Fintan O’Toole: Who dares to speak of recent history?

“Who fears to speak of Ninety-eight?/Who blushes at the name?”

Or, later, “Who fears to speak of Easter Week/Who dares its fate deplore?”

Nationalist ballads are powerful carriers, not just of Irish public memory, but of the contrast between “our” willingness to remember and “their” cowardly amnesia. The mark of republican virtue was resistance to forgetting.

The template was created in the 1840s by John Kells Ingram’s The Memory of the Dead, with that brilliantly arresting question about the 1798 Rising. The answer was that only he who is “all a knave or half a slave” turns away from recent history.

All through the 19th and 20th centuries, this was a potent claim: the knaves and the slaves fear to speak. We don’t.

It is not even 30 years since Ireland repealed the Victorian anti-homosexuality laws under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted

What’s happened to this ballad form, I wonder? Who now fears to speak of recent history? Who blushes at the names of brave deeds for which there was “no alternative”? Who is keeping the Law Library busy with warnings to cease and desist from speaking the unspeakable?

But it’s not just that some people have a fear of speech about the recent past. It’s that there’s a wider, almost generational, irritation expressed in that three-word spell that magics it all away: that’s all history.

When people say “that’s all history”, what they really mean is “I don’t want to know my history”. There is, in contemporary Ireland, a deep impatience at the recent past, an annoyance at being asked to recall it accurately.

[ Fintan O’Toole: The full, unexpurgated version of Up the ’Ra  ]

In some ways, this is quite understandable. Ireland has changed so profoundly in the last thirty years that the world of a few decades ago can seem ancient and irrelevant.

It is not even 30 years since Ireland repealed the Victorian anti-homosexuality laws under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted. Likewise, it is a mere thirty years since access to contraception was fully liberalised.

Even the 1990s can thus seem, not just a foreign country, but a different planet. That was then; this is now — and the Troubles that largely ended in 1998 belong on the far side of that great dividing line.

Fintan O'Toole on 'Up the 'Ra' and turmoil in Westminster

Listen | 46:59

Many Irish Times readers were talking this week about Fintan O'Toole's column on the subject of the IRA and the appropriateness of chanting "Up the 'Ra'.Hugh talks to Fintan about his column, the debate around the chant and how the history of the Troubles is understood today.Plus, a look at what's happening in Westminster following an extremely turbulent week for prime minister Liz Truss.

There is another incentive to amnesia: it’s an unrelentingly ugly era. WB Yeats’s doleful combination, “great hatred, little room”, created an intimacy of violence, a close-up, familial cruelty that is hard to look at without wilting.

It takes genius, like that of Anna Burns in Milkman, to make us want to linger in the claustrophobic world of communities squeezed between a state that could not be trusted, the tyrannies of paramilitary martinets and the terror of random violence. Without the allure of brilliant fiction, the reality remains repellent.

When it comes to the Troubles, many of the antagonists have a common interest in not looking too hard

There’s a numbing futility to those bleak years of the 1970s and 1980s. They hardly even form a narrative — they had a beginning, no apparent conclusion and a formless, endless, horrible middle.

For most people, the overwhelming memory is of mundane, low-level obscenity punctuated by atrocities. But even for the fanatics, there is the embarrassment that the great end that justified the grisly means — a United Ireland — was no nearer in 1998 than it had been in 1968.

Hence, there is a lot not to speak of. That’s all history — let’s move on to a bright future.

The problem is that it’s never like that. Public memory abhors a vacuum. Like it or not, we tell stories about the past.

We either tell stories that are, as far as they can be, truthful, or we tell lies. We either have “all history” or all fable — narratives shaped by public evidence that everyone can argue over or inventions in which the past is mere material for present-day propaganda.

When it comes to the Troubles, many of the antagonists have a common interest in not looking too hard. Who fears to speak? Only a strange triple alliance of the British government, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Féin.

In principle, they all agree that there should be something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In practice, why would they want it?

The British government would have to face up to its own crimes and its collusion in loyalist murders. The DUP would have to face its history of sectarianism, incitement and collaboration with paramilitarism.

And of course Sinn Féin would have to face up to its own role in enabling and justifying IRA atrocities. It would have to undergo the kind of moral reckoning that many of its leading members still seem to find too uncomfortable to bear.

These evasions make a kind of sense. What I don’t understand, though, is why the one institution with relatively clean hands — the Irish government — has been so abjectly passive in allowing selective amnesia about the Troubles to become almost a source of pride for so many of its own citizens.

Yesterday, I checked how many copies of Lost Lives, the peerless record of all the Troubles killings, our public libraries have available for loan. There’s one in Birr, one in Waterford, one in Lifford, and one in Kenmare. That’s it.

The book is long out of print. There is no digital version. The cheapest of the six copies for sale online costs €495; the most expensive €1,021. That’s now The Memory of the Dead.