And I remembered how I called/To the men of no voice nor tongue/The sightless mouthless mass of humanity/To use my voice and mind as their/Instrument and their echo chamber/To the nobility of their burnt out lives.
I may do much and I may do nothing/But I want them to know that when/The seekers of cultural asylum asked me/To read their cry of tortured humanity/As a prop for the ends of pained indifferent/Conversation during the meal, I refused."
- John Conneely, "First Reading"
THESE lines, from a poem by a colleague and neighbour from the borderlands of Galway and Roscommon. came back to me in my efforts to describe my feelings on hearing that. this coming bank holiday weekend, this State of ours will stage a "commemoration" of the Great Famine of the 1840s.
It will, it appears. be an event filled with humour and high spirits, but will also have a serious purpose, in a manner in keeping, perhaps, with Padraig Pearse's analysis that the English never started a famine purely for fun.
Awareness of this event has come to me gradually and as it did I confess I found myself increasingly unable to believe what I was hearing. Could it be true that an event was being organised, with the aid of £10,000 in Government money, to "celebrate" the 150th anniversary of the Great Hunger?
Could it be true that it was to be called The Great Irish Famine Event? Was it possible that this occasion would include a rock concert, featuring Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, complete with merchandising and all the usual commercial frills? Could it be that it was proposed that the US President would participate in a symbolic candle lighting exercise via a video link up?
No, I decided, such a notion was too crass, too tawdry. But in the past week I emerged from what I thought must be an awful dream to the realisation that the proposal is even more grotesque than my wildest nightmares might have envisaged. The occasion, we were informed in an Irish Times report last Thursday, is expected to bring 100,000 visitors over the June Bank Holiday weekend".
It is billed as "a celebration of triumph over disaster". One of the events is described by the organisers as "an exhilarating themed show, a tribute to the Irish spirit through drama, dance, music and cultural reflection".
The organisers predict that it will be "one great party". This, as with the "celebration" in general, is being run as a commercial event, with some of the proceeds to be given to "good causes". One of the organisers told The Irish Times that the event will not be "solemn and terrible". Nor, "cultural reflection" notwithstanding, will it be in any way political.
If you are not appalled by this, nothing I say will make you so. I am willing, on the basis of my experience in raising the issue of the Famine for public debate, to believe that I am alone among, say, the readers of this newspaper, in believing this event to be an obscene appropriation for commercial purposes of an occasion which, if it is to happen at all, should indeed be solemn and terrible.
BUT I am grateful to Joe Murray, of the aid - agency AFrI, who has given voice to some of my sense of disbelief by describing this proposed event as "dancing on the graves of the Famine dead".
I am well aware that what I have to say now will ensure that the ultimate accolade of [begrudger] is added to the already impressive list of sobriquets I have earned while attempting to raise this issue. ("Witch doctor" is my personal favourite).
As one of those who, three years ago, brought before the Irish public the question of how we should appropriately remember the one million people who died in the Great Hunger, I am proud to have, added my voice to those of people working to fight famine today in suggesting that, apart from the relevance of the Irish Famine for catastrophes of a similar kind in the modern world, the as yet unexplored questions of the Great Hunger might uncover one or two metaphors for Irish society in the 1990s.
For our troubles we received no end of abuse. What I feel it vital to remember is that an Irish Government, fearful of the Irish people coming to any kind of understanding of the meaning of this calamity in our relatively recent history, at first tried to ignore the discussion and, when this failed to close down debate, proceeded to appropriate it.
The Minister of State who was given responsibility for "commemorating" the Famine, Ms Avril Doyle, having denounced those who had brought the issue up in the first place, set about scuppering any possibility of a solemn engagement by dealing with the issue as an opportunity for creating tourism, Having awarded grants to revisionist historians to write more distortions of Irish history, she announced that any monument to the Famine dead should be built beside an airport.
Now she presides over the ultimate betrayal of our sacred history an event in which the leader of the most powerful colonising nation in the modern world will join with a bunch of apolitical socialites to steal from the Irish people the right to engage, in silence and respect, with their collective pain.
This weekend, courtesy of the Minister and her Government of amnesia, the Irish public will be invited, as paying spectators, to commodify the destruction of our ancestors and offer it up at the altar of tourism in "one great big party". In this she has created the perfect metaphor for the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, a travesty of nature built upon the graves of its dead.
That those who sought to abuse us into silence by accusing us of attempting to reawaken race sentiment should now attempt to exploit the sacred memory of the starved by flogging it to exiled Americans is as telling a tale of the hypocrisy of this sleazy little State as any you will ever care to hear.
Had I known that talking about the Famine would end in such an obscenity, I confess I might have kept my counsel. To the extent that, by raising it I have contributed to the offence of this "celebration", I have made a mistake.
It would have been better to forget the Famine than to demean its dead and the millions of dead and dying in the unending stream of comparable modern famines by pretending that it is possible to talk about famine without talking about politics.
But still I believe in those words of the great native American artist, Jimmie Durham: "We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew." They will be more relevant than ever this weekend when the obscenities we will be forced to witness in the name of commemoration will have ignorance as their only possible excuse.