Memorial to abuse survivors must be dignified - and angry

CULTURE SHOCK:A FORTNIGHT AGO, the Minister for Education Batt O'Keeffe announced the formation of a committee to consider what is surely the most difficult public art commission in the history of the State. The Ryan report into institutional child abuse recommended, among other things, the erection of "a memorial to the victims as a permanent public acknowledgement of their experiences", writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

Beyond suggesting that it contain the key words of the Taoiseach’s public apology, issued in 1999, the commission, reasonably enough, did not go into detail. It will thus be up to the new committee to consult with survivors, work out the appropriate form of the memorial and “oversee the commissioning and delivery by the Office for Public Works (through competition) of the design and building of the memorial”.

The people chosen for this task are formidable and well qualified, with the former chairman of the OPW, Sean Benton, leading the effort and Bernadette Fahy and Paddy Doyle representing survivors. Yet it is an undertaking of extraordinary difficulty. The psychic wound inflicted by decades of systematic violence against children is very deep. It cuts most profoundly, of course, into those who experienced that violence at first hand, but it also leaves an ugly scar on those who inflicted it – the whole apparatus of Church and State and, more broadly, the collective culture of independent Ireland.

In this respect, whatever is created has to be less like an official war monument and more like a Holocaust memorial. It has to serve two distinct functions – to remember the victims and to remind the society. It has to speak both to those who could never forget because they wake up in the night screaming, and those who would prefer to forget. And it has to be both an official statement by the State and an angry rebuke of the State. It has to be dignified and angry, beautiful and raw, defiant and ashamed.

The difficulty is enhanced by the fact that the responses of the artistic community to the Ryan report have, on the whole, been meagre. The need for cultural institutions to help the public absorb and process the new and infinitely painful reality contained within its pages is obvious. But that need has not been met. One might have expected the major theatres to mount readings of witness statements or the major galleries to commission images, however raw and immediate, that would crystallise some kind of physical response. One might think someone would have done a show on, for example, ideas for a monument, even as a way of thinking about how Irish art might play a role.

Yet not only has there been very little active response, the most prominent event has been a debacle. In July, Gerard Mannix Flynn's exhibition Padded Cell and Other Storieswas withdrawn from the Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise when the director, Louise Donlon, with the subsequent support of the Arts Council, objected to the display in the foyer of a part of the exhibition which included, in a statement by a victim, the words "orally raped" and "anal rape". Flynn was accused of putting children at risk by seeking to display documents which contained such phrases in an open public space. (His reply was that "child protection is about protecting children from harm, not from truth".)

This cancellation was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. Flynn's book Nothing to Saywas (along with Paddy Doyle's The God Squadand Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey's Children of the Poor Clares) one of the key moments in the breaking of the silence around the regime of terror. His work since then as a visual artist, performer and cultural guerrilla has been a brilliant and brave exploration of the cultures of institutionalised violence in Ireland. The documents and statements that were included in the aborted Portlaoise show have been displayed on the streets of Dublin in the works State Meantand Trespass and Forgiveness– without, so far as I know, corrupting the minds of the young.

With typical resilience, Flynn has re-mounted the intended Portlaoise show in Dublin, at a space called adifferentkettleoffishaltogether on Ormond Quay. The centrepiece is a reconstruction of the padded cells used in Irish prisons for emotionally disturbed inmates until Michael McDowell ended this barbaric practice. In front of it is a set of church-like pews, and the whole arrangement evokes both the religious and political dimensions of institutionalised violence. The documents that have been used in various forms in Flynn’s installations and performances are on the walls. Upstairs are his powerfully evocative meditations on cultures of violence and processes of “letting go”, including his boldly imaginative re-creation of the process of IRA decommissioning. None of the work is offensive. All of it is thoughtful, sober, honest and ultimately reaching for the idea that genuine engagement with a hidden reality creates the possibility of transcendence.

There’s something badly awry when this work cannot be presented in a public arts centre and has to exist at an angle to the official culture. And this awkwardness surrounds the whole question of how that same culture can conceive an artistic monument adequate to the task of both remembering and reminding.

For many survivors, for example, the words of Bertie Ahern’s official apology that are to be inscribed on the monument simply do not ring true.

One of the key phrases is an apology for the State’s “failure to detect their pain”, the suggestion being that governments were simply ignorant of the abuse. The fact is that the State knew all about the pain and allowed it to continue. There is genuine fear among survivors that a monument conceived in a spirit of tidying up the past will, as one of them put it in a post on Paddy Doyle’s excellent website, “just be a cold soulless thing the same as what abused us”. And if it is not to be cold and soulless, the monument will have to have the kind of awkward and discomfiting presence that would not sit too easily in an official arts centre.

Padded Cell and Other Storiesis at anotherkettleoffishaltogether, 18 Ormond Quay, Dublin 1