Olivia O’Leary

2024 HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE AWARD CEREMONY

I have framed over my office desk an article from The Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole. It arose out of a controversy in 2022 about the number of young Irish people who taken to singing ‘Up the ‘Ra’ on nights out,  In a brilliant piece, Fintan wrote that he was all in favour of young people singing ‘Up the ‘Ra’ as long as it was the full version.  And he went on to give that full version:  ‘Up cutting the legs off young women shopping for wedding dresses; up torturing kids with Black and Decker drills through their kneecaps….Up burying the body of a widow in a secret place and telling her 10 kids that their mother has run off with some man and left them. Up massacring those mourning the dead of two world wars…’ and he finished many paragraphs later..’…up the maimed and the bereaved; the broken and the bereft.’

That long list of Fintan’s is familiar to me as I was up in Northern Ireland reporting for RTE at the time.  I covered many of those stories. They happened, as did murders by loyalists and by the British army. And there are younger people who will say to me ‘But we don’t remember them. They are not part of our reality.’  Oh yes, they are, or they should be. I don’t believe any democratic state can function at its best without a sense of shared reality, both about the present and the past.Take Ireland’s refusal, for example, to allow the President to attend any official commemoration of the dead of the last two world wars until the 1990s.   Or take our official determination to play down, or excise altogether from our teaching of history, incidents like the murder during the 1798 Rising of about 200 Protestants in a barn at Scullabogue in Co. Wexford.  This was the one sided version of history which helped to create a Roman Catholic/Protestant faultline down the middle of our society where people owed allegiance to their church, their tribe, rather than to their state. It fractured our sense of shared ownership of our own state.  It contributed to a lack of pride in our public places and our shared heritage.  It resulted in a weakened sense of citizenship.  Hubert Butler has written very cogently about the price to this state of not having as part of our public debate the dissenter tradition represented by Irish Protestants, something for which he excoriates his own community as much as the Roman Catholic one.

So, taking issue slightly with the suggested theme of the essay competition this year, I would say that the danger to reconciliation is not always that memory would be substituted for history, but that partial and unreliable memory is substituted for history. One essayist this year reminded us of the words of Gerry Adams in his funeral oration for former Chief of Staff of the IRA, Kevin McKenna, on 27 June 2019, where he said: ‘we will not let the past be written in a way which demonises patriots’. Dictating the way history will be written, refusing to recognise the importance of having a shared reality, undermines our democratic present and poses challenges to  reconciliation in the future.

Those in power will always try to dictate the way history is written and sometimes people go along with it because it’s easier that way, or it’s what they want to hear.  I am old enough to have grown up in an Ireland in the 50s which must have been the most Catholic place in the world.  We had Catholic writers- Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, François Mauriac.  We had Catholic singers- Bing Crosby, Mary O’Hara, and Canon Sydney McEwan. All our heroes and heroines were Catholic and most of our villains were Communist. We were taught to hate the communists even more than the Nazis.   When after the second world war the communist authorities in Croatia imprisoned Catholic Archbishop Stepinac, we knew whose side we were on. So the fur flew when Hubert Butler, at a meeting of the International Affairs Association in Dublin in 1952, dared to raise the extent to which the Catholic Church authorities in Croatia including Stepinac collaborated in, or at least were ready to benefit from, the forced conversion to Catholicism of Serbian Orthodox Christians by the pro-Nazi Croatian authorities. The Papel Nuncio walked out of the meeting and the papers next day reported this scandalous ‘insult to the Nuncio’.   Hubert Butler was denounced and votes of condemnation against him passed in local authorities around the country.  Worst of all, in the revived Kilkenny Archeological Society which he had co-founded with my grandfather, John O’Leary, the Graignamanagh baker, a motion was put down to remove him as secretary. The motion was well defeated so Butler could have stayed on.  However, he said he didn’t want to be a source of division in a society he had hoped would provide common ground for Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants to celebrate their joint archaeological inheritance. So he resigned.

Which brings me to another picture hanging on my wall at home.  It is a cartoon by the artist Rita Harte of that famous Kilkenny Archaeological Society, with Hubert Butler in the dock. It was given to me by Hubert’s granddaughter, Suzanna. All those who supported Butler have a halo around their heads.  All those who opposed him have devil’s horns on their heads.  And my bewildered-looking grandfather who, as President, chaired the meeting, has over his head one horn and a half a halo.  The support for Butler was overwhelming so my grandfather didn’t have to cast the deciding vote .  He was a loyal Catholic, so I imagine he was vastly relieved.  He died when I was 12 so I never got to ask him.

So I recognise in the essays here other countries that had similar dictated mindsets.  In his essay,‘Remembering the Future’, Maurice Fitzpatrick writes about the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia where after the assassination of the assistant head of the SS  Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, all the men were massacred and the women and children were taken to concentration camps.Then a historian discovered in 2020 that only two days before the assassination, a Jewish man who had been sheltering for years in the town was handed over to the Nazi authorities.  This was an inconvenient fact in the official story of Lidice’s victimhood under Nazism and the authorities insisted that local schools and museums continue to stick to the original  and official story.

In her essay, ‘Bomb Shelters in Belfast - the Uneasy Consolations of History’, Niamh Cullen looks at the fact that neither the British notion of their national stoicism – the ‘keep calm and carry on’ of popular imagination – nor the notion that ‘Britain stood alone against Hitler’ which figured large in the Brexit debate, quite fit actual histories of the war. They are more a consoling myth in an uncertain world.   

Then take Russia, where there was the general belief that Stalin was the standard bearer against fascism until that wonderful book by Vasily Grossman, ‘Life and Fate’ , written in the 1950s, was published in the 80s, long after the Jewish author, imprisoned for his dissident views, had died. As Dr. Conor Daly writes, “the novel presents Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s resistance as a struggle between two brutal dictatorships – a totalitarian Nazi Germany and an equally totalitarian Soviet Union – in which all humanity is the victim.” It even dares to have a chapter set in a gas chamber as the gas is turned on.  It was the most powerful book I had read in forty years but it told a story of a brutal and incompetent Stalin that many Russians didn’t want to hear.   It was a novel which probably contributed to the end of the Soviet Empire.  And now that Putin in an attempt to make Russians feel great again is trying to return to a version of that Stalinist or even imperial past, he may find ready Russian takers.   As Conor Daly says, history shows that we can go backwards as well as forwards. 

Hubert Butler was a true member of the awkward squad.  He believed in challenging his readers, and these essays, in a competition which bears his name, do the same.  Like him, these three prizewinning essay writers explore and make us face uncomfortable truths; they challenge us intellectually; and they write beautifully.  Hubert Butler would have approved.

Olivia O’Leary, Kilkenny 13 August 2024