Rules of engagement for a decade of centenaries

CULTURE SHOCK:IN THE Jesting of Arlington Stringham, by the strange and wonderful English writer Saki (HH Munro), the eponymous politician says the people of Crete "unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally". The same can be said of Ireland, and over the next decade we will have an astonishing overproduction of official historical memory.

We are 100 years on from the tumultuous set of interrelated events from which the State, Northern Ireland and, though this is conveniently forgotten, the United Kingdom in its present form all emerged. Beginning with the Ulster Covenant of 1912 and running all the way through to the end of the Civil War, in 1923, we have a fast-running conveyor belt of centenaries. How are we going to consume them all? One good answer is not to bother. Many people, especially in Northern Ireland, dread all this stuff and its proven capacity to reinforce tribal and sectarian identities. In the so-called republic, meanwhile, it could be hideously embarrassing to be commemorating the struggle for independence while the State is effectively governed from Frankfurt, Washington and Brussels. Even in Britain, the events of those years carry an uncomfortable reminder that Britain itself is a contested construct. How, for example, might memories of Ireland’s breakaway from the UK play into plans for a referendum on Scottish independence?

But amnesia is not an option. There will be plenty of unofficial commemorations in any case. And people do have a right to engage with history. There is a temptation to cordon off the centenaries into academic conferences and seminars, to keep the explosive material of the past out of the hands of the ignorant plebs who don’t know how to handle it. This is misguided in itself: an engagement with history is one of the foundations of citizenship. But it is also excessively pessimistic. Surely the decade of centenaries can be an opportunity for real public discourse about meanings, values and identities. Why can’t it be an opportunity to challenge tribal myths rather than to reinforce them? For this to happen, there needs to be a coherent and agreed approach, with some guiding principles. For the sake of argument, I suggest six basic rules of engagement.

Define inclusivenessGiven the dominant language of the post-Belfast Agreement era, everyone will be committed to inclusivity. But there are two very different ways of being inclusive. One is the official paradigm of "two traditions" that must be granted "parity of esteem". This leads, in reality, to fair and balanced exclusivity, an exquisitely calibrated doling out of tribal sugar plums. Here's the Battle of the Somme for the Prods and the 1916 Rising for the Taigs; Stormont for the unionists and the first Dáil for the nationalists. And we'll all agree to respect each other's pieties so nobody gets offended.

This would be worse than amnesia. We need instead a much more radical inclusivity that starts with the notion that there are not two histories but one history with many strands. All the events have to be commemorated as part of the same package, not least because they are utterly intertwined.

But inclusivity also has to extend to the “what” as well as the “how” of commemoration. The decade isn’t just about the “national question”. It’s also about social milestones such as the 1913 lockout and the suffragist struggle that culminated in votes for women in 1918. Even within nationalism, the mainstream, nonviolent tradition has to be given its due.

And, of course, everything has to be placed in the overarching context of the original sin of modernity, the first World War. Finally, inclusivity has to extend to so-called ordinary people: tools such as genealogy allow non-historians to engage in complex ways with the past.

Commemoration is not the same as celebrationThere's a tone to be adopted in all this, one that doesn't set out to denigrate the participants in the upheavals but that recognises human tragedy is at the heart of this period. The 28 children who died in the 1916 Rising, for example, can't be washed away in the rhetoric of "blood sacrifice".

Involve artists as well as historiansCommemoration is as much an act of imaginative sympathy as it is of historical reconstruction. Good art thrives on details and is inherently resistant to cliche – both necessary qualities. Artists tend to challenge, rather than shore up, assumptions.

Broaden the canvasPut women and children back into the picture. Start to see events in Ireland and Britain as part of a much larger European, and indeed global, turmoil.

Set physical goalsOn the analogy of the Millennium Development Goals, though obviously on a less momentous scale, the various governments on these islands should be able to come up with some tangible, real-life project (in healthcare or education, perhaps) that would be a legacy. If we're going to use the decade to explore shared values and ideals, we should demonstrate those values in practice as well as discuss them in theory.

Adopt a decent mottoIn trying to think of one, it struck me that it can't be in English, Irish or Ulster Scots without offending someone. So we have to go back to Latin and to the Roman satirist Horace: Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur: just change the name and the story is told about you. This suggests, I think, two things. One is that we must not patronise the past and assume ourselves to be superior to our ancestors of a century ago. We have a litany of reasons to look back in a spirit of humility. The other meaning is that all the stories of that decade are about all of us on these islands. They have to be understood together or they will not be understood at all.