Day 20 Thursday June 11th 2009

by Conor Kelly, 11 Jun 2009

In 1953, the same year the first fire was lit for Roger Casement above Murlough Bay, the workers rose up in protest against the Communist machine in East Germany. To the memory of the June 17th uprising in Berlin, Katharina Karrenberg’s 1998 prize-winning response proposed 468 lights to run across Leipziger Strasse. The lights spelled out the words, ‘Who are you that you would dare to say – these were heroes?’ The sculpture found little favour with veterans of the movement. The seeming ambivalence of the sentiment was found unsuitable for the re-unified public.

This ambivalent phrasing is central to the Casement memorial. If he is not a hero, then what is he? Without his contribution to Irish history and to Irish culture, the landscape today would certainly be very different. Those in the majority of the island would most likely argue that because of the ‘sacrifice’ he made and that of others like him, the state of things have, in the long term, altered for the betterment of the public. Its not a view shared by everyone, one could view his contribution as merely the continuation of a culture of murderers and would-be murderers. The derivation of monument from the Latin ‘monere’, to remind or warn, would suggest that, over time, a failure to articulate the questions surrounding such ‘amnesiac sites of history’, (as Young puts it) such as Murlough Bay is somehow a perilous pursuit.