DEEP MEMORY

Since the 1930s, historians of Ireland have deconstructed piecemeal popular nationalist metanarratives of eight hundred years of conquest and continuous oppression at the hands of “perfidious Albion.”Footnote 17 Entrenched Manichaean oppositions of Gael versus Gall, Celt versus Sassanach, and rebel versus redcoat have been superseded by a concept of “varieties of Irishness” that constitute “a complex of Irish and Anglo-Irish cultures operating within, and powerfully affected by, the dominant English culture.”Footnote 18 This irreverent historiographical approach (which neglected a conceivably broad spectrum of identities that do not correspond to an Anglo-Irish political paradigm) has been criticized for failing to register “catastrophic dimensions of the Irish past” and effectively “cerebrising and, thereby, desensitizing the trauma.”Footnote 19 Indeed, driven by a positivist impulse, Irish historical revisionism went on to undermine populistic notions of “poor old Ireland” as “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.”Footnote 20 Echoing the literature on false memory syndrome, references to a traumatic past were diagnosed as suffering from a delusory syndrome cynically labeled “Most Oppressed People Ever” (MOPE).Footnote 21 Though useful in putting insular misconceptions into perspective, such realist iconoclasm, which is founded on a sweeping dismissal of popular beliefs as “harmful mythology,” proves to be of limited value for studies of mentalité that seek to decode conflicts sustained by intransigent mindsets.Footnote 22 To quote Bronislaw Malinowski, “myth is not merely a story told but a reality lived,” and even though he was specifically referring to “myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its living primitive form,” this maxim may be equally valid for the modern world.Footnote 23 Whether factually erroneous or not, myths molded popular outlooks, which influenced the course of modern Irish history.

In order to accommodate the unmistakable significance of “mythistory,” to use a term coined (but not thoroughly conceptualized) by William McNeill, the study of Irish history could evidently benefit from what Jan Assman named “mnemohistory,” in reference to a “history of cultural memory” that is concerned “with the past as it is remembered.”Footnote 24 Remembrance in this sense is not simply a metaphorical extrapolation of individual memory but a complex social construction, which, as shown in numerous recent studies, inherently has a history.Footnote 25 But social memory is usually branded as short-term. In a world of “imagined communities” (pace Benedict Anderson), we are told that commemorative traditions were by and large only recently “invented” in the interests of industrial capitalism and the service of modern states.Footnote 26 Though there is a case to be made for a distinct culture of “modern memory,” any attempt to authoritatively pinpoint its advent is subject to dispute.Footnote 27 To cite a prominent example that refers to a relevant time frame, Jay Winter challenged Paul Fussell's seminal argument that modern memory began in consequence of the Great War by demonstrating that remembrance of the First World War has drawn heavily on earlier traditions of memory and grieving.Footnote 28 It is worth considering the possibility that the history of memory has a longue durée that reaches beyond the late nineteenth century, so that modern memory may be influenced by earlier traditions of remembrance.

Moreover, it could be argued ontologically that the memory of historical events does not begin after the event in question, or even during the event, but perhaps before the event. Is it at all conceivable that memory can precede history? Such a statement would initially appear to be paradoxical, if not absurd. But, on second thought, it is evident that memory is not simply invented ex nihilo. In most cases, we tend to base our memories on templates provided by recollections of earlier experiences, or “schemata,” as such prememories were labeled by Sir Frederick C. Bartlett, the pioneer of experimental social psychology of memory.Footnote 29 Memories of earlier events influence the way contemporaries perceive historical events and, in turn, influence the way these events will subsequently be remembered. Therefore, historical investigations of modern memory need to take into account deep memories embedded in traditions that predate remembered events. One of the problems with such an approach hinges on how far back a fruitful pursuit of the origins of memory can probe without reifying a Jungian notion of primordial collective unconscious or falling prey to the illusion of stable continuity that traditions tend to project. An effort of “genealogical deconstruction” is required, to borrow from David Gross, in order to uncover original traditions, changes that occurred during transmission, and traditions that were “re-functioned” in a new context.Footnote 30 Although any starting point for critical historical inquiry into traditions of deep memory is inevitably subject to arbitrary choice, it should still acknowledge influences of earlier memories. Hence, a study of remembrance of the Easter Rising and the Somme in Ireland would need to go beyond 1916 and consider the legacy and reverberations of older traditions.

An apposite point of departure for this kind of investigation can be found in the memory of the dramatic events of the late seventeenth century. The interpretation of the conflict of 1688–90 in Ireland depends on whether it is considered a Williamite War, reflecting the point of view of the victors, or a Jacobite War, accommodating a narrative through which the vanquished tell their tale. The local conflict in Ireland split along entrenched sectarian lines stemming back to a prior history (and earlier remembrance) of colonization and resistance. As a whole, Catholics rallied behind the ousted Stuart, King James II, while Protestants generally supported King William III of Orange. These conflicting experiences bred contrary communal historical interpretations, which cemented two competing traditions of memory, one based in celebration of triumph and the other in lamenting defeat. Their impact would prove to be long lasting and would ultimately influence the ways in which both nationalist and unionist communities chose to commemorate the historical events of 1916.

