Fearghal McGarry’s group biography of 1916 rebels associated with the Abbey Theatre is engagingly written, scholarly, and beautifully produced and illustrated. It commands a wide popular appeal while also making a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ‘revolutionary generation’. The first section opens with the 1966 ceremony to honour seven 1916 veterans associated with the Abbey, and the unveiling of the plaque that inspired the book. A chapter on each Abbey rebel’s early life and influences follows before section II offers a short but skilful narrative of the Rising itself, and the punishment that followed, from the perspectives of the Abbey rebels. Importantly, the story does not end in 1916, and later lives are carefully scrutinised and contextualised in turn in section III.

The rebels under survey range from usher Ellen Bushnell and prompter Barney Murphy to actors Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh and Arthur Shield. Working class voices – and those generally less inclined to put their experiences on paper – remain relatively neglected in the historiography and McGarry works hard to shed as much light on previously obscure figures as the available sources (including recently released Military Service Pension applications) will allow. What 1916 meant to these rebels for the remainder of their lives, and their experiences after independence was achieved in twenty-six counties, was as varied as their backgrounds. Arthur Shields, for example, toured the U.S. with the Abbey and acted in Hollywood, while at the same time feeling increasingly isolated from ‘de Valera’s Ireland’. There was little room for women like Helena Molony in the mainstream politics of the new state. She was described by a senior Dublin Castle official in 1916 as the ‘most dangerous woman in Ireland’ (p. 180) and remained a passionate but marginalised activist after 1922, spending her final years drinking heavily and living hand to mouth in Dublin.

Much of The Abbey rebels is not about trying to understand what actually happened in 1916, but an elucidation of the ways in which the Rising was repackaged and reproduced over the years by the rebels themselves, or to serve the needs of the present. A final chapter assesses how they remembered 1916, and attempted to shape the collective memory of the Rising in the decades afterwards. Indeed, memory has become an important medium through which to understand the Ireland that emerged after independence. Just as the ways in which the Rising has been remembered by individuals, and their experiences after it was all said and done, are starting to be revealed, so too has the more traditional, top-down concept of commemoration and commemorative practice been placed under greater scrutiny.

Remembering 1916, edited by McGarry and Richard Grayson, interrogates memory from two perspectives: commemorative tradition and ‘historical memory’, a much broader definition of commemoration that incorporates individuals, families, and communities. The volume takes a valuable comparative look at the Rising and another pivotal 1916 event: the battle of the Somme. As the editors point out, the importance of ‘1916’ for Ireland stretches further than the wide-ranging consequences of the events themselves. The significance of the Somme and the Rising is seen in the ways in which they ‘came to be retrospectively understood as iconic moments in the emergence of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic’ (p. 1).

Part I of the book focuses on broader theories and practices regarding ‘historical memory’ and features essays by Guy Beiner, Dominic Bryan, and Roisín Higgins. Part II addresses memorialisation of the Rising and the Somme more directly in chapters by David Fitzpatrick, David Brundage, and each of the editors. The relationship between remembering and literary and material cultures is explored in part III by Heather L. Roberts, Nicholas Allen, and William Blair, while Margaret O’Callaghan, Kevin Bean, and Jonathan Evershed explore the memory of 1916 through the prism of the ‘Troubles’. Individually and collectively, readers will find much of value in each of the chapters produced in the volume.

Contributors are under no illusion about the prevalence and endurance of the desire to commemorate 1916, culminating in, as David Fitzpatrick puts it, an ‘orgy of centennial commemoration’ (p. 65) in 2016. It is clear that there is more to this than the simple passing of 100 years. For Dominic Bryan, the events that fall under the banner of the ‘decade of centenaries’ are ‘understandably deemed to be vitally important events in contemporary Irish history’ (p. 28). But the very idea of attaching worth to a centenary is arbitrary, with value added only because we deem it should be so. Moreover, this particular range of events is worthy of special consideration now because ‘there is a political context in the present that makes them important’ (p. 28). This point is made clear by lack of uniformity in the periodisation of the ‘decade’ itself. Even Bryan’s own reference to the ‘period, running from around 2012 to 2022’ is unsatisfactory.

An important achievement of the recent scholarship has been to uncover previously neglected or sidelined voices and experiences. A chapter on McGarry’s Abbey rebels is fruitfully followed by Grayson’s study of west Belfast unionist fighters at the Somme. As Grayson makes clear, in comparison to some rather well documented rebels, uncovering the individual experiences of the men who fought and died in the Great War is more challenging. Commemoration of the Somme, like the Rising, presents a neat narrative of unionist service and sacrifice, but the reality is much more complex. Looking at where former Ulster Volunteer Force men were killed, for instance, shows that many died away from the Somme and were subsequently ‘lost’ or displaced from the dominant narrative. Something similar can be seen among cohorts of republican rebels where clear hierarchies very quickly emerge, with the signatories of the proclamation very much at the top. The political use of commemoration of events like the Rising and Somme make it convenient (perhaps necessary) for awkward and uncomfortable experiences and narratives to be brushed aside.

Roisín Higgins points out that the Easter Rising ‘was itself a commemorative event’ (p. 51) and those who lived through 1916 were clearly influenced themselves by commemoration. Heather Roberts’s chapter explores the influence of the 1798 centenary on the rebels of 1916 (McGarry notes the same impact among the Abbey rebels). Beiner, indeed, points out that ‘the generation that came of age in 1916 was schooled on quasi-historical mythology’ – whether through the ‘commemorative culture of national martyrology’ made popular by the Fenians or the annual parades of the Orange Order – before 1916 itself became subject to ‘instant mythologising’ (p. 15). Beiner’s idea of ‘prememory’, whereby events are being interpreted and understood in the context of history, and even as history, while they are taking place, is reflected in David Fitzpatrick’s ‘instant histories’. Ulster Day (1912), Easter week (1916), and Anti-conscription Day (1918) were all, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates, carefully managed and crafted pieces of street theatre, experienced by both actors and observers as if they were ‘living out history and in history’ (p. 65).

At the heart of much of the collection is the idea of ‘ownership’ and the ways in which the Rising and the Somme were used for political purposes in the decades that followed. David Brundage’s study of the varying ways in which the Rising influenced Marcus Garvey, Mike Quill, and Seamus Murphy suggests that ‘Remembering 1916 in America could never be the property of Irish-America alone’ (p. 151). But, he argues, this commemoration was less charged and polemical than it was in Ireland. This is especially so after the outbreak of renewed violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. Faced with the Provisional I.R.A.’s claim to be the ‘heirs’ of the men of 1916, the Irish government adopted what Margaret O’Callaghan describes as a ‘very low-key commemorative acknowledgment of 1916’ (p. 208), including a short-lived attempt in the 1970s to confine state commemoration of the revolutionary period to a single day, St Patrick’s Day. At the same time, Jonathan Evershed reminds us that the ghosts of Carson and Craig, of the Somme, ‘remain active agents of the politics of the present’ in Northern Ireland, potentially as disruptive as ‘those of Connolly, Pearse et al’ (p. 243). William Blair’s chapter examining the Ulster Museum’s approach to 1916 concludes by stating that the peace process has encouraged a shift from ‘passive to active’, as an earlier desire to avoid ‘the politics of identity’ has been replaced with ‘a conscious effort to contribute to the public policy agendas of “shared history” and “shared future”’ (p. 203). But polarisation and contested memories will no doubt continue as the ‘decade of centenaries’ carries on. And 1916 was supposed to be the easy part.