Historical commemorations are always about the present as much as they are about the past. That is certainly true in the case of the centenary of Northern Ireland's creation, an event that continues to shape – and divide – opinion while setting the terms of current debates about the future of the island. Brexit reopened wounds that the Belfast Agreement was designed to heal, while the ongoing dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol has strained all three of the key relationships – North/South, East/West and internal to the North itself – that underpinned the 1998 agreement. Partly due to those tensions, but also because voter realignments have set off a bitter contest for supremacy among the three main unionist parties, the power-sharing institutions in Belfast seem to be in a state of constant vulnerability.
The controversy over President Michael D Higgins's decision to decline an invitation to a religious service marking the centenary of Northern Ireland – and the reaction to that decision – cannot be disentangled from that backdrop. He said he opted not to go to the Armagh event, which is being organised by the main churches and is to be attended by Queen Elizabeth, because its title, which framed it as a commemoration of partition, had the effect of "politicising" it. Neither the organisers nor Higgins are entirely blameless for the diplomatic mess that ensued. Surely some accommodation could have been reached between the two sides that would have addressed Higgins's concerns. And by waiting two full days to explain his reasons for declining – two days in which he was accused of snubbing Queen Elizabeth – Higgins allowed the controversy to grow.
If one common misapprehension is that commemoration is about the past, another is it can ever be non-political. Public remembrance is a political act. Higgins’s real problem with the event was perhaps not that it was political but that it was political in a way that made it inappropriate for him to attend. That’s his prerogative. He was elected to use his judgment. The criticism of his non-attendance would be more persuasive if Higgins had shown little interest in engaging seriously with the complexities of the decade of centenaries. In fact he has involved himself deeply in that process of remembrance, and has done so respectfully. It should not be surprising that he would choose carefully how to remember the establishment of Northern Ireland – an event that many see as an occasion to celebrate but which many others recall as a moment of profound pain and hurt.
Remembering 1921 requires sensitivity, but also realism. If there are limits on our ability to agree how to remember the past, the challenge for political leaders is to ensure that does not impede the search for agreement on a shared future.