TRIUMPHANT AND TRAUMATIC TRADITIONS OF MEMORY

Triumph, for Anglo-Irish Protestants, was predicated on fear. The Williamite victory was perceived as deliverance from a threat of annihilation at the hands of Catholics, an anxiety founded on earlier memories of atrocities that had been ritualized in annual sermons and commemorations marking the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1641 uprising on 23 October and codified in historical writings that influenced the Protestant historiography of 1688.Footnote 31 As the sense of salvation was confirmed by privileges granted by the crown to a Protestant ascendancy, victorious commemoration was imbricated in the politics of loyalism. The Orange triumph and the “Glorious and Immortal Memory” of the victorious King William were publicly celebrated by Protestants in the eighteenth century on six annual festive days and in a wide array of commemorative activities such as toasting (often in special glassware), renaming of streets, painting the monarch on prominent buildings, and construction of monuments.Footnote 32 The emblematic battle site at the Boyne was marked with an obelisk (dedicated in 1736), and Grinling Gibbons's equestrian statue of William III on College Green in the heart of Dublin (ceremoniously unveiled for the eleventh anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, 1 July 1701) became a controversial shrine for the Williamite cult.Footnote 33 Various loyalist clubs, such as the Boyne Society, organized processions to honor King William's triumph, which cumulatively instigated a popular commemorative marching tradition that was eventually ritualized by the Orange Order, which shortly after its formation in 1795 rescheduled annual parades to 12 July (in accordance with the Gregorian calendar).Footnote 34

With the passing of the Act of Union and foundation of the United Kingdom (1801), Protestant loyalist remembrance was inextricably associated with a political culture of unionism that dominated the public sphere. While attempting to curtail the excesses of Orange demonstrations, the authorities had to come to terms with the blatant sectarianism of popular unionist celebrations, which defied the disapproval of Dublin Castle.Footnote 35 Over the nineteenth century the increasingly conservative establishment of the Orange Order co-opted, formalized, and consolidated sporadic grassroots practices into “The Twelfth” (12 July), which was institutionalized as the central festival of unionism.Footnote 36 Through landmark confrontations that entered into local social memory, such as the mid-nineteenth-century violent sectarian clash at Dolly's Bray in county Down (12 July 1849), this holiday changed over time and acquired a history, which interweaved a spirit of triumphalism with a tally of grievances.Footnote 37

Though it is possible to identify a distinct “unionist sense of history,” it was neither stable nor homogenous but constantly readapted to changing political circumstances and fractured along divisions of class, ideology, and, not least, denomination (with distinct differentiation between Church of Ireland Episcopalians and dissenting Presbyterians and with further subdivisions).Footnote 38 Yet, at its core, unionist loyalist memory was a triumphalist celebration of a Protestant elite asserting its supremacy and harping on the source of its domination over a largely Catholic population. By looking back to a key foundational moment in the past in order to tell a story of liberation and progress, this formulation of memory constitutes a linear historical model, which amounts to a popular Anglo-Irish variation of a “Whig Interpretation of History,” insofar as it is geared toward “ratification if not the glorification of the present.”Footnote 39 At the same time, it incorporates a cyclical mechanism of commemorative repetition that pivots on a victorious menstruus mirabilis of July, compressing three years into a mythical time frame in which the emblematic victory at the Battle of the Boyne (1 July 1690 Old Style [O.S.]) is placed alongside the subsequent decisive Battle of Aughrim (12 July 1691 O.S.) and the prior “breaking of the boom” that lifted the siege of Derry (31 July 1689 O.S.). This commemorative calendar follows a familiar pattern of selecting a “dense cluster” of historical events to create a cycle of celebratory holidays.Footnote 40

Yet, for all its triumphalism, Protestant memory never lost its foundational fear and, as McBride observed, “was tempered by a note of anxiety.”Footnote 41 Recurring dread of “papist” atrocities resurfaced in recollections of “suffering loyalists” of the Irish rebellions of 1641, 1689, and 1798, which constitute another tradition of deep memory that recycles evocative images from the multiple editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (popularly referred to as the Book of Martyrs).Footnote 42 In the nineteenth century, alarmist reactions to ubiquitous threats of agrarian “outrages” often revealed fears of an impending wholesale massacre of Protestants.Footnote 43 These apprehensions were most clearly articulated in commemorations organized by specially dedicated Apprentice Boys Clubs of the siege of Derry that attributed particular significance to the shutting of the gates that marked the beginning of the harrowing siege (7 December 1688 O.S.), first reenacted in 1775.Footnote 44 Venting a bitter sense of betrayal (symbolically personified in annual burnings in effigy of “Lundy the traitor,” inaugurated in the centenary celebrations of 1789), remembrance of the siege became a founding myth for a Protestant “siege mentality” encapsulated in the truculent motto “No Surrender.”Footnote 45 For all its triumphalism, Protestant loyalist remembrance incorporates a deep memory of trauma.

