A volume of essays about the relationship between past and present in Irish society.

Discussing the relationship between the past and the present in Irish society, this title outlines the ways in which Irish identities have been shaped by oral tradition, icons and images, rituals, and re-enactments. It examines pivotal moments in Irish history, such as the 1798 rebellion, the Famine, the Great War, and the Northern Ireland troubles, investigating the ways in which they have been recalled, commemorated and mythologised. Beginning with the conviction that commemoration has its own history, the essays address questions concerning the workings of communal memory. How have particular political and social groups interpreted, appropriated and distorted the past for their own purposes? How are collective memories transmitted from one generation to the next? Why does collective amnesia work in some situations and not in others? What is the relationship between academic history and popular memory?

1. Introduction: memory and national identity in modern Ireland Ian McBride
2. Martyrdom and memory in the seventeenth century Alan Ford
3. Remembering 1798 Roy Foster
4. Famine memory and the popular representation of scarcity Niall O Ciosain
5. The star-spangled shamrock: memory and meaning in Irish America Kevin O'Neill
6. 'Where Wolfe Tone's statue was not': Joyce, monuments and memory Luke Gibbons
7. 'For God and for Ulster': the Ulstermen on the Somme David Officer
8. Commemoration in the Irish Free State: a chronicle of embarrassment David Fitzpatrick
9. Monument and trauma: varieties of remembrance Joep Leerssen
10. Northern Ireland: commemoration, elegy, forgetting Edna Longley
11. 'No lack of ghosts': memory, commemoration and the state in Ireland D. George Boyce.