Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution 1912-1923, edited by John Horne and Edward Madigan

Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution

Author: Edited by John Horne and Edward Madigan

ISBN-13: 978-1908996176

Publisher: Royal irish Academy

Guideline Price: €15

This thoughtful collection of essays deals with the Ireland that is and the Ireland that was; how we remember the Ireland of revolution before it became a republic, the place whose many sons donned the uniform of a monarch for whom they might have had little feeling. So how do we remember our antecedents now? Commemoration is about the future as much as the past, and is part of the historical process, but it also articulates family histories and is something with which Ireland, north and south, has struggled for many generations. As Jay Winter points out in his piece on war memorials, "language frames memory in a host of ways, and both language and memory can be lethal". Tellingly, many of the essays cite one particular day of commemoration as momentous for Ireland and Britain, when Queen Elizabeth II made her state visit, in 2011. Surely that was a day on which language and memory did justice to our predecessors' memory.