Unbiddable Pasts

Abstract

At the Ulster Museum in Belfast two artefacts connect the momentous events of 1916 with the thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. One piece is the work of republican prisoners interned aboard HMS Maidstone in the Belfast docks in the early 1970s: a plaque, signed by its creators, bearing a portrait of the only socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, James Connolly. The other is a painting by Gusty Spence, the founder of the modern loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It commemorates the Battle of the Somme: two soldiers in silhouette, bugles to their lips, on either side of a standard bearing the words ‘In Immortal Memory’, a reference to the 5,000 troops from the 36th Ulster Division who were killed or injured going over the top on 1 July 1916. These two objects not only bring home the importance of history and memory to the paramilitaries who fought each other during the Troubles but also point to how the story of the modern conflict is already being crafted for current political debates and future generations. As William Blair writes, the greatest challenge for the Ulster Museum in the near future will not be remembrance of the battles of a century ago but ‘dealing with the difficult and divisive legacy of “the Troubles”’.1 This is also an issue which historians have already begun to confront, often through their contributions to the debates surrounding the so-called ‘Decade of Centenaries’, stretching from the Home Rule crisis of 1912 to the end of the Irish revolution in 1923. These five books deal with the politics of memory in Ireland generally, and Northern Ireland in particular, and how memorialisation of traumatic events – official, unofficial and private – has shaped both the public sphere and the hidden recesses of everyday life. Two almost simultaneous events from 1916 – the Easter Rising in Dublin and the Battle of the Somme – have acquired extraordinary resonance in the contemporary politics of memory in Northern Ireland.