But one camp's victory is, of course, an opponent's defeat. The catastrophic ramifications of the Jacobite defeat for Irish Catholics, who were not only vanquished but also discriminated against under penal laws, was aptly depicted by the contemporary poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair as An Longbhriseadh (The shipwreck).Footnote 46 Jacobitism redressed trauma with a triumphalist tone of wishful thinking. Notwithstanding embittered folk poetry, which scorned “James the shite” (Seamus an chaca) for his cowardliness at the Battle of the Boyne, a flourishing Irish language literary tradition elevated King James and his heirs to the messianic role of deliverers destined, with the support of foreign military aid, to liberate the downtrodden.Footnote 47 Irish Jacobitism was not solely, if at all, preoccupied with a British dynastic dispute but constituted a vigorous, and sometimes virulent, response to subjugation and dispossession that was expressed in a range of oral and literary forms that permeated popular culture, such as toasts, prophecy, seditious chapbook prose, and, most prominently, in Gaelic poetry. These works juxtaposed allegorical images of a distressed wizened woman or fabulous maiden awaiting salvation with crudely explicit yearnings for restitution of the “Irish tribes (clanna Gael)” through the rout of “foreigners” (Gaill) and Protestant “heretics” (eiricigh).Footnote 48

This culture of literary Jacobitism amounted to a potent subversive popular ideology, which continued to offer a demotic political vocabulary for seditious Catholic agrarian secret societies from the Whiteboys of the 1760s to the Defenders of the 1790s.Footnote 49 Jacobitism was utilized in local interpretations of the American Revolution, and it mediated the popular reception of radical republican ideas in the 1790s.Footnote 50 Despite the ancien régime lexicon of Jacobitism, which hinged on the restoration of a “rightful king,” its interpretation of defeat in the past as entailing a millenarian promise of future victory served as a foundation for a modern nationalist memory. This memory was shaped by the culture of republican commemoration inaugurated by the French Revolution and introduced to Ireland by the secret society of the United Irishmen.Footnote 51 Shortly after the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, the dissemination of memories of grievances in the popular press began elevating the vanquished United Irish leaders into heroic martyrs. Footnote 52

A republican model of martyrdom was more clearly formulated after remaining United Irishmen defiantly rose up again in rebellion in 1803. Robert Emmet, the young and idealistic leader of this failed insurrection, exemplified the theme of triumph in defeat in his celebrated speech from the dock. Facing a death sentence, he effectively turned the crown prosecution (and by proxy the government) into the accused. The memorable concluding words, which tie his own fate and the reputation of the republican insurrection with that of the Irish nation, are addressed to a future audience, “when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.”Footnote 53 This appeal to a utopian time frame epitomizes the central principle of triumph of defeat, whereby memory of a defeated rebellion is presented as a step toward an inevitable triumph of national liberation. Footnote 54

In the nineteenth century, this pattern repeated itself in the construction of nationalist republican memory of the seemingly negligible rebellions of Young Ireland in 1848 and of the Fenians in 1867. Through the publication of countless hagiographic histories and street ballads, these humiliating defeats were remembered as exemplary events. The depiction of rebels as martyrs for Ireland, which is central to the notion of the triumph of defeat, was crystallized in the massive commemorations for the three Fenian “Manchester Martyrs,” who were executed on 23 November 1867 for their part in a deadly prison rescue operation. This subsequently became a day of popular nationalist commemoration.Footnote 55 Patrick Pearse most famously articulated the triumph of defeat in his 1915 graveside oration at the public funeral of the veteran Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa: “Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations.”Footnote 56

The conceptualization of history underpinning nationalist republican memory, which has become primarily associated with the Catholic population, although many of its leading exponents were Protestants, is both cyclical and linear.Footnote 57 It is cyclical, as rebellions in the past are framed within a recurring pattern of struggle and defeat. But, in spite of Oliver MacDonagh's claim that the “characteristic Irish time-frame” is entirely cyclical, it is also linear, as the events are sequenced on an eschatological-millenarian time line that leads toward future triumph and salvation.Footnote 58 Its impetus is a memory of trauma awaiting resolution.

In its origins, the memory of defeat was inherently subaltern and positioned itself in opposition to the Ascendancy public sculpture that adorned a culture of imperial unionist commemoration. For instance, the recurring defacements of the aforementioned statue of King William III on College Green contested hegemonic commemorative domination.Footnote 59 After Catholics dramatically reclaimed the public sphere in Daniel O’Connell's large-scale “Monster Meetings,” in the second half of the nineteenth century, a counterhegemonic culture of nationalist public commemoration emerged with the erection of monuments for Irish national heroes, commencing with prominent statues for Daniel O’Connell and culminating with graveyard memorials for the Manchester Martyrs.Footnote 60 Nationalist commemoration reached its apex in the centennial of the 1798 Rebellion, which was presented as a separatist counterdemonstration to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (1897).Footnote 61 However, the centennial demonstrations met with violent hostility in loyalist areas of Ulster, where they were perceived by Protestant unionists as offensive and threatening.Footnote 62 As an increasingly militant unionist movement became localized within Protestant loyalist areas of Ulster, its siege mentality was exacerbated by fears of betrayal at the hands of liberal British governments and expressed in defiant grassroots politics that amounted to a “highly dangerous form of brinkmanship.”Footnote 63 By the time of the debates over the Third Home Rule Bill (1910–14), unionist triumphalism founded on commemoration of victory appeared to have reached an impasse and was threatened with growing sentiments of defeatism. In contrast, increasingly confident expressions of nationalist republican commemoration, which harked back to traumatic defeats, leaned toward triumphalism.

