The Belfast Agreement of 1998, which initiated the so-called Peace Process in Northern Ireland, was fashioned so as to avoid creating mechanisms for addressing the legacy of the past, not least the commemoration of the fatalities of the Troubles which began in 1969. In this paper we explore, first, the role of the past and practices of commemoration in unagreed societies such as Northern Ireland in which consensus appears an unlikely proposition, the focus being on inclusion and exclusion and on the role of the contested nature of a hierarchical victimhood in commemoration. Second, the discussion engages with a succession of interconnected ideas that define the spatiality and landscapes of commemoration and considers the practices and spatialization of commemorating the Troubles within the grounded reality of everyday life and within the pragmatism of politics in Northern Ireland. We argue that processes of remembering and forgetting the dead of the Troubles point, at best, to a democracy shaped by ‘conflictual consensus’, in which the contested heritage of victimhood both constitutes an important resource in ethnonationalist and ethnosectarian politics and undermines the consociational Belfast Agreement and its attempt to elide the burdens of the past.

This paper explores the iconography of Dublin's central thoroughfare, O'Connell Street, formerly Sackville Street, as it evolved in the decades before Independence. Theoretically informed by recent developments in the fields of cultural and historical geography, it makes use of metaphors such as the city as text and the iconography of landscape. The paper focuses in particular on the role of public statuary in articulating issues of cultural and political identity in a city of contested space. The monuments erected on this street during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries capture in microcosm broader trends in public statuary whereby monuments were erected to express loyalty to Empire on the one hand and opposition to such imperial rule on the other. It is argued that these public statues provide the geographer with an important lens through which to explore the processes at work in shaping the city and which give tangible expression to often competing ideologies. A following paper will chart the iconography of O'Connell Street in the decades after 1922.

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