The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture

The Politics of Irish Memory

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The Politics of Irish Memory Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture Emilie Pine

© Emilie Pine 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24741–3

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Ronan

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Past Traumas: Representing Institutional Abuse

18

2 The Remembered Self: Irish Memoir, Past and Present Selves

52

3 The Exiled Past: The Return of the Irish Emigrant

78

4 Embodied Memory: Performing the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes

100

5 In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War

127

6 Haunted Pasts: Exorcising the Ghosts of Irish Culture

152

Notes

171

Bibliography

185

Index

195

vii

Acknowledgements It is important to acknowledge the input and encouragement of many people to the gestation and completion of this book, not least my colleagues in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, who together represent a dynamic and supportive School. I owe particular thanks for advice and support to John Brannigan, Ron Callan, Nicholas Daly, Fionnuala Dillane, Niamh Pattwell, Nerys Williams, and the singular Anthony Roche. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Richard Rowland and Mary Luckhurst, as part of Writing and Performance, at the University of York where I taught for two years. And at Trinity College Dublin, I would like to thank Nicholas Grene for his continued encouragement. I would like to pay particular tribute to the community of Irish studies scholars of which I am privileged to be a part. Organisations and conferences, such as the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, the Irish Theatrical Diaspora project, the Irish Society for Theatre Research, the British Association of Irish Studies, and the American Conference of Irish Studies, have provided necessary and inspiring fora where this study has developed due to the scope of lectures and conversations, all in the spirit of intellectual generosity. As part of that community, I would like to thank in particular: Aidan Arrowsmith, Terence Brown, Brian Cliff, Claire Connolly, Gerald Dawe, Joan Dean, Oona Frawley, Luke Gibbons, Nicholas Grene, Kathy Heininge, Catriona Kennedy, Declan Kiberd, Helen Lojek, Gerardine Meaney, Christopher Morash, Martine Pelletier, Shaun Richards, Anthony Roche, Kevin Rockett, Jim Shanahan, Anne Solari, and Robert Tracy. I have been fortunate, also, in the opportunity to present parts of this study in research lectures. Parts of Chapter 2 were given as a lecture at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University; parts of Chapter 4 were given as a lecture at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast; and parts of Chapter 6 were delivered in lecture form at the Synge Summer School. I have also benefited from lecturing at and attending the Durrell School of Corfu, the MacGill Summer School, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. The libraries and librarians of the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and the University of York, have been enormously helpful in the researching of this book. I would viii

Acknowledgements

ix

like to particularly thank the staff of the Abbey Theatre Archive and the Irish Film Archive for their help and assistance in navigating unpublished material on Irish theatre and film. I have been lucky in counting as friends a number of academic colleagues of whom I could ask editorial advice, and special thanks are due to Patrick Lonergan, Jenny McDonnell and Pádraic Whyte. Thanks also to Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan for believing in the project, and to Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for her help with queries. For reading the entire manuscript, I am indebted to Richard Pine. Beginnings and endings are important and for their help with both, I’d like to thank Ronan Kelly and Melanie Pine. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in Oona Frawley (ed.), Memory Ireland: Volume 1: History and Modernity (Syracuse University Press, 2010). Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in the Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 2008). And parts of Chapter 5 appeared in the Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 2010). I am grateful to the publishers and editors of those books and journals for their permission to revise and re-use that material. All efforts have been made to secure the rights for the material used in this book. I gratefully acknowledge: Martin Lynch for permission to reproduce extracts from his unpublished work; Methuen for permission to reproduce extracts from Declan Hughes, Tom Murphy and Christina Reid; Faber for permission to reproduce extracts from Sebastian Barry and Frank McGuinness; Random House for permission to reproduce extracts from Dermot Healy; Fourth Estate for permission to reproduce extracts from Hugo Hamilton; and New Island Books for permission to reproduce extracts from Nuala O’Faolain. The cover photograph is by Matt Kavanagh, which I am grateful for permission to use, while especial thanks are due to Barry Mac Evilly for his superb cover design. Books could not get written without a huge support network of colleagues, librarians and fellow researchers. Most of all, this book would not be possible without the support of family and friends. My thanks to my wonderful sister Vanessa Pine, and my parents, Melanie Pine and Richard Pine, who all three support me and, perhaps most importantly, inspire me. Thanks also to the friends who have helped along the way: John Butler, David Long, Jenny McDonnell, Tara MacLoughlin, Olwen O’Callaghan, Niall O’Neill, Niamh O’Shea, Éadaoin Patton, and Christine Ryan. And finally, I dedicate this book to Ronan Kelly, with all my love and admiration, for his love, his unstinting support and his example.

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Introduction

In early April 2006 The Irish Times published a supplement to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, illustrating the national importance, and newsworthiness, of this commemorative year. As part of the supplement, the newspaper published a photograph captioned ‘Fog of War: Government troops and rebels shoot at each other on a narrow smoke-filled street as an overturned car burns during the Easter Rising in 1916’. Though the supplement in general received public praise, there were some reservations over the inclusion of this particular image. As Pat Cooke, Curator of Kilmainham Gaol, and a Kilkenny man, pointed out, as well as the photograph seeming ‘suspiciously “stagey”’, the car in question bore a licence plate which was registered in Kilkenny in 1952.1 Mr Cooke had checked this with the Kilkenny county council before writing to the paper to correct the date of the photograph. In response, the Editor of The Irish Times wrote that the image had been ‘supplied by Getty Images, one of the world’s leading photographic agencies. In response to a query from The Irish Times [sic] on foot of Mr Cooke’s letter, Getty contacted its New York office to check the origins of the picture. On the basis of that check, it said that, as far as it was aware, the picture was authentic.’2 This was where the official editorial line stopped, passing the buck, as it were, to Getty Images, and accepting – rather than interrogating – Getty’s assertion of authenticity. Indeed, this acceptance is illustrated by the continued use of the image as part of the online supplement on The Irish Times website, though without its problematic caption.3 Several further letters appeared, however, to correct the provenance of the photograph. Sunniva O’Flynn, Curator at the Irish Film Archive, identified the photo as an image of the set of Young Cassidy, the 1965 biopic of Sean O’Casey, co-directed by John Ford and Jack Cardiff.4 And 1