It would seem that in the early twentieth century, two well-established traditions of collective memory were firmly positioned in opposition to each other. However, it should be acknowledged that there were many Protestants and Catholics of broadly liberal unionist and nationalist persuasions who did not necessarily subscribe to these partisan bipolar perceptions of the past. Burdensome legacies were spurned in favor of more nuanced historical interpretations, which accommodated hybrid identities and opened other political possibilities. In light of these ambiguities and complexities, the validity of a “two traditions model” can be called into question, and yet (like all other nationalists) Irish unionists and nationalists shared “a tendency towards producing a simplified and unifying historical creed for the consumption of the pious.”Footnote 64 These high-profile traditions remained significant points of reference even for those who consciously rejected them and so continued to function as landmarks of communal memory. The perpetuation of these traditions was not a straightforward insular dynamic of continuity propelled by repetitive reiteration. Throughout modern Irish history, both unionist and nationalist ideologies were periodically reconstructed through responses to changing internal and, not less important, external factors. Yet, reconfiguration and innovation should not be confused with invention, as already established traditions of memory offered a familiar lexicon and a mental framework within which contingencies could be patterned. Whereas myths do not directly constitute events, they offer interpretative narratives through which meaning of events can be constructed. At least to an extent, memories of the past shaped the perceptions of historical events and were thus a reflexive agent of self-validation and autoregeneration.

THE EASTER RISING WITHIN A TRADITION OF TRIUMPH OF DEFEAT

The Easter Rising of 1916 marked the zenith of the nationalist republican tradition of “triumph of defeat.” Patrick Pearse was intent on following in the footsteps of Robert Emmet.Footnote 65 Two years earlier, he argued in a commemorative speech titled “Robert Emmet and the Ireland of To-Day” that Emmet's rising was “not a failure, but a triumph for that deathless thing we call Irish Nationality” and that patriotism was “in large part a memory of heroic dead men and a striving to accomplish some task left unfinished by them.”Footnote 66 Accordingly, the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic is a constitutional rendering of the cyclical and linear perception of history and its vision of a fulfillment of national destiny. The signatories justified the insurrection with reference to “the dead generations” and an “old tradition of nationhood” through which “every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty.”Footnote 67 In turn, the imposition of martial law and the excessively brutal suppression of the rebellion (with its high toll on the civilian population) were not only traumatic in their own right but also served to fortify the hagiographic cult of political martyrdom, which had become a pillar of republican remembrance.Footnote 68 The executed leaders of the rising, alongside the subsequently executed Sir Roger Casement (who was apprehended just before the insurrection), were instantly apotheosized, and their memory was enshrined in a well-established pantheon of nationalist martyrs, which separatists enthusiastically harped on as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting parliamentarian Home Rule nationalists.Footnote 69

Though in military terms the rising was a failure, it can be seen as the opening volley of a largely successful Irish Revolution. Through “a process of wholesale conversion, along with a pattern of retrospective endorsement of the defeated rebels and their objectives,” the separatist republican party Sinn Féin benefited from the popular image of a “Sinn Féin Rebellion” despite not actually being involved in the insurrection.Footnote 70 Radicalized and revitalized by its association with the rising and the subsequent martyrdom of Thomas Ashe (a prominent 1916 rebel who went on a hunger strike and died as a result of force-feeding in prison), Sinn Féin mobilized the wide public support of its anticonscription campaign to win a sweeping electoral victory in 1918 and went on to strike for independence from Britain.Footnote 71 From this sequence of events, it would appear that defeat finally resulted in triumph. In this light, the perceived outcome of 1916 was not only shaped by a tradition of deep memory but also served as its vindication. Accordingly, nationalist commemorations of 1916, which celebrated the ultimate success of the Easter Rising, whether in the military parades of the south of Ireland or in the paramilitary sponsored republican murals of Northern Ireland, have flaunted triumphalism.Footnote 72

For some nationalists, the long-desired goal of independence was, for the most part, achieved in 1922 with the treaty that ended the Anglo-Irish War and established the Irish Free State, while diehard republicans would defiantly remember the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 as another defeat in the unfulfilled quest for a thirty-two-county republic. In its formative years, the independent Irish state was unsuccessful in utilizing commemoration to redress republican grievances.Footnote 73 For their part, republicans sustained a subculture of grassroots remembrance spearheaded by the National Graves Association and manifested in countless local unofficial commemorative initiatives (which were not widely advertised and remain mostly undocumented).Footnote 74 Militants engaged in “de-commemoration” of loyalist triumphalism by illegally destroying statues and purging the public sphere of imperial monuments.Footnote 75 Among the statues targeted, by what Orangemen condemned as republican outrages, were the obelisk at the Boyne (23 May 1923) and the statue of William III on College Green (11 November 1928).Footnote 76 In Northern Ireland, the tribulations of discriminated-against Catholics and the outbursts of violence in the Troubles over the last three decades of the twentieth century were perceived by republicans as yet another calamitous series of events that could only be redeemed by a future victory—evoked in the belligerent motto “tiocfaidh ár lá” (our day will come). In this way, the tradition of traumatic remembrance remained alive after Irish independence.

