When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) again embarked upon armed struggle in 1956, it was again for “an independent, united democratic Irish republic.” “This is the age-old struggle of the Irish people versus British aggression,” read the Proclamation of December 1956.Footnote 1 The plan was for “flying columns”—which had played an important role in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21—to cross into North Ireland’s border counties and link up with local units.Footnote 2 The four columns were named after republican heroes (Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Bartholomew Teeling, and Liam Lynch) and Tom Barry, who had written the West Cork flying column of the Anglo-Irish War into legend, was called upon to train his successors.Footnote 3 By fleeing into the past, however, the IRA was forced once again to retreat: the present problems of the North’s security apparatus, the South’s hostility, and the Catholic community’s indifference could not be overcome by anachronistic tactics.Footnote 4 In February 1962, when the IRA finally faced up to the failure of the campaign, the Army Council blamed “the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people—the unity and freedom of Ireland.”Footnote 5
Before continuing with this narrative about the Irish revolutionary tradition, it is necessary to break off to examine the narratives that are within it. Why did the Irish revolutionary tradition survive into the 1960s? Why did it revive at the end of the decade when so many of its European counterparts were going to the dustbin of history? With the past pervading public life, with different versions of the past being used to define identities and justify goals, the temptation is to turn to memory studies for answers. During the last three decades, the memory industry has achieved impressive market share in the humanities and social sciences, pushed through leveraged buyouts of folk and oral history and of the study of myth and tradition, established itself in every major territory across the world, and expanded aggressively into the courts, museums, mass media, and politics.Footnote 6 Such success should make scholars suspicious. Memory with a capital M is much written about, yet rarely is it employed in the same way in different books and articles—or, for that matter, in a way that accords with general usage.Footnote 7 Looking out of my office window at Queen’s University Belfast, I could see a First World War memorial, a physical object which some historians would describe as memory itself.Footnote 8 But people are needed to ascribe meaning to objects, and this meaning will also vary from person to person. For the staff and students who served in that conflict the names inscribed upon the monument may have called up images and stories from their own pasts, whereas for me the images and stories that it brought to mind were not memories but my personal construction of social representations of the past.Footnote 9 Moreover, as Alon Confino recognizes, “in itself memory does not offer any true additional explanatory power. … Only when linked to historical questions and problems, via methods and theories, can memory be illuminating.”Footnote 10 So, using memory to explore how war was publicly remembered in the twentieth century presents challenges for a historian—albeit challenges to which some historians have risen superbly.Footnote 11 And using memory to explore how representations of the past have shaped how people have historically imagined the future and acted accordingly presents so many challenges that it may be better just to find another concept.
There are many options available, such as tradition, myth, or narrative. The last is the most promising: narratives give shape to a human being’s experiences, thoughts, and imagination in terms of past, present, and future. The others, including memory, have a more problematic relationship with history, and an elaborate dance is often performed in which antonyms become synonyms become antonyms become synonyms. By contrast, as Paul Ricoeur has gone to great lengths to demonstrate, history is a narrative—albeit one that has the appearance of a plot, characters, and events and one that should be within the limits of what the past has left behind of itself in the present.Footnote 12 Even historical works that “eschew storytelling and try to limit themselves to statistical analyses of institutions and long-term … processes,” argues Hayden White, have transformed past events by emplotment into “a story with identifiable beginning, middle, and end phases.”Footnote 13
Ricoeur and White are generally regarded as the main figures in carrying the linguistic turn into thinking about history. White criticized historians—not altogether fairly—for treating “language as an unproblematical, transparent medium.” History is “only accessible by language,” and “language is both a form and a content.”Footnote 14 White therefore went on to recommend that the techniques of literary criticism be used to analyze and understand sources and that historians should be aware of how language conditions their own writing. The linguistic turn has ended; what Michael Roth has described as the “massive tide of language” has rolled back.Footnote 15 Nancy Partner joins Roth in spotting what the storm-tossed sea has left stranded on the shore and spies, among other things, memory. One of the appeals of memory is it seems to offer an untainted and unmediated way of connecting with the past—an escape from the prison house of language.Footnote 16 However, as Richard Rorty has warned, “Truth cannot be out there.”Footnote 17 The tide that threatened to sweep away the author, historical facts, and the distinction between primary and secondary sources may have receded, yet it has left its mark on the academic landscape and the role of language in shaping meaning cannot be overlooked.
Partner also finds narrative washed up on the shore: “Gentle narrative, so apparently soft-edged and only lightly theoretical, with its childlike alternative term of story, is out there.” Narrative appears natural and universal, is easily and widely understood, gives order and direction to groups and to the self, and binds together the individual and the collective. Its “eerily elastic and tenacious” hold over humanity is reflected in the popularity that the concept has enjoyed across and outside the academy. Partner “can say with some confidence that there is nothing that cannot be narrativized, and is not.” The routine references to Ricoeur made by research psychologists working on narrative identity—a body of knowledge that this article draws upon—shows how far the concept has developed.Footnote 18 Narrative’s success, though, rests on more solid foundations than memory’s; narrative possesses the interpretive strengths of precision, suppleness, comprehensiveness, and clarity at every scale, starting from inside an individual mind and stretching outward to increasingly large and complex groups.
