Art has not reflected our grief

Over five years ago, in April 1995, a huge fertiliser bomb demolished half of the nine-storey Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in the centre of Oklahoma City in the US. The explosion killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children who were in the building's creche.

To the scale and savagery of the attack, which would cause trauma even in wartime, was added the shock of a completely unexpected event. No one had imagined that the extreme right-wing fringe in US politics presented a threat of this kind.

And even if some terror group wanted to make such a grotesque gesture, nondescript Oklahoma City seemed the last place to do it. The bomb, planted by Timothy McVeigh and others, was as sudden as it was terrible.

Recently, I happened to be passing through Oklahoma City and took a detour to see the site of this catastrophe. What I saw was one of the most moving, dignified and beautiful responses to violence that I have ever seen. It made me wonder why a supposedly gauche and shallow culture like America's can produce such a powerful and restrained memorial to those killed by a terrorist bomb when Ireland, which prides itself on its rich artistic and spiritual history, has managed nothing of the kind.

Shortly after the bombing, the mayor of Oklahoma City appointed a lawyer and civic activist, Robert Johnson, to bring together a widely representative group. This group spent a long time talking to bereaved families, survivors, and local communities about how they should commemorate the dead. Johnson's group commissioned the design partnership of Hans and Torry Butzer to create a memorial. The result was unveiled by Bill Clinton this year.

The site of the atrocity is now enveloped by the memorial. At either end of the large rectangular block which was the Alfred P. Murrah building there stand huge portals of stark, pale gold stone. Each of these walls is bare expect for a tall, narrow slot, like the entrance to some ancient sacred space, and three digits. At the front, the wall bears the numbers 9.01. At the back, facing inwards, are the numbers 9.03. Symbolically, they indicate that the space between them is 9.02, when the bomb exploded. This moment becomes frozen time, an eternal hole in the fabric of the city's daily life.

Within these impassive portals are the remains of the old building's walls, marked by the scars of the explosion. One side, which was the side street where McVeigh parked the truck loaded with explosives, is now a very shallow pool lined with black granite over which a constant stream of clear water keeps flowing. The effect of this unending black stream is that of a dark, sinister hovering presence.

On the other side there is a grassy hill. On it stand nine rows of empty chairs - one row for each storey of the old building. The chairs, one for each victim, are made of stone and bronze, giving them a timeless, regal quality. Each stands on a glass base etched with the name of a victim. Nineteen of the chairs, marked with the names of the dead children, are smaller than the rest.

The effect is at once solid and ghostly so that the visitor is aware of that most eerie paradox, a visible absence. Outside this enclosed area, there is an elm tree which somehow survived the blast and bloomed that summer as if nothing had happened. Now, it is surrounded by a small orchard of fruit trees which seems both to protect it and to echo its defiant fertility.

Beyond these three areas, representing in turn the bomb, the dead and the survivors, there is very little. Though the mood is deeply spiritual, there is no specifically religious imagery. Though the message is, in the broadest sense, political, there are no state symbols.

The main inscription merely asks us to remember "those who were killed, those who survived, and those changed forever" and to "know the impact of violence". No cliches, banalities or empty rhetoric intrudes on the silent, serene grief. What will stand at the heart of the city is just an immensely moving evocation of a public and private loss.

Contrast this with the way Dublin, Omagh, Belfast, Monaghan and Enniskillen have marked, or rather buried, atrocities. Where we have monuments to the victims of terrorist bombings, they tend to be small, unimaginative and rather embarrassed. The instinct has been to rebuild, repair and move on. For all our notion of ourselves as a richly spiritual culture, the transforming power of art has not been used to reflect the grief of a 30-year conflict.

There are obvious reasons for this, some of them artistic, the others political. We have no great tradition of public monumental art and what we have tends either towards imperial pomp or twee sentimentality.

Besides, the major bombing atrocities here in the last 30 years have happened in a context very different to the Oklahoma City outrage. US society was virtually unanimous in its attitude to the violence which had occurred; Irish society was not.

The Oklahoma bombing, moreover, could be thought of as a one-off event. Here each terrible bombing seemed part of a continuing pattern of atrocity and counter-atrocity.

Even if there are more atrocities, the conflict, as it unfolded between 1968 and 1996, is over. It seems grotesque that the only discussion about memorials is the notion, floated again at the weekend, that the Maze prison complex, which housed many of the perpetrators of the violence, should become a museum.

Though books like Lost Lives and the starkly moving new collection of testimonies Bear in Mind, just published by An Crann/The Tree oral history project, have been laying the foundations of accurate and emotional memory, the notion of creating a great permanent memorial space like the one in Oklahoma City has received little official attention.

As a poem quoted in Bear in Mind puts it:

"To step around it is a choice that's made

We take the scenic route among the dead."

fotoole@irish-times.ie