IF YOU travel around some areas of Belfast you’ll see wall murals celebrating the IRA and other paramilitary groups.
They provide one of the simplest ways of letting you know whether you are in a nationalist or a loyalist area. You may feel safer in one than the other.
Clearly some people are concerned to preserve a memory of the troubled period, basically the last thirty years of the last century, the destruction and the thousands killed.
There is an extraordinary similarity between how the rival cultures commemorate.
The murals depict men with guns, or revered cultural symbols. The symbols vary: gravestones, crosses, the Bible, the crown, the familiar interweave of Celtic design as if lifted from the Book of Kells.
With so much interest in marking the past you would think that the case for a museum of the Troubles would be easily made but the difficulty is that there are two distinct rival narratives of that past.
One says that terrorist insurgents, murderers and saboteurs, attacked the state, gratuitously and fruitlessly, affecting to be fighting a guerrilla war for the self determination of the Irish people and the expulsion of British imperial forces who were oppressing them.
The other says that political deadlock over British management of Northern Ireland through its client unionists left decent people no choice but to take up arms and gun down the neighbourhood bobby on patrol.
I’m being a little sarcastic about both visions.
But the point is that we do not have a museum of the Troubles because the nationalist and unionist versions of history cannot be reconciled.
There was to be a Peace Centre on the site of the old Maze prison. This was the prison which housed republican and loyalist militants who’d got caught and a few innocents caught with them, and, in the early days, men interned without trial.
Ten men died on hunger strike in that prison, claiming rights which they argued would amount to political status.
Our power sharing government had agreed that the Peace Centre would be built but then the Democratic Unionist Party pulled out of the deal, anxious that the centre would become a shrine to the dead hunger strikers and a monument to the republican cause.
That was twelve years ago and there has been no development on that site since.
The designer of the aborted Peace Centre, was Daniel Libeskind who also designed the Ground Zero memorial in New York city.
He has been arguing for the parties to end the deadlock and build the centre and use it as an opportunity for dialogue and reconciliation.
Another group operates on the same motivation. Irene Boada, is campaigning to create a Troubles museum in Belfast, preferably in the historic Assembly Building in Waring Street which is currently disintegrating through neglect.
She also believes that a museum dedicated to recalling the Troubles would be a focus for meeting and discussion of the past with a view to healing old enmities.
But it is the very division she wants to address though the museum which makes it so difficult to get it established.
The separate narratives in Northern Ireland are not amenable to being merged into one story that all can agree on.
So I have an alternative idea. We shouldn’t even try to find common ground between unionism and nationalism.
Neither side will give up its history. They went as far as they could in that when they reached the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, though unionists prefer to call it simply, The Agreement.
I think we should give up on the idea of a museum being a peace centre.
We should give up on it expressing any objective at all. We should just have somewhere that provides the best and most sophisticated chronology of the Troubles, representing every viewpoint - there aren’t so many that that would be a problem.
Unionists fear that tourists walking into preserved prison cells that had housed republican martyrs would be moved to honour those dead men, perhaps leaving flowers or other tokens. And that appalls them.
Organisations representing the concerns of victims of violence are particularly concerned about that prospect, that the men who indulged in sectarian slaughter would be revered as heroes.
The prison site provides a possible platform for the stories of most participant groups, for the republicans, loyalists, prison officers, soldiers were there.
But most of the killing and the suffering of the innocent happened elsewhere and one can see the danger that their grief and grievances would be overlooked.
Yet without a museum the record of the Troubles will be those wall murals and memorials and the rebel songs and the propaganda passed on to another generation which already understands only a simplistic account of those days.
Of course, there are others who don’t want to remember, for whom it was all just too ugly and bothersome and they have the right to live their lives undistracted by painful reminders.
So I’m for having a museum that they can stay away from if they wish and then for wiping the walls free of the garish propaganda that already must make many tourists think that Belfast is proud of its those who once wrecked the city.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
See More: Belfast, Northern Ireland, Troubles