This article argues that the Irish revolution is not over and that narrative is the best concept for understanding the ways in which it has shaped Northern Irish history.Footnote 19 This requires a comparative approach—comparing Irish and French history and Irish and French debates over history and memory—because Irish historians as well as Irish revolutionaries have borrowed and adapted French ideas.Footnote 20 Section I of this article makes a lengthy critique of Pierre Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire, which allows both the relevant history and historiography to be explored. The emphasis given to Nora may seem surprising at first because memory studies in general has moved on from his groundbreaking project. However, Nora’s seminal edited collection Les Lieux de mémoire still remains the defining influence for most Irish scholars working on memory. To give just two examples of this here, the essays in the 2007 volume, 1916 in 1966, aim at “adapting Nora for Irish purposes,” and Clair Wills’s 2009 Dublin 1916 opens with a quotation from the immortel.Footnote 21 Section II builds on the discussion in the first one about nineteenth-century French political culture and French struggles to create a new order to argue that twentieth-century Irish history was marked by rival aspirations to democracy and to ending the Irish revolution. In the next two sections, the pertinent problems with memory are put forward and narrative is presented as a concept that overcomes many of them. Section V offers a short case study, which sketches out the role the nationalist, republican, and revolutionary socialist narratives played in Northern Ireland’s slide toward communal conflict. The final section pulls together the different threads of the argument to show that historians who use memory to read Northern Irish history as text risk reducing everything else to and sanctifying the political, and therefore having their work end up serving the narratives.Footnote 22
I
François Furet presents the “whole history of the century that runs from the French Revolution to the Third Republic” as a period when the Revolution’s “unpredictable events were continually being reenacted.” “In the second, repetitive, cycle,” he continues, “the French recast and in doing so crystallized for longer periods the same political forms, reborn from the same revolutions.”Footnote 23 That quotation from Furet, ultimately, comes from his contribution to the monumental 5,633-page collective work on “les lieux de mémoire,” loosely translated as “realms of memory,” that Nora oversaw between 1984 and 1992 (the revised, English-language translations came afterward). Before this project had reached completion, the original, unifying purpose had given way already to encyclopedic ambitions. Indeed, the books in recent years have often been treated by French historians as a work of reference, not as even an introduction to memory studies.Footnote 24
However, as Guy Beiner has pointed out, “The clock of Irish historiography often appears to be running slow, lagging a stroke behind contemporary research on the Continent.”Footnote 25 The essay collection History and Memory in Modern Ireland, which was published in 2001, marked the belated arrival of memory studies. In the introduction, Ian McBride states, “this volume aspires to the kind of history which is, as Pierre Nora puts it, “less interested in events themselves than in the construction of events over time.”Footnote 26 Irish scholars on the whole have continued to look to Nora. A 2008 article reviewing the recent Irish historiography opens with several paragraphs on Les Lieux de mémoire, arguing that memory’s “more recent spread of influence … may be attributed primarily to the work of … Nora.”Footnote 27 Catherine Switzer and Brian Graham’s article on the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s (RUC) George Cross Garden and Margaret O’Callaghan’s on the historical representations of partition both deferentially use the term lieu de mémoire.Footnote 28 This embrace of Nora is not usually seen as a problem; the neglect of Nora usually is. Beiner and Charles Townsend have each admonished academics for not using his work—which Beiner claims is “without doubt the most influential contemporary critical discourse.”Footnote 29
What does lieu de mémoire mean, and what does this imply for its use by Irish historians? Nora’s preface to the first English-language edition attempts to capture in a single sentence the essence of his master idea: “If the expression lieu de mémoire must have an official definition, it should be this: a lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the French community).”Footnote 30
Lieu de mémoire had already been given “official definition” as it had been written into an amended “Loi du 31 décembre 1913” regarding the preservation of historical sites. This was not welcomed by Nora. In the final essay, he laments that what had begun as a way of getting “critical distance” had been absorbed into the commemorative obsession.Footnote 31 This had also simplified into a slogan a complex concept, so complex in fact that the first English-language edition needs four essays to set out Nora’s design. These trace how a “notion” became a “category” became a “concept”, an evolution that saw the accent shift from lieu to mémoire.Footnote 32 That it is lieu and mémoire, not place and memory, matters. From the start of foreign fascination with his project, Nora has maintained that no exact translation can be made from the French into English or any other language.Footnote 33 Yet, with the first English-language edition, Nora compromised and sat “realm of memory” uneasily alongside lieu de mémoire (“lieu” has what might be called an initial sense of “place,” and so many English-speaking historians have preferred the term “sites of memory”). This, as well as the awkward use of parentheses in the quotation from Nora’s preface given above, reflects the tension between whether the concept remains a specifically French instrument of inquiry or has become a tool with universal application. As late as his general introduction to the second English-language edition, Nora was still insisting upon the “singularity of the French case” (i.e., experience) while at the same time welcoming the initiatives it had inspired across the world.Footnote 34
Lieu de mémoire has undoubtedly escaped its original context. The 2010 conference of the Association for Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS) stated in its call for papers that “Common to France and Ireland over the last fifteen years has … been the promotion of … lieux de mémoire.”Footnote 35 In her pioneering study of the ways that the Irish Civil War has been commemorated, Anne Dolan casually remarks that “every … European country has inscribed its grief in so many lieux de mémoire.”Footnote 36 Dolan devotes less than five pages to the methodology of memory; Ian McBride’s excellent essay “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” which gives an overview of the debates on memory as they stood at the start of the century, pays much more attention to lieu de mémoire and its French roots. He nonetheless quickly moves on to the process of planting it into Irish soil: “France” gives way first to “contemporary societies,” and finally to “Ireland.” McBride’s main goal was to persuade his colleagues to move from debunking myths to exploring memories.Footnote 37 He succeeded, so much so in fact that what was meant to be an introduction has become the introduction.