THE SOMME AS A CRUCIBLE OF TRIUMPHANT-TRAUMATIC MEMORY

Just as 1916 was to become a cornerstone of nationalist memory, that eventful year would also prove to be a watershed for unionist memory.Footnote 77 Though the devastating fatalities suffered by the Thirty-sixth (Ulster) Division on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) may not quite add up to the “decimation” of over 5,000 casualties that reportedly failed to turn up for role call on the following day, the disastrous offensive became, in the words of John Wilson Foster, “an archetypal event in loyalist psycho-history.”Footnote 78 The unionist press prepared the public at home for the shock by cautioning that the engagement was not the anticipated “thunderbolt stroke” but a “slow, continuous and methodological thrust” that might signal a gradual turning of the tide of the war.Footnote 79 In the absence of Orange parades, which had been canceled that year out of respect for the war effort, the widespread outburst of grief following the arrival of news from the front was initially channeled into the church ceremonies of The Twelfth and shortly after structured commemoration commenced.Footnote 80

A study of the connection between World War I and partition observed that “if any one event in the Great War might be selected as the moment which symbolised the psychological partition of Ulster Unionism from the rest of the island, it was probably the impact of the Battle of the Somme upon the Ulster Unionist psyche, and the Ulster Protestant community generally, coming as it did so soon after the Easter Rising.”Footnote 81 After the war, unionist politicians exploited the “sacred memory” of the “blood sacrifice” at the Somme to bolster their claim that the predominantly Protestant counties of northeast Ulster, which had visibly demonstrated their loyalty to Britain, should remain part of the United Kingdom.Footnote 82 This rhetoric appeared to bear fruit with the creation of a six-county Northern Ireland (1920), as is evident in the speech of King George V at the opening of the devolved parliament: he lauded Ulster's “patriotic devotion to the Empire which you proved so gallantly in the Great War.”Footnote 83 Remembrance of the Somme evidently proved instrumental for unionism in overcoming the defeatism to which it had appeared to succumb.

In integrating the Battle of the Somme into what has been labeled its “ethno-history,” Protestant Ulster sought to reaffirm existing myths.Footnote 84 The focus on the undaunted heroism of the prototypical “Ulsterman,” who fought not only for “King and Country” but first and foremost for “God and Ulster,” initially located the event within a loyalist tradition of military triumph. Unlike the Tenth and Sixteenth Irish divisions, the Thirty-sixth was intrinsically associated with militant unionism and Orangeism. It was almost exclusively recruited from the Ulster Volunteers Force (UVF), a loyalist paramilitary organization founded in 1912–13 to oppose Home Rule that drew much of its membership from the Provincial Grand Orange Lodge of Ulster. In his influential history of the Ulster Division, Cyril Falls, who had been a captain in the unit, noted the “very special significance” of the date of the Somme offensive, as 1 July was the original historical (O.S.) date of the Battle of the Boyne, so that “the sons of the victors in that battle, after eight generations, fought this greater fight.”Footnote 85 Stories circulated of how the troops had gone over the top with cries of “No Surrender” and “Remember the Boyne.”Footnote 86 Commemorative speeches repeatedly drew analogies between the battles of the Somme and the Boyne.

However, the Somme was a far cry from a self-evident military triumph. The attempts of wartime propaganda and partisan historiography to present the disastrous campaign as a victory could not counter the unabated sense of catastrophe, which was corroborated by the colossal figures of mortality.Footnote 87 An embittered undercurrent of local narratives of betrayal accused an incompetent command of failing to send reinforcements to support the undaunted Ulster soldiers after they successfully accomplished their initial task of taking the Schwaben Redoubt.Footnote 88 Though it was at best a “glorious defeat,” the performance of the Ulster Division at the Somme would be described by contemporaries as “one of the greatest victories of the war” and would later be remembered as “the greatest battle the world has ever seen.”Footnote 89 Accordingly, in Protestant memory it would become a liminal event, which hovers between defeat and victory but is, above all, traumatic.

Whereas nationalist unease with commemorating the participation of Irishmen in World War I evoked official “embarrassment and resentment” that resulted in a form of “forgetful remembrance,” the Somme has dominated memory of the Great War among Ulster's Protestants.Footnote 90 Though there were other displays of heroism on the battlefield that resulted in evident victories, such as the impressive record of the Ulster soldiers at the Battle of Messines, these could not uphold the political-religious exclusiveness attributed to the Somme, as they were shared with Englishmen (who had filled the depleted ranks of the unit) and, more problematically, with Catholic nationalists.Footnote 91

Subject to “an increasingly conventionalised form of memorialisation,” it would appear that “remembrance of the Somme battle conformed in many ways to a more general European myth.”Footnote 92 Comparing remembrance of World War I across Europe, George Mossé identified a “Cult of the Fallen Soldier,” which overrode actual war experiences and propagated instead a “Myth of the War Experience” that was founded on adoration of the virility of youth and on a reverence of sacrifice that likened death on the battlefield to the Passion and resurrection of Christ.Footnote 93 These attributes can be found in the public memory of the Somme, which disregarded the more realistic private memories of grieving veterans.Footnote 94 Moreover, Ulster's politicized valorization of the carnage at the Somme can be placed within a wider commonwealth context. Similarly, Australians and New Zealanders remembered the calamitous Gallipoli campaign as passing “the test” that “has necessarily been judged by mankind as the supreme one for men fit to be free,” in the words of one of its most influential mythographers.”Footnote 95 Yet, despite these similarities, it is likely that the primary source of influence may be closer to home. In representing their dead soldiers as political martyrs and turning a military disaster into a promise for a future triumph, Protestant loyalists may have unconsciously emulated the nationalist republican tradition of triumph of failure. Though the memory of the two events has been contrasted, with unionists adamantly opposing the innocence and loyalty of the Somme to the treachery of the Easter Rising, the adoption of celebrated defeat was a revolutionary moment in the development of unionist memory.Footnote 96

