You can’t have a memorial of something that is not yet history

 —  October – November 2013

CULTURE abuse memOrial

The

‘Journey of

Light’

n late September, An Bord Pleanála heard

appeals against the decision by Dublin

City Council to give permission to the

Oﬃce of Public Works for the €,

‘Journey of Light’ memorial – to the victims

of residential abuse. It will be a covered

passageway, lit at night and ﬂanked by fos-

silised limestone walls and waterfalls running

through Oisín Kelly’s Children of Lir monu-

ment commemorating the  Rising in

the Garden Of Remembrance, Parnell Square

in Dublin. A memorial was a recommenda-

tion of the Ryan report, after generations

of abuse and decades of inquiries into child

abuse including the Ferns report, the Murphy

report, the Cloyne report, the Raphoe report,

and the Dublin Dioceses report.

The hearing was extremely intense at

times, hostile and defensive. It seemed to me

as an observer and objector that the case for

going ahead with this memorial was rather

heavy-handed and oppres-

sive. This was not a holistic

process designed to give

healing and create reconcili-

ation. It was evident that no

real consideration had been

given to the impact and inte-

gration of what can only be

described as an entrance tun-

nel to the hallowed Garden of

Remembrance.

Multiple theoretical and

visual aesthetic concerns were

ventilated. For me the Journey

of Light is drab, unimagina-

tive, insensitive, visionless

– and grandiose. Independent TD, Maureen

O’Sullivan maintained: “It is demeaning to

the survivors not to give them their own space

but to ask them to share with a memorial that

is celebratory. And it is demeaning to those

who fought for the principles of democracy,

our independence, to ask them to share with

this dark chapter of abuse”. Will soldiers at

future state occasions have to turn their

backs to this memorial?

The Irish Georgian Society objected to

the eﬀect the proposal would have on the

surrounding historic eighteenth-century

square, and to the interventions in the garden.

Parnell Square should eventually be reimag-

ined with the feel of a park. An Environmental

Impact Statement would have been useful and

should probably have been required, legally.

Statements were also given by historian Tim

Pat Coogan and John Connolly, grand nephew

of James, against the proposal .

The City Council was somewhat confused

in its evidence. It had granted the permission

despite a motion passed unanimously by all

Councillors in December , to make the

site a protected structure.

The ethical problem which sweeps aes-

thetic concerns in its path here is that there

have in fact been no serious consequences for

the individual perpetrators of the residential

abuse being memorialised. Or for the con-

gregations of religious or the Irish Catholic

Church or indeed the state departments that

were involved in joint ventures

in this diabolical delinquency,

and which then indemniﬁed

the religious.

Yet now the co-accused, the

State as oppressor, is proposing

this ill conceived, premature,

insulting and unwanted ges-

ture. Justice Seán Ryan in the

Ryan report ensured in his rec-

ommendation that the then

Taoiseach’s apology should

be enshrined in any memo-

rial expression. So the words

of Bertie Ahern, a man who

serially betrayed us all, are

to be enshrined forever more on this state

memorial that is supposed to heal us and

acknowledge our suﬀering.

This is a grandiose gesture from a bank-

rupt state. An unnecessary spend of money.

A contempt to those children who are home-

less on our streets this very day, who are

still dying in our State care system. Who are

unprotected and unsafe in their own homes.

This state indiﬀerence is itself an abuse.

There is a potential conﬂict of interest

insofar as the Minister for Education, the

department that is making the application for

the memorial, appointed two of the memo-

rial committee members to the Residential

Institutions Statutory Fund (RISF).

The memorial omits mention of the

Magdalene women, the mother and baby

homes, the banished babies, the Bethany

home, the mental institutions: Grangegorman,

Ballinasloe, and the Midlands.

History here is being presented and cre-

ated by the State, by a conspiracy of the OPW,

the besmirched Department of Education and

Dublin City Council, as the triumphant vic-

tor over oppression: the rescuer. In fact this

is a grab by the State, a monumental memo-

rial cover-up by a co-accused that has evaded

any accountability to this day. Beware of the

state bearing monuments.

We place great faith in the independence of

An Bord Pleanála and believe it will reject this

proposal in its entirety on planning grounds.

But more importantly on ethical and moral

grounds, on the grounds of contempt to the

very idea of what memorial and monument

can be and as further injury to the wounds

of the many who are unfortunate enough to

have been selected for incarceration in the

regimes of state-run residential institutions

that contained and brutalised those of us that

were deemed surplus to need.

As James Young wrote about the Holocaust,

“once we assign monumental form to memory,

we have to some degree divested ourselves of

the obligation to remember”.

Memorials are about the past and the

issues of physical, emotional and sexual abuse

in Irish institutions are not yet historical.

An Bord Pleanála should say no to commemorating residential abuse with a

tunnel next to the military memorial on Parnell Square. By Mannix Flynn

You can’t have a memorial of

something that is not yet history

The ‘Journey of

Light’ is drab,

unimaginative,

insensitive,

visionless and

grandiose

“