Opinion

Newton Emerson: If politicians can't agree a Troubles memorial, someone else should build it

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

The Titanic Memorial Garden beside Belfast City Hall is simple and moving. It lists all 1,512 victims. The lack of a similar memorial to Troubles victims is a glaring omission
The Titanic Memorial Garden beside Belfast City Hall is simple and moving. It lists all 1,512 victims. The lack of a similar memorial to Troubles victims is a glaring omission The Titanic Memorial Garden beside Belfast City Hall is simple and moving. It lists all 1,512 victims. The lack of a similar memorial to Troubles victims is a glaring omission

METHODIST former president Rev Harold Good has proposed an annual day of Troubles remembrance and reflection.

The idea has been given a guarded welcome by Presbyterian and Catholic clergymen. It is a timely reminder that Stormont's political battle over legacy issues will leave most of the population cold, even if it succeeds on its own terms.

However, such an occasion still seems doomed to become a 'summer school' type event, drawing in the usual suspects to panels and debates while everyone else by necessity gets on with their daily lives - unless it was made a public holiday, in which case it might end up demeaned as just another day off.

The conventional and accessible way to remember a conflict is to build a public memorial. The model to do this without controversy, while remaining effective and respectful, is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC.

It lists the names of all 58,318 American service personnel killed, inscribed in chronological order on two 75-metre long plain black stone walls, without further ornamentation.

No Vietnamese casualties are mentioned, which might seem to make it irrelevant for Northern Ireland purposes.

But the Vietnam war was still such a raw wound in America in 1979, when the memorial was commissioned, that it was considered highly divisive.

Its unprecedented design, when first proposed, was denounced by the public and government officials as trite and insulting.

Criticism abated rapidly once the memorial opened and people experienced its emotional power. This is something visitors bring with them and project onto it - be they searching for the name of a relative, or just reading humanity into each name and realising how many there are.

In truth, it is more elaborate memorials that are often trite - trying to sum up momentous events and myriad loss in a single artistic vision can blend the height of arrogance with the lowest common denominator.

In Northern Ireland, memorials to peace - a tentative attempt at memorials to war - have given us a slew of glib rubbish.

By contrast, the Titanic Memorial Garden beside Belfast City Hall is simple and moving. It lists all 1,512 victims on five brass plaques in alphabetical order, set on a marble block.

Visitors can always be found lingering at it - even with no personal or ancestral connection to the disaster, it draws you in.

It also makes the lack of a similar Troubles memorial in Belfast so glaringly obvious that you have to wonder if that was somebody's intention.

In 2003, on the day of worldwide protests against the Iraq war, the names of the Troubles dead were chalked on the pavements surrounding Belfast City Hall.

I found myself, like many present, walking around the building trying to read them all. It was sobering and mesmerising - no doubt for completely different reasons to everyone doing the same. How much more inclusive can remembrance and reflection be?

This list of names was presumably taken from Lost Lives, the book that already functions as a printed memorial of the Troubles.

Its complete chronological listing of all deaths causes no controversy. On my circuit around City Hall I did not see a single name scuffed out, although it would have taken only a brush of the foot to do so. The simple recitation of the dead seems to inspire immediate respect.

One of Rev Good's Methodist colleagues has expressed concern that a Troubles memorial might equate victims and perpetrators. A list of names does this only in the minds of those inclined to do so - the concept itself does not appear to antagonise.

The real problem is that no political decision-making body in Northern Ireland is capable of commissioning any Troubles monument without descending into deadlocked argument.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial again provides an answer. It was ordered and paid for privately by a veterans' charity - government, far from helping, initially tried to block it.

If Northern Ireland's politicians cannot build a Troubles memorial, somebody else should do it.

It would take relatively little money and a small plot of land, preferably in central Belfast.

Memorials of this nature need not be expensive - a low-six figure sum is realistic, including a landscaped setting.

The churches would be well placed and suited to the task, if they could arrange it in a sufficiently ecumenical manner.

The precinct of St Anne's Cathedral, for example, is currently used - in fact, underused - as a staff car park.

It could be an ideal location.

newton@irishnews.com