The Ulster's Museum's minimalist Troubles exhibition has studiously avoided trying to give offence, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
COMMEMORATING FOUNDING events is difficult in many societies. In the North, the concept of the state itself has always been contentious, bitterly opposed inherited histories working against the development of a civic sense and communal pride.
A Troubles exhibition in the newly refurbished Ulster Museum shows the past defeating the present: good intentions inhibited, by the look of it, for fear of giving offence, causing controversy.
From a distance this might be a puzzle, like the thought of anyone expressing outrage at Kilmainham’s representation of 1916, say. But the Republic can mark controversial events from a largely agreed viewpoint. After all the losing side in the civil war has formed the government more often than not. Almost all were reconciled early, even proud of the new State.
Most can look back on the violence at its birth as inevitable, even honourable or glorious. But the Westminster backbenchers who make up the House of Commons “Northern Ireland Committee” stated the obvious recently when they found that Northern Ireland is as yet not agreed about “how to move on from its recent past”.
So, as one of the major new features of its reopening after a three-year £17 million revamp, perhaps it is no wonder the biggest Northern museum went for a minimalist Troubles exhibition. As an account of the North’s defining experience in the past century it is a disappointment: slabs of text interspersed with photographs, no accompanying sound and not an artefact in sight. Presenting an avowedly authoritative version of the Troubles is a tough proposition. Some dislike the name “the Troubles” itself.
There is no agreement on how they began, nor how, or even if, they have ended. It could be argued that if a shared view of the North’s history existed, there would have been no “Troubles”, in this or previous generations.
Museums are contentious in themselves, of course: what they should value, who decides, the picture of society that they bolster or more rarely, question. The Ulster Museum’s name reflects the early days of an embattled new state with an unhappy minority. Northern Ireland was to have the dignity of a country, so the ancient name of a nine-county province was requisitioned for the six. Not much wonder then that the museum was always uneasy, stronger on natural history than addressing the competing strands of Irish and British allegiance. A mainly Protestant front of house staff developed a reputation for objecting to displays, in one case attendants refusing to hang paintings depicting soldiers and the IRA.
Pre-renovation, a small “Conflict” section raised few hackles by not pretending to be comprehensive. It was a different matter for the Tower Museum in Derry, overwhelmingly Catholic, to mount a 1992 display on the Troubles. Anyone who might have thought old habits had begun to fade needed only note recent examples of coat-trailing, involving the figures who supposedly jointly head an administration meant to work towards reconciliation.
The Newsletter reported Orange Order plans for two new museums to counter “misunderstandings” of its role and history. The accompanying photograph showed DUP leader Peter Robinson almost managing a smile, flanking the order’s grand master with Jim Allister, the man who hounds Robinson for “sharing power with terrorists”. Only to pay dues to the Orange Order would Robinson appear with Allister. Both know just how acutely Catholics understand the order.
Martin McGuinness celebrated his own household gods with a speech in Derry during a day of remembrance for local IRA volunteers, three shot dead by undercover soldiers and a fourth drowned trying to escape them 25 years ago. These days, McGuinness gets credit for attempting to sound like a leader of “the entire community”, unlike Robinson’s fidgeting between hardline and softer. But McGuinness’s appearance in Derry could only repel Protestants. Presumably today’s museum planners figured they were damned if they tried to confront the past, and damned if they didn’t. The newly sky-lit entrance leads the eye to the exhibition, as though proud of it.
There are jabs of candour, as when the exhibition dates the death-toll of the Troubles from 1966, not 1968 or 1969 – potentially controversial, since that means presenting loyalists rather than republicans as responsible for the first killings. As in any looking back, the photographs on display are the most telling element: people with terrible injuries, bodies on stretchers, wrecked streets.
A final section holds a small collection of Troubles literature, a couple of computers with some useful database information. But recordings of personal experiences that could be very effective are spoiled by being largely inaudible against background noises.
Every so often there is a great crashing storm. Not a belated effort to convey the terror of a bombing, though, but the stereophonic excitement of a believably rough ocean sinking a simulated Girona, the Armada wreck whose relics the museum treasures.
Presenting the contentious recent past, though, has daunted imaginations.