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The Politics of Irish Memory

several days later, Tanya Kiang, Director of the Gallery of Photography, gave further details of the photograph, identifying it as the work of Erich Hartmann who was engaged as a stills photographer on Young Cassidy in 1964.5 As both O’Flynn and Kiang suggest, the image is thus an important part of Irish film and photographic history – and a part of the visual legacy of 1916 – but ‘not quite the primary photographic evidence that it purported to be’.6 Cultural artefacts, such as photographs, are useful ways of illuminating history, yet they are only ever representations, versions of the actual event. And, in this case, the photograph is a version of a version. The distance between culture and reality is thus always a risk and, much to the embarrassment of The Irish Times and Getty Images, because of this distance, cultural representations do not always tell the ‘truth’ they appear to tell. Instead, what culture often reveals are the demands of the present for a history that fits the needs of now, whether that need is for a dramatic ‘smoke-filled’ streetscape, or merely a need for convenience. The sourcing of the photograph from Getty Images by The Irish Times bypassed the archives available within Ireland, and used instead a globalised (online) business – with an easy keyword-search facility to make these images ultra-accessible – to source an image of local and national history. This choice displays not only the way that images of the Irish past are commodified as products that circulate in a globalised marketplace, but also the flattening of history, so that history becomes a series of labelled images, rather than a narrative or series of artefacts in their ‘authentic’ context. This process is, perhaps, inevitable in a globalised news-world, but it is notable that the custodians of the Irish past, the heritage and archive community, were so keen (and so qualified) to correct the mistakes made by such a process. This keenness goes to show the extent to which the past matters within Ireland; indeed, the extent to which the past is still a current subject. And, if the Irish past is still a contested space, as this example illustrates, the act of contestation can be a positive force, helping us to know our past better. And we have never known our past better than we currently do, and it has never been so vital that we do so. Over the last thirty years, Irish remembrance culture has opened up our recent history so that audiences, readers and viewers are now more present in the past – and vice versa – than ever before. What has been uncovered in the process are events and subjects of national importance, including the traumas of child abuse, the pain of emigration, and the legacy of conflict. These recovered memories – both of the individual and the collective past – are

Introduction

3

problematic, and the question remains of how to reconcile them with the present. This book is about that question and the ways in which Irish remembrance culture has responded to the subject of past traumas. Remembrance culture has a dual function as both a mode of knowing the past and as a way of reflecting the needs of the present. To remember is not a straightforward injunction: culture frames the past in political ways. A consideration of remembrance culture thus necessitates a process of decoding and analysis, a critical navigation of the territory of represented memories so that, as audiences, we know what we are seeing, and to what we are being asked to bear witness. Through analyses of individual cultural texts – drama, film, memoir, the visual arts and fiction – The Politics of Irish Memory explores the general territory of remembrance culture, and asks what is at stake in how we remember.

Performing the past: Irish remembrance culture and anti-nostalgia Irish culture is obsessed with the past. From the commemoration of historic events to the memoirs of childhood, we cannot escape the remembrance of things past in newspapers and books, on stages, on screens, in museums and on the streets of major cities, and in the spaces of public galleries. While representations of the past have always been an integral element of Irish culture, they are now one of its most compelling subjects. And the tone that characterises this subject is trauma. We are not who we thought we were, or put another way, we remember ourselves differently now. The consequence of this revisiting of the past is that it creates new narratives – alternate and more complex narratives – taking account of memories that were for too long ‘forgotten’, or sidelined, by Irish history and culture. These new narratives expand the traditionally narrow definition of Irish historical identity, and reconfigure this identity through the framework of remembrance and trauma. The significance of this is not merely historiographical, but also ethical: to remember is, as former President of Ireland Mary Robinson termed it, ‘a moral act’. The correlative, however, has been to render the story of Ireland more traumatic. Robinson’s use of the word ‘act’ highlights the performative nature of remembrance culture; this is not a straightforward act of retrieval and re-presentation of past events, and the resulting performances are not innocent. Performing remembrance begins as a process of constructing a version of the past, and the version that is presented is necessarily

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The Politics of Irish Memory

selective and shaped for consumption, so that Irish culture presents the past in ways that are accessible and salient to an audience with no direct or lived experience of the past which is being represented. Performance is also an ongoing process, being re-shaped constantly, so that it is iterated and reiterated, a process of repetition that creates a ritual of the performance. However, in shaping the past for presentation, the forms of cultural remembrance – books, plays, art works, films, television, newspapers, museums, and memorials – are also acts of cultural mediation. The audience for these performances are accessing a virtual past. In turn, by consuming acts of cultural remembrance, audiences are performing a memorial activity themselves, and in doing so, should not forget to interrogate those acts, to question the uses to which the past is being put, and to identify the strategies of cultural mediation at play. Irish remembrance culture is characterised by distinct patterns and strategies of representing and framing past traumas. As this book considers, the traumatic past can be represented with empathy or with horror, and can be viewed as either open-ended with implications for the present, or limited, so that the present-day is safeguarded from the implications of the past. This book interrogates a range of performances within Irish remembrance culture, and each chapter questions what aspect of the past is being remembered, how it is being performed, and what the consequences of those performances are. Throughout, the issue of ethical remembering is crucial, and the book asks if the emphasis on the backward look represents a real engagement with the past, or a resolution of past trauma. The book is structured thematically, from childhood, to adulthood, to public life and, finally, to the limbo afterlife of ghosts. The wider issues of remembrance culture are addressed chapter-by-chapter in relation to how they affect specific issues within Irish society and culture, and the argument of each chapter is founded on close-reading of individual performances of remembrance. Chapter 1 discusses the various ways in which institutional child abuse has been represented, from official investigations such as the Commission to Enquire into Child Abuse, to films, plays and novels which have grappled with this most traumatic of subjects. The representation of childhood is also the subject of Chapter 2, which analyses a group of literary memoirs and the challenge of articulating the self, particularly against the background of a difficult childhood. The argument moves then to the twin concepts of exile and return, as Chapter 3 focuses on representations of the pain of homecoming, particularly relevant given that in the 1990s the tide of emigrants turned back towards Ireland. Chapter 4 considers a different kind of exile, as represented in

Introduction

5

films and art works set in and about Northern Irish prisons in the period of the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes. Developing the theme of the divisive politics of commemoration, Chapter 5 addresses the different forms of commemorating the Irish involvement in the Great War (1914–18). Finally, Chapter 6 reflects on the supernatural trend in Irish theatre and film as a mode of expressing dissatisfaction with the haunting and, in many ways paralysing, burden of the past in contemporary Irish culture. From 1980 to 2010 Irish culture has undergone a major shift in terms of the representation of the past. That shift, this book will argue, has resulted in traumatic memory becoming the dominant way of seeing, of understanding, and of communicating, the Irish past. We are obsessed with the past, and we are haunted by trauma.

