Appendix 3: The Oral History Archive Storytelling and oral history initiatives have long since been acknowledged as an important and distinctive element of peacebuilding and reconciliation. They have assumed added significance in Northern Ireland where a lack of consensus on the causes of conflict and the appropriate mechanisms for dealing Continue Reading
Remembering 1916 at the Ulster Museum
By William Blair The First World War is many things – terrible, epic, dramatic, tragic and compelling – but in Northern Ireland today it is, perhaps most importantly, a barometer on our ability as a ‘post-conflict’ society to deal with a complex and divisive period of our history. That is Continue Reading
Turning to the past: global contexts for the 2016 commemorations
By Niall Ó Dochartaigh In this year of peak commemoration much of the reflection on 1916 has been infused with the spirit of global history, locating the Rising in geopolitical and transnational contexts. The commemorations themselves are far less often discussed in this broader context however. The Rising was acted out Continue Reading
The Other 1916
By Jane McGaughey Nearly a decade ago, I was on a tour bus coming back to Belfast from a day-trip along the Antrim coast. The tour guide was a very charismatic woman keen on imparting all the secret tales and modern myths of the region, from the bombings of the Europa Continue Reading
What if the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions had swapped places on the Somme?
By Richard Grayson The nationalist 16th (Irish) and unionist 36th (Ulster) Divisions on the Somme in 1916: two divisions, two phases of the British army’s most infamous battle of war, very different results, and disparate memories. But what if their experiences had been different? What if, instead of fighting on Continue Reading
Instant History: Ulstermen at the Somme, July 1916
By David Fitzpatrick What historian of revolutionary Ireland can claim to have remained utterly impervious to seduction during the current orgy of centennial commemoration? The study of how distant events have been remembered is suddenly both popular and profitable, offering almost irresistible attractions. The core documentation for public commemorative practices Continue Reading
The names that stilled her childish play: the women of 1916 and the women of ‘98
By Catriona Kennedy [full_width] [/full_width] That the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 provided the men of 1916 with a set of heroic exemplars is well documented. Figures like Theobald Wolfe Tone could be harnessed to the different political visions of the rising’s leaders: his death a model of republican sacrifice for Continue Reading
The Easter Rising and India
By Joseph McQuade On Good Friday, 1930, a group of revolutionaries seized the armouries of the police department and the auxiliary forces in Chittagong, Bengal. Led by Surya Sen, a prominent Bengali freedom fighter, the revolutionaries referred to themselves as the Indian Republican Army, or IRA. The timing of the raid Continue Reading
“‘an extraordinary secretary bird’: writing, history and Roger Casement’
By Alison Garden O WHAT has made that sudden noise? What on the threshold stands? It never crossed the sea because John Bull and the sea are friends; But this is not the old sea Nor this the old seashore. What gave that roar of mockery, That roar in the Continue Reading
Revisionism Revised – by Revisionists
By Jim Smyth [full_width] [/full_width] In 2011, deploring the ‘fundamental hypocrisy’ of official Ireland’s attitudes towards the 1916 rebellion, the (self-described) revisionist, and polemicist, Eoghan Harris, questioned the wisdom of any centennial ‘military display’; ’the republic has no right’, he declared, ‘to parade troops past the GPO’. In 2015, however, Continue Reading
Revising the Rising Revised
By Arthur Aughey I was struck by a comment of Ruth Dudley Edwards’ (2015) on public interest in the anniversary of the 1916 rebellion. ‘All Ireland seems to be hosting history fight clubs these days’. Headline exaggeration apart, her point is well-made. Those who have observed the way in which 1916 Continue Reading
Dressing-up and Make Believe
By Roisín Higgins [full_width] [/full_width] Historians have identified a cult of commemoration in the nineteenth century which expressed itself through the erection of monuments and the marking of anniversaries and jubilees. It was fed, some argue, by a fear of cultural amnesia.[i] Pierre Nora famously claimed that ‘We speak so Continue Reading
Democracy and the Right to Resist in the Ulster Covenant and Proclamation of the Irish Republic
By Colin Reid [full_width] [/full_width] In the hours before becoming First Minister of Northern Ireland in January, Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, caused a political storm by announcing her refusal to officially mark the centenary of the Easter Rising. ‘Easter 1916 was a very violent attack Continue Reading
Republican theory, Irish practice
By Philip Pettit [full_width] [/full_width] In 1782 the Westminster Parliament was pressed into repealing a law of 1720 under which the Dublin Parliament could have its resolutions nullified in London; this law had been designed, in its own words, ‘for the better securing the dependency of the kingdom of Ireland on Continue Reading
Why every school in the Republic of Ireland should be presented a copy of Eoin MacNeill’s 1916 Memorandum
By Matt Kelly According to Circular 0047/2015, issued in September 2015 by the Department of Education and Skills, every primary and post-primary school in the Republic of Ireland was to be presented with the national flag and a copy of the 1916 Proclamation in England and Irish. ‘It is intended’, Continue Reading
‘The Darkest Blot on Ireland’s History’: the Easter Rising, the Executions and Scottish Newspaper Reportage
By Helen O’Shea The execution of the Easter Rising rebels has been pivotal to a widely accepted, yet rarely questioned narrative in the Irish and British popular historical imagination – that initial widespread condemnation of the rebels’ supposedly futile actions gave way to a surge of sympathy in the wake Continue Reading
1916 and ‘Anti-Imperialism’
By Marc Mulholland Of all the 1916 leaders, Pádraic Pearse has suffered the most calamitous collapse of reputation. Once acknowledged as first amongst equals, he now tends to be tucked away somewhere in the background in those familiar artistic depictions of the Proclamation’s signatories. His eccentric spiritualism and notorious enthusiasm Continue Reading
1916: Red Rag to John Bull
By Joep Leerssen For the past years, I have been working on French-German enmity over Alsace-Lorraine between 1840 and 1914, and the continuity of that enmity, and the agency of intellectuals maintaining that continuity: Quinet, Venedey, Mommsen, Fustel de Coulanges, Strauss, Treitschke, Renan, Thomas Mann, Durkheim. It is remarkable to see Continue Reading
Temporality and Legitimacy in Violent Conflicts: 1916 in Contemporary Context
By Jennifer Todd Introduction Most Irish people in 1916 did not want an armed rising. If the British connection had been the source of many of Ireland’s ills over the last three centuries, over the last three decades the state had begun to make amends. There had been a comprehensive Continue Reading
The Forgotten Inhabitants of Kilmainham Gaol, 1916
By Laura McAtackney Having spent much of my time since 2012 conducting fieldwork in, and thinking about the material remains of, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, one would assume that the leaders of the Easter Rising and their legacies would be paramount in my thoughts. They are not. While Patrick Pearse, Continue Reading
Party Like It’s 1991
By Brian Hanley For some time we Irish historians have been congratulating ourselves on how an array of primary sources (particularly the Bureau of Military History Witness Statements and the Military Service Pension Files) have opened up new vistas for researching the revolutionary period. It has even been suggested that Continue Reading