Historian Donal Fallon has the right phrase for any and everything Ryan Tubridy throws at him, even when it's an existential enquiry like, "What is a statue?" Ryan opted to get to the bottom of the recent spate of statue-topplings that have sprung up following the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. And he wanted to start the investigation at the very beginning. "What is a statue?" Donal's reply rather ignored the fundamentally engineering-related nature of the question and instead directed our attention to Russian revolutionaries' outlook on history:

"The Bolsheviks in Russia had a great line. They always joked that the future was guaranteed but the past was uncertain."

Does anyone remember all the pre-pandemic fuss about the government's ill-fated attempt to commemorate the Black and Tans? It seems like it was sometime last decade, but in fact it was only four months ago. And that fuss was revealing about us in 2020, according to Donal:

"Commemoration – be it statues, be it monuments, be it events – it's as much about the present as it is about the past."

Back to the existential questions: why, Ryan asked, do people put statues up in town and village squares, on main street thoroughfares?

"I think it's just like street names. It's designed to politicise your day to day life. And statues, like street names, they're an attempt to immortalise people."

This politicisation, Donal tells Ryan, is all about "who put it there and when did they put it there", the when being particularly important and often overlooked.

"Nelson's Pillar, for example. Nelson's Pillar, what an incredible monument in terms of scale. It goes right up in the middle of Dublin, literally in the middle of the main thoroughfare, 6 years after Robert Emmet's failed rebellion in 1803."

William of Orange's statue went up in College Green only 11 years after the Battle of the Boyne, when William was still alive. The colonial statues and monuments that were erected in Dublin were, Donal contends, a way of saying to Irish people that Dublin was a British city.

"It's a grab for space and it's a grab for the narrative, as much as anything else."

The current attacks on statues in various parts of the world – are they appropriate or are they an over-reaction, Ryan wanted to know. It's not a yes or no question, Donal maintained. Every monument and statue has to be taken on its own merits. He put it to Ryan that the current spate of monument-toppling began in 2018 when statues of Confederate leaders from the US Civil War were being debated and, in some cases, removed. The problem, though, with a lot of these statues is not only who they are, but also where they are:

"There's an argument that these can be moved into a, say, a museum setting; you can contextualise who these people are better"

Donal explains that – Bolsheviks notwithstanding – people tend to try to focus on the future, which means different things can be read into the past by different people. Donal puts it best:

"History never repeats itself. Sometimes it does rhyme, though. And I think that's what you're seeing. People are looking – they're focused on the future on one level, but sometimes that involves kind of reinventing the past."

To hear the full conversation between Ryan and Donal – including the story of John Grey, "the Tony Holohan of his day" and why there are so few statues of women in Ireland – go here.

And you can find Donal Fallon’s podcast, Three Castle Burning, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Niall Ó Sioradáin