International memory Ireland is not alone in the contemporary desire – or need – to remember the past, as recent years have witnessed an international memory boom. History as a mass activity, as Raphael Samuel argues in Theatres of Memory, ‘has possibly never had more followers than it does today, when the spectacle of the past excites the kind of attention which earlier epochs attached to the new’.7 What Samuel identified in the 1990s was a shift in cultural attention from the future to the past, and this begs the question: what, over the last three decades, has made the past so attractive? The answer seems twofold. First, the conditions of global modernity and capitalism, in fostering a sense of social progress and advancement, have at the same time engendered a feeling of insecurity. As technology and culture constantly make themselves ‘new’, the necessity of keeping up-to-date is both relentless and impossible. In this volatile context, cultural remembrance of a supposedly more stable past works to provide a reassuring anchor, a line of progression, and a balancing sense of continuity and groundedness. Second, the very ‘mass activity’ element of the current approach to the past has widened the parameters of traditional historical narratives, resulting in the foregrounding of personal memories, instead of a single, implicitly impersonal, History. Despite the fact that history has long used oral memory archives for evidence of non-text-based, and unofficial, histories, there is still a perceived qualitative difference between history and memory. Both history and cultural memory are culturally produced versions of the past, but whereas memory has come to be positively associated with personal and subjective meanings, history is negatively associated with rigid or objective ideas of a broad

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The Politics of Irish Memory

and sweeping monolithic narrative. Memory is thus perceived as more accessible as well as more intimate, and for these reasons remembrance culture frames itself in terms of memory as opposed to history. The recourse to memory is not unique to late modernity. Pioneering memory theorist Pierre Nora argues that memory achieves a high cultural value whenever ‘there is a perceived or constructed break with the past’.8 In the French context, Nora identifies the 1789 French Revolution – both a liberating and traumatic national experience – as a key example of just such a break with the past. In the context of modern Ireland, the traditional relationship between the past and the present remained relatively stable from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, the major break in the conception of the Irish past, and its relation to the present, is symbolised less by the revolutionary struggles for self-government and independence, than by the shift from a traditional and self-sufficient nation under de Valera, to the economically open 1960s when Ireland embraced a narrative of modernisation, which as Conor McCarthy argues, became a creed for how Ireland ‘envisioned its future’ and, as this introduction argues, its past also.9

National memory Nineteenth-century Irish culture used the remembrance of the past as a compensatory strategy: a glorious past functioned as compensation for a degraded present. By the late nineteenth century, the idea of a lost heroic age and a distinctive Irish cultural identity reached its apogee in the Gaelic and Literary Revivals, which aimed to renew this lost identity in the present through promoting the Irish language, Gaelic games, and, crucially, myths of the past, in order to build a bridge between the past and an imagined ancient past.10 In this respect, the classic text of the Revival, W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s play Kathleen ni Houlihan (1904), is a key example of how the noble idea of the past was used as a force for regeneration. The play is set on the cusp of the 1798 rebellion, when the old woman Kathleen ni Houlihan calls upon the young Michael Gillane to fight for her ‘four green fields’. His willingness to fight, to make a blood sacrifice, renews the old woman so that she is transformed into ‘a young girl … [with] the walk of a queen’.11 The implications of this play for its audience were political, the reference to 1798 a call to renew the blood sacrifice in the present. This was clear to Yeats years later when he remembered his own life and wondered, ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’12 After 1916, the nationalist narrative of the past was confirmed, with a gallery of martyrs to sustain it.

Introduction

7

In contrast to the heroic past of early-twentieth-century nationalism, the most recent thirty-year phase of Irish remembrance culture looks back instead to a degraded past, stimulating the present by provoking the desire to escape that past. In Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), set in a Donegal hedge-school in 1833, the rebellion of 1798 is again remembered. Hugh Mor O’Donnell, the village hedge-school-master, recalls setting out to fight with his friend Jimmy Jack. Yet far from joining the rebellion, they grew homesick and retraced their steps home. The seeming ignominy of this abortive journey responds to the noble heroism of Kathleen ni Houlihan, and sounds a considerably less defiant note. Instead, Translations privileges life over blood sacrifice, insisting on the pragmatic need to survive – and the personal nobility of doing so – over and above the idealism of politics. Rather than holding up the past – the failed rebellion of 1798 – as heroic, Translations performs an elegy for a tragically lost past, and suggests that while we must know our past, we must also progress beyond it. In Translations Friel manipulates history, in particular remembering the Ordnance Survey as a military operation, rather than the scholarly exercise it actually was (though the resulting map was no doubt used for military purposes).13 In this, the play remembers the past as more traumatic than it actually was. Friel’s strategy of remembrance not only heightens dramatic tension, but further frames the past – inaccurately – as a non-idealised space. Though Friel argued that ‘we don’t go to Macbeth for history’, delineating an important distinction between art and reality, Translations typifies the tendency of Irish culture to refashion the past so that it is read exclusively under the sign of trauma.

Nostalgia and anti-nostalgia The past can act as a counterpoint to the present: where the present is changing, the past can be fixed; where the present is increasingly globalised, the past is reassuringly insular; where the present is technologically innovative, the past is solidly low-tech. The alienation of an ultra-modern present thus leads to nostalgia for a simpler past. Irish nostalgia is big business, as demonstrated by the cultural reach of Riverdance (first performed in 1994). The huge touring success of Riverdance testifies to the national and international appetite for a cultural event which draws on a rich dance and music heritage, and re-packages it for a modern audience, hungry for both tradition and innovation.14 The added international allure of Riverdance is the authenticity conferred upon it as a cultural product from a small nation with a

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The Politics of Irish Memory

big history, and a big diaspora. Likewise, nostalgia generates significant revenue for Irish films both at home and abroad, for example heritage films such as Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot (1989) and Pat O’Connor’s Circle of Friends (1995).15 Though many of these heritage films are set in economically deprived or socially backward milieus, the dominant nostalgic aesthetic and plot, hallmarks of Irish heritage cinema, are ultimately emotionally restorative. The final, and crucial, element of nostalgia is that the ending is a happy one, and the comfort that these uplifting endings confer is key to the way that nostalgia performs a past which does not make demands of the present. Cultural remembrance, however, goes beyond the nostalgia and celebratory aspect of events such as Riverdance or heritage cinema, and what is notable is that in fact, time and again, the past which is evoked and performed is not a comforting vision, but is, rather, represented as a space of trauma and pain. This is anti-nostalgia and it is now the dominant form of Irish remembrance culture. The difference is this: nostalgia feeds a yearning for the stability which is absent from a present that is perceived to be fast-paced and hence unstable. In contrast, anti-nostalgia’s vision frames the past as inherently unstable and traumatic, encouraging audiences to be grateful that they have escaped. Anti-nostalgic memory thus enables audiences to maintain a traditional form of cultural identity, one that is defined by its relationship to the past. Yet this relationship is also transformed, so that the present, or perhaps more accurately, the future, becomes the idealised space. Not only does this justify a futurecentric cultural outlook, it in fact drives its audience towards the future and its promise of progress and prosperity. Anti-nostalgia distinguishes the recent trend for remembrance from the standard need of modernity to define itself against, and distinguish itself from, what came before. It also shifts away from the nostalgic strategy of using the past as a welcome break from the demands of the present. In the Irish context, the anti-nostalgic narrative of the Irish past is characterised by trauma, from the failed 1798 Rising, to the exodus of the Famine, to the more recent travails and traumas of the independent state and Northern Ireland. This anti-nostalgic narrative serves three purposes. First, the sense of historical suffering, familiar from the Literary Revival, establishes the pedigree and authenticity of the Irish nation, forged in pain. Second, the experience of Irish modernity can be celebrated for no longer being defined by a narrative of suffering and crisis. And third, the implication of anti-nostalgia is that the values of the present are more liberal, more inclusive, more productive than those of the past. The present, by inference, is established as the best, and the most viable, route away from trauma.