Counterintuitively, it may be more fruitful for the study of Irish history to focus on what is singularly French about lieu de mémoire rather than its general significance. Ambivalence runs through Nora’s project; the confidence that characterizes the final stages is repeatedly undercut by the pessimism which had been there from the start.Footnote 38 Nora’s 1978–80 seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, at which lieu de mémoire was first tried out, was held in a period of anxiety.Footnote 39 Economic stagnation had replaced the “Thirty Glorious Years,” and France had begun to recognize what had been lost as well as what had been gained in the long boom. La France profonde had melted into air as the peasantry melted into the cities. The loss of continuity was completed by the collapse of the narratives the French told about themselves, narratives about Revolution and Resistance. Charles de Gaulle had preached from the Hôtel de Ville that the Liberation had been achieved by the “support and help of France alone, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!”Footnote 40 But the General had died in 1970 and his story was dying without him. The release of Marcel Ophulus’s The Sorrow and the Pity and the translation of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France, in particular, spurred a public debate on the extent of French collaboration with the Third Reich. The Communist Party, the other arm of the Resistance, was losing its voters, its theoretical foundations, and its grip on intellectuals. The French translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which was published in 1974, marked the moment the Left Bank left the Party.Footnote 41 Solzhenitsyn is invoked in Furet’s 1978 Penser la Révolution Française (Interpreting the French Revolution), which demolished the “revolutionary catechism”—“at once communion and pedagogy”—through which the French had learned their history. This was history as commemoration. The French Revolution was interpreted as both the founding event of the modern world and a promise for the future—a promise that Marxism-Leninism would fulfill. This morality play, however, folded when the hero was exposed as a villain; black-and-white illusions gave way to gray reality. Furet concluded that “no historical debate about the Revolution any longer involves real political stakes.” The theater of the past had gone dark; “the French Revolution is over.”Footnote 42
This was the collapse of a grand narrative that originally had been constructed a century before. Between 1871 and 1914, the fathers of the Third Republic taught a story about the Revolution that they believed would bind together a divided and defeated society, make sense of the past, and provide a vision for the future. And the French were taught: the original volumes of Les Lieux de mémoire have essays on pedagogues and school textbooks.Footnote 43 For Nora, the republican memory was simultaneously authoritarian, unitary, exclusive, continuous, combative, and “passéiste.”Footnote 44 The last is important: the Republic began to commemorate itself from the moment it was brought into being so as to justify its instant claims to historical legitimacy. “La Grande Nation” was therefore given a grand narrative, telling an “absorbing family saga” with its “highs and lows, its great moments and its ordeals, its inexhaustible repertoire of personalities, scenes, lines, intrigues, dates, good and bad people.”Footnote 45 This ambitious political and cultural project successfully presented state and society, history and memory, nation and Republic in a patriotic synthesis. There was a “reciprocal circularity” between memory and history (as will be clear from what follows, Nora is not using these terms as they are commonly understood): “mémoire collective” was shaped by what the agents of the state selected as part of France’s heritage, which, in turn, was based upon a national historiography that had much in common with “collective memory.”Footnote 46 This is a variation on the familiar idea that national identity was imposed by Paris on the periphery, an idea that has since been persuasively challenged by the argument that the creation of the national narrative in the Third Republic was a dynamic, fluid, negotiated process.Footnote 47
Over the decades, the circle that Nora describes had been unwound into a spiral. “The dissolution of the unifying framework of the nation-state,” according to Nora, “has exploded the traditional system that was its concentrated symbolic expression.”Footnote 48 The nation and the state, the past and the future, and history and memory had been pulled apart. In Nora’s reading, society succeeded the nation as the organizing force, and a one and indivisible (constructed) national identity gave way to myriad (constructed) social identities.Footnote 49 France’s different social groups each have a different collective memory and a different heritage that they want acknowledged by the state. Nora gives as an example of this the Jewish community’s campaign to get the president to recognize France’s responsibility for the deportation and murder of Jews during the Vichy years. History was no longer about resemblances and similarities across space and time, but about differences. Separated from both memory and the nation, history had become “society’s study of and knowledge about itself.”Footnote 50 The national myth was dead.
Yet, argues Nora, the nation still has a ghostly presence as the “memory-nation”: the nostalgic focus for a country that has already half-forgotten what it once was.Footnote 51 This memory-nation though remains substantial enough to integrate state and society. Nora hopes that his own project will aid this process by introducing an approach to history “better suited than traditional history to the civic as well intellectual needs of the time” (italics mine).Footnote 52Les Lieux de mémoire has a political purpose—and this is where optimism replaces pessimism in the project. As one of its contributors observes, “France has tended to conceive of its conflicts in historical terms and to conceive of its history in terms of conflict.”Footnote 53 Nora now seemed to see the venom draining away from these conflicts and the possibility of France escaping from his bêtes noires of Gaullism and Communism.Footnote 54 In his words, Nora’s “ambition” was to “think about the nation without nationalism.” France was moving away from a history that divided society to a culture that united it: “France has rediscovered its heritage.”Footnote 55
However, this rediscovery has much in common with a weekend morning browsing at the Saint Ouen Flea Market. The national past, which had previously been carefully ordered and controlled, has become a random assortment of knickknacks to be picked up or discarded. Nora celebrates this “richness and variety” and Les Lieux de mémoire tries to match it.Footnote 56 There is a distant echo of Ernest Renan’s famous claim that a nation required “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories.” Renan also specified that forgetting was as important as remembering, and Nora appears to have a certain idea of France in mind when selecting which lieux de mémoire to study.Footnote 57 While he stresses the part played by the decline of French power in giving rise to his project, Nora’s great work ignores the empire(s) upon which France’s world role largely rested.Footnote 58 The “minorities” in Nora’s multicultural France are “workers, Jews … , Bretons or Corsicans, [and] women.”Footnote 59 That said, one particular Corsican is largely absent from the thousands of pages: Napoléon Bonaparte. There is no article on the Emperor, or on his nephew Napoléon III, or on the tradition of Bonapartism, or on the Invalides.Footnote 60 Here is Nora as the Lavisse of the post–de Gaulle Fifth Republic, generally teaching a history that smoothed away destabilizing divisions and discords.Footnote 61 Republicanism’s late nineteenth-century triumph over its Bonapartist, Orléanist, Bourbon, and Jacobin/Communist competitors was restaged at the end of the twentieth. Nora was trying to construct what Perry Anderson describes as a “union sucrée.”Footnote 62
II
So, France is a foreign country: they collectively remember things differently there.Footnote 63 But the comparison can be drawn on to illuminate twentieth-century Irish history. In Ireland, as in France, different narratives were competing to become the official one. What in particular made this Irish conflict different from the so-called Franco-French war were the outsider (from a nationalist perspective) unionist community and the outside interventions from Britain and the diaspora. Still, Ireland also has tended to conceive of its conflicts in historical terms, and to conceive of its history in terms of conflict: the Irish nation versus British imperialism, Catholics versus Protestants, natives versus settlers, nationalists versus unionists, and nationalists versus nationalists.
