Irish history in 100 objects: lessons we have learned

The choice of the final item for our series divided opinion. Here's the solution

It would be good to announce that the decommissioned AK-47 that appears on this page is the 100th object in the History of Ireland in 100 Objects series. In fact it is the 101st.

Readers and visitors to the accompanying exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland’s decorative-arts-and-history branch, at Collins Barracks in Dublin, were asked to vote for the final object from a shortlist of 10. In the event, readers voted online for the Anglo Irish Bank sign that appeared last week. But those who saw the objects in the museum voted for the gun that epitomises the achievement of a settlement to the conflict in Northern Ireland. In the end it seemed right to pick both objects.

They tell different stories, after all. And while one of those stories is of high hopes turned sour, the other is of dark despair turned into sober, qualified but concrete optimism. That seemed a better note to finish on, and not just because we need some light at the end. More importantly, a restrained, tentative hopefulness is more in keeping with the experience of thinking about Irish history through the medium of the objects it has left us with.

There’s probably a certain bias towards optimism in the very idea of telling the story of Irish people though physical, man-made things. By definition, existing objects are survivors. They’ve made it through to the here and now, enduring all the ravages of time and nature and decay. Some of them, like the fabulous gold regalia that come to us from thousands of years before the birth of Christ, are completely undaunted, their sun-like lustre as dazzling to us as they must have been to those who first saw them.

Others, like the fish trap woven from sticks with which the series began, are so battered by age they are not immediately recognisable, but their fragility makes their survival seem all the more miraculous.

Others again – think of the beautiful gold salamander pendant recovered from a Spanish Armada wreck – have the special poignancy that comes from being shards of drowned lives, mute defiers of the oblivion that overtook their owners.

This innate optimism of survival can be distorting. I thought it important, in deciding on the final list, to include at least one object that makes this point because it has not in fact survived. The one I chose is the inauguration stone of the O’Neill clan, very deliberately destroyed by Lord Mountjoy in the aftermath of the final English victory over the Gaelic aristocracy. Some things really do disappear, for ill and good. Even the most solid and sacred of objects can be obliterated – along with the people to whom they matter.

I also became aware, in the course of the series, that there are aspects of, and immense episodes within, Irish history of which almost nothing survives. Most of the ordinary, daily lives of the vast majority of the island’s inhabitants, for the vast majority of the period in which it has been inhabited, have left few traces. Materials are snobs and sexists: they favour the rich and male. Things like clothes made of organic materials and working implements of wood simply decay. Metals, controlled by priests, kings and warriors, persist.

But even in relatively recent periods of history, there are extraordinary lacunae. One of the reasons objects are optimistic is that not many of them survive from the very worst times. The awful 14th century, with its plagues and invasions and civil wars, had to be represented by an absence: the long gap in the production of Irish coinage is the most eloquent testimony to the decline of towns and commerce.

The terrible 1640s and 1650s, when a series of violent conflicts devastated ordinary life, are a crucial period of Irish history, but there is almost nothing that represents, for example, Oliver Cromwell’s infamous campaign of conquest. And then, of course, there is the Great Famine of the 1840s, a catastrophe defined by what was not there: the potato that had been the staple diet of the poor. The best way to represent it seemed to be an empty 19th-century cooking pot, the emptiness being the point.

Yet these gaps are exceptional. It is possible, in spite of them, to trace the development of Irish culture over 10,000 years – which is, after all, a very short time in the overall scheme of things. Possible, too, to hazard one or two sweeping generalisations about the way that culture has worked.

Chief among them is a paradox: Irish culture is very good at adapting to change because it is very good at preserving what it already knows. Irish culture is conservative but not in a passive way. There are times when its conservatism seems demented, such as the refusal of Irish horse warriors to adopt stirrups even when it was obvious that they helped to make the Normans such a formidable fighting force.

But often the conservatism is pursued with enormous ingenuity. New things are expressed in terms of the old, or the old is smuggled into the new. A ninth-century crucifix, when you look at it carefully, has spirals on Christ’s breast that go back to Newgrange. A 12th-century bishop’s crozier fuses old “Celtic” designs with new-fangled Norse symbols. Nineteenth-century Irish miners in Australia made a gold cup decorated with images of ancient torcs – and with a kiwi and kangaroo.

The wondrous complexities of the Book of Kells inspire James Joyce’s modernism. Eileen Gray’s ultramodern furniture has an organic fluidity that seems somehow continuous with the work of the great goldsmiths of the early Christian era.

Perhaps because times are so often traumatic, the desire to hang on to something familiar runs very deep. But it has to be expressed not in a pig-headed hanging on to the past but in reinventions, revivals and fusions. In an ever-changing world the desire to keep something you know becomes a ferocious energy because, in order to keep it, you have to make it new.

A History of Ireland in 100 Objects will be published as a book by the Royal Irish Academy in March; you can get 20 per cent off by ordering now at 100objects.ie