Introduction

9

Memorialisation and anti-nostalgia: famine and finance An illustrative example of the role of anti-nostalgia in the politics of remembrance is the national Great Famine memorialisation from 1995 to 1997. The culmination of remembrance, marked in 1997 as the 150th anniversary of the worst year of the potato blight, was problematic from the outset. The years after 1847 saw higher levels of starvation and emigration due to the cumulative effect of years of blight and thus might have been included in the commemorative period. However, the presiding logic was practical: in 1998 the bicentenary of the 1798 Rising would be celebrated. The memorialisation of these two events was thus constructed as mutually exclusive, as what was paramount was the presentation of an accessible and uncomplicated narrative of the past.16 The scale of the official Irish government Famine commemorations, and the erection of multiple memorials, nationally and internationally, also suggested that there was some anxiety about the Famine being forgotten. The wave of commemorations, suggests Mary Daly, ‘reflects the gestures of a population that is now more urban, that is less in touch with rural Ireland and with its past. The memory of the Famine is no longer part of a long-standing tradition; rather it now has to be made intelligible to people who find it distant to their everyday lives.’17 What is striking about the most well-known of the Irish memorials is just how the Great Famine is remembered in order to make it intelligible to audiences in the present. There were many and diverse ways of marking the 1997 anniversary of the Great Famine, including investigations into local history and international recognition of Ireland’s diaspora. Indeed, as Margaret Kelleher notes, the erection of monuments to the Famine in the United States, as well as in Ireland, symbolically united the histories of the old and new worlds.18 In Boston, the official memorial to the Famine was created by American artist Robert Shure, and erected in 1998. The memorial consists of two large sculptures: one depicts the victims of the Famine before they leave Ireland, and these figures are represented as emaciated and poverty stricken. In contrast, the second sculpture depicts a group of hale and hearty Irish emigrés arriving in Boston, ‘filled with hope and determination’. Shure’s vision establishes a link between Ireland and trauma on the one hand, and America and salvation on the other, thereby creating a corresponding association between Ireland and the past, and America and the future. In Dublin, the largest public memorial, commissioned by businesswoman Norma Smurfit and ‘donated by her to the Irish nation’, follows

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The Politics of Irish Memory

the logic of the Boston memorial but re-imagines modern Ireland as the setting for a hopeful future.19 Framing the Famine in this way exemplifies Cormac Ó Gráda’s comment that the commemorations of the Famine ‘probably spoke more about Ireland in the 1990s than in the 1840s’.20 This monument, erected on Custom House Quay, is in two parts, the main element a series of sculpted figures entitled ‘Famine’ (1997) by Rowan Gillespie. The frail and gaunt bronze figures trail along the quay, towards the sea and the possibility of escape. Yet the stricken figures are not the only presences on the quay; the second element of the monument is set around their feet: a series of bronze plaques, laid the following year, and bearing the names of wealthy Irish individuals and companies. This incongruous juxtaposition is perhaps inspired by the history of engraving the names of those who are lost in battle or disaster on the tablets that constitute traditional memorials, so that what is remembered is both the large event as well as the individual meanings. Yet, in this context it is not the names of the victims but, implicitly, those of the survivors – the modern-day success stories – who are remembered. In this version of the Famine, the sculpture represents a moving form of remembering the tragic past. Yet the name-plaques represent a different agenda, commodifying the past in order to brand it in terms of the present. Though the donations which were paid to secure one’s presence on the plaques went to charities, nevertheless, there is something exploitative about this process. Furthermore, the location adds another level of irony, as the main building adjacent to the Smurfit Famine memorial is the Irish Financial Services Centre, a hub of foreign direct investment, and a symbol of selling futures, rather than pasts. The bastion of the IFSC represents the reverse not only of the journey that the sculpted famine victims are poised to take out of Ireland, but also the converse of their impoverished, famished state. Despite – or rather because of – the fact that the past being remembered is one of the most traumatic events in the history of Ireland, it underlines the prosperity and security of the present. Crucially, the observer of this memorial is being asked to perform two acts: on the one hand, the viewer is being asked to empathise with the ragged figures, yet on the other, the viewer is also being asked to recognise these figures as different from themselves, and by doing so, to celebrate the triumph of modern Ireland in the face of the adversity of the nineteenth century. The context of this Famine memorial, and in particular, the bronze plaques, insists on the inherent past-ness of the Great Famine. The spectre of famine no longer haunts Ireland; it is no longer our problem. Meanings shift, however, and a further irony is that

Introduction

11

since the demise of the Celtic Tiger, one might argue that the bronze plaques themselves have become a memorial to a time of visible wealth, security and prosperity, which is now lost.

Policing the border between past and present: Dancing at Lughnasa The past-ness of an event is vital to enabling its remembrance as, when the trauma is still current, it is extremely difficult to memorialise it. When trauma recedes into memory, however, a boundary is created between the past and the present. Remembrance culture polices this boundary, because it prevents the traumas of the past from seeping into the present. This is vital because in order to observe past sufferings, audiences must do so from a position of relative security in the present. This is explicit in nostalgia, which designates the past as a sepia-toned lost era, with little connection to the present. It is also implicit within the framework of anti-nostalgia, which views the past as painful and the present, or rather future, as the antithesis of that pain. In anti-nostalgic remembrance culture, the result of this separation of past and present is that the impact of past trauma on the present is lessened because it is distanced. Anti-nostalgia thus cordons off the past from the present, and this is a strategy which is made explicit in Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, which premiered in 1990 at the Abbey Theatre. Dancing at Lughnasa insists on the separation of past and present. Though there are nostalgic elements to this play, it is more fully understood as an anti-nostalgic representation of the past. In this respect, the play embodies a tension between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia, and its production history – two landmark Irish productions in particular – illustrates this tension. Lughnasa opens with an onstage narrator, Michael Mundy, who remembers that perennial subject of both nostalgia and anti-nostalgia – his childhood growing up in a household in Donegal, with his mother and aunts and uncle. His tone, from the beginning of the play, is wistful yet controlling: ‘When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me.’21 In his attitude to the past and memory, Michael embodies the process of mediating between present and past, and his role clearly places the power in the present, to use the act of memory to access the past at will, and to select which memories are articulated. In one way, the play seems to express an easy nostalgia for a simpler life, when ‘wireless’ technology was new and life was centred on the family. Yet even in this relatively innocent rural world, there are hints of anti-nostalgic discord.

