Memory and History in Northern Ireland

In a bitterly ironic way, the events of 'Bloody Sunday' — 30 January 1972 in Derry city — demonstrate the founding premises of the History Workshop movement. These terrible occurrences were a striking instance of the historical agency of the obscure and ordinarily powerless. A handful of privates and junior NCOs transformed Irish history. Responsibility for the day's events, of course, goes much wider and higher up, extending to senior politicians and generals. Even so, these few humble men — almost none even a full Corporal, let alone anything grander in the military hierarchy — took an initiative which displayed to the full the relatively autonomous agency of the lowly. These men repeatedly took aim at unarmed, unoffending people and shot them dead, and in doing so they changed the course of British and Irish history.

Very few people in recent times can have been more completely anonymous than Lance Corporal F and Private G, who between them killed at least six of the day's victims. Usually nowadays, when a newspaper tells us 'a woman has been charged . . .' or TV news reports that 'a well-known public figure is . . .', a few minutes' search among blogs, websites and other arenas of cybergossip will (if one has enough prurient curiosity) reveal the person's name, or at least the name which some believe it to be. This does not seem to be the case for the initialled soldiers of Bloody Sunday, whose incognitos have been extraordinarily well preserved — for very obvious and understandable reasons, even though one of the main killers is believed now to be dead.

Bloody Sunday is at the heart of Graham Dawson's fine though inevitably contention-arousing book on memory and trauma in contemporary Northern Ireland.¹ Making Peace with the Past? is just part — though perhaps the single most probing and intellectually sophisticated product — of a rapidly building wave of writing on, and of, memory and commemoration of Ulster's violence and its victims. This includes academic and journalistic works, official and quasi-official reports, local community publications and ones by lobby groups of various kinds, as well as a mass of vernacular forms from websites to mural paintings and songs — and, of course, the ever-swelling number of physical (as opposed to virtual) commemorative sites. Ruth MacKay recently asked in this journal, in relation to Spain: 'How does one write contemporary history while having to step around unmarked graves?'² In Northern Ireland there are very few unmarked graves — most notoriously, those of a handful of victims who were 'disappeared' by the IRA, allegedly under the direct orders of Gerry Adams. Indeed the culture of commemoration there has revolved to a great degree around very prominently marked graves, as well as memorial plaques, murals, books, songs, websites and much more.³

The wave of Northern Irish 'memory studies', and analyses of commemorative cultures relating to the recent Troubles, is in its turn part of the bigger tide of investigations of collective memory which has been washing over Irish intellectual life — as it has in so many other places — for several years. Irish historical, social and cultural studies were not in the global forefront of this trend (that pole position usually being accorded to the French, with such long-totemic figures as Maurice Halbwachs and Pierre Nora) but have certainly contributed prolifically to it in the past decade or so. As elsewhere, writings on memory, commemoration and remembrance of war, disaster and trauma have commanded most attention; with an especially prominent place occupied by studies of the 1914-18 war. A particular Irish twist is, however, given to this theme with much discussion of how 'memory' — and forgetting — of the Great War has...