Iconoclasm is never anything but ugly and soul-destroying, as the forces of Islamic State have demonstrated in recent days and months. In February 2015, the antiquities in Iraq’s Mosul Museum received their lethal minimalism. Now it’s the turn of ancient Palmyra in Syria to suffer the dark side of the human soul and the voices that urge annihilation.
Iconoclasm is not peculiar to Islam. Fanatics can emerge at any time and in any culture. In 1643, the English puritan Richard Culmer entered Canterbury Cathedral, climbed to the top of a 60ft ladder and, aiming a steel-tipped pike at centuries-old stained glass, “rattled down proud Becket’s glassy bones”. In the spring of 1650, in the aftermath of the siege of Kilkenny, Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers charged around St Canice’s Cathedral, defacing tomb effigies and turning windows into cascades of rainbow crystals. Two years later, the same puritans inflicted a similar fate on St Nicholas’s Church in Galway where, in the south transept, two stone angels still bear witness to the wrecking – as far as they can in their headless state.
A country’s material culture is the vital memory of the tribe; it serves as a bridge not only to our ancestors, who created it, but also to our descendants. To destroy a nation’s heritage is not only an act of violence against the human soul, but a tangible way of undermining the identity of its citizens.
A Syrian watching Palmyra being razed would be akin to an Irishman watching the Rock of Cashel or Newgrange being levelled.
That type of systematic, cold-blooded philistinism could never happen here in Ireland, in the 21st century, surely?
It's hard to envisage an army of TNT-toting fanatics advancing on Cashel or anywhere else in Ireland. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, or to chip away at a country's heritage. Not so long ago I stumbled on an article by Patricia Feehily in the Limerick Leader about the demolition of Limerick's elegant Cruises Hotel in 1991 to construct a new street. According to Feehily, it was "a national monument – the oldest hotel in the country. Even the liberator, Daniel O'Connell, had stayed there once. Why did we stand idly by and let them do that, for heaven's sake?"
Demolition of past
In November 1998, James Joyce’s family home at 2 Millbourne Avenue, Drumcondra, was demolished for a new development. The Joyce enthusiast Brendan Kilty reportedly rushed there on the morning of the demolition: “I was expecting to find a huge protest.” Instead, he saw the rubble being removed.
A hotel and family home are a far cry from an ancient Roman city. And demolition with a view to creating a street or a housing development cannot be compared with wanton destruction.
Yet are we so rich in historical culture that we can afford to lose places that remind us, in brick and mortar, of two of our greatest historical figures, O’Connell and Joyce?
Both Feehily and Kilty remarked on the lack of protest regarding their respective demolitions. Yet at least we enjoy the privilege of being able to protest – unlike the Iraqis and Syrians. In 2008, when Tara was under threat from the planned motorway, Seamus Heaney registered his deep unease about it in an interview on BBC Radio Ulster. In doing so he set out why heritage is intangibly crucial to a country’s spiritual wellbeing: “I think it literally desecrates an area – I mean the word means to de-sacralise and, for centuries, the Tara landscape and the Tara sites have been regarded as part of the sacred ground . . . I mean the traces on Tara are in the grass, are in the earth – they aren’t spectacular like temple ruins would be in the Parthenon in Greece but they are about origin, they’re about beginning, they’re about the mythological, spiritual source – a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit.”
Tara had an advocate in a Nobel-prizewinning poet. Imagine how many buildings and landscapes have been destroyed or desecrated through having no voice to defend them? And a country is only as rich as its myriad pockets of culture. We take pleasure in a town or village not because of its new multistorey car park or office block but, say, its medieval bridge, quirky post office, ancient trees, famine graveyard or . . . a building associated with a great patriot or writer. Take these away and a country becomes a desert of shopping malls and tourist shops dispensing kitschy souvenirs of a sanitised what was.
It’s not just buildings and archaeological ruins that need protecting. Heritage applies as much to landscapes. To take just one example, whenever I leave Knockcroghery in Roscommon, heading towards Strokestown, there comes a point during the ascent from the village when I can see in the distance Sliabh Bán surfacing from the plain like a huge beautiful whale from a sea of brown and green.
The Strokestown area is fortunate to have such a natural feature. Mountains are sacred: the ancient Hebrews and Chinese believed they were platforms on which people could communicate with God, or the gods. From below, mountains look majestic, while their summits provide visions of distance and raw exhilaration – Yeats puts it well: “For I would ride with you upon the wind, /Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, /And dance upon the mountains like a flame.” Mountains remind us of the creation of the Earth, the primordial shifting of tectonic plates, and the sheer majesty of nature and our human faculty to appreciate it. That is why, above all, we want our mountains to be as pristine as possible.
You might think that keeping mountains in their natural beauty would be a universal and overriding desire. Sadly, not so. In the 1980s, for example, three mining companies attempted to mine gold on Croagh Patrick but were defeated by local, national and international protests. And now Sliabh Bán, with its ancient monastic paths, its red squirrels, ravens, and five species of warblers, and its views stretching to Croagh Patrick, is being desecrated (to use Heaney’s word). Its fate was sealed by being sufficiently windy to induce Coillte to plant 20 wind turbines on it. Not pretty little windmills, mind: each turbine is higher than the Spire in Dublin.
Nobody is saying that green energy isn’t a good thing – and mountain lovers do tend to be eco-minded. But mountains are rare around Strokestown. It gives the area its “distinctive spirit”. Yet the sleek blue whale will soon look as if it as been speared to death by 20 giant white harpoons.
Coillte claims its “core purpose is to enrich lives locally, nationally and globally”, yet the residents of Strokestown were overwhelmingly opposed to the Sliabh Bán development. Perhaps if St Patrick had held a vigil on it, or Seamus Heaney had written a poem about it, Strokestown would have avoided having their lives “enriched” in Coillte fashion.
Mythic resonance
When Heaney read at the Strokestown Poetry Festival in 2006, I’m sure Tara was more on his mind than Sliabh Bán. I’m equally sure that if he were alive today he would be a saddened friend of Sliabh Bán, especially with the centenary of 1916 next year. For, as he said about Tara: “I was just thinking actually the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 summoned people in the name of the dead generations and called the nation, called the people in the name of the dead generations. If ever there was a place that deserved to be preserved in the name of the dead generations from pre-historic times up to historic times up to completely recently, it was Tara.” Sliabh Bán lacks Tara’s scale and unique mythic resonance, but not its beauty. Heaney talked about something “that gives the country its distinctive spirit”. We must decide what things, big and small, give Ireland its distinctive spirit and cherish them. Do visitors come here to admire our state-of-the-art wind turbines or the sweep of the mountains of Mourne?
Patricia Feehily said about Cruises Hotel: “Why did we stand idly by and let them do that, for heaven’s sake?” Do friends of Sliabh Bán and the thousands of other places in the country under threat of various sorts really want that sentence to be carved as an epitaph on the gravestones of developed or destroyed sites? We should love and be grateful to our history, culture and heritage, and raise our voices in their defence; and we should remember the silence and dust rising from Palmyra.
James Harpur has published five books of poetry which reflect his interest in myth, history and spirituality. His latest book, Angels and Harvesters, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Prize. He is a member of Aosdána