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The Politics of Irish Memory

The first production at the Abbey, directed by Patrick Mason, emphasised the visually nostalgic elements of the play. This was expressed particularly by the set, designed by Joe Vanek; the backdrop to the stage was a huge field of corn, ready for the harvest, and a clear blue sky. The set thus picks up on the final description of the cast ‘lit in a very soft, golden light so that the tableau we see is almost, but not quite, in a haze’, and bathes the whole production in the same kind of nostalgic glow (70). However, there are many signs within the play script that the past being remembered is more fragmented than nostalgia usually allows, as Kate says ‘hair cracks are appearing everywhere … control is slipping away … the whole thing is so fragile it can’t be held together much longer. It’s all about to collapse’ (35). Friel’s vision of the 1930s is thus not an evocation of a stable past, but is rather an anti-nostalgic vision of thirties Ireland as vulnerable and bleakly repressive. In Act One, the explosion of the women’s dance focuses the conflict between the expectation of Lughnasa to be a nostalgic play, and the rather harsher actuality of the women’s lives. In the first production, though the women danced wildly, the energy of the dance was primarily joyful. This sense of harmony was accentuated in the later film version, directed by Pat O’Connor (1998). The film moves the dance to the end section of the film, so that it is a dramatic climax, rather than an out-of-the-blue explosion, as in the play. The women dance outside of the home, holding hands in a circle, watched by the men. These changes remove any sense of subversiveness, and the women’s smiling faces generate an image of domestic bliss and accord, and deliver the emotionally restorative ending so necessary to Irish heritage cinema. However, this harmonious and nostalgic vision of the women dancing is at odds with what the play is telling us, as Michael characterises the women as ‘shrieking strangers’ (2) and the stage directions describe, in detail, the women’s energies as ‘frantic’, ‘erratic’, and ‘grotesque’ (21). In line with these complex energies, the 2004 production of Lughnasa at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, directed by Joe Dowling, was a far darker response to Friel’s text. The stage and set, designed by Robert Jones, was literally bleak, the dominant tone being grey, as opposed to the golden corn of the Mason/ Vanek production. The dance too was darker, with the women expressing not simple joy or pleasure, but a deep-seated need to dance, to use the body to resist the hardship and containment of their lives. There was anger and aggressive energy in the movements of the actors, and when the dance ended the women were left to try to restore order and to dispel the fractious energy that they had both given in to and given rise to. Dowling’s production thus drew far more on the anti-nostalgia of the play.

Introduction

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The end of the play refuses, however, to show the worst of what happens to the women, relying on Michael’s narration instead to inform the audience of his aunts Rose and Agnes’s tragic deaths in London. The audience thus hears the traumatic story of the ‘collapse’ of the Mundy family, but at the same time, it sees the family onstage, still holding it together. The anti-nostalgia of Michael’s narration is thus limited by the ‘soft, golden light’ of the play’s final images. This final moment demonstrates the process of performing the boundary between the past and the present. The power of Michael’s narration, which sets in motion the action of the play, the performance of remembrance, now shuts it down. While Michael concludes their stories, the Mundys stand in tableau, swaying with a ‘movement … so minimal that we cannot be quite certain if it is happening or if we imagine it’ (71). Michael’s monologue thus fixes the characters in the past, while the child’s home-made kites, held up between Gerry, Agnes and Jack, and painted with frightening ‘crude, cruel’ faces, warn the audience from identifying with this group. The Mundy family is now silenced and immobilised, and the anti-nostalgic energies of the past are separated from the present. Despite the final monologue’s effect of closure, the slight movement of the characters in the tableau faintly suggests the vestigial energy of the past, and the possibility that it might explode once more. The swaying figures of the final tableau thus reference the bodily memory of the dance and imply that there are some memories that refuse to be contained. The powerful non-verbal energies of dance thus resist the closure of anti-nostalgia, and what Lughnasa finally illustrates is the tension between remembering and forgetting.

Remembering and forgetting Dancing at Lughnasa dramatises Michael’s personal struggle to come to terms with a troubling past by opening it up and allowing certain aspects of the past to be performed in the present. In public terms, one of the central moral elements of the act of memory is that cultural remembrance can act as a catalyst for social openness. The cultural remembrance of the Irish soldiers of the Great War, or the children abused in Irish institutions, has provoked a social reaction and, in doing so, motivated acts of official remembrance, from governmental investigations to public commemorations. Memory can thus function as an ethical act, a moral duty that we exercise. Indeed, the concept of memory as an ethical act makes it our duty to remember.

14

The Politics of Irish Memory

The goal of ethical memory is a form of justice that recognises the political nature of remembering and forgetting. The political focus of historical memory means that what is remembered of the past is what serves the needs of the present, reflected in the maxim that ‘History is written by the victors’. Paul Ricoeur argues that ethical memory necessitates the creation, or remembering, of a ‘parallel history of … victimisation’.22 Ricoeur further argues that ‘the duty to remember consists not only in having a deep concern for the past, but in transmitting the meaning of past events to the next generation’.23 By remembering the victims, as well as the victors, of history, memory becomes futureoriented, as it aims for justice for the victims, and further, as it regulates against the repetition of victimisation. Thus, the goal of remembrance of past traumas goes beyond ‘a deep concern for the past’ to the necessity of preventing the recurrence of that trauma in the future. The working of ethical memory, however, is hampered by two forms of ‘forgetting’: anti-nostalgia, and selective remembering. Anti-nostalgia sets up a boundary between a traumatic past and the relative security of the present. Anti-nostalgia thus prevents memory from being an active agent for change because of the assumption that the present is already so much better than the past. Audiences are encouraged to empathise with victims of past trauma, but not to translate them into the present; if the past is a foreign country then its victims are, by extension, foreigners to the present. This is a major failure of anti-nostalgic remembrance culture, which consigns trauma to the past and thereby symbolically forgets the victims of both the past and the present. Second, Irish memory culture is characterised by selective remembering, as seen in the selection of the years in which to mark the sesquicentenary of the Famine. Often this selectivity is motivated by the political aspects of certain memories. In 1991, the 75th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising was relatively muted, because of the ongoing context of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But fifteen years later, in 2006, the 90th anniversary of the Rising was marked in Dublin with a full military parade, the first in thirty years, illustrating the shifting political meanings of memory, in this case due to the intervening years of the Peace Process. The parade was not without controversy, however, dividing opinion as to whether it constituted a celebration of militarism and revolutionary values or whether it was at last a proud and open marking of an event which led to the founding of the modern Irish state. Yet it was not just the parade itself which proved controversial, but also the framing of it. In April 2006, the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern gave a speech at the opening of an exhibition on 1916 at the National

