This edited volume of essays is a valuable attempt to discuss the modes, methods and key narrative underpinnings of memory and memorialisation relating to Northern Ireland’s Troubles. The book largely divides itself thematically along the lines of group affiliation with chapters that consider the viewpoints of a variety of different participant groups in the conflict. Notable contributions by established scholars like Ian McBride (on experience and truth) and Ruán O’Donnell (on the Provisional I.R.A.) are complemented by new research from contributors like Aaron Edwards and John Mulqueen on arguably narrower topics (the British Army and Official I.R.A., respectively).
In terms of its strengths, the chapters all ably discuss the difficulties and challenges for academics studying memory and commemoration. James W. McAuley’s eloquently written chapter on loyalism discusses how the present informs the memorialisation of the past and how the collective memory of loyalism continuously attempts to yoke historical events from a highly selective canon of loyalist history to the present-day challenges they face. Ruan O’Donnell’s chapter gathers together a wide range of sources and demonstrates the irony of how the provisional republican movement can at times be fixated with the public representation of their own genealogy despite their being ‘self-professed inheritors of the unelected United Irishmen, Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.), Irish Citizen Army, and original Óglaigh na hÉireann [who] required neither mandates nor popular acclaim’ (p. 52). The appearance of historical commemoration within the group’s newspapers from as early as 1970, the printing of publicity posters and the publication of the memoirs of select activists is indicative of a conscious effort to not only take possession of their own version of the past but to have it accepted more widely. This tendency is also apparent in Margaret O’Callaghan’s chapter on the 1966 and 1976 republican commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising, the former successfully subverted by a united republican movement, the later demonstrating clearly both the growth in activism during the Troubles and the curiously presbyterian tendency of the I.R.A. to split.
In stark contrast to both republican and loyalist efforts at public commemoration is Aaron Edwards’s insightful chapter on the British Army’s memorials of their fallen. These were often hidden from the public and were largely removed at the end of their operations in Northern Ireland when the bases and other facilities that housed them were demolished. Rightly included within the work is the idea that memorialisation is more than the construction and maintenance of physical memento mori. Remembering Northern Ireland’s long war, Edwards argues, has remained useful within the British Army, particularly given the counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan they have more recently been deployed on.
A perennial problem with almost all edited volumes nowadays is the maintenance of subject balance among the contributions as a whole, and while an editor can only work with what their authors provide them, three (and arguably four) chapters on republican memorialisation in this work are answered by only one on loyalists and a chapter on the British Army. Another chapter could have usefully dealt with the R.U.C., another on peace movements and further chapters on ‘moderate’ nationalism and unionism are also notable by their absence. The editor’s introduction acknowledges that a reader’s report on the manuscript identified this as a problem, though he curiously contends in a footnote that, because the S.D.L.P. and Alliance Party have no murals or parades, they have no commemoration and that mainstream unionism’s links to the Orange Order ‘render problematic the designation “moderate”’ (p. 8). Though this view narrows the scope of the work significantly, the publisher’s decision to print an Irish tricolour flag on the spine of the hardback edition is also an indication of the work’s limited view of what commemoration can be and who can legitimately do it. Smyth’s own contribution, a poignant chapter on Milltown Cemetery’s republican plots, focuses, of course, on the dead republican combatants and, while it mentions the 166 British military dead also buried there (from the First and Second World Wars), also interred at the same site are many victims of the conflict who, despite being unaffiliated and unconnected to any political movement, are remembered and memorialised privately all the same.
Cathal Goan’s publication in the final chapter of his own father’s formerly hidden account of being abducted by the I.R.A. in 1974 provides some redress from the active participant bias Smyth believes is inescapable. But the use of scholarship, memoir and documentary film on, for example, John Hume could have been explored. (Recent work such as P. J. McLoughlin, John Hume and the revision of Irish nationalism (Manchester, 2012), Sean Farren (ed.), John Hume: in his own words (Dublin, 2017), and Maurice Fitzgerald’s documentary In the name of peace: John Hume in America (2017) come to mind.) In doing so, it would have opened up discussion of memory as a still contested space while keeping well within the boundaries of the ‘remembering the Troubles’ brief.
Overall, the scholarship within the individual chapters of this volume is of real merit and it contains some important, interesting and highly readable contributions to our understanding of memorialisation in Northern Ireland at present. Although the imbalance of subject matter makes the work less than definitive, this book remains of deep interest in terms of its methodology and significant in terms of its findings to all scholars of recent Irish political history.
