during the Troubles. A core challenge today, and a challenge for Ireland’s future, is to enable younger generations to unlearn those abstractions that have accreted into a prevalent narrative about the Troubles.

Frequently, the narrative of the peace process eclipses the narrative of the Troubles. That has become a prevalent mode in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement (1998) – even more so since the St. Andrew’s Agreement (2006) by which the administrative and political culture in Northern Ireland has an inbuilt equal footing basis for the two dominant parties, assuming that one represents unionism and the other represents nationalism. This narrative has had the effect of replacing divergent views about the past with a unifying official policy that makes the discourse around Northern Ireland’s past less capable of admitting distinctions and differences. Yet is the cumulative pressure on institutions in Northern Ireland to obviate the truth of what happened for “the sake of peace” conducive to justice, or even to lasting peace?

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s influential essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” explores the production of sameness in mass culture as a technique to expunge any prospect of subversion of capitalist processes of production and monopolies. Likewise, the narrative weaved around the peace process in Northern Ireland has been responsible for the production of deadening discursive norms. It is a narrative that has been replicated in films that sponsor happy endings in depictions of the “peace process” culture and in the portrayals of the political institutions of Northern Ireland which underpin Unionist and Republican ideologies.

Consider the absence of an historicist view of the evolution towards the St. Andrew’s Agreement in a film about Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness’ latter-day political cooperation, The Journey (2016). The film has the perfectly valid defence that writers and directors are free to make any film they wish, and to do so how they please. Yet this is not the rationale that its makers advanced. Director of The Journey Nick Hamm said:

We wanted to make it as accurate as possible […] [T]heir relationship opened the door into the Northern Island [sic] peace process which really stopped people killing each other. This was not a fictionalized event. This happened. It was real and the bombing stopped. (Minow 2017)

Loyalist and Republican ceasefires were declared in 1994; they largely held until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and they certainly held thereafter. The Paisley-McGuinness entente and the St. Andrew’s Agreement occurred in 2006, twelve years after the ceasefires. Therefore, it can hardly be cited as the cause of the end of the violence.

Screenwriter of the film Colin Bateman described the film as follows: “We’re telling a story that in reality played out over 40 years within the confines of a 94-minute movie – this is what drama does”. What Bateman could have added is that the parameters of the film overlap with the efforts of both Paisley and McGuinness (both of whom were alive when The Journey was shot; the latter was Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland) to localise the narrative of the peace process to emphasise their latter-day co-operative mode (2006-2008).

Proponents of “balance” in political filmmaking are unlikely to highlight these issues. Yet the putative objective of “balance” in this instance masks the political agenda of blurring distinctions about the past. If there is to be an effort to build long-term cross-community trust, those very distinctions must be assiduously written into rather than written out of the narrative of the Troubles. And that unflinching narrative needs artists to explore its complexity.

Overarching these concerns is the paucity of alternative narratives of the Troubles in DUP-Sinn Féin ruled Northern Ireland. The prevalent narrative today is of the peace process. That is something that really ought – in films, in academic research and in journalistic overviews – to be subjected to the scrutiny of which astute commentators on Northern Ireland are capable.[5] There is a public appetite for that. For example, on March 29, 2017, a week after Martin McGuinness’ death, a newspaper that self-identifies as Unionist in its orientation, The Belfast Telegraph, editorialised as follows:

Despite his undoubted journey [my emphasis] to peace, what is most disappointing about McGuinness is not simply his failure to disown the use of violence by the Provos, but his attempt to still justify their use of violence. He said that the circumstances in Derry in the 1970s were such that he, as well as others, had no other choice but to join the IRA. This is insulting to thousands of ordinary young people in Derry who did not feel forced by circumstances to join the IRA. It also ignores the fact that there was another alternative available; that is the path of peaceful constitutional nationalism forged by fellow Derryman and SDLP leader, John Hume. Hume taught that justice, equality and, indeed, reunification could be achieved through gradual political change. It was Hume’s bold vision of peaceful change that McGuinness ultimately adopted.