The years between 1912 and 1923 were marked by all of these struggles and can be seen as the Irish parallel to 1870–79 in that one narrative—broadly defined—won out in the political culture of what became Southern Ireland. The Free State may have fallen short of the vision of Ireland that inspired the Easter Rising in 1916—it may have shared continuities with the old regime, it may have made overtures to the small Protestant minority—but its identity was Catholic, Gaelic, and nationalist. Schools once again played a central role in shaping minds, though in Southern Ireland the Church was able to keep its monopoly on teaching Catholics. The Irish language was made an examined subject in secondary schools, and Irish history was used “to inculcate national pride and self-respect … by showing that the Irish race has fulfilled a great mission.”Footnote 64
In 1932, Fianna Fáil was elected. The movement was subtitled “The Republican Party” (italics mine), which positioned it as the only legitimate heir to the Irish revolution against the claims of both Cumann na nGaedheal, which had governed the Free State since the Civil War, and what was left of the IRA (though the differences between the three should not be overstated).Footnote 65 The Constitution of 1937 was the culmination of Fianna Fáil’s ambition to speak for the nation, to set down its beliefs, ideals, and aspirations. The Ireland it tried to speak to was one where the Catholic Church held a special position, where Irish was the first official language, the British Crown had been removed from internal affairs and was only allowed conditional powers to act for external purposes, and the Dublin government had jurisdiction over the whole island.Footnote 66 However, neither Fianna Fáil nor the constitution spoke to or for the Protestants of Northern Ireland.
Partition is a problem for scholars. The temptation is to follow the clear line on the map and divide Ireland into two distinct subjects for study.Footnote 67 This is not unreasonable: maps shape the way people understand their world, states makes sustained efforts to control and order the lives of their subjects, and borders often take account of existing differences. But partition was not merely a divide; it was also a disruption, a dislocation, a window, a mirror, a defensive wall, a crossing.Footnote 68 Just as partition was not inevitable, neither was the sectarian character that the Northern Ireland state took a certainty. The need to make concessions to the Catholic minority only came to an end as the South was drawn into civil war and Britain withdrew from Irish affairs. The pressure on the Northern Irish government now came from below, from its own supporters. Extreme Protestants lobbied for the criminal law to be used selectively; the Protestant churches undermined efforts to create a secular education system; local Unionist associations had ward boundaries gerrymandered to keep them in power.Footnote 69 Northern Ireland was a cold house for Catholics, so the Church set about building a state within a state, a Catholic countersociety to the Protestant state.Footnote 70 Again, there is a comparison to be drawn with the Third Republic. After the disappearance of political rivals such as Bonapartism and Orléanism, republicanism’s only real opponent was Catholicism. Although it was waged with restraint and with limited success, a culture war was fought between the two Frances, and the main battleground was the schools. In both countries, the integrating effect of two education systems, of two rival networks of sociability, and of two stables of newspapers fixed the divides.Footnote 71
Yet, in other ways, the resemblance is closer to the 1815–70 period, as the different worldviews and their different narrative forms were still struggling for mastery. The question of who ruled and by what right had not been settled: the theater of the past was not dark, the revolution was not over. For Southern Ireland the border became a bulwark against the unmanageable past breaking back into politics, sweeping everything away and ending the ending to the revolution. At the close of the 1960s, however, the defenses seemed about to be overwhelmed. Half a century after 1916, Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most formidable intellectual, blamed the latest IRA campaign in part upon “the great commemorative year [of 1966], a year in which ghosts were bound to walk.” The past remained unmastered. “The general calls for rededication to the ideals of 1916,” O’Brien continued, “were bound to suggest to some young men and women … that the way to return to them was through the method of 1916: violence, applied by a determined minority.”Footnote 72
III
Narrative is a useful way of conceiving of how individuals and groups relate to each other and how they both relate to time and space. Indeed, when exploring Northern Irish history, narrative is more useful than memory. To rework one of Nora’s metaphors, I have no intention of drawing up a line of battle on the shore in the manner of Caligula against the sea of memory.Footnote 73 This article is instead merely urging caution as to when and how memory is used.Footnote 74 As Jay Winter has pointed out, collective memory (to pick the most popular of the many terms employed) is an “absurd phrase which can mean virtually anything or nothing.” There is very little scholarly agreement as to how an individual, psychological, and neurological phenomenon is linked to imagined communities or if it can be linked at all.Footnote 75 The problem of where to locate a group’s memory function is typically overcome by suggesting that it can be found in social practices or sites—which also means that memories can live on after all the individual witnesses have died. (The problem of how the nature and mechanics of human memory constrain and determine the way in which past events are remembered is usually ignored altogether.)Footnote 76 In reflective works like Beiner’s Remembering the Year of the French, which is the only study of Irish memory to have had an impact on the wider discipline, a sense of both the individual and collective dimension is always present. Following an impressive survey of the theoretical literature, Beiner concludes that social memory—his preferred term—“does not merely reflect the total sum of individual memories in a community at any given time, but is grounded in a set of frames of reference by which individuals can locate and reinterpret their own recollections.”Footnote 77 Yet, many other Irish scholars use memory as little more than a metaphor. So, for example, wreath-laying ceremonies for IRA volunteers forget the people whom they have killed and the RUC’s George Cross Garden remembers the force’s dead.Footnote 78 Such approaches fail to face the fundamental fact that collective memory is ultimately located in individual people, not in practices and places.Footnote 79
Groups cannot remember or forget, and psychologists continue to debate the existence of repression, yet nations are often put on the psychoanalyst’s couch.Footnote 80 During the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine, as Roy Foster has explored, psychoanalytic vocabularies were employed. Some historians wrote that the nation had “suppressed the memory” through “survivor guilt,” so it now needed to “reappropriat[e] that buried experience” to gain “a fuller and more honest sense of who we are.”Footnote 81 Memory here was aligned with versions of psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, resisting the oppression of imperialism, modernity, and history. The trauma of the Famine had been repressed, but now the repressed had returned and was being worked through to heal and redeem the nation.Footnote 82
