Last year marked the end of a two-year cycle commemorating the Famine. This year is scarce begun and already we know the details of the myriad events and festivals to be held around the country in celebration of the 1798 bicentenary. The Irish have long nursed a passion for the past but we're not the only ones going at commemoration with a vengeance. In Britain the anniversary marking the end of the second World War was feted by a plethora of ceremonies and rites of remembrance. At a time when British officials were much exercised apologising for the iniquities of their ancestors, the chance to celebrate the spirit of the Blitz was a positive way to counter the British Empire's bad press.
But what exactly is going on in this frenetic desire to commemorate. Is it therapy culture gone mad or the fulfilment of a basic human need?
Whether we look back in anger or in celebration, we say as much about the present when we celebrate past events as we do about the past itself. In Ireland commemoration has frequently been a pitched battlefield for opposing ideologies, more divisive and triumphal than healing and celebratory. As Edna Longley noted: "Commemorations are as selective as sympathies. They honour our dead, not your dead." Virtually all the public festivals in Ireland have evolved and changed to fit a timely political need. Others have fallen entirely into disuse. King William's birthday, November 4th, was celebrated up until 1806. Now it is a forgotten event. Easter 1916, especially in the years following the Civil War, was a contentious anniversary, highlighting the divisions in the new Ireland rather than heralding a brave new world. In the years 1924-'27 the anniversary was marked by Republicans marching to Glasnevin to lay wreaths. Cumann na nGaedheal officialdom ignored the event and there were in fact no government organised celebrations till the introduction of a military parade in 1954. Commemoration of the Civil War has yet to become a public event and needless to say there is no common memorial to the dead and many of those small individual markers of atrocity around the countryside are neglected and abandoned. Is this because we haven't truly dealt with the Civil War yet?
Tom Garvin, Professor of Politics at UCD, believes this is so. "Yes, you'll see they're going to go on and on about 1798 but there, the viciousness has gone. You have to distinguish between 1798 as a commemoration and something like the Civil War. The Civil War still hurts. It was not to be talked about. People are trying to get over this conspiracy of silence but it's only beginning." By commemorating certain events and ignoring others are we just prolonging the hurt, manufacturing fresh grievances, or do we really move on? Historian Kevin Whelan, director in Dublin of the Irish arm of the US university Notre Dame is on the National Commemoration Committee for the 1798 bicentenary and was very involved in the Famine commemorations. He passionately believes in the importance of commemoration, provided it is done in the proper spirit, and sees interesting developments in the way we have celebrated three landmark dates in the last decade. "If you look at the 75th anniversary of 1916, in 1991, the State backed away from it. Then there was an interesting shift with the Famine commemoration in 1995, the government did take that one on board and they did a pretty good job of it. And now with 1798, the Government are proactive in relation to it as opposed to letting it slide. And in a way I think it marks an interesting kind of transition, a maturing process. The State is taking responsibility for this. After all, the State that doesn't respect its own history is a bankrupt one. I think that we should talk not just about commemoration, there's memory as well which is about the past and the present and what people today think of the past. The tradition in Ireland up until recently was to conceive of memory as somehow getting in the way of history. So there was an opposition set up between memory and history."
Ronit Lentin has edited a book on gender and catastrophe and her academic work has focussed on the way the Holocaust has been dealt with in Israeli society. She believes official memory - what we do and do not choose to commemorate - is constructed and in the case of such overwhelmingly unspeakable events as the Shoah (the Hebrew word for Holocaust) or the Irish Famine, or for that matter the Irish Civil War, coming to terms with the real horrors of the event can take one or two generations. "The collectivity cannot deal with the memory of the unspeakable," says Lentin. "These are elements of our own humanity that we cannot bear to hear." She also maintains that these events and memories are deliberately silenced, frequently because of the need to do other vital things, like re-build the very society from the ashes of the catastrophe it seeks to forget. What she terms society's silencing of catastrophe has many implications.
Historian Christine Kinealy has asked whether remembering the Famine is "a dangerous memory" and has taken to task those who had for so long ignored the Famine.
The black US novelist Toni Morrison has her own word for the whole thing. To her it is "rememmoration", a reconnecting with a painful memory or event that has been suppressed or erased in the past. Kevin Whelan identifies with this. "That was very much the philosophy of those of us who were involved in the Famine thing, that same process, re-establishing in the public discourse and in the public memory an event that was so hugely significant but which had, for specific reasons, been deliberately erased or submerged. Our job was to bring it back up." Whelan doesn't believe this task should be confined solely to professional historians but should take in all manner of people. "As Nietzsche said," history is what hurts," remarks Whelan "and sometimes
things hurt so much that they can't have articulation. It takes a long, long time for them to work through; slavery in America is one, the Famine in Ireland is another and the Holocaust. You can't restore the past but you can restore memory and that's what that whole process of commemoration is about."
From commemorating it's just one step to apologising and then there's the question of reparation - both psychological and financial. According to Mitch Elliott, president of the Irish Psychoanalytical Association, the public needs to remember and re-live events and then forgive, which mirrors the principles of psychotherapy and the process the individual goes through to expunge the hurts of the past. He believes that the Irish have in their generous involvement in Famine work in Africa and in projects like Bob Geldof's Live Aid begun their own healing in relation to their Famine experience. For some the work of how we might commemorate future landmark dates in Irish history is already beginning. Dorothea Melvin, director of the Cultures of Ireland group to promote tolerance and diversity North and South, ran a Culture of Commemoration lecture series last year, looking to both the past and the future. "The idea to begin with was to be a lead-up to the celebrations for 1798 but also it had one eye to the future. We wanted to ask if eventually an absolute ceasefire occurred in the North, how in fact and in what manner would people commemorate the 25 years of violence."
To many the commemoration circus may look like another extension of the heritage industry, a provider of jobs and cash for all sorts of interest groups. But while greater affluence affords us more time to contemplate the past, the commercialisation of commemoration cannot totally undermine its purpose.
To remember and be remembered is a fundamental human need. Ancient man scratched on cave walls; prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto and Japanese POW camps scribbled on bits of paper - all of this was a bid for immortality, a need to leave their mark in the sand. Commemoration is another expression of that need. Commercialisation may affect the rites of memory but we still need to perform them - "lest we forget".