Introduction

15

Museum, extolling the high points of the Irish past which should be remembered proudly.24 Ahern chose to be selective in his speech, however, mentioning only those events which his own party, Fianna Fáil, had presided over. The omission of crucial moments such as the declaration of the Republic in 1948, under a Fine Gael government, illustrates the politically strategic shaping of the past, what is remembered and what forgotten, even within a larger project to remember inclusively. That same year, the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme was also officially memorialised, at the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin. These plural performances of remembrance, at the Rising Parade and the Islandbridge ceremony, including both the soldiers who fought against the British Army, and the soldiers who fought for the British Army in 1916, illustrate the expanded forms of memory made possible by the Peace Process. In particular, the memorialisation of the Battle of the Somme is a key example of ethical remembrance, as official memory is expanded to include those individuals who were for so many years forgotten. Ethical memory is thus the converse of political amnesia. The processes of ethical memory and commemoration are not, however, complete. Behind the commemorations of the 1798 Rising, the Famine, and 1916, is a spectre: the civil war. The civil war and the events of 1922 have not been the subject of either major cultural remembrance, or official memorialisation. In contrast, the events which are publicly memorialised, from 1798 to 1916, represent a relatively clear-cut narrative of the emergence of the nation and the State out of trauma and into stability and modernity. The divisive politics of the civil war complicate this narrative, and the lack of memorialisation of 1922, or of an official memorial to the civil war dead, suggests that the traumatic memory of this period is still too strong – or politically divisive – for it to be memorialised.25 Though alternate histories, such as the experience of Irish soldiers in the Great War, have in recent years become more visible, the narrative is still selective. Selective remembering is not limited to historical events, as the recent spectacle of proceedings of the Mahon Tribunal has proven.26 Testimony from witnesses, including then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, was often incomplete, as witnesses could not remember certain events, or because separate testimonies conflicted over the details being remembered. The hearings left the public with the distinct impression that the full story was not being told, though the final report promises to be comprehensive. The hearings of this tribunal into planning corruption have thus established just how thoroughly the injunction to remember

16

The Politics of Irish Memory

can be resisted, and the challenge this poses to ethical remembering. The Mahon Tribunal’s hearings are thus disturbing proof of a failure of memory – and of ethical memory in particular. All these trials of memory, and the prevalence of selective memory, suggest the fragility of the act of remembering, and the political pressures on performances of remembrance.

Exorcism The Irish cultural obsession with the past is an imperfect form of remembering. On the one hand, the act of cultural remembrance has opened up the Irish past, making the narrative of Irish historical identity more plural, and more cognisant of the memories of victims of past traumas. On the other hand, however, the cultural tendencies of anti-nostalgia, which cordons off the past from the present, and of selectivity, which continues to ‘forget’ or sideline certain aspects of the past, limit the scope and impact of ethical remembering, rendering it incomplete. One paradigm for understanding the incompleteness of cultural remembrance is the figure of the ghost on the Irish stage and screen. The theatrical trend for the supernatural embodies the tension between the past and the present, remembering and forgetting, in the form of the ghost. The haunted stage is, moreover, representative of the larger haunting of Irish culture by the past. The ghost represents the unbiddable, irrepressible, and uncontainable nature of memory, which disrupts linear progress and thus haunts not only the present, but the future also. The appearance of ghosts suggests that the past cannot be easily contained but that there will be a confrontation between past and present. If the present is to release itself from this haunting, then a resolution has to be negotiated with the ghosts of the past. The haunting of the present also suggests that the cultural obsession with the past is damaging. Ghosts are a sign of what Ricoeur calls the ‘excesses’ of memory, a manifestation of the excessive grip of the past on the imagination of culture in the present. This is particularly problematic considering the traumatic nature of the issues and events which are so often the subject of cultural remembrance. Considering the Irish past exclusively under the sign of trauma, and further, failing to create strategies to resolve that trauma, has created a haunted culture. Kevin Whelan terms this ‘the entropy of the traumatic version of memory, fixated permanently on the past’.27 To combat the entropy of trauma, Irish culture needs to follow the imperative of ethical remembering: to remember the past and to

Introduction

17

perform that remembrance, but to do so in order to create a more just future. What is troubling about remembrance culture in Ireland over the past few decades is the tendency to focus on the traumas of the past without elucidating the implications for the future. The cultural obsession with the past has responded to the sense of remembering as a necessary and ‘moral’ act. In doing so, however, it has become indentured to the memory of the past. In order to become an ethical form of memory, remembrance culture needs to move on from being haunted by trauma, to learn to reconcile the past with the future, and to find ways to exorcise the ghost of the past.

1 Past Traumas: Representing Institutional Abuse

On behalf of the State and of all the citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue. (Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, 1999) The Taoiseach’s apology of the 11th May 1999 marked a transformation in attitudes. How did this change take place and why? It seems to us that this is a legitimate area of inquiry and we want to ask those who apologised to victims of abuse and who contributed to the redress fund – we want to ask them: ‘How did you come to apologise?’1 (Judge Sean Ryan, 2004) On 11 May 1999 the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, convened a press conference at which he delivered a public apology to the children who had been abused while in the care of the State. The family is enshrined in the Irish Constitution as ‘a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights’ which the State ‘guarantees to protect’.2 However, should the family fail, the State will intervene, as decreed in Article 42.5: ‘In exceptional cases, where the parents for physical or moral reasons fail in their duty towards their children, the State as guardian of the common good, by appropriate means shall endeavour to supply the place of the parents, but always with due regard for the natural and imprescriptible rights of the child.’ However, it became increasingly clear in the 1990s that since independence the State 18

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had in fact profoundly interfered with the integrity of the family in inappropriate ways, which violated the ‘imprescriptible’ rights of the child.3 Following the Taoiseach’s apology in 1999, the government proposed a referendum on strengthening the rights of the child in the Constitution. Though a decade later, in 2009, proposals were published for the 28th Amendment to the Constitution on the rights of children, there has been no official commitment as to when this referendum will take place. The system of childcare institutions was – and in many cases still is – in the charge of a number of religious congregations, in particular the Christian Brothers. Though government bodies such as the Department of Education had been aware for decades of the serious problems within this system, evidence was ignored or covered up.4 An official, public response was finally provoked by the broadcast in 1999 by RTÉ (the Irish public broadcaster) of a three-part series, entitled States of Fear, on the scale and extent of abuse in these institutions. The Taoiseach’s apology, and the resulting foundation of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the Residential Institutions Redress Board (established in 2002), was at last a public recognition of past wrongs and a step towards writing a parallel history of victimisation. States of Fear was by no means the first revelation of institutional child abuse. In the 1950s and 60s there were isolated voices raised against the system, but since the early 1980s a growing number of voices raised this issue, and called attention to the government’s failure to intervene, detect or rescue.5 From fictionalised works such as Nothing to Say by Gerard Mannix Flynn (1983), and investigative books like Children of the Poor Clares by Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey (1985),6 to harrowing individual stories of survivors like The God Squad by Paddy Doyle (1988), an increasing range of personal stories of abuse regularly emerged, effecting a shift in public and governmental attitudes, referred to by Judge Ryan. In the 1980s, the difficulties of bringing these stories to public attention is attested to by Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey who submitted their book to over fifteen publishers before they were able to publish their history of the orphanages run by the Poor Clares, and even then it was only published with significant changes, specifically with the ‘political’ material taken out.7 Underlining the culture of silence on the issue of institutional abuse, Cathal Black’s docu-drama Our Boys, about the Christian Brothers, was made for Irish television in 1981, but was not screened until 1991. However, these singular examples of remembrance culture, over time, have had the cumulative effect of generating wider

