Brendan Hoban: We must keep learning the lessons of history             

Western People  27.8.2024

I may be wrong but I suspect that few of my readers took in the recent Electric Picnic, Ireland’s biggest outdoor festival. Just over a week or so ago, thousands of music fans descended on Stradbally, County Laois where a predictably rain-sodden Irish summer and the most basic of living conditions didn’t deter them from their enjoyment of a surprisingly old style repertoire of musical favourites rehashed to unusual acclaim. 

Musical tastes since the Beatles are beyond the ambit of curmudgeons like me, but the startling presence on stage of musical icons like headliner Kylie Minogue as well as The Saw Doctors and The Wolfe Tones attested to the resilient popularity of former musical styles.

Regarded as ‘the Republican Balladeers’, the Wolfe Tones, in the words of Ronan McGreevy in the Irish Times report, ‘have reached a younger audience with songs including Celtic Symphony and its chant of ‘Oh ah, up the RA’. It’s a song that, in McGreevy’s words, has ‘provoked a generational schism between those who remember the Troubles, and deem the chant to be entirely inappropriate, and those who have no memory, and for whom it is just a catchy refrain’.

At one point, watching television, I switched channels to an edition of RTÉ television’s Reeling in the Years which brought images of the devastation wrought by the Abercorn Restaurant bombing in Belfast on March 4, 1972. Two people were killed, 130 people were injured – some with horrific injuries that included the loss of limbs and eyes – an atrocity for which even the Provisional IRA ‘failed to claim responsibility’ – though unofficially, as Ed Moloney, an expert on the dark days and years of the Troubles, has confirmed was part of the IRA’s long litany of dishonour.

The contrast between (on the one hand) a mainly young audience waving Tricolours, letting off green flares, and spontaneously joining in the chorus ‘Oh ah, up the RA’ and (on the other hand) the images on the RTÉ Evening News of March 4, 1972 could not have been more marked. Indeed, watching the (mainly) young audience, the obvious questions posed were: Have they forgotten about the Abercorn and other bombings? Did they watch the news on television evening after evening through those dark days for Ireland? Did they not know that the Provisional IRA had inflicted atrocity after atrocity on innocent people? And were they not aware that joining in the chant was effectively helping to justify the Provo actions?

You can hear the explanations: it was just a song; they were too young to have known what it meant; some of them weren’t even born at the time of the Abercorn bombing; it was like Jack Charlton’s Olé, Olé, Olé; etc.

Excuses, yes, but not good enough in the light of what ‘Oh ah, up the RA’ represents and the thousands and thousands of victims left in the wake of the IRA campaign. Someone, somewhere has to bear responsibility: the Department of Education to ensure that our history is too important to be sidelined to the periphery; the need for those who have influence not to allow the provenance of the terrible atrocities and the unspeakable suffering they inflicted so gratuitously on so many to be camouflaged by a chorus that celebrated its perpetrators; and, not least, the obligation of the individual to know.   

In short, what this particular episode of Electric Picnic 2024 attested to was the importance of history.

Coincidentally, round the same time as ‘Oh ah, up the RA’ was ringing out in Stradbally, a full house in Lahardane Community Centre was launching a new book – Addergoole, People and Culture – A Testament by Peter McLoughlin. It’s focus is Addergoole parish and it squeezes between its 700-plus pages, a mountain of information and data that before this was not readily available. It’s incredible in its organisation, its scope and its wealth of detail about people and places, incidents and events, narratives and traditions in a context of centuries  of history, at once looking back to the distant past and bringing the story of Addergoole up to the present.

The value of a book like this is two-fold – it’s the result of years of meticulous research and it provides a template for other parishes. To give some idea of the extraordinary achievement that this book is can I say that possibly no other parish in Ireland has a book that contains so much detail of its people and by extension of its history and its culture. It is both a remarkable and magnificent achievement which I have no doubt will be read over and over again, not least by families in Addergoole who will take advantage of Peter’s research to begin their own family histories.

For those interested in the history of Addergoole, this book is pure gold – the most detailed contribution yet to the history of the parish and an essential text on the people, families and photographs, old and new, of Addergoole and its people.

Patrick Corish, the great Catholic scholar, once said that the history of Irish Catholicism can never be written until the history of each diocese is written, and it might be added that no diocesan history can be written until the history of each parish is written.

What we have here in Addergoole: People and Culture is not just a draft of its history because much has been written already about this historic parish but a massive contribution to an even more complete history. In short, it’s an essential building block for future history and a huge resource for future historians.

What Addergoole: People and Culture represents is a celebration of the importance of history, of knowing our history, of understanding our history and of learning the lessons of history. It mightn’t sell to an Electric Picnic audience but it will become a much sought after volume of history long after it’s out of print and will be for sale on Amazon at a multiple of its present cost.

* Peter McLoughlin’s, Addergoole: People and Culture is now on sale @ €35.