MANY people in Belfast feel that there should be some kind of permanent memorial to the Troubles.
A big problem in creating it is that a divided society retains conflicting accounts of what happened and why.
Furthermore, the major political parties which will form the Northern Ireland Executive, if the Assembly ever comes back, represent those opposing accounts of the period. So they are hardly likely to agree on a monument.
They disagree fundamentally on the meaning of the years of contention, and they hoped throughout those years for entirely different outcomes.
Sinn Féin still defends the IRA as a noble and heroic force which challenged an imperial power.
The First Minister Designate, Michelle O’Neill has argued that there was no alternative to the IRA campaign.
The IRA did most of the killing and inflicted a horrific burden on the community it claimed to represent.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is currently boycotting the Assembly and thereby making impossible the formation of a power sharing executive.
This party represents a wholly other view of the violent years.
The Union with Britain was, from their perspective, an arrangement for the good of all.
It defends even those soldiers accused of unlawful killing while paradoxically insisting on the rule of law.
The DUP also has an ambiguous relationship with the loyalist paramilitaries.
It never fully endorsed them in the way Sinn Féin endorsed the IRA but a key episode in their history was the Ulster Workers Council Strike which brought down the first power sharing Assembly in 1974.
During that protest, the DUP leader, Reverend Ian Paisley sat down with the loyalist paramilitary groups to direct the protest.
Each party would like to have some control over any organised remembering of the past which might embarrass them if they can be embarrassed.
And there are others who would like to frame any remembering as a project for reconciliation between divided communities and who might therefore find themselves tempted to spare embarrassment to people with criminal pasts.
You can see the outworking of that attitude in the memorial garden to the dead of the 1998 Omagh bomb, the worst atrocity of the whole Troubles period.
There is no mention at the memorial garden of the organisation which planted that bomb, the Real IRA.
The local library has a room dedicated to the story of the bomb, exhibiting expressions of sympathy from around the world.
After thousands of floral tributes were laid at the site of the bomb, artist Carol Kane had the idea of gathering them up and drying them out and inviting families of the victims to help make pictures from them as part of a Petals of Hope project.
The finished pictures were given to the bereaved. It was a beautiful project, again entirely symbolic without any statement implied other than sympathy and the hope of peace.
In the late 1990s as group of journalists led by David McKittrick collated a record of all the deaths of the Troubles.
They produced the book Lost Lives, clear factual accounts of each killing, but without any polemic or accusation.
And this had been tried before. The BBC’s News Information library in Broadcasting House in Belfast had a filing cabinet that reporters called ‘the Mortuary’.
This kept accounts of all the killings and for much of the period was the only such research resource that I knew of.
Then Malcolm Sutton brought out Bear in Mind These Dead, the fullest collation of the horrors to date, and more dependable than the Mortuary because reporters tended to borrow files and not leave them back.
Lost Lives was a much larger book with greater detail. Both, inevitably, had some inaccuracies and neither yet has been turned into a searchable database.
Lost Lives has been treated almost as a monument in itself. It has been incorporated into religious services as a symbol of the overall carnage.
Out of print now, you are likely to have to pay over £300 for a copy.
There are other valuable archives like the CAIN website and the Public Records Office, of more value to journalists and academics than to the wider public as memorials, though just poring over old files can evoke the deepest feelings for those reminded of the incidents they relate to.
The advantage in the archives is that - apart from materials redacted to preserve intelligence - they are neutral. You can go in from any perspective and find some affirmation and some challenge.
What Lost Lives and Petals of Hope illustrated is that there are two possible ways of memorialising the horror without taking sides.
One is simply to provide all the information available. This could be done in a museum where we might see everything described but not rationalised.
This may become easier as the generation which did and excused the killing fades away, and as it become more important that mythologies die out with them.
The other is to be purely symbolic, an image that is affecting and yet borne out of the trouble.
Each would be a memorial without a narrative, simply inviting people to think about how this society tore itself apart.
See More: Memorial, Northern Ireland, Troubles