20

The Politics of Irish Memory

social openness. Once the subject of institutional child abuse began to be addressed more frequently through these revelations, the ensuing shift in attitudes to traumatic memories of childhood enabled others to come forward about their own experiences, as suggested by the title of Mary Drennan’s book You May Talk Now (1994) and television programmes suh as Louis Lentin’s drama-documentary Dear Daughter, and the follow-up Prime Time programme ‘Dear Daughter’, both screened by RTÉ 2 in 1996.8 This chapter will consider the ways in which remembrance culture of the past twenty years, following on from earlier, pioneering works, has chosen to represent institutional abuse. The works covered vary in genre from documentary to drama, and from prose to film, in order to analyse the strategies of representation of both factual and fictional works. The factual works that I will discuss are the documentaries Dear Daughter (1996) and States of Fear (1999). The chapter will then consider the representation of boys’ institutions in fiction and film: The Butcher Boy by Pat McCabe (1992), and the film version directed by Neil Jordan (1997); and Aisling Walsh’s 2003 film of Patrick Galvin’s memoir Song for a Raggy Boy (first published in 1991). The analysis then turns to institutions for girls and young women, as represented by three works which dramatise the Magdalen laundries: Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed (1992); Aisling Walsh’s television film Sinners (BBC, 2002); and Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002). Finally, the chapter considers the post-Ryan Report reaction from Irish culture, in particular the ‘Darkest Corner’ series of plays at the Peacock Theatre in April 2010. What emerges from this analysis is the tendency of fiction, in particular, to represent institutional abuse in anti-nostalgic ways, so that the past is framed as traumatic, and the trauma is cordoned off from the present. This strategy has implications for the extent to which these acts of cultural remembrance function as ethical memory, and underlines the need for official – and inclusive – acts of remembrance. Moreover, the post-Ryan Report artistic and theatrical responses highlight the need for audiences in the present to pay full attention to, and also to respond to, the Report by not allowing the subject – and the implications for Irish society past and present – to be forgotten.

Official remembrance Though the revelations concerning abuse developed momentum from the early 1980s and increased in the 1990s, the harshness of the system of education and child care was certainly not unknown before then,

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21

though that knowledge may have been generally repressed or pushed aside. Indeed, as Gerardine Meaney has pointed out, the abuse of children is made quite clear as far back as 1907 in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World when it is remarked that Christy would come home from school ‘many’s the day, with his legs lamed under him, and he blackened with his beatings’.9 Decades later, after independence, when Monsignor Edward Flanagan, founder of the famous Boy’s Town orphanage in Nebraska, USA, visited Ireland in 1946, he was horrified by the conditions he witnessed in Irish reform and industrial schools, yet his reaction and feedback were simply ignored.10 In the same period, the attempts of a Limerick man, Martin McGuire, to bring Government and public attention to the flogging of a young boy was, according to Mary Raftery, ‘foiled by the refusal of the national newspapers to cover the story’.11 Indeed, Suffer the Little Children by Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan documents complaints about the ‘appalling conditions’ of industrial schools made as far back as the 1930s, while Diarmaid Ferriter draws attention to a letter, circulated by the Superior General of the Christian Brothers to the order in 1920, which warned about the dangers of ‘fondling boys’.12 In the 1960s, there were also cultural representations of abuse, such as Richard Johnson’s play The Evidence I Shall Give, which ran for a remarkable eighty-seven performances at the Abbey in 1961. The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse singles out this play as an ‘indicator’ of institutional abuse and argues that its long performance run shows that there was an audience open to hearing stories of abuse.13 The government also received official reports on the state of the system, such as the Kennedy Report (1970), and more recently commissioned its own, such as the Madonna House Report (1996), both of which strongly criticised the system of institutional care. Yet it seems that, out of a will to maintain the status quo, deference to the Catholic Church, and to simply avoid the scandal and implications of dealing with the complaints made, successive governments, and the public in general, instead ignored or repressed the problems. Indeed, in the case of the Madonna House report, the government suppressed several chapters, thus censoring its own publication.14 On 20 May 2009, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its Report (the Ryan Report), which revealed that many of the religious congregations interviewed by the Commission were still deeply reluctant to accept the full implications of the witness testimony of the scale and reach of the abuse perpetrated in their institutions. As the Ryan Report states, the Christian Brothers congregation, in

22

The Politics of Irish Memory

particular, though co-operative in terms of producing documents, was ‘defensive’ in relation to allegations of abuse, claiming that the official record showed no such abuses occurred.15 In addition, Brother Michael Reynolds, a senior leader of the Christian Brothers, following a series of allegations of abuse in the Artane Industrial School, defended the ‘positive’ role of the system and that school in particular.16 Assertions such as this, however, are no longer believed. Where once there was a culture of silence surrounding abuse, what the Ryan Report called ‘an iron curtain’ of silence, that silence has been definitively shattered. Even organisations as resistant to this traumatic truth, such as the Christian Brothers, have been forced by the publication of the Ryan Report, to acknowledge – and apologise – for their past failings. Yet though on the day of the Report’s publication, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe apologised in the Dáil for the ‘wrongs of the past’, in the focus on the wrongs of the religious congregations that ran these institutions, there has not been as much focus on the failures of the Department of Education and the State-Church co-operation in running these institutions. The Ryan Report pulls no punches when it states that the Department’s Inspectors did not ‘interfere’ when they were aware of ‘fundamental’ breaches of the regulations.17 Indeed, the demonising of the religious orders, while understandable as a reaction to the horrors that the Ryan Report uncovers and collects in one, irrefutable document, may actually prevent more attention and resources being spent on addressing the wrongs of the State. In November 2009, the Commission of Investigation into the handling of abuse claims in the Dublin Catholic Archdiocese published its report (the Murphy Report). Again, this public and official recognition of past wrongs was provoked by a television programme: RTÉ’s Prime Time ‘Cardinal Secrets’ programme, broadcast in October 2002. Chaired by Justice Yvonne Murphy, the Commission of Investigation found that there was widespread abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese and that the abuse was routinely covered up in order to avoid scandal and protect individual priests.18 In the wake of the Murphy Report, four auxiliary bishops resigned in response to public outrage at their role in covering up abuse by Catholic priests. Almost as much as the abuse itself, it is this discovery that is shocking – that the cruelties perpetrated against children, the most vulnerable members of society, were systematically ignored in deference to a culture of silence and amnesia. And an admission of this is what, of course, is absent from Ahern’s apology in 1999. Though he admits that it is ‘long overdue’, the State had in fact long before this detected the children’s

