Newton Emerson: The North’s approach to difficult statues is adding rather than removing

It is surprising that the new mood of iconoclasm has not alighted upon Belfast's statue of Dr Henry Cooke.

A 19th century Presbyterian clergyman, Cooke had nothing to do with slavery – but that has not stopped Northern Ireland making the present moment about itself, as usual. The statue of Edward Carson outside Stormont has been much mentioned online, as have two statues of Queen Victoria, although due to her reign coinciding with famine, not empire.

Compensation for the abolition of slavery was paid to some estate-holders in Ulster but Belfast rejected attempts to establish a slave trading company.

The only statue of a pro-slavery figure that has turned up anywhere in the North so far has been of the Protestant Young Irelander John Mitchel, immortalised on a plinth and several street signs in Newry. This has caused cross-community perplexity: the SDLP has suggested adding an explanatory plaque; the UUP worries renaming streets “would set a dangerous precedent”.

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No explanation for that fear is necessary. A decade ago, Sinn Féin councillors in Limavady sought removal of a statue of an early 20th century prime minister of New Zealand, a native of the town, on the pretext he had been in the Orange Order. Any excuse to knock a Protestant off his perch.

Consensus

Since then, a consensus has emerged that the best approach to difficult statuary is addition rather than subtraction. Belfast City Council has a draft agreement to supplement the unionist grandees set in stone around City Hall with nationalists and republicans. Similar "equality audits" have been performed elsewhere.

While balance may seem trite, politically and artistically, it is an improvement on most of the anodyne public sculpture that has marked the peace process. In recent years there have been suggestions that Northern Ireland could export its statue-adding model, given that contentious memorials are an issue across the world. But it is hard to see how this can help with the legacy of slavery, for which balance is hardly appropriate. Some things simply do not deserve an honoured space in the public square, however well contextualised. In 1970, the IRA blew up a statue in north Belfast of the Rev "Roaring" Hugh Hanna, a Victorian forerunner of Ian Paisley, notorious for anti-Catholic sermons that sparked sectarian riots.

His statue fell over intact and has spent the past half century in a storage yard. For 30 years, councillors puzzled as much as argued over what to do with it.

In 2008, they commissioned a replacement artwork “to reflect the whole community”. Although this never materialised, more peace process sculpture seems inevitable.

That brings us back to Dr Cooke, immortalised outside Belfast’s old technical college.

Fateful figure

He encouraged his contemporary Hanna to give roaring sermons, knowing full well the consequences, when other churches were calling for calm – but he needed no assistance to rouse the crowd. Cooke has a good claim to being the single most fateful figure in Ulster’s history. He took the radical Presbyterian tradition, which had eschewed slavery and backed the 1798 rebellion, and transformed it into pro-union conservatism. His initial targets were theological opponents within his own church but he was soon stirring up resentment against Catholic education and emancipation – his statue has its back turned on a school he disapproved of.

In 1834, at a huge rally in Hillsborough, he proclaimed "the banns of marriage" between Presbyterians and the Church of Ireland, forming a 'Protestant party' in the politics of Ulster that went on to become unionism.

Cooke was a leader of this alliance for the rest of his life. He chased Daniel O’Connell out of Belfast in 1841. In 1867, aged 80, he attended another monster rally in Hillsborough to inaugurate an Ulster Protestant defence association.

A more liberal alliance led the subsequent campaign against Home Rule but not before Cooke had defined Ulster unionism’s constituency and to some extent its character.

Intriguingly, after he died in 1868, his supporters were not satisfied with a statue to commemorate him. Another statute had to be very pointedly removed.

Frederick Richard, the Earl of Belfast, had impressed the citizens so much before his untimely death in 1853 with his art and philanthropy, including famine relief, that they put up a statute to him – the city's first – by public subscription. It stood for 20 years until it was carted off, via some council chicanery, to make way for Cooke.

The earl’s statue is safe today inside City Hall. Whenever someone objects to Cooke, as still occasionally happens, putting the earl back is a common suggestion. Balancing a cynical hardline preacher with a patrician liberal aristocrat would be a witty verdict on unionism.

However, the quiet revelation of this week is that even when people want to argue over statues – and Belfast has only a handful of landmark examples – Cooke and his views are too obscure to be thought worth arguing over.