Memory Ireland: Volume 3: The Famine and the Troubles

3 Commemorating the Great Irish Famine1840s–1990s

91 3 Commemorating the Great Irish Famine 1840s–1990s M A RG A R ET K E L L E H E R “Irish anniversaries,” according to historian Ian McBride, “have an uncanny way of making history themselves” (McBride 2001, 304). Introducing a collection of essays entitled History and Memory in Modern Ireland, McBride observes, “In Ireland, as is well known, the interpretation of the past has always been at the heart of national conflict . . . What is so striking about the Irish case is not simply the tendency for present conflicts to express themselves through the personalities of the past, but the way in which commemorative rituals have become historical forces in their own right” (ibid., 1–2). McBride may overstate the singularity of “the Irish case” in this regard; more persuasive, however, is his diagnosis that “there is no evidence” that “this preoccupation is abating; if anything, questions of collective memory and commemoration have assumed a new prominence in recent years” (ibid., 3). The sesquicentenary of the Great Irish Famine initiated historical debates from, and indeed about, its very beginning. For some historians, its commencement in 1995 rather than 1996 was premature;1 more widely criticized was the government’s decision to end official commemoration of the Famine early, in the summer of 1997—an ironic echo of the fatal declaration by another administration, 150 years earlier, that the crisis was past. Govern1 . For a discussion of the problems in dating the 1840s famine, see Ó Gráda 1999, 37–46. 92 Margaret Kelleher ment ministers and some historians moved with some unseemly haste to the next anniversary event: the marking of the 200th anniversary of the 1798 rebellion. Yet even this short three-year period witnessed a flood of publications on the Famine, many conferences and symposia, and an ambitious if diffuse government-funded program of events (including a school essay competition, scholarships for students from developing countries, conferences , a lecture series in the United States and Australia, commemoration concerts, commemorative postage stamps, sponsorship of television documentary programs, and so on) accompanied by innumerable locally initiated activities (the restoration of Famine graveyards, erection of Famine monuments , research into the local effect of the Great Famine, publications in local history, to name some examples; see the booklet Ireland’s Commemoration and Awareness [1996]). FA MINE A S TR AUM A? The “industry of commemoration” and, more specifically, some of the Famine activities and commentaries of this period have been sharply criticized by Roy Foster in his volume The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland. The “150th anniversary” (and in marked contrast to the centenary of the Famine in the 1940s) was, according to Foster, “big business”: “It was linked to exploiting tourist sites and attracting interest from the Irish diaspora” (Foster 2001a, 29). Although acknowledging some “historical pay-off” in Ireland, in the form of “some first-rate and important local research, a number of extremely worthwhile conferences, and a shift among historians toward a consensus of concentration upon the role of the British government,” his evaluation of the overall significance of the commemoration (in an essay entitled “Theme-parks and histories”) is sweepingly critical: But the effect of the commemoration year (or years) was to highlight the issues of guilt and pain, driven by the idea that some sort of empathy could be achieved, and a therapeutic catharsis brought about. The language of popular psycho-therapy replaced that of historical analysis. This was popularized by a strange alliance of populist journalists, local political wheeler-dealers, erratic rock stars and those born-again newly Irish Eng. Commemorating the Great Irish Famine 93 Lit. academics. . . . Meanwhile in the USA, a movement began among politicians in search of the ethnic vote; the Famine was defined as genocide in certain states and put on the curriculum of “Holocaust Studies.” (Ibid., 30–31)2 In a choice of vocabulary itself worthy of notice, he writes, “Post-traumatic stress disorder stalked the land, buried ‘memories’ were indiscriminately exhumed, and ‘survivor guilt’ was ruthlessly appropriated from Holocaust studies and exhibited in the market place” (ibid., xv). The “overall effect,” he concludes, “while it boosts popular interest in a kind of Irish history, may not really lead to much illumination” (ibid., 31). Foster’s distaste for what he sees as a popularizing trend among Irish historians recurs throughout this collection of essays, accompanied by comments on “the dangers of new deconstructed...