Remembering 1916

A pioneering analysis of how the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme have been remembered in Ireland since 1916.

This book asks how the commemorations of the Easter Rising, the Battle of the Somme, the 1978 Rebellion, and the H-Block Hunger Strike have become incorporated into present politics in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. The book begins and ends with the Easter Rising. The construction of 1916 as the pivotal moment of Irish history, identity, and memory has had lasting consequences for the Irish definition of political conflict and how this is defined through commemoration. It argues that the ghosts of 1916 are in many ways the ghosts of 1998.

This book explores the official 50th anniversary commemorations of the 1916 Easter Rising in the Irish Republic how the government reinvented the message of 1916 through the jubilee celebrations; the organization of various unofficial commemorations in Northern Ireland; and the significance of these for nationalist and unionist politics in the mid-1960s. The book also examines the 1966 anniversary celebration of the Rising from the perspectives of drama, performance, youth culture, and history.

The year 1916 witnessed two events that would profoundly shape both politics and commemoration in Ireland over the course of the following century. Although the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme were important historical events in their own right, their significance also lay in how they came to be understood as iconic moments in the emergence of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawing on history, politics, anthropology and cultural studies, this volume explores how the memory of these two foundational events has been constructed, mythologised and revised over the course of the past century. The aim is not merely to understand how the Rising and the Somme came to exert a central place in how the past is viewed in Ireland, but to explore wider questions about the relationship between history, commemoration and memory.

This collection addresses how models from ancient Greece and Rome have permeated Irish political discourse in the century since 1916. The 1916 Easter Rising, when Irish nationalists rose up against British imperial forces, became almost instantly mythologized in Irish political memory as a turning point in the nation's history that paved the way for Irish independence. Its centenary has provided a natural point for reflection on Irish politics, and this volume highlights an unexplored element in Irish political discourse, namely its frequent reliance on, reference to, and tensions with classical Greek and Roman models. Topics covered include the reception and rejection of classical culture in Ireland; the politics of Irish language engagement with Greek and Roman models; the intersection of Irish literature with scholarship in Classics and Celtic Studies; the use of classical referents to articulate political inequalities across gender, sexual, and class hierarchies; meditations on the Northern Irish conflict through classical literature; and the political implications of neoclassical material culture in Irish society. As the only country colonized by Britain with a pre-existing indigenous heritage of expertise in classical languages and literature, postcolonial Ireland represents a unique case in the field of classical reception. This book opens a window on a rich and varied dialogue between significant figures in Irish cultural history and the Greek and Roman sources that have inspired them, a dialogue that is firmly rooted in Ireland's historical past and continues to be ever-evolving.