From the outset, Northern Ireland proscribed public expressions of nationalist commemoration and officially endorsed unionist commemoration.Footnote 97 Sir James Craig, the founding prime minister and the Grand Master of the Orange Order in county Down, defined himself as “an Orangeman first and a politician and member of parliament afterwards” and famously boasted in 1934 that “we are a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State.”Footnote 98 In such a partisan cultural-political environment, The Twelfth effectively became a ritual of state.Footnote 99 As Keith Jeffery has pointed out, alongside long-standing commemoration of the Williamite triumph, “the losses of the Ulster Division on the Somme came specifically to be associated with the freedom of Ulster Unionists to run their own polity.”Footnote 100 Ulster Protestants embraced the memory of the Somme, commemorating the traumatic event through a myriad of official and unofficial media. Unveiled in 1921 on the battlefield site at Thiepval in France, the impressive Ulster Tower (a replica of Helen's Tower in county Down) became a site of pilgrimage for veterans and a heritage tourism destination for the wider community.Footnote 101 Following the rededication of the tower on 1 July 1989, a Somme Association (formed in 1990) assumed responsibility for its maintenance and, after opening a visitor's center (1994), went on to purchase the surrounding Thiepval Wood (2003) with the intention of developing a memorial park.Footnote 102 In 1994, the Somme Association also opened a Somme Heritage Centre in Newtownards, county Down.Footnote 103 In addition to these institutional sites of memory, the Somme was also marked through popular expressions of commemoration.

Toward the end of the war, a striking painting of the charge of the Ulster Division by the military artist James Prinsep Beadle was unveiled in the west corridor of Belfast City Hall (1 July 1918), an institution that served for many years as a bastion of unionist politics. The image, alongside other commemorative merchandise, has since been mass reproduced and widely distributed on posters that can be found in many Protestant homes.Footnote 104 Although the quintessential unionist mural is an iconic image of King Billy crossing the Boyne on a white steed, which shows “all the signs of triumphalism,” images of the Somme have also appeared on murals ever since this mode of popular commemorative artwork first came into vogue.Footnote 105 The first mural on the Somme appeared in 1919, and additional murals were painted in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 106 Whereas the prevalence of traditional Williamite murals appears to have gone into decline since the 1970s, wall paintings commemorating the Somme have enjoyed increasing popularity.Footnote 107 Many of these murals have become shrines of grassroots commemoration, which are cultivated locally through such mundane acts as regular decoration with fresh flowers. Closer examination of murals depicting the Somme reveals rivalries between warring loyalist paramilitary factions clamoring for recognition as the true heirs of the Ulster Division.Footnote 108 The Orange Order endorsed the memory of the Somme as the only event it marks outside of the Williamite War; in 1993 the order erected its own monument at Thiepval.Footnote 109 In recent years, growing involvement of local working-class “kick the pope” marching youth bands resulted in a sharp upsurge in the numbers of loyalist parades, so that all the 2,400 annual parades listed in 1996 reportedly made “some acknowledgement to the Somme.”Footnote 110 Most conspicuously, the ongoing volatile controversy over the Orange march from the Drumcree Church through the Catholic neighborhood of the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, a confrontation that has been evocatively described as “the Orange Order's Last Stand,” originated in a parade to commemorate the Somme.Footnote 111

Critics have categorized the popularity of the myth of the Somme as part of a characteristic strain of defeatism in contemporary Northern Irish Protestant culture, also evident in local reverence for the Titanic (which was built in the predominantly Protestant Belfast shipyards).Footnote 112 For some commentators, such as the postcolonial literary critic Joe Cleary, this defeatism stems from an early twentieth-century loss of faith in progress, so that in Northern Ireland “modernity was culturally conceived of in terms of catastrophe, collapse and decline.”Footnote 113 For others, such as the sociologist Andrew Finlay (who questions the validity of deep-rooted historical identities), it is even more recent and can be dated to the erosion of Protestant supremacism in the disparaging climate of the Troubles.Footnote 114 These critiques do not take into account the genealogy of defeatism, which can be traced through a history of deep memory. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the distinction between defeatism and celebration of defeat. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch demonstrated in his comparative study of the “Culture of Defeat,” engagement with the trauma of crushing defeat is a constructive process, which can instigate national regeneration.Footnote 115 It is with this observation in mind that the historical survey of remembrance outlined above can serve to identify fundamental characteristics of memories of triumph and defeat and to reveal the dynamic relationship between trauma and triumphalism.

DEFEATIST TRIUMPHALISM AND TRIUMPHALIST TRAUMA

Evidently, trauma and triumph are indeed fundamental elements of memory in modern Ireland, where the validating charter of loyalists was founded on enthusiastic remembrance of triumph, as opposed to the obsession of nationalists with the memory of defeat. There is, however, a qualitative difference embodied in distinct mnemonic temporalities between the formations of these two types of remembrance. Unionist loyalist adulation of triumph takes place in a “past continuous,” as it looks back to an exemplary past in order to reaffirm the present. Nationalist republican fixation with defeat inhabits a “future perfect,” by which the desire to reverse failures in the past sets aspirations for the future.Footnote 116 From a philosophical point of view, change is inevitable, and so remembrance of triumph that zealously clings to a present, which cannot be indefinitely preserved, is unavoidably defeatist. Utopian remembrance of trauma is constructive, insofar as it is a powerful motivator for change; in turn, a desire for sweeping transformation driven by fervent conviction engenders triumphalism. Though founded on competing perceptions of triumph and defeat, both nationalist republican Catholic and unionist loyalist Protestant memories engage with triumphalism and trauma so that distinct characterizations of these traditions may prove misleading.

