Memory without walls: from Kevin Barry to Osama bin Laden

National memory does not just belong to museums; it is a resource for the multi-cultural Ireland of today. In Anne Roper's television documentary, The Green Fields of Vietnam, recently screened on RTÉ , the far-off killing fields of Asia threw an unexpected light on memories of the dead closer to home — those left by the Irish War of Independence. Three Vietnam vets, who featured in the documentary, claimed that family memories of the old IRA contributed to their decision to enlist. Remembering his father turning up for a funeral replete with war medals, Michael Duignan remarked: "That was the first influence I had to join the service". For another veteran, Michael Coyne, the appeal of western movies was added: "I'd always seen the American army as freedom fighters, from the cowboy films, before I went to Vietnam".

In the jungle, a darker picture emerged as the Irish, like many others, began to wonder what they were doing there, and which side were they on. Duignan described being "in a Jekyll and Hyde situation", sending home photographs of himself in the company of local Vietnamese he had befriended, as if he were a missionary, and then taking up arms against them on search and destroy missions. For Coyne, the point of no return came when his Irish historical past caught up with him:

"I remember one day I was on the tank and a boy emerged out of the jungle. The officer told me to go over and check him out, I was supposed to search him and all that. He was shaking he was. I felt like a Black and Tan fellow, and says, 'You'll be alright'. I went back and said: 'He's alright'. I felt uncomfortable with the war after that. The fact that I was Irish, I grew up with the stories of the Black and Tans in Ireland, and their methods, and I'd just seen the relationship to what I was doing myself."

These flashes of memory from the American heart of darkness serve as a rejoinder to those who argue that political commemoration, and the heritage of 1916 and the War of Independence in particular, can only have a negative impact on the culturally diverse Ireland of today. Instead of turning inward, these memories move outward, seeing in others the plight of the Irish in previous generations. Memory becomes a two-way street, opening alternative futures as well as dwelling on the past.

Any suggestion that the legacy of the War of Independence might help to prevent racism, as in Coyne's moment of revelation, will hardly be welcomed by those historians, and their cheerleaders in the press, who have sought to recast the guerilla warfare of Tom Barry, Liam Lynch and others as "terrorism", "serial-killing" or "ethnic-cleansing". Such is the one-size-fits-all category of "terrorism" that resistance to colonial occupation, even with the mandate of the 1918 election, is a war crime, or an offence against ordinary decent standards of state terror.

The irony is that while stereotypes of atavism and bigotry are used to denigrate a war fought against seemingly insurmountable odds, the British Government is drawing a clear line between the activities of groups like Al-Qaeda, and territorial struggles for independence. In mid-September, the British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, announced the introduction of Orwellian legislation to control speech as well as action, with the particular aim of outlawing the 'exaltation' or 'glorification' of 'terrorism'. The remit of the legislation extends beyond the recent past to events before 1985 — but in a move that cannot have pleased debunkers of the boys of the old brigade, the 1916 Rising was specifically exempted from the decree.

In a trenchant attack on the legislation, Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian, questioned why the proposed legislation stopped short of implicating conflict in Ireland: 'Already we are told that Clarke's listed events will not include anything Irish. Why? King William's campaign is life and breath to loyalist militants, as is the 1916 Easter Rising to Blair's pet insurrectionists, the IRA. Why should these groups be excused the law?' Jenkins then explained why:

'Terrorism as defined in law more or less covers the story of the human race ... Even without the cliché that one man's listed event is another's act of heroism, this is a can of worms. Bomber Harris's flattening of German cities in the second world war was specifically described by Churchill as "simply for the sake of increasing terror". The bombing of Hiroshima was, to put it mildly, a politically motivated assault on people and property. Last month it was not glorified, but it was certainly celebrated.'

Jenkins rightly points out the dangers in the conceptual inflation of terrorism: it extends to acts on which 'legitimate' states or settlements are based, and thus calls into question many of the foundational fictions of western democracies. While some commentators in the Irish media vilified the memory of Kevin Barry, the Irish Government saw fit to re-inter his body, and those of nine other volunteers, in a state funeral in 2001. Are those who equate Barry with al Qaida suggesting that the political outcomes of their respective activities are equally illegitimate?

One of the most memorable versions of the ballad "Kevin Barry" was sung by the great African American singer, Paul Robeson, who transformed it into an anthem of courage and freedom that spoke across the race divide. Against this backdrop, the controversy over the fate of the disused building at 16 Moore Street, where the rebels of 1916 issued their surrender, takes on a new resonance. This is the area, north of the city centre, that has perhaps become the most diversified and globalised due to immigration. If the proposed museum in that building takes effect, it should be one in which memory has no walls, reminding us that others – immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees – are in the position today that many Irish were in not too long ago. A familiar chorus has it that in Celtic Tiger Ireland, culture should "give up its auld sins" and purge all traces of its troubled past, but an ethics of remembrance has never been more appropriate.

A recent Sunday Tribune article, "Whatever happened to the 1916 buildings?", was illustrated by a photograph of two African women – one with a rucksack on her back wheeling a baby – walking past the steel shutters of 16 Moore St. Nothing could be more in the spirit of the building than a removal of the shutters that have prevented Irish people from seeing in their own past an image of those looking for new beginnings in the Ireland of today.