Kerwin Klein has argued that the postmodern challenge helped power the expansion of the memory business.Footnote 83 One form of defense was co-option, and this is where memory marched back into the field. Nora was, to use Robert Tombs’s phrase, “fighting postmodernism with its own weapons.”Footnote 84 Scholars can deconstruct their subjects while nonetheless avoiding hyper-relativism by selecting subjects of such magnitude that they cannot be kicked free of the earth. After all, almost no one would claim that the Battle of the Somme is a text or that Auschwitz-Birkenau is a discourse. Indeed, when White came explicitly to consider historical writing on the Holocaust, he was clear that “the facts of the matter set limits on the kinds of stories that can be properly (in the sense of both veraciously and appropriately) told about them.”Footnote 85 To take a local example, the essays in History and Memory in Modern Ireland explore subjects such as martyrdom, failed rebellion, famine, and war.Footnote 86 However, as Klein notes, the reverence for suffering and the focus on rituals and memorials help bring the new, academic definitions of memory closer to “its early meaning,” which was found “in the union of material objects and divine presence.”Footnote 87 The word “memory” therefore can be seen as offering hope and redemption at a time when “history” only provides doubt and disenchantment. At its very worst, this leads to historical writing that shares similarities with that of a century ago and that recasts the inner character of a race as a group’s memory. It should give pause for thought that Alice Stopford Green’s histories of Ireland as a nation spiritually bound together are littered with the phrase “the Irish national memory.”Footnote 88
IV
Narrative has unfortunate associations, too, but it also has some fortunate ones. Unlike memory, narrative invokes the future as well as the past and the present. Narratives allow complicated constructions of temporality—where past, present, and future are no longer separate categories—to be integrated and communicated.Footnote 89 Foster and Nora have argued that the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp’s ideas about folktales can be applied to the narrative forms of Irish nationalism and French Communism, respectively, with their fixed elements, roles assigned in advance, and promises of a happy ending. As narratives that have known endings, the narrativized Irish and Communist ideologies compelled and justified action.Footnote 90 And this is significant, as endings determine beginnings and both then give meaning to middles. Foster’s “own belief is that the most illuminating history is often written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never happened.”Footnote 91 The constitutional nationalists, republicans, and revolutionary socialists who shaped the history of Northern Ireland at the start of the Troubles were acting in expectation of a future that would never happen, not just imagining a past that had never happened.
Storytelling is universal: human beings throughout the world and throughout history have communicated, thought, and dreamed in narrative.Footnote 92 As White notes, there appears to be a “need not only to narrate but to give to events an aspect of narrativity.”Footnote 93 Individuals make sense of their own personal identities in a fashion that approaches how they come to understand characters in fictional stories.Footnote 94 The identity of a character emerges from the plot, which pulls together the events that befall them, their aims, their actions, and the contexts in which everything happens. Likewise, according to Ricoeur, individuals try to bring order and meaning to their world and control to their self by telling themselves stories or, in other words, helping to create the illusion of identities for themselves. Constructing these narratives allows individuals to act with purpose and meaning, as it allows them to organize their experiences into a series of causes and effects. Since these actions change their world, they also change their narratives. Just like with fiction, an individual’s identities are not fixed and can be reworked right up until the end of the story—so identity is a verb, not a noun.Footnote 95
For groups, history provides them with the appearance of shared narrative, a sense of continuity (issues to do with, for instance, divisions within groups and overlapping group memberships will be discussed below). A group’s representation of its history gives shape to a long past, a complicated present, and possible futures and therefore to its shifting identities.Footnote 96 “Narrative is the most effective expression of collective life over time,” writes Partner, “and the inevitable voice of nationalism, a collective identity story.”Footnote 97 In Irish nationalist historical writing, Ireland has often been portrayed as a character in its own story; the autobiographies of key figures such as Young Ireland’s John Mitchel weave together this character with their own. Mitchel’s Jail Journal “shrinks” “the general affairs of the country … to the dimensions of a single prosecution.”Footnote 98
Individual and group narratives and individuals and groups are connected to each other. The stories that an individual tells about him- or herself necessarily involve other people, and this entwining of personal narratives leads to shared, group identities.Footnote 99 All human beings possess such identities; indeed, the individual’s stories develop out of an interaction with the situation in which he or she finds him- or herself, including its group narratives and the language, values, and beliefs that these impart.Footnote 100 As the psychologist Dan P. McAdams pithily puts it, “The self comes to terms with society through narrative identity.”Footnote 101 The slow pace of infant development means that groups—the family, neighborhood, congregation—know who an individual is before he or she does.Footnote 102 An adolescent only starts to construct a convincing narrative after he or she has grasped his or her culture’s ideas about how a life story should be told. Gerry Adams, who came of age in 1960s Northern Ireland, has repeatedly presented his biography in ways that conform to Irish archetypes. He enjoyed an idyllic childhood in a poor but happy family living within the tight-knit Catholic community of Ballymurphy. When the violence of the Troubles broke into this closed world, Adams had the moral values needed to take part in the final rising of the Irish nation against British oppressors and local collaborators. An innocent, idealized Ireland was celebrated; the complexities of contemporary Ireland were ignored.Footnote 103 Revelations about the sexual abuse of children by his father and brother—what has become a tragically familiar Irish narrative—shook this life story. However, there was a narrative available that allowed Adams to integrate this disruption: his family needed to engage in a “healing process” just as the wider family of the Irish nation was after the trauma of the Troubles.Footnote 104