McBride differentiates between nationalist and unionist memory with religious criteria, labeling the former “redemptive,” along New Testament lines, and the latter “providential” and grounded in Old Testament imagery.Footnote 117 The theological presumption behind this distinction is that Irish Protestantism, in its many denominations, dogmatically eschews iconography and martyrology and that any concept of a “crucified nation” is “profoundly alien to Protestants, for reasons that lie ultimately in reform theology.”Footnote 118 Yet, these doctrinal distinctions may be overstated. After all, republican models of national martyrdom were originally molded by United Irish Protestants who were later revered and idolized by Young Ireland Protestants.Footnote 119 Moreover, the Somme and the Easter Rising were construed in memory as “two sacrificial shrines—the people crucified, a chosen people massacred” so that Protestant remembrance also found its redemptive Golgotha.Footnote 120 The significant difference is that unionist sacrifice, as opposed to republican martyrdom, was not invested in an intangible future destiny but was presented as a concrete political debt that would be redeemed from Britain.

Contemplating remembrance in modern Ireland, Joep Leerssen distinguished between two modes of commemoration: monumental “society remembrancing,” which is orchestrated by elites and institutions and is essentially triumphalist, as opposed to “community remembrancing,” which is sub-elite and conforms to a subaltern “traumatic paradigm.” Yet, on second reflection, he admitted the limits of this overly schematic differentiation, noting that “the distinction between community and society remembrance is blurring even as I am making it.”Footnote 121 Clear-cut separations between triumphal-elite and traumatic-demotic commemorative cultures do not hold water. Official sites of outwardly triumphalist commemoration, such as war memorials, can open up spaces for expressions of recalcitrant traumatic memories.Footnote 122 Moreover, remembrance of traumatic events is not only oral and informal but can also be commemorated monumentally. For example, ethnographic examination of the nationalist “statuemania” manifested in the 1798 Rebellion's centennial mentioned above shows that it was not simply a triumphalist exercise of mass mobilization by emergent Catholic nationalist elites and that the popular reception of metropolitan commemorative initiatives was mediated through “negotiations of memory” with provincial folk histories steeped in local recollections of trauma.Footnote 123 Generally speaking, this is the case for most commemorative celebrations, which facilitate a “public memory” that is an “intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions” and is often a “battleground” for competing dominant and subordinate group memories.Footnote 124 Furthermore, as Leerssen acknowledged, grassroots demonstrations of apparent Protestant loyalist triumphalism, such as Orange parades, incorporate traumatic memories of intimidation and bereavement.Footnote 125 Similarly, Catholic republican demonstrations triumphantly, and even threateningly, brandish a legacy of trauma. Though they appear to be polar opposites, commemorative trauma and triumphalism often go hand in hand. In constructing the traumatic memory of the Somme, unionists were taking a leaf out of a nationalist book, which had forcefully demonstrated the appeal of political claims based on accounts of suffering. Within a short period after the events, both nationalists and unionists could show clear gains for presenting their respective traumas in 1916 as triumphs of defeat.

Triumphalist commemoration of these 1916 traumas influenced the memory of the more recent Troubles. The Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, acknowledged the view whereby it is possible to “identify the first stirrings of the current conflict in the clash of conflicting ideologies in 1966, at the time of commemoration of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme respectively,” soberly adding that “the events of 1966 are, perhaps, a timely reminder that in our society commemoration itself can too easily take on a confrontational quality.”Footnote 126 Even prior to the formation of the Provisional IRA (1969), which was part of militant republican mobilization in the north that was allegedly inspired by the triumphalistic commemorations of the Easter Rising's jubilee, the first of the new loyalist paramilitaries emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme and was consciously named the Ulster Volunteers Force.Footnote 127 Captain Terence O’Neill, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, rushed back from Somme commemorations in France to condemn the UVF's inaugural murder spree, emphatically declaring that the name had been “misappropriated” and that there cannot be “any connection whatever” between the “authentic and original” UVF and the current “sordid conspiracy of criminals.”Footnote 128 Yet the new UVF unashamedly insisted on historical continuity and openly proclaimed this association in their symbols and songs.Footnote 129

In vacillating between celebration of triumph and commemoration of heroic defeat, unionists made a strategic choice in 1916, which in some ways was ahead of its time. Since the Second World War, there has been a noticeable shift in dominant commemorative culture, which has moved from monuments of triumph and conquest to memorials of trauma and suffering, with commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust standing out as the prevailing paradigm. Politically correct cultural trends and postcolonial environments have endorsed and encouraged the cultural construction of trauma. In today's world, there is apparently far more political-cultural currency to be found in embracing victimhood so that even communities implicated with perpetrating atrocities seek victim status. Trauma, as Bernhard Giesen argues, is now globalized as a “new mode of universalistic identity.”Footnote 130 Marie Smyth has shown that in Northern Ireland, “as a result of almost thirty years of violence and its antecedents, the political cultures of contemporary Loyalism and Republicanism are cultures of victim-hood” and that “the claim to victim-hood brings with it certain political advantages.”Footnote 131

