The Irish Hunger Memorial in New York's Battery Park City is a remarkable work.

With fallow fields, a rebuilt Mayo cottage and stones from each of the island of Ireland's 32 counties, it gives poignant testimony to the nightmare that made Americans of so many. The site was completed in July 2002.

Other cities around the world have also erected their memorials, like signposts planted across continents to mark the travels of the Irish who became Australian, Canadian, American, or British in the aftermath of an Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger. Liverpool has a sculpture; Cardiff a Celtic Cross. Glasgow has yet to conclude its deliberations.

Some will object that there is already a memorial at Carfin, unveiled by the-then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in 2001. But the outskirts of Motherwell are not Glasgow. The famines that saw perhaps 90,000 souls cleared from the west Highlands and islands were not confined to Ireland. One legacy of the horror that helped to shape a city, meanwhile, is the fact that some migrants to Scotland were Protestant Irish.

Around the single truth of a catastrophe there are complicated stories. That is all the more reason to have them told. If New York and Liverpool derive unique identities from the Famine's legacy, so too - in every fold of its culture and echo in its speech - does Glasgow. The city would be dishonest with itself if it failed to recognise and remember that. The kind of asinine protests reserved for Mr Ahern in 2001 are utterly beside the point.

On paper, no one disagrees. On paper, there is unanimity: there ought to be a Glasgow memorial; there shall be a Glasgow memorial. But the historian, Professor Sir Tom Devine, has already criticised a lack of expertise and understanding among those involved in the project. Now Councillor Feargal Dalton of the SNP, who proposed the idea, says he will be "unable to support further progress" thanks to a failure to reflect public enthusiasm, or to instigate public fundraising.

The rights and wrongs of arguments within Glasgow City Council are neither here nor there. The city has an overriding responsibility to mark a decisive moment in its history. The Famines of the 1840s were events of global significance. Parochialism, even over misplaced fears of banal "controversies", should not hinder a memorial. That would prove only an inability to understand history, far less why it matters.

When last year she gave a state banquet to Michael Higgins, President of Ireland, at Windsor, the Queen spoke of the amity that has developed between two countries with a tortured shared history. The monarch also spoke of a Britain "hugely enriched by the migration of Irishmen and women to these shores". Glasgow's council should reflect on those words.

For our world, the effects of the Famine matter as much as the hideous causes. The character of modern Scotland, Glasgow above all, can be counted among those causes. We cannot embrace the future if we hesitate over the past.