The gap between the individual, who receives the group narratives, and the group that stores these narratives is spanned because all narratives possess a point of view and can evoke empathy. The perspective of the author or implied author, which comes from the position taken in time and space relative to the content, influences the way the recipient understands and responds to the narrator. Indeed, as Ricoeur points out, the author or implied author is trying to press on the recipient “the force of conviction—the illocutionary force, we might say in the vocabulary of speech-act theory—that upholds the [particular] vision of the world.”Footnote 105 The recipient therefore can sympathize with the situation and empathize with the individuals and groups depicted in the narrative. Empathy overcomes two key problems associated with collective memory: empathy does not require the recipient to identify completely with the group’s narrative, nor does it require every member of the group to have an identical interpretation of the narrative. Recipients complete the narrative for themselves, redefining and reinterpreting what is already there in terms of their own narratives to produce individual readings of the group’s narratives. Individuals can fail to be moved by even the best-told stories, can subvert even the most-well-constructed ones, and can weave together even the most contradictory ones.Footnote 106 From the subjective point of view of Matt O’Leary, chair of the Derry Housing Action Committee in 1968, even the narrative forms of Communism and Catholicism, two of the greatest and most antagonistic stories ever told, could cohere.Footnote 107
A certain type of group narrative seems to be especially successful at generating empathy in recipients. Across the world, history is popularly understood as a series of political conflicts, with the most recent ones looming largest in people’s minds.Footnote 108 From legends and folktales to Hollywood blockbusters and best-selling paperbacks, the basic template for storytelling is conflict. It is a means of taming, possibly even resolving, people’s hopes and fears. With popular representations of the past, complex and contradictory details are lost, and lost quickly, as the narrative is told and retold.Footnote 109 What is usually retained is the plot arc of conflict. The passage of time and the passing on of the narrative will also lead to the aspects that reflect badly on the group being played down and the positive elements being played up, so as to enhance and protect its members’ sense of self.Footnote 110 When their own narratives are threatened by conflict and the emotional confusion it brings, individuals will turn to the group in an attempt to find explanation and reassurance. This usually takes the form of storytelling in a socially shared language, of giving back order. Both during the Troubles and afterward, people involved in every aspect of the Northern Irish conflict have felt compelled to tell their stories.Footnote 111 The more intense the emotion elicited by the situation, the more likely that a narrative will be constructed and spread. The act of sharing matters, as this strengthens social bonds and aids group integration—though this may come at the expense of relations with the group on the opposing side of the conflict.Footnote 112
Solidarity comes through empathy because emotions are difficult to fake and are therefore more trusted than other forms of interpersonal communication. Individuals are most confident of a shared bond when they share emotions. When two people do feel similar emotions, each can better understand the other’s perspective and can more accurately perceive the other’s views, aims, and actions. So, a person listening to an emotional story might find him- or herself thinking or acting in a way that is more appropriate to the situation of the storyteller than it is to the circumstances in which he or she finds him- or herself.Footnote 113 Direct contact is not necessarily needed to bring about this transformation. In an attenuated, mediated form, the author or implied author of a poem, book, newspaper, play, film, television program, song, ceremony, commemoration, museum exhibit, and so on can elicit empathy in his or her audience and thus shape its thoughts and actions.Footnote 114 The medium itself becomes involved in the dialogue between author and audience out of which a narrative is constructed in individual minds.Footnote 115 This is how an individual can learn and be taught to be part of a group, to participate in its narratives.
V
The Nationalist politician and Northern Ireland MP Eddie McAteer wanted to rewrite his group’s narratives. In 1966, with false rumors spreading that the anniversary of the Easter Rising would be marked by IRA violence, he “wondered sadly whether the most telling commemoration might be simply a moment of silence.”Footnote 116 Two years later, at the 1968 Nationalist Party conference, McAteer used the leader’s speech to warn that history was in danger of repeating itself as the broad-based campaign for civil rights that had been gearing up during that decade had started to stall. Republican violence seemed set to replace constitutional politics once again. He urged Catholics to “be realistic” because “we are an entrapped minority” and “are very much on our own here in the North of Ireland.” Dublin and the diaspora were content with the discontent of Northern Catholics and preferred the suffering of these second-class citizens to be silent or at least to follow the sanctioned script. Change then was not going to come from across the border or across the seas, but instead from across the communal divide. That was if change were to come at all: McAteer feared that “the way to power and advancement in the Unionist Party is by kicking the Nationalist people.” Despite this, he continued to preach patience. McAteer begged those “amongst us who are thinking about going home and taking up their pikes” not to be “goaded into precipitate action which could only set the clock back a very considerable time.”Footnote 117 Pikes were the principal weapon used by the United Irishmen and had come to symbolize the 1798 rising; it was difficult not to refer back to the old narrative.
McAteer was remembering the future in this speech, but the recent past allowed different futures to be imagined. In the United Kingdom as a whole, everyday life in many of its essential features stayed largely the same from the late 1890s until the early 1950s.Footnote 118 Rising prosperity then began to threaten traditional practices, to cause fragmentation and blurring, and to encourage individualism and self-interest. Northern Ireland undoubtedly lagged behind other parts of the United Kingdom: for example, full employment was never secured and female church attendance remained high.Footnote 119 But in the fifty years since the census of 1911 there had been a doubling of the proportion of both the Catholic and the total workforce employed in professional and managerial jobs.Footnote 120 In any case, the cultural consequences of the decline of deference throughout the West still reached Northern Ireland—via radio stations, commercial television, and paperback books—and ensured that the country did not fall too far off the pace. There was a decline in deference shown by the young toward their elders, women toward men, and homosexuals toward heterosexual norms. Away from the obvious transformations of the long 1960s, Northern Catholics were less deferential toward the storytellers in Dublin. An attitude survey carried out on the eve of the Troubles found that most Catholics felt that they were very different from people across the border, 24 percent did not even consider themselves Irish, and of those that did, 22 percent supported the existing constitutional settlement.Footnote 121
The breakdown of Communism can be seen as a loss of deference toward the Kremlin as the sole authority on the narrative of Marxism. The IRA leadership’s Marxist turn after the failed 1956–62 campaign can be understood as a way of rejecting the right of the dead generations to set the story for the living.Footnote 122 Northern Ireland’s revolutionary socialists also tried to distance themselves from the country’s most popular group narratives; neither Orange nor Green, they empathized instead with the New Left and a narrative that wove together the international and the local, blamed people’s problems on capitalism and imperialism, and offered socialism as a solution.
