Enough bad history and politics. Perhaps the past is best on TV

CULTURE SHOCK:THE YEARS between 1901 and 1911 constitute the longest decade in Irish history. The census returns for those years, placed online by the National Archives of Ireland, show a remarkable number of people becoming 12 or even 15 years older between one and the other.

This speeding up of the ageing process is not all that mysterious. The reforming Liberal administration of Lloyd George introduced, in the period between the two censuses, pensions for those over 70. There was suddenly a very good reason for people to revise an apparently fixed aspect of personal identity: the year of one’s birth.

This episode illuminates two points that are relevant to the next decade in Ireland, north and south. We are entering a period in which commemorations come thick and fast: the Plantation of Ulster (1608-12); Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant (1912); the foundation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Irish Volunteers, and the Dublin Lockout (1913); the first World War (1914-18); the Curragh Mutiny and the Larne gunrunning (1914); the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme (1916), the anti-conscription campaign (1917); female suffrage and Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph (1918); the first Dáil and the beginning of the War of Independence (1919); the Government of Ireland Act and partition (1920); the Treaty and the establishment of Northern Ireland (1921); the beginning of the Civil War (1922).

Almost every year for the next 10 years, in other words, is the centenary of a bitterly divisive event on this island. With Northern Ireland still in a fragile state and the Republic in long-term turmoil, there is the opportunity for commemorations to be exploited, as they have so often been used in the past, by the most reactionary forces in Irish culture. But there’s also the opportunity to challenge crude versions of history.

The rapidly ageing population between 1901 and 1911 points towards two interesting ways to approach this whole business. Firstly, it highlights the things that are not commemorated. People changed their ages because the old-age pension was one of the most significant things that ever happened in Irish society. But we don’t commemorate things that don’t involve conflict.

The Old Age Pension Act of 1908 was marked with no great fanfare in 2008, just as you’d be hard put to know that this year is the centenary of the National Insurance Act, which introduced unemployment benefit. Equally, this year’s centenary of the foundation of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Foundation has been given relatively little official recognition (though An Post, to its credit, issued centenary stamps this month). Commemoration, therefore, isn’t determined by the calendar. It is a matter of choice. It is not essentially about history: it’s about culture. It’s about ideas of the “historic” that are always shaped by present-day concerns. Pensions and national insurance would be very good subjects for commemoration, not least because they were an all-Ireland phenomenon. But as both the UK and the Irish governments have been in the business of rolling back the welfare state, these particular anniversaries are inconvenient.

The other thing about the way people aged between 1901 and 1911, though, is that it tells us that identity is much more malleable than we like to think. As individuals we are supposed to have a strong sense of our own past, of the unfolding identity that we mark every year with a birthday. But, if it suits us, we can be remarkably pragmatic about the past. If there’s something in it for us we’ll happily subject our past to the most radical surgery.

If we keep in mind that commemoration is a cultural phenomenon and that the past is not a closed book, we can navigate the rapids of awkward centenaries not just safely but pleasurably. What’s needed is a process of communal thinking, one that involves artists, historians, politicians, churches, communities. There is a real challenge to Irish culture, but there are encouraging signs that it is at least being recognised. Last year Brian Cowen made a very well-judged speech on the subject, identifying mutual respect and historical accuracy as key principles. On Monday I spoke at a very lively and well-attended conference at Belfast City Hall, organised by the Community Relations Council, at which politicians, historians and community groups had a complex and civilised discussion about the challenge of arriving at a common framework in which to commemorate the centenaries.

There is at least an awareness of the issues and what seems to be a genuine determination not to allow commemoration to reinforce tribalism. The biggest danger, in fact, is not that official commemorations will be full of rancour. It is that the rhetoric of “mutual respect” and “two traditions” will result in a kind of equal-opportunities mythologising.

Thus the Catholics/nationalists will hold their tongues and put on a show of tolerance while the Protestants/unionists mark the Ulster Covenant, the Battle of the Somme and the foundation of Northern Ireland. The Protestants will return the favour while the Catholics are allowed to mark the 1916 Rising and the first Dáil. This is the kind of sterile “mutual respect” that would end up merely reinforcing the idea that there are two histories, ours and theirs.

This would be bad politics and bad history. You can’t understand the Ulster Covenant unless you understand the home-rule movement. The foundation of the Irish Volunteers is a direct response to that of the Ulster Volunteers. Events take the shape not of railway tracks but of a cat’s cradle.

The temptation for officialdom is to seal off the commemorations from each other and, especially, from the great unwashed, who can't be trusted not to turn them into excuses for atavism. On the contrary, the real challenge is to engage with popular culture, north and south. Get people to do history – of their own families and communities. The success of genealogy shows on TV suggests both that people are immensely curious about where they came from and that, when you take it down to the smallest levels, history is always full of surprises, contradictions and ambiguities. The best thing the governments of both parts of the island could do is to make the decade of anniversaries into a giant version of Who Do You Think You Are?

fotoole@irishtimes.com