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If, as some authors argue, the First World War marked a ‘satire of circumstance’ for the young men and women of Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century, for Irish people the events of 1914–18 marked no less a panoply of contradictions. Characterised as the first modern war where technology and communications enhanced, on scales heretofore never witnessed, the capacity to obliterate life with extreme regularity and ferociousness, the recruitment needs of all sides in the conflict implicated sections of the population which, until then, were immune from military experience and modern warfare. Enacted, to a great extent, by a volunteer army, recruited and trained ‘for the duration’ and whose commitment to military life was to extend no longer than the conflict, the war necessitated the state to undertake a massive drive to enter into the hearts and minds of young men and women whom it sought to recruit. While to ‘fight for one's country’ or one's empire, was not in itself a new phenomenon (indeed the heroic soldier of the literary consciousness had entered the imagination of the young long before the war), the call to arms nevertheless was a structured, planned activity which, through a variety of means, sought to tap into a suite of cultural and political prejudices of the day. Despite the common references found in recruitment propaganda of all participating states, there are, equally, strategies in this literature which reveal the different recruitment policies observed by individual combatant states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations This extract from Patrick Pearse's renowned oration of 1915 at the graveside of the Fenian, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, reminds us of the powerful political and symbolic role of public commemoration in the politics of everyday life in early twentieth-century Ireland. The previous century had provided several important precedents for commemorating the death of political leaders as the funerals of O'Connell, Parnell and MacManus testify. Commemoration, however, was not confined to individual leaders. The politics of memory generated by the centenary celebrations of the 1798 rebellion, represented through the fusion of the heroic priest-leader and the archetypal peasant in public statuary, illustrates that collective memory could also be aroused through the remembrance of an anonymous rebel soldier. As Whelan puts it, in his examination of official and popular readings of the rebellion, ‘besides its Catholic-nationalist reading, the centenary was pivotal in knitting together the strands of nationalist opinion which had unravelled in the acrimonious aftermath of the Parnell split’. Over two decades later, commemorating the dead who served in Irish regiments in the First World War would similarly challenge cultural allegiances in Ireland, both in nationalist and unionist quarters. The peace parades of July 1919 established the initial framework for commemoration. The public spectacle staged in cities and towns around the country in 1919 provides insights into how the war was calibrated in the popular imagination at a moment when the Home Rule crisis was not yet resolved and the Easter rebellion of 1916 was fresh in the public's memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power of the dead to disturb the living is explored in James Joyce's short story ‘The Dead’. Gretta's resurrection of the memory of the long-deceased Michael Furey, entombed in a lonely graveyard in Oughterard, in the western county of Galway, displaces her husband Gabriel's cultural and emotional coordinates. From the comfort of their room in Dublin's fashionable Gresham Hotel, Gabriel is confronted with his wife's past. Gabriel's belief that he must look to continental Europe to enhance his intellectual formation, rather than towards the provincial backwater of a city from which he comes or from the west of Ireland where Irish cultural revivalists locate their centre of intellectual gravity, is completely shaken. The revelation that the memory of the dead can inform so much of Gretta's identity challenges his optimism that the future of his marriage and his life rests upon the absorption of European cultural traditions. Joyce's deployment of memory and spatial categories – the Irish west and the Gaeltacht, continental Europe, Dublin's opera venues, the central plain of Ireland – to anchor his story of early twentieth-century Dublin life, reinforces the contention that time and space, memory and identity get calibrated in fractured ways and the paths of history, nightmarish as they might be, can never be totally relegated to the tomb. This book has attempted to examine the routes by which European history literally travelled into the Irish imagination through the loss of thousands of Irish soldiers' lives during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 addressed the spectacle of remembrance at the Peace Day parades, yet the material basis of much commemorative energy focused on the construction of permanent spaces and artefacts of memory on both the war and Home Fronts. The mapping of the casualties of war through the making of memorial sites aroused widespread debate for the victorious and the defeated. It formed part of a larger on-going process in the redesign of public space through monumental architecture and statuary. War memorials thus exist in tandem with a suite of other markers, which map the cultural and historical identity of cities, regions and nation-states. Wagner-Pacifini and Schwartz suggest that ‘Memorial devices are not self-created; they are conceived and built by those who wish to bring to consciousness the events and people that others are inclined to forget.’ In particular, in post-war Ireland, the politics of remembrance and amnesia were interrelated in complex ways. With the establishment of the Irish Free State and the partition of the island, the use of public space to articulate a version of the past and a vision of the future was a highly disputed issue on both sides of the border. The claim that ‘Statues or monuments to the dead … owe their meaning to their intrinsic existence … [and] one could justify relocating them without altering their meaning’, is to ignore the historical moment and geographic specificity of debates undergirding the building of war memorials and to overemphasise their transcendental qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To remember everything is a form of madness While this book has so far focused on the commemoration of the First World War in Ireland in the context of a variety of narratives of identity, this chapter directly addresses the efforts made to commemorate one of those competing narratives — the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Although the Rising interrupted the tempo of the First World War in terms of recruitment and subsequent public remembrance of the war, it also generated its own set of commemorative questions in the years after the establishment of the Irish Free State. If the rebellion was staged literally on the streets of the capital city in 1916, the performance of public remembrance took place in a host of different arenas and the interpretation attached to these public acts of ritual changed with time. This chapter will examine a few moments in the trajectory of remembrance to highlight some of the key spatial and iconographic motifs employed to generate a national narrative of commemoration. If sites established to the memory of the First World War, at times, represented points of political and cultural controversy, the Easter rebellion also provoked mixed reactions among pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty factions within Ireland. On Easter Sunday in 1991, seventy-five years after what Yeats described as the birth of a ‘terrible beauty’, the Irish state commemorated the 1916 Rising at a ceremony at the General Post Office in Dublin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

if Turnage's aim … was to distil the grotesqueness of war into an aural equivalent of the serial geometrics invented by C. R. W. Nevinson … he succeeded … This quote, from a review of the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera The Silver Tassie, which opened in the London Coliseum in February 2000, underlines the continuing imaginative appeal of the First World War as a source of creative energy. While the war was popularly commemorated through monument, memorial and spectacle, the war similarly spawned a vast array of literary works. If social memory found material expression through spaces of commemorative activity, the social imagination was also cultivated through representations of the experience of war in novel, play and verse. The war was mapped and its physical, cultural and psychological spaces made meaningful to popular audiences through these works. Ironically, fiction could at times translate that which documentary accounts found difficult to communicate. The upheavals of 1914 affected every reflective person across Europe: ‘Artists, poets, writers, clergymen, historians, philosophers, among others, all participated fully in the human drama being enacted … Even the introvert Marcel Proust … was spellbound by the spectacle.’ Hynes suggests that literary and artistic accounts of the war created a space for the articulation of an alternative view of the war that deviated from the romantic or heroic expression that appeared in other forms of commemoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On a grey, wet Sunday in October 2001 the bodies of nine men executed and buried in Mountjoy gaol in Dublin were exhumed and reinterred at Glasnevin cemetery. Thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin to watch the passing of the funeral cortege, while tens of thousands witnessed the event as it was broadcast live on the national television network. With full state honours, the coffins, draped in the Irish tricolour, were publicly paraded from the gaol to the Catholic Pro-Cathedral in central Dublin where a concelebrated requiem mass was held before the bodies were transported for burial to Glasnevin cemetery. A graveside oration, delivered by the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), was accompanied by the sounding of three rounds of ammunition and the playing of the Last Post and national anthem. While some controversy surrounded the day's events, by and large the ceremony was deemed a fitting, dignified and noble occasion of reconciliation and remembrance. The men concerned were Irish Republican Army (IRA) Volunteers executed eighty years earlier, under British authority, at Mountjoy gaol during the War of Independence 1920–21. Their bodies had been buried in the grounds of the prison and their re-interring at Glasnevin cemetery had been mooted over subsequent decades. The final symbolic recognition of their sacrifice through the performance of a state funeral on a rainy autumnal day in 2001 reinforces the significance of the dead in the arousal of the collective and personal memories of the living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter argues that the hegemonic image of the West of Ireland as the cultural heartland of the country was an essential component of the late 19th century construction of an Irish nationalism which, in its dependence on a Gaelic iconography, was to prove exclusive rather than inclusive, particularly when its representations became fused with Catholicism. Strongly reinforced by the intellectual elite of early twentieth-century Ireland, the West became an idealised landscape, populated by an idealised people who invoked the representative, exclusive essence of the nation through their Otherness from Great Britain. The invented, manipulated geography of the West portrayed the unspoilt beauty of landscapes, where the influences of modernity were at their weakest and which evoked the mystic unity of Ireland prior to the chaos of conquest. Moreover, this imagery of Otherness was also constructed externally through the conceptualisations of anthropologists, including C. M. Arensberg and S. T. Kimble. As J. Agnew argues, such renditions of place are fundamental to a European tradition of over-simplifying space into idealised constructs of tradition and modernity. In common with other European attempts at nationbuilding, an idealised landscape and people were invoked to represent the essence of the nation. The fact that people in western Ireland spoke Irish reinforced its status as a metaphor for cultural identity. Ironically, the practices of successive governments since independence have not always been in tune with the public rhetoric about cultural identity.