Unionists, history does not care about your values

(‘The disputes over our history will go on and on’).

As we celebrate our Province’s 100th anniversary we will rightly and reverently recall our past political heroes – Carson, Craigavon, Spender, Brookeborough – to name just a few.

But heroes are only revered because they reflect our values as a people.

History, as Mark implies, is different.

It is independent of our reverences and our values.

Today, too many chroniclers of Ulster’s heritage who write regularly in our newspapers resist this reality.

For them history is not a door to genuine erudition.

Instead it must be re-cast as a mechanism for Unionist self-affirmation.

When evidential history inevitably exposes the inherent shortcomings of their agenda, such chroniclers resort not to dispassion, but to deflection, invective and condescension.

In so doing they expose a desperately insecure vision of Unionism – one that is too conceptually needy for its future good.

In April 2016, the wonderful Alex Kane publicly declared that it was “time for hypocritical Unionism to look in the mirror.”

With due deference to Lord Bew and the Northern Ireland Office’s centenary advisory panel, if all shades of Unionism cannot in 2021 finally rise to Alex’s 2016 challenge, our commemoration of Northern Ireland’s 100 year history will fail utterly.

Wesley Curry, Belfast BT10

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