Nationalist parliamentarians had failed to win meaningful reforms, let alone end partition; IRA gunmen had failed to break the power and legitimacy of the Northern Irish state. Revolutionary socialists set out to use nonviolent action to create a crisis that would bring broad support, worldwide publicity, and pressure to bear on the government.Footnote 123 They had learned the same lesson as Martin Luther King, that it was “ineffective” to stage “token marches avoiding direct confrontation.”Footnote 124 For Eamonn McCann, the leading Derry radical, the “one certain way to ensure a head-on clash with the authorities was to organize a non-Unionist march through the city centre.”Footnote 125 He asked the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to sponsor the march and—disregarding McAteer’s warnings about the “company [they] were keeping”—the Belfast-based committee agreed.Footnote 126 On 5 October 1968, as McCann had hoped, the police were provoked into an overreaction in front of the television cameras.Footnote 127 Seeing innocent blood spilled appealed to emotion rather than to reason, and turned thousands of passive bystanders into active participants. A mass movement came into being.
The New Left narrative elicited a high degree of empathy from a tiny band of young people, convincing them that a socialist future was possible and that they should pursue unusual, risky actions. This new narrative helped break Northern Ireland out of the recurring story that McAteer feared, but it and its storytellers were unable to sustain and guide the mobilization of the thousands now on the streets. In his account of how beliefs and actions can be formed and changed, the psychologist Howard Gardner recognizes that it is “not easy for a story to gain a hearing.” He praises Mahatma Gandhi for taking on the difficult task of “develop[ing] a new story, tell[ing] it well, embody[ing] it … and help[ing] others understand why it deserves to triumph.”Footnote 128 McCann was skilled with words and devoted to the cause, yet he fell short of the standards that Gandhi and indeed King had shown were necessary for a chance of success. Where Gandhi and King had set moral examples for followers thinking of violence, McCann had joined rioters in the streets and thrown two petrol bombs.Footnote 129 McCann confessed to the New Left Review in April 1969 that “all that we managed to get across was that we were more extreme than the Civil Rights people.” “We failed absolutely to change the consciousness of the people.”Footnote 130
What was in the minds of the people of Derry? The violence of the Troubles is usually explained as a resurfacing of ancient tribal hatreds or as another round in a timeless ethnic conflict, yet, as Richard Bourke shows, it was a modern political struggle.Footnote 131 The Irish revolution was not over: the different democratic ideologies and their narratives were still contesting who ruled and by what right. The nationalist and republican narratives were embedded in poetry, books, newspapers, plays, films, television programs, songs, ceremonies, commemorations, monuments, and museum exhibits—put succinctly, Irish culture.Footnote 132 They remained relevant to that culture and were now reworked for the Troubles. Behind the barricades of “Free Derry,” a “liberation fleadh cheoil” (festival of music) was staged at which traditional Irish dancing and folk music were performed by artists from across the island. One of the highlights was Tommy Makem’s rendition of “Four Green Fields”: “I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage / In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me / But my sons had sons, as brave as were their fathers / My fourth green field will bloom once again.”Footnote 133 The revolutionary socialists, by contrast, were reduced to giving Black Power salutes when the Irish national anthem was played in Derry and composing new lyrics about civil rights to be sung to the tune of old rebel songs.Footnote 134 “In like manner,” as Marx observed of the 1848 revolutionaries, “a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue.”Footnote 135 McCann would later accept that his opponents were also better storytellers. John Hume, who became the leader of the civil rights movement and constitutional nationalism, managed to “perfectly match … the mood of the Catholic masses” with his words and actions, which were “reasonable, respectable, righteous, solid.”Footnote 136 When Derry came to choose between the two men in the March 1969 Northern Irish elections, Hume won with a record vote and McCann polled so low that he lost his deposit.Footnote 137
The new narrative also lost out to the old ones because its central message on the whole appealed to hope rather than feeding on fear. Studies suggest that hope is based on thinking, creative and flexible thinking, while fear is emotional, leading to a flight into a conservative position or even a fight with the perceived threat.Footnote 138 As Gardner concludes, “the simplest and most awful stories generally triumph.”Footnote 139 The gangs of Catholic youths that were involved in running battles with the police in Derry soon began singing republican songs and shouting slogans such as “Up the IRA.”Footnote 140 For those who did want to hit out, militant republicanism at this time had given them a group narrative that made sense of their situation and legitimized violence.Footnote 141 It taught them that Northern Ireland was inherently sectarian and incapable of reform, the IRA was the sole protector of their community, and armed struggle was the only path to a united Ireland. McCann explained to the New Left Review that the “idea of revolution is not at all alien to the Irish working class, as it is to the English, and when one calls for revolution, no matter what one actually demands there is always a link … to 1916 and the armed uprising.”Footnote 142 Looking in the French mirror is again revealing because the street fighting in France during ’68 was not followed by a full-scale terrorist campaign as it was in Northern Ireland—and, indeed, in West Germany and Italy. This difference is difficult to explain, yet it seems that the republican narrative helped dissuade the French from embracing the politics of the gun.Footnote 143 The older revolutionary narrative may also have played a role: power was to be taken by victorious crowds in the streets, not through armed conspiracies. And the latter were firmly associated with the far right after the Organisation de l’armée secrète’s campaign of bombings and assassinations at the start of the decade.Footnote 144 Setting narratives alongside wars, revolutions, economic changes, and social upheavals when trying to understand the start of the Troubles or the absence of armed struggle in France may appear absurd. However, a group narrative, “our story,” can attract a powerful emotional investment from its recipients and can impose constraints and directives upon their action.Footnote 145 This is something that memory, which Irish scholars tend to see as a present-minded construct, obscures.Footnote 146
McCann tried to grasp why his future had never happened by writing a story just before the communal conflagration of August 1969. “Once upon a time,” he began, “we all talked about the non-sectarian nature of the Civil Rights movement. Now we … are accepting, deepening, and physically drawing the line between Catholic and Protestant working-class people.” The last time the Catholic districts of Derry had erected barricades—after the “Long March” from Belfast at the start of the year—McCann had crossed over to meet the city’s Protestant working class. “I gave out the usual CR line,” he continued,
about wanting justice for all sections of the community, etc. and put it to them that the minority [Unionist] rule of Derry Corporation was indefensible. How could they justify it? A middle-age woman told me immediately: “But if you Catholics were in control there would be no life for us here. We would have to leave our homes and get out.” It was clear that every one of them actually believed that. It is ridiculous, I told them. They must have been brainwashed by the Unionist Party. Hadn’t they listened to our speeches? But then, look at it from another point of view. … All the attack was concentrated on the political philosophy which happens to be accepted by the overwhelming majority of Protestants. … In Derry, we socialists have finished up participating in the “Defence Association” locking ourselves inside the Catholic area.Footnote 147
This is where they would remain. For the fortieth anniversary of the 5 October 1968 march, McCann wrote an article complaining that the “fact that there was an international dimension to the North’s civil rights movement has virtually been written out of history.” It no longer fitted with present understandings. Subversive readings, contingencies, possible futures had all been smoothed away in narratives where almost everything had to happen the way it happened. The assumption was that the stories of the past had to be told “in terms of Orange and Green, Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist.”Footnote 148 The narratives of the Protestant and Catholic communities are woven around many of the same dates and events, but there are vast differences between them—especially between their imagined endings and the beginnings that these had then assigned. While these narratives remain essentially unchanged, they will remain constraints upon political compromises.
