Transforming 1916
Meaning, memory and the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Cork University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright Page

1. The Official Commemoration
The blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar in March 1966 happened just in time for the golden jubilee of the Easter Rising. The Birmingham Post reported that the shattered stump served as ‘a convenient and symbolic vantage point’ for Irish television cameras during the opening parade...

2. Alternatives to the Official Commemoration
Writing in the Irish Socialist in June 1966, Michael O’Riordan applauded those who had offered critical readings of Irish society during the jubilee of the Easter Rising. He welcomed them as an important antidote to the ‘adman’s clichés of Lemass and Co., who sound more and more as if...

3. ‘The Other Place ’: Commemoration in Northern Ireland
In September 1966, assessing his achievements in office, the prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, expressed his belief that Ulster was ‘with it’ and forging ahead towards the 1970s.1 The language of modernisation, however awkward, was present north of the border as...

4. Calling Up the Dead
Ferdia MacAnna, writing of his part in the pageant at Croke Park, scripted and directed by his father Tomás, recalled the issue of payment for boys who had minor roles: ‘we made representations to the management . . . At one stage there was talk of a strike: there would be no new...

5. Where Nelson’s Pillar was Not
When commissioned to design the central sculpture for the Garden of Remembrance, Oisín Kelly was concerned about the ‘general difficulty of expressing the heroic in our time’. He intended in his design to create a new nationalist iconography. ‘There is no tradition on which to build,’ he...

7. ‘What to Do with their Lovely Past? ’Promoting the Commemoration Abroad
‘They dream their lives away casually here,’ Jimmy Breslin wrote of Ireland in the New York Herald Tribune in 1966, ‘but at the same time the dreaming is what makes them. Dreaming of sex comes out far better than sex.’ The wise man might riddle what dream had come true fifty years...
E-ISBN-13: 9781908634238
Print-ISBN-13: 9781859184868
Print-ISBN-10: 1859184863
Publication Year: 2012
OCLC Number: 809317413
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Transforming 1916