Politics and Narrative in Ireland's Decade of Commemorations

Abstract

Politics and Narrative in Ireland's Decade of Commemorations Sara Dybris McQuaid (bio) and Fearghal McGarry (bio) Commemoration has become an increasingly important analytical category through which to understand historical narratives, social practices, cultural formations, and political challenges in contemporary Ireland. This is not least a result of the ongoing impact of the large-scale, state-sponsored commemorative program the Decade of Centenaries, which runs from 2012 to 2023. This program uses the events of a significant political transition in the past (Ireland's violent evolution toward national independence) as a commemorative prism for existential reflections on the Ireland(s) of the present and the future. As a political genre, commemoration is a powerful tool for harnessing the past, for capturing and reordering politics in the present, and for staking out claims to the future. As a narrative genre, commemoration works to arrange events and figures in relation to each other, and to invest these with shared values and meanings for groups and societies. In the context of the Decade of Centenaries engagements with the past have become a crucial vehicle for democratic participation, and commemoration has arguably come to reshape political subjectivities as well as languages and materials of cultural expression. Put differently, commemorating the past is now a dominant practice through which individuals, groups, and institutions understand, orient, and position themselves in relation to each other. In this special issue we examine politics and narratives in Ireland's Decade of Commemorations. We use the term commemorations in order to include events and engagements that do not officially form part of the Decade of Centenaries but, crucially, take place within this context and become part of its critical mass. [End Page 8] Commemorative Governance: Politics in Ireland's Decade of Commemorations Examining the politics of Ireland's Decade of Commemorations means conceptualizing commemoration as a particular form of politics, as well as studying this commemorative era as a particular context for politics. As a form of politics, commemoration is frequently a practice of contestation that sees relationships between the past and the present drawn along competing lines, with diverging criteria influencing the selection of quintessential events and figures or incommensurable interpretations of their importance. Here different political interest groups draw on history as a resource to undergird contemporary projects, whether by claiming credit for the glories of the past or by proclaiming themselves as heirs or guarantors of an evocative heritage, tradition, culture, or identity. Thus commemoration becomes a fundamentally political construction. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that official commemoration, such as the institution of public ceremonies or the erection of monuments, is about "inventing traditions" through processes of formalization and ritualization characterized by reference to the past.1 According to this argument, these constructed versions of the past bound citizens into collective national identities, particularly during the nineteenth-century shift from traditional to modern societies. While Hobsbawm is often cited to argue for the fundamentally political nature of contemporary commemoration (as a top-down instrument of presentist legitimization and competition), his key insight for this special issue is his focus on how the state plays a crucial role in "linking both formal and informal, official and unofficial, political and social inventions of traditions."2 In order to capture these linkages in Ireland's commemorative program, we consider the official Decade of Centenaries not just as a form of programmatic politics of commemoration but as a form of "governance of commemoration." That is, we recognize commemoration as a site of several modes of intervention, with indirect [End Page 9] and contingent patterns of authority,3 where state and society come to share the responsibility for reviewing and renewing the origins, boundaries, and narratives of the national community. The structural design of the Decade of Centenaries program—which features a "state ceremonial strand," "historical strand," "community strand," and "creative imagination strand"—illustrates how the Irish state attempts to introduce a form of meta-governance in which different sectors and stakeholders are allowed a certain measure of autonomy and a variety of entry points and expressions are encouraged. Importantly, the Decade of Centenaries also constitutes a particular context for politics. The official program forms an exceptionally long scale and deeply immersive...