Legacy: How the Pain of More Honestly Reassessing Our Ancestor’s Legacy Might Secure a Better Legacy for Us. #70 #cong24 #legacy

Total Words

The photograph I’ve shared here is of the front gate of my grandparents’ house just outside the village of Cong, Co. Mayo. All the cousins grew up referring to the field to the right of the picture as ‘the road field’, for obvious reasons. Endless games of football were played here over multiple generations, accessed by the stile visible to the right. I remember helping making hay in that field on days full of cousins, bottles of tea, and raucous laughter. This field is part of the legacy I inherited, and part of what makes me so proud to be Irish.

However, since I first heard of this year’s topic “Legacy” I haven’t been able to get another anecdote from family lore out of my head. A story whose significance I had overlooked all my life in a manner that parallels some of the flaws in this country’s relationship with its troubled past. Flaws that maybe we now need to confront and reconcile.

It is said, that during the Famine years, a woman died on the road between this gate and the stile. It is not remembered, at least not by me, who she was, or where she had come from. Nor do I remember when I first heard it, but I do remember feeling safe and lucky to be so far removed from such hardship. Like so many others, we used the story to buy into our parent’s fetishisation of education. And it worked too, all thirteen of the Irish born cousins of my generation were educated and have since made their lives in the West of Ireland. This 100% retention rate stands in stark contrast to the three out of ten born in that house that survived and got to stay.

In Ireland, we tell ourselves stories of victimhood and injustice, of oppression and revolution, of civil war and emigration. To these all three of my brothers and I add stories of college, the Celtic Tiger, and Galway’s Medical Device industry. So, the conventional view of history, and of the rhetoric my generation was fed has served my family well.

Indeed, that field was a pillar of my identity that had gone unquestioned until Eoin Kennedy suggested ‘Legacy’ would prompt another thought provoking, diverse, and unmissable Congregation. It was only then that I linked it to my current worries about the future of a civilisation undermined by polarisation from within and existential threats from outside. Young people disillusioned by social injustice, climate disaster, and wealth inequality are enraged by the blatant hypocrisy of leaders, corporations and celebrities whose words suggest they care, but whose actions prove they don’t. ‘The road field’ represents the foundations of some of my deepest beliefs, but I now see shadows of my own hypocrisy in its luscious greenness. Shadows that reflect even more sinister aspects to that nameless death that my family still remembers. The conventional version of Irish history is one of colonialism. We were innocent victims, and ‘they’ were totally evil. But what if the reality of that past was more complicated? What if it was even worse? Are we mature enough as a nation to revisit our legacy? Are we ready to think about the survivors’ guilt that must have ravaged our forebears, or worse the real guilt that people like my ancestors must have endured.

Our stories suggest that we have forgotten that we are not the descendants of the victims who died. We are the descendants of the victims that survived, and this begs the overlooked question, what did our people have to do to survive? Would facing those truths make us less naive about our uncompromising goodness, and less smug about the uncompromising evil of others. I have started to ask, why did my people not help this woman? What choices were they forced to make to protect their own? Did they know the woman’s name, where she came from. Did they inform her people? Did she have any people left?

How did my people raise their children with a sense of right and wrong, and of generosity and decency when they themselves were forced to turn a blind eye. I remember generous grandparents, with great neighbours in safe, open-door communities. So why were those wonderful people able to ignore clerical sex abuse and excuse the Magdaline Laundries. Why, a generation later, were those of us who were brought up during the Troubles, able to blank out most of what was happening, even though it was on our televisions every night. Why, a generation later again, can we claim to be outraged by the genocide we are witnessing live on TikTok, while allowing our leaders to get away with doing nothing. Is it because deep down while we may have post-colonial empathy for the oppressed, we’ve allowed it to be tarnished by a post-colonial ability to turn a blind eye to oppression?

We might never know the true extent of the sacrifices that were made to get use here, both practical and moral, but we would do well to remember that are not here today by the grace of our oppressors, or the charity of our betters. We are here because we made it happen for ourselves when everyone had us written off. Maybe, as the world faces another period of unprecedented change, we’d be better served remembering that we are survivors, not victims. Maybe we should be more appreciative of a legacy that has made us a nation of cute hoors, rather than helpless feckin’ eejits.