I'm pretty sure I worried more that summer's day about how the Small Faces were doing in the charts than about history's hand.

I remember the speeches as hellish dull. As a kid, I was hazy about my relationship with personages and plaques. I stood on the cobbles of Edinburgh's Cowgate thinking: "If anything that ever mattered happened here, it's probably worth a mention."

A few years pass and I'm working as a hospital porter. One of the colleagues, staunch union man, decides to regale us with the tale of how he and some Red Hand pals half-inched that same plaque. The way he tells it, it's funny: "Like any" - short word - "wid look twice at some hooks staggerin' through the Coogate in the dark wi a ladder." When I say I saw the plaque unveiled, the comrade-colleague asks, "And what was he to you?"

After things settled, the porter and I talked a bit about James Connolly and the forever-disappearing Cowgate plaque. In the view of a Leither, full of fond memories of Protestant Action, the great trade unionist was a socialist gone wrong. He might have amounted to something, but he was ever a "Fenian" - short word - and "disloyal" too. That plaque could not be - likesay - allowed.

It's still there. A bit higher than it used to be, or needs to be. The damp shadows of the Cowgate are still as grim as they were when Connolly was born in Edinburgh's subcutaneous slums in 1868. And history is still contested, still a street full of agitated souls running around in the gloom defacing that memorial, disputing this account, plastering their posters over your posters, or sending anonymous tweets to remind you that your kind doesn't deserve to live.

Yesterday, people who claim a connection with Armenia commemorated events for which the word genocide was coined. In 1915, around 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottomans. The world knows this, knows far too many hellish facts about the slaughter of a people in the deserts of Syria, but the Republic of Turkey contests history.

Ataturk's heirs cannot, or will not, deal with it. A century has elapsed, but still the dignity of a modern state is wounded if a pontiff says "genocide". No one confuses the Ottoman regime with the present country, but history, the land of the dead, is an enemy. When it is not locking up journalists, the government of Recip Tayyip Erdogan is shuffling commemorative events just to keep the cameras on the Dardanelles centenary rather than on dead, disputatious Armenians.

But why wouldn't you remember Gallipoli? Some modern states - Australia, New Zealand and Turkey - came to consciousness thanks to that bloodbath. Older empires sent pale children from Scottish slums to vouch that imperialism died there. I could name them. Is it impossible to have reverence for dead boys, Turkish or Scottish or Anzac, but not dead Armenians? Mr Erdogan prefers to make contemporary political choices.

History and the uncomplaining dead deserve better. Last autumn, many tried to turn British thoughts to the charnel house that opened for business on July 28, 1914. Amid the poetry we heard minor politicians, a Michael Gove and worse, attempt to use a nightmare, a collective exsanguination, to make points about Britishness. I could care less about Mr Gove and his dislike of the "Blackadder myths" that happen to be true. What of Verdun?

All over France they are preparing to think about the 10-month "battle" that took away three-quarters of a million poilus. We will, as we must, remember the Somme next year. One is theirs, the other "ours". History is disputed when people make claims. Yet are people not entitled to make their claims, and to dispute the claims of others? Or do we accept the witticism of Herr Hitler? Once he asked: "Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Not Barack Obama. Campaigning for office, he promised that as president he would recognise the genocide on behalf of the United States. Now, careful of Turkish sensitivities and geopolitical necessities, he says nothing. Is history so difficult, so imperious? Is it impossible to say, 100 years on, two simple words, "This happened"?

The past bleeds into the present. Existence would otherwise be impossible, even with a patriotic and endlessly-revised tabloid newspaper to keep you going. We are the people we are because of things our forebears did and did not do. After that June day in 1968, after Mr Brennan from the embassy, and Mr Humphries from the STUC, and "a section of the Irish Trades Union Band", they gave us each a little green and bronze Connolly badge.

What people always say is this: "So you got the eyebrows and forehead?" It's true enough. I have a few stammering habits of speech, too. I'm not looking for Post Office steps from which to read a proclamation, but I know what happened with the history. It rolled on.

In one part, for me, there was my great-grandfather's brother who got himself executed as the most distinguished Marxist in the British islands. He said - I'll simplify - that you cannot be an internationalist and a socialist until you are a nationalist. He said that the rights of women come first in any politics. I could do a list. Then again, that Small Faces track never did get to number one and history did not become anything less than disputed.

Next year, Ireland will mark what James Connolly, Padraic Pearse and the rest began late in April in 1916. Some people won't care for it. The decent ones will send me learned arguments on "Connollyite Marxism"; the usual - small word - sort will tell me they know where I live. Should I tell them that they, like me, are probably Scots only because of a famine a long time ago, the one that Glasgow City Council is too frightened to memorialise? Would that work?

Perhaps someone should consult Mr Erdogan on how best to handle such things. History disputed is, too often, history denied. The Armenians, that vast diaspora, know all about it. They have spent the best part of 100 years simply saying those two words: "This happened." So does Glasgow get to talk about itself through a simple memorial to the Famine dead? Or is that still the wrong kind of history in a 21st century Scottish town?

The porter who said taking down the Connolly plaque had to be done was - with ladders - making an argument. For half a year, we got on fine. He taught me a lot about Loyalism and its sense of itself. He said - got one right - that there would be no plaque for the likes of him. He was aggrieved at history and at life. He told long stories about his forebears on the tip of Ulster. I didn't despise him for it.

He might have turned up for the opening of a Famine memorial. He'd still be telling me it couldn't possibly be true that James Connolly's wife was a Protestant. And he'd probably still try to sell me a plaque.