However, the revolutionary socialists themselves never succeeded in completely reinterpreting their new narrative away from the old ones: the nation still stood at the center of the story; the tale still ended with a united Irish republic, albeit a workers’ republic. Likewise, socialists under the Third Republic constructed a narrative about taking the “Bastilles” of the bourgeoisie and creating la République démocratique et sociale.Footnote 149 The power of the old narratives was acknowledged by the former leftist Anne Devlin in her 1984 play The Long March, which concludes with the character of Helen remembering “that time when we thought we were beginning a new journey: the long march. What we didn’t see was that it had begun a long time before with someone else’s journey; we were simply going through the steps in our time.”Footnote 150
VI
At the start of the 1990s, McCann published a book in which the thirteen people who were killed in Derry on 30 January 1972 were remembered by relatives, friends, and neighbors.Footnote 151 “Bloody Sunday” was the worst act committed by the British state during the Troubles, and as the subsequent inquiry was dominated by lies, further pain rather than justice was brought to Derry. McCann’s book helped to create the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign. Graham Dawson has studied this campaign in detail—looking at memories, the wider cultural context that shaped them, and the interactions between victims, politicians, and the state. Oral history is used (rare in Irish memory studies), but places and sites are again central to the analysis. Derry, he concludes, was a “traumatized community”: the city’s Catholics, even those who had not been alive in 1972, were trapped in a reality that eluded comprehension but yet was ceaselessly relived in bodily symptoms, neurotic behaviors, nightmares, and amnesia. The community was escaping from this trap and reclaiming their past by sharing with the outside world their memories of what had happened. Dawson was just one of those bearing witness to their campaign for “truth and justice.”Footnote 152
But do victims need to share their traumatic memories to recover? There is a growing body of research that suggests such an approach may have only a negligible effect or may even aggravate the problem. And what of the moral duty of the victims to break the silence and speak out? It does not necessarily follow that talking about violence in the past will prevent violence in the future, and the assumption that it does risks sanctifying the victims and sacralizing their memories. They become idealized innocent victims, stripped of their moral and political complexity; their memories are held up as a particular kind of truth with the power to counter totalizing narratives.Footnote 153 Dawson, for example, criticizes the new Bloody Sunday tribunal for asking the victims to “provide only ‘factual’ testimony capable of corroboration by other ‘sources.’” He is concerned that the inquiry may not therefore hold the British establishment to account for one of the great traumas of colonialism in Ireland; neither he nor the memories he quotes show much concern about the widespread rioting and IRA attacks on the security forces that happened in the months leading up to 30 January 1972. Despite its undoubted sophistication, Dawson’s article essentially ends up siding with the “local nationalist community” and its political allies in a “memory war”—memory having become by this point the most popular concept for constructing the past.Footnote 154 But Ireland’s past and future have not been pulled apart; the nation still has meaning and direction. “Our focus,” announced the group, the Bloody Sunday Initiative, that commissioned McCann’s book, “is on the future; helping to work for British withdrawal and to build an independent, pluralistic, [and] democratic Ireland.”Footnote 155 Bloody Sunday is treated as “a microcosm, a symbol of what Britain does in Ireland.”Footnote 156 It is woven into the old narratives of the centuries-long, unbroken struggle between the Irish people and British imperialism which will one day end with Ireland united and free.
Dawson’s work can be seen as part of a wider international trend. Partner has found examples of scholars working on Israel-Palestine also using postcolonialism and memory studies in such a way as to promote a nationalist narrative.Footnote 157 (I am not lurching here into a misguided intervention on behalf of one side or the other in the Israel-Palestine conflict; this is simply the example Partner has chosen to illustrate her arguments.) The introduction to a recent volume on Palestinian memory, for instance, claims that “making memories public affirms identity, tames trauma, and asserts Palestinian political and moral claims to justice.”Footnote 158 In an earlier article, Ahmad H. Sa’di takes up the “indispensable tool” of “Nora’s concept” to study Al-Nakba (the immense catastrophe of 1948) as “a site of Palestinian collective memory”—a lieu de mémoire that “connects all Palestinians to a specific point in time that has become for them an ‘eternal present.’” Al-Nakba “disturbed the ‘normal’ evolution of history,” ensuring that “Palestine has not developed in the same direction as other ‘Third World Countries.’” The lieu de mémoire enabled the construction of “a national narrative with which a whole community can identify” and with which to challenge “the society’s disintegration and the stifling international silence.” Again, memory is enlisted to put the nationalist narrative beyond scrutiny. “Sites of memory,” asserts Sa’di, “cannot be refuted, nor can they be subjected to a detached account or to a comparative analysis.”Footnote 159
Memory usually takes narrative form—and narratives can and should be questioned, studied from an outsider’s perspective, and compared to examples from different times and places. In the case of Northern Ireland, memory has hindered rather than helped this historical analysis: at worst, it has led to the narratives being sentimentalized and endorsed; at best, it has led to imagined futures and narrative theories being overlooked.Footnote 160 Irish historians should forget memory and remember narrative when they come to study group narratives, which, like a shard from a broken mirror, puts into the hand both a distorted reflection and a potential weapon.
