Locating Memory: Tracing the Trajectories of Remembrance

Abstract

I n October 2001 on a damp morning the remains of nine men executed and buried in Mountjoy jail in Dublin were exhumed and re-interred at Glasnevin cemetery. The streets of Dublin were lined with thousands of people who watched the passing of the funeral cortege. The event was witnessed by tens of thousands, as it was broadcast live on the national television network. The coffins, draped in the Irish tricolor and awarded full state honors, were paraded publicly from the prison to the Catholic Pro-Cathedral in central Dublin. There was a concelebrated requiem mass before the bodies were transported for burial to the cemetery in Glasnevin. There, the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) delivered a graveside oration. Three rounds of ammunition were released and the Last Post and national anthem were played. Although there was some controversy surrounding 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 volunteers, executed under British authority eighty years earlier at Mountjoy jail during the 1920-1921 War of Independence. Their bodies had been buried in the grounds of the prison and their re-interring at Glasnevin cemetery had been disputed 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. In his oration the prime minister claimed that: “The big powers had said that it was for the small nations that the First World War was fought. The people of Ireland were determined that the principle of national selfdetermination must also be extended to the Irish nation.” The lexical juxtaposition of the First World War with the question of Irish independence reminds us of the real proximity in time and space of the global conflict that was the Great War and the local conflict that was the Irish independence movement. The overlapping of these powerful political moments would be crucial for the development of a memorial landscape PRACTICING HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY

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