Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Our most divisive memorials are parades, not statues

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus. The university said it was moving the statues because they have become "symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism". Picture by AP Photo/Eric Gay.
A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus. The university said it was moving the statues because they have become "symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism". Picture by AP Photo/Eric Gay A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus. The university said it was moving the statues because they have become "symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism". Picture by AP Photo/Eric Gay.

STATUES taken down in the night is a rare business, and yet it happened last week in the presently Disunited States of America.

How likely, though, is a major, continuing removal of images clearly glorifying the enslavement of black people - much less serious debate about the heritage of institutional racism?

The debate may be merely gearing up or lack the energy to go any distance. All bets are off while Donald Trump is president.

A communal rethink of statues and other emblems marking a difficult past was already happening pre-Trump, but he has fed it by licensing the 'Alt Right', including a now-lively Ku Klux Klan.

Here we can watch with a degree of indifference. We have had blood and thunder enough and this is not an American fashion we'll be copying.

A bygone establishment's notion of worthies deserving sculpture and pedestals has for sure left dull blobs, all male bar Queen Victoria, spattered through Belfast and in the heart of many towns, in addition to all those remembrances of the fallen in wars ancient and modern.

But familiarity breeds invisibility, or at least a veil of boredom, and for those so minded, shrines to fallen republicans are alternative memorials.

Churchill with his green mohican was a London thing. Life is short.

If there should be a yen here to remove the statues of past domination, think of the Nolan hours of lamentation and cufuffle.

The rearguard would consist of all those citizens still sure the old Northern Ireland state is not to be disrespected - and who will not, perhaps cannot accept that the day of the single community state has passed, and certainly not the lifespan of its monuments.

What's a monument for, after all? Bronze and marble portray ancestors reverently.

Rewriting history to keep the unionist state clean is no more than a natural defence of the record - against republican revisionism; it's keeping the record straight if you do it, revisionism if the enemy does.

It would also be pointed out that a quantity of 'our' public images - spot the major fly in soothing ointment - are not of British royalty or unionist politicians but of local-born inventors, scientists and preachers, oops, of Protestantism.

The Seamus Heaney library at Queen's and the Homeplace in Bellaghy are latecomers to a portrait of society so lopsided even the least impressed at the poet's elevation have held their tongues.

Americans whose ancestors were treated as sub-human creatures to be traded make an unanswerable case for removing reverent representations of slavery's champions.

Anger is sharpened by the excuses for right-wing extremism peddled from the White House. Americans shamed that their civil war has been misrepresented are starting to look afresh at public statues.

Thoughtful essays on US news sites point out that the bulk of civil war memorialising came decades after it ended, alongside denial that the quarrel over slavery was its root cause.

The Jim Crow laws, named after a caricature character, set out to negate the end of slavery by systematic segregation and disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

Now the Black Lives Matter movement and the white nationalism fed and exploited by the Trump campaign have in effect clashed.

It may still be too early for perspective, but maybe this is the carnival of reaction to the election of Obama.

Solely British/unionist/Protestant street furniture in the most central of spaces, if you let it annoy you, is an irritation.

But then much of it dates from British control of the entire island, and this state, to put it mildly, was not established to honour and reflect Irish culture and history.

Whereas the USA was created at least notionally on the basis of equality, voiced eloquently by slave-owning Founding Fathers who were men of their times.

So the constitution decided that states' representatives "be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons".

Our most divisive - because they are harder to ignore - memorials are not static and oxidised by the weather, though often rained upon.

They plod and stamp and march on the spot, behind bands feeble, belligerent, tuneful and tuneless, smartly-uniformed and coat-trailing.

It has taken until now to diminish their offence, to the point where few if any need any longer spend hours penned in their homes as triumphalism sashays past.

Objectionable statues are nothing beside the age-old indignation at the most deliberately offensive of each year's roughly 3,000 mobile memorials. Statues make no sound.