In addition, his failure to reject IRA violence is dangerously supportive of the dissident republican argument that armed struggle is still a legitimate political act. After all, the Provo campaign was devoid of any democratic mandate. Surely, in his heart, he must have realised that the campaign itself was counterproductive to the declared aim of a united Ireland? (Belfast Telegraph 2017)

The will to have such discussions extends far beyond The Belfast Telegraph readership. Authentic historical narratives and explorations of the Troubles are the linchpin of evolving constitutional arrangements on the island of Ireland. One painter who has accepted the challenge of producing work in this space, and whose pictures present an imperturbable probing of the menaced circumstances of the Troubles, is Dermot Seymour. Seymour has matched Hubert Butler’s audacity with his titles. The title of Seymour’s selected paintings, The Bloated Inability to Eat Flags, applies John Hume’s dictum “you cannot eat a flag” to the North’s traditional propensity to engorge itself with a smorgasbord of nihilism. Seymour found in cows roaming the border a brilliant metaphor for his vision. Depicting them with blank stares at the perceiver, Seymour’s cows are by turns pierced through by flagpoles, shadowed by helicopters or witnesses to the farcical “invaders” of Clontibret, Co. Monaghan, in 1986. The cows seem to dare us into acknowledging our agency in creating the meaning in the pictures. To remember for the future, we need an honest appraisal of how we created the elements and conditions for the ferocious conflict that blocked Ireland for so long from embracing its future. Just as our perception of our country formed part of the weight of that history, so too could a new vision contribute to creating a new political culture on the island of Ireland. As Paul Muldoon wrote, in a poem dedicated to Seymour:

Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain,

the helicopter gunship, the mighty Kalashnikov:

let’s rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain. (Muldoon 1993: 161)

During the long road towards decommissioning weapons, a necessary step to copper-fasten the Good Friday Agreement, a novel idea gained broad support. Several prominent leaders and parties agreed that an Irish version of the Christ the Redeemer of the Andes sculpture could be created in the North. It would consist of molten down weapons shaped into a mutually agreed sculpture. The prototype discussed still stands in the Andes to symbolise the peace between Argentina and Chile over a territorial dispute; the national flags of both nations are displayed on either side of it. The idea for an Irish incarnation of Christ the Redeemer of the Andes got lost as the controversies around decommissioning endured.

Even so, it is worth pondering the validity of the proposal and what it could have symbolised. It could have constituted a unifying work of art that would outface the long-term political failure and communitarian disaster of the Troubles. It could, in Auden’s words, “make a vineyard of the curse” (Auden 1991: 249). Granted, there are artworks and sculptures in the North and border region that symbolise reconciliation and a new beginning. However, a sculpture made from molten weapons would have been moulded and shaped by the very objects that for so long prevented that new future from emerging. While politicians were agonising over whether decommissioning was a requisite or a precondition, writer Adam Harbinson relished the prospect of an Irish version of Christ the Redeemer of the Andes transcending that political discourse: “Semantics would be redundant […] it could empower us to shake off the chains of the past and enable us all, at last, to confidently embrace our common heritage” (McGee 2022).

Taking the gun out of politics and literally putting it into a work of art was a novel concept yet linked to earlier efforts by artists to insert art into the Northern conflict. For example, actor Stephen Rea said of the decision he and Brian Friel made to stage the first production of Translations in the Guildhall in Derry: “It was a dead political space and we made it a live theatrical space”.[6]

Questions about our relationship to the past continue to haunt us and require courage and commitment from us all to build for a shared future. To which we might say, with Seamus Heaney, “question me again” (1979: 24). We all have a fundamental role to play in honouring the past with a sincere appraisal of the record just as we have a duty to ourselves to find creative ways to negotiate its confines.

Notes

[1] See also “The Making of Political Biopics”, a discussion on the legacy of John Hume and Mahatma Gandhi with myself and the Indian filmmaker Ramesh Sharma, director of Ahimsa: Gandhi – the Power of the Powerless, at the Times Literature Festival in Delhi on December 1, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/TimesLitFestDelhi/videos/1038675573144448/.

[2] As military historian Gwynne Dyer has argued: “Hamas and Hezbollah are deeply unattractive organisations, but then so are most nationalist movements fighting foreign occupation. In the former British empire alone, Irgun in Israel, Mau Mau in Kenya, EOKA in Cyprus and the IRA in Northern Ireland all employed brutal terrorism in their struggles – but their leaders all ended up having tea with the Queen” (2020).

[3] I, Dolours, directed by Maurice Sweeney (New Decade Film and TV, 2018), 01:19:02 – 01:19:25. Similarly, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has related: “I have met former IRA who say this to me now: they wish they had never got involved; they don’t believe it was worth one drop of blood, given what subsequently transpired and that many young people were lured into the IRA, into situations where they ended up in prison for a long time” (Martin 2020).

[4] “A Northern Catholic” by John Hume first appeared in The Irish Times in two parts on May 18 and May 19, 1964.

[5] Novelist and journalist Éilis O’Hanlon’s critique of Paisley is one instance (2008).

[6] Translations Revisited, directed by Maurice Fitzpatrick (Tobar Productions, 2013), 00:30:32 – 00:31:45