THE SUGGESTION that the portraits of “tainted taoisigh” be removed from Leinster House is an intriguing one – not so much the idea of a blank wall where a taoiseach should be but the questions it raises: just how should we commemorate disgrace? How should we memorialise what we’d rather forget?
Senator James Heffernan grabbed himself some headlines with the proposal. “To have those who have been found culpable of corruption, abuse of power and privilege and of perjury smiling down on all those who walk past them is not the kind of message that we need to give.”
Actually, none of his presumed targets – Bertie Ahern, Charles Haughey or Albert Reynolds – is smiling in his portrait. Of the line-up of former taoisigh (collective noun suggestions, please . . .) only Garret FitzGerald raises the hint of a smile. John Bruton’s portrait is of a civil servant, captured mid-file. Haughey, meanwhile, holds the relaxed pose of a man who wears his Charvet shirt well, who is happy in his own company and in that of an artist, John Kelly. Perhaps he viewed himself as a patron of the arts, and the portrait is a tribute to this as much as to his role as taoiseach. In fact, while not alone among the portraits in facing straight-on, this old republican carries a regal nature the others do not.
He certainly looks far more comfortable than Ahern, who, in James Hanley’s portrait, is seated almost at a right angle. Ahern’s head is turned a little towards us, but his gaze is off somewhere, like a man having second thoughts about something. Say, the horse he backed in a race.
If Hanley had been feeling satirical he might have painted Ahern in his yellow suit. Alas not.
Would removing either portrait fulfil much purpose? Both men were voted into the role by the chamber along the corridor on which their portraits hang. You can’t excise those records, so should you excise the result?
We are well practised in paying tribute through public art. Mere presence does not always mean general repute, however. How many Dubliners could identify each of the statues that thread along O’Connell Street? All would know Daniel O’Connell at one end, Charles Stewart Parnell at the other and James Larkin in between, but could they name their companions? Would many recognise William Smith O’Brien or Sir John Gray, or know why they are there?
O’Connell Street gave us our most famous act of “removal”, a belated parallel of the now familiar sight of old-regime statues being pulled down by the victors. However, the reduction of Nelson’s Pillar to a blasted stump gave it a particular life in Dublin lore, as well as, ironically, a place in many homes. As I write this a shard of the monument, grabbed up by my grandfather, sits on the windowsill.
The street itself changed name as a response to a new regime, just as many of Dublin’s streets did in a newly independent state keen to remember its martyrs
Context changes everything. Future historians will no doubt differ on Ahern and Haughey’s legacies. Future Irish citizens will see them either more or less negatively.
Nor is it out of the question that we will revert to political tributes. For now we have moved away from the memorialising of politicians with trends towards oblique monument (the Spire), catastrophe (the Famine victims on Custom House Quay) or artistic figures (James Joyce, Phil Lynott, Joe Dolan).
Yet if we have stopped paying public tribute to politicians’ achievements, how might we remember their failings? We could leave the portraits in Leinster House and put a potted biography next to each.
Or we could remove their portraits from Leinster House, replace them perhaps with darker wallpaper, a rectangular clue that something was there. Visitors’ curiosity might be piqued. What’s supposed to be there, they’ll ask. Well, let me tell you . . .
What else can be done? There might be a blue plaque on each of their houses (“Bertie Ahern lied here”). Or we could subvert the notion of a sculpture by commissioning, in a corner of Dubin Castle, a statue of Ahern in the box at the Mahon tribunal, frustrated, wounded, bronze.
A few metres away, a bench could be placed on which the public could face him while they munch on rolls. And there, free of a judge’s censure, they could laugh and gasp as much as they wanted, a 24/7 re-creation of a tribunal we wanted to wind up but wouldn’t want to forget.
Twitter @shanehegarty
