old and gentle souls we knew as children, and who we now have to recast as the young active participants or witnesses to these events, and wonder how they were affected by them, and how, in turn, they have affected us. Is this really the best we can do to commemorate them?
Conclusion So I’ve been sitting around the committee table struggling with these questions for the past few months, aware at the same time that it is a good opportunity to highlight the museum that I work in, enhance its visibility within the local authority structure and maybe catch any funding that might be floating by. So it might have been wiser to keep my questions to myself and not be the party pooper. But I have reminded myself that I am a historian, and therefore I’m not obliged to see the past through a political frame. I really don’t need politicians to tell me what to think about the past or how to deal with it, and neither does anyone else for that matter. The subtleties and nuances of history are my stock in trade, and they are vital to arriving at some kind of coherent understanding of the motivations, loyalties and identities of the people a century ago. As a historian working in the public sphere whose job it is to promote a greater understanding of the past, it seems to me that I have a responsibility to make the effort to see beyond the politics. So from now on I’m going to be like one of Odysseus’s sailors and plug my ears with beeswax so that I can continue to facilitate people’s engagement with the complexities of history, while sailing on past the alluring simplicities of the heroic future promised in the siren song of ‘Ireland 2016’.
Helen O’ Carroll is Curator at Kerry County Museum.
88
Museum Ireland
Volume 25 2015