Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland, ed. Jim Smyth

Abstract

The use of memory in reconstructing the historical past has, in recent years, come to preoccupy historians as they seek to explain what the relationship is of memory and commemoration to history. Such a task is of particular importance in places such as Northern Ireland where the use of memory, commemoration and history in the context of a divided society can serve to keep alive bigotry, intolerance and intercommunal violence. This is given greater edge when both sides to the Northern Ireland conflict parade their duty to the dead as a means not just of underscoring the identity of each community, but as providing motivation for action in the present. Ruan O’ Donnell, in his richly textured chapter, quotes the leading Republican Daithi O’Conaill to the effect that ‘as long as people revere the memory of those who suffered and died in the cause of Ireland, freedom will never be defeated’ (p. 65). Another instance of what A.T.Q. Stewart noted many years ago, that in Ireland all history is applied history.