Wherever Green Is Orange

Abstract

Wherever Green Is Orange Stephen O'Neill (bio) "Caught Inextricably in the Web of Their Tragic History" Reconciliation has been something of a mantra for the Decade of Commemorations. At the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) annual conference held in the Armagh City Hotel in 2012, the tánaiste Eamon Gilmore rebranded his government's commemoration program as "A Decade of Reconciliation," which formed the title of his keynote address: "Let's aim not simply for a decade of commemoration. Let's work together on a decade of true national reconciliation."1 In 2014, during president Michael D. Higgins's state visit to London, David Cameron echoed the president's words in suggesting that "we must … keep on with the work of reconciliation."2 The Ireland 2016 centenary program suggested that the decade provided an opportunity to "Remember, Reconcile, Imagine, Present, and Celebrate."3 A 2019 Sinn Féin policy document lauding the success of the official commemorations recognized the importance of "continu[ing] to be imaginative and creative in taking initiatives on commemoration and remembering which enhance reconciliation and healing."4 In the ongoing context of the peace process, the act of gleaning this "reconciliation" from commemoration has often relied [End Page 289] upon a deterministic reading of the chosen "decade," which was the climax of one of the most heavily narrativized periods in Irish history. In his influential summary of the Irish cultural and political revolution, F.S.L. Lyons's Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1945 (1979) exemplified a pervasive attitude of fatalism toward the events of "the period from the fall of Parnell to the death of Yeats": It was not primarily an anarchy of violence in the streets, of contempt for law and order such as to make the island, or any part of it, permanently ungovernable. It was rather an anarchy in the mind and in the heart, an anarchy which forbade not just unity of territories but also "unity of being," an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.5 Writing of this diagnosis of "irreconcilable cultures" and its comorbidity with the "intractable, timeless problem" of the north of Ireland, Ian McBride detected "an unmistakable ring of self-exoneration."6 McBride noted that this deterministic interpretation refused the possibility that these readings are dictated by the present rather than the past.7 Such determinism and self-exoneration has dominated the Decade of Commemorations in terms of its chronology, its themes, and the attitudes toward the uses of the past that it has adopted, particularly in its search for a "shared future" as a prehistory of the peace process. The commemoration of partition has proven particularly difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the aims of this peace process. As Lesley McEvoy, Kieran McEvoy, and Kirsten McConnachie wrote in 2006, "The 'two-traditions,' or perhaps more pejoratively 'two tribes,' paradigm was, arguably until the current peace process the dominant construct for not only framing an analysis of the nature of the conflict for much of its history, but also of what was required to achieve its [End Page 290] resolution through reconciliation between those warring traditions."8 Yet even with the onset of the peace process, and indeed arguably because of it, little has changed in terms of the framing of the conflict since then, particularly in relation to understanding the roots of an ongoing partition. The apparatuses of each state on the island have either refused or been incapable of integrating partition into their legitimating narratives, with the failures to find reconcilable ways of marking the foundation of the northern state forming a case in point. As Éamon Phoenix recounted in a conversation about partition with Laura McAtackney and Myles Dungan on RTÉ's The History Show in May 2021, some of the initial plans for commemorating the centenary included a "baby box" and a "twenty-one gun salute," recalling what he termed the worst excesses of "Ulster '71."9 When asked by Dungan how the "potentially divisive" nature of commemorating the beginning of...