Public remembrance of victims tends to be exclusive and monopolistic, denying the trauma of others and ranking one's own suffering above theirs. As succinctly phrased by Longley, “Commemorations are as selective as sympathies. They honour our dead, not your dead.”Footnote 132 Since World War I, competition over commemoration of trauma in Ireland has been evident in rivalries between those who choose to wear a poppy around the month of November, initially commemorating the dead of the Great War and by extension all those who have since died in the service of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, and those who wear a lily at Easter time, commemorating (since 1926) the dead of the 1916 Rising and by extension all those who have since died for the republican cause.Footnote 133 Not only does each side cherish its own commemorative symbolism, but it also denies the validity of the other's rituals, as the poppy in the eyes of ardent republicans stands for collaboration with an oppressive regime, while many loyalists see the lily as implicated with terror.Footnote 134 In the early years of the Irish state, “Poppy Day” commemorations were continuously subject to republican violence.Footnote 135 These commemorative enmities culminated in the IRA bombing of a Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen in county Fermanagh (8 November 1987), which left eleven dead and sixty-three injured.Footnote 136 Likewise, when in 1988 a loyalist gunman opened fire and launched grenades in Belfast's Milltown cemetery, killing three and injuring fifty of the mourners attending a funeral of IRA men (who had been previously shot dead by British special forces in Gibraltar), this was not a random sectarian assault but a calculated attack on a republican funerary ritual that was part and parcel of an established commemorative tradition of nationalist political martyrdom.Footnote 137

Throughout the Troubles, both loyalist and republican paramilitaries justified their acts of violence through claims of victimhood.Footnote 138 However, the recent efforts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and, more specifically, the paramilitary ceasefires, which culminated in the IRA publicly renouncing their armed campaign (25 July 2005), have substantially undermined this vicious rationale. Such offshoots of triumphalist trauma, which are rooted in the notion of triumph of defeat, increasingly appear out of sync and amount to nonproductive, if not defeatist, politics. Addressing the key problem of decommissioning paramilitary organizations, an international committee noted that a resolution cannot be found as long as “the parties resort to their vast inventories of historical recrimination” and that “what is really needed is the decommissioning of mind-sets in Northern Ireland.”Footnote 139

In seeking rapprochement, the Irish Peace Process has acknowledged trauma but attempted to redirect it into constructive channels, as stated in the Good Friday Agreement: “It is recognised that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.”Footnote 140 The political scientist Frank Wright argued that the “opposed national histories” (a term that he used interchangeably with “memories”) of Catholics and Protestants sustain irreconcilable antagonisms, which can only be circumvented by calling attention to forgotten episodes that could provide an alternative “history of ecumenism.”Footnote 141 In the current climate of reconciliation, particular attention has been directed to commemorative initiatives that promote common remembrance of suffering on the battlefields of the First World War. On 11 November 1998, the heads of state of Ireland and the United Kingdom, President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth II, jointly inaugurated the Island of Ireland Memorial Peace Park, which is located on the Belgian battlefield of Messines and dedicated to all the Irishmen who died in the First World War.Footnote 142 This memorial (which rapidly fell into neglect and has since required renovation) has been widely acclaimed as a desired model for inclusive commemoration that could allow for the forgetting of partisan memories.Footnote 143 It has even been proposed that the construction of the monument was influenced by revisionist history writing, which supposedly liberated commemoration organizers from the nationalist myths of 1916.Footnote 144 However, the deeply embedded myths targeted by iconoclastic historians have not evaporated, nor do they show any signs of doing so.

The philosopher Richard Kearney argued that reconciliation between the different cultural traditions in Ireland requires a “process of critical and creative interpretation” of myths, which he considered to be “a living dimension of culture,” so that traditions would be “demythologised and remythologised.”Footnote 145 From a point of view of “parity of esteem” (a cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement), an even more significant example than the ceremony at Messines can be found in the tribute to the remembrance of the Somme paid in 2002 by the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Belfast Alex Maskey, who refrained from attending the “highly militaristic unionist commemoration” but laid a laurel wreath (rather than a traditional poppy wreath) at the Belfast City Hall Cenotaph (1 July 2002) and went on to lay a wreath at the Ulster Tower in Thiepval (15 September 2002).Footnote 146 The negotiated peace settlement is not between victors and vanquished but is based on compromise and mutual respect of contrasting traditions. Innovative attempts to utilize commemoration as a bridge between hostile communities cannot merely be invented and imposed from above through collaboration of professional historians and present-minded politicians but need to find ways to accommodate popular traditions of deep memory.Footnote 147 Newly formulated expressions of ecumenical sharing of trauma may ultimately carry less resonance than sectarian evocations of trauma that entail a spirit of triumphalism. To return full circle, the Irish government's initiative to commemorate the ninetieth anniversary of a “shared history” by reviving the Easter Rising military parade and also holding a memorial ceremony for the Somme, though falling short of conciliating Northern Irish animosities, recognized conflicting perceptions of both trauma and triumph and touched on an ingrained common legacy of Ireland's “mythistory.”Footnote 148