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pain, or been presented with evidence of pain, but had chosen to ignore it and, as a result, had chosen not to come to their rescue. In the wake of the Murphy Report in 2009, Taoiseach Brian Cowen responded in the Dáil by defending the Vatican’s failure to supply requested documents to the Commission of Investigation. By not expressing official public condemnation of another layer of clerical cover-up, again the government failed, retrospectively, to come to the rescue of the children who were abused. The refusal to fully acknowledge the past still afflicts official responses to institutional abuse. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was hampered by long delays and that, combined with the government’s changing policy, led in 2003 to the resignation of the Commission’s original chairwoman, Justice Mary Laffoy, who declared that the Commission had ‘in a practical sense been rendered powerless’.19 In May 2005 Timothy O’Rourke made a presentation to the Commission on the issue of successive governments overlooking evidence of institutional abuse, pointing out that questions were asked in the Dáil as early as 1982 regarding sexual abuse by teachers, and that much of the evidence heard by the Commission was, in fact, available decades earlier. O’Rourke went on to criticise the operation of the Commission, highlighting the restrictions on the number of witnesses, and the sampling of witnesses, so that the ‘commission will examine only a fraction of the cases’.20 For, while the Confidential Committee received applications from 2,107 witnesses, only 227 were given a hearing and 447 were interviewed, representing a selection rate of approximately thirty per cent. Moreover, though the Commission received allegations against over 800 abusers, none of this testimony has legal status in a court of law, or will directly lead to criminal charges being brought. As Mannix Flynn argues, ‘not a word in the report can be used in evidence against the abusers’.21 The Commission’s mode of operation thus prevented it from being able to produce a complete history of the victimisation of children, or to effect any punishment for those acts of abuse. Without such a complete understanding of past trauma and victimisation, the ethical function of memory is limited, so that there is less capacity for preventing the recurrence of abuse.22 Though under the new chairman, Judge Sean Ryan, the Commission has produced a thorough Report, which has been welcomed by groups representing abuse victims, several decisions have marred the Report’s claim to full disclosure. The most far-reaching decision in this regard was to preserve the anonymity of the alleged abusers, by using pseudonyms instead of their real names, even for criminally convicted abusers.

24

The Politics of Irish Memory

This, arguably, continues a partial culture of silence. Moreover, the Report has been criticised by Mary Raftery for not having strong or specific enough recommendations.23 A seemingly fundamental error was also made when the groups representing victims of abuse were banned from the press conference held at the Report’s launch. Thus the promise of full disclosure and an open history of the State’s institutional care of children recedes. This is a failure not simply to detect or to intervene, but to officially remember. This kind of partial memory on behalf of the government, is further confirmed when we consider that the Magdalen Laundries were not even included in the list of institutions to be investigated by the Commission or to be compensated by the Residential Institutions Redress Board, on the basis that they were independent from the court system and therefore private institutions, despite the fact that, as was revealed in 2009, women were sent to laundries by State agencies and they were in receipt of State funding.24 In conjunction with the argument that it was individuals who perpetrated these crimes and that we should not ‘demonise’ an entire system as a result, runs the argument from those like journalist John Waters that ‘present-day understandings’ distort how we judge the past.25 Since corporal punishment was an accepted and approved way of disciplining children in former decades, it is bad historical practice to use the standards of today, when corporal punishment is illegal, to understand the past. While this argument has some validity in reminding us not to fall prey to anachronism, it is nevertheless a gross underestimation of the kind of abuse that went on and runs counter to the findings of many contemporary reports – the 1970 Kennedy report being one – which themselves deemed the levels of physical and sexual abuse of children to be ‘serious’.26 Despite the State’s acknowledgment of failure and guilt, the establishment of a commission into the abuse with the twin goals of deciding on responsibility and redress, and the growing public awareness of collective culpability, this is still a contested history. Nevertheless, what the two recent reports uncover is monumental in terms of revealing the scale and reach of abuse in child care institutions in Ireland, and has thus silenced many of the defenders of the institutions, while provoking apologies from others, including the Christian Brothers, and resignations from several Catholic bishops. A strong aspect of the documentaries and memoirs that have emerged in the last twenty years is telling one’s story, as the act of narration is cathartic because it performs the desire to uncover a traumatic past and to share it. The Ryan Report states that the ‘most frequently cited reasons

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25

given by witnesses for attending to give evidence to the Confidential Committee were to have the abuse they experienced as children officially recorded and to tell their story’.27 There is also an equal drive to understand the past for two further reasons, which are directed towards both the past and the future. First, a history of abuse is vital in order that the past can be, in the process of being heard and acknowledged, healed and justice achieved. Second, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes and abuses, the present must learn from the past. Implicitly, it is only by doing this that the survivors can be truly rescued. Though the best method for dealing with abuse against children may be juridical proceedings, the creation of public works such as novels, films and plays is an important element in the processing and understanding of historical traumas. And, in the absence of a completely comprehensive State-led investigation, which names and shames, it remains the remit of culture to continue to remember.

Documentary approaches In the docu-drama Dear Daughter (1996), Christine Buckley narrates the circumstances of her childhood and the thirteen years she spent in Goldenbridge Orphanage.28 While there she experienced cruelty – both physical and emotional – and was considered lucky to be one of the few who got any education whatsoever. The documentary is told from Christine’s perspective, along with several other survivors of the orphanage. These women together re-enact some of the trials they went through as children – standing at night, shaking with cold and fear on the landing of the stairs, waiting for the nun who would beat them before eventually allowing them to go to bed. There are scenes of the now-adult women rocking in the tiny children’s seats as they make rosary beads, recounting the harsh treatment they received were their work not fast or good enough. One woman is locked back into the boiler room where she was punished as a child. There is also black and white footage with actors playing the children and nuns, which aims to give a more evocative picture of how it was when they were children. But the adult women’s re-enactions, though awkward at times, are the most affecting aspects of the documentary, illustrating the extent to which as adults, they are still trapped in the roles and punishments meted out to them so many years earlier. In addition, Christine narrates large portions of her experiences direct to camera, in a close-up that is not only emotionally affecting but creates absolute credibility. This is not simply a story but is testimony, with the audience as witness.

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The Politics of Irish Memory

Dear Daughter has a somewhat happy ending in that Christine manages to track down her father, now living in Nigeria. Her story ends with her receiving his letter, which starts ‘Dear Daughter’, the affirmation that she has so longed for, and the final image of her story is of a photograph of them finally reunited in Nigeria. But this is not the end of the programme; in the programme’s epilogue Sister Helena O’Donoghue, the provincial leader of the Sisters of Mercy, the religious order which ran Goldenbridge, apologises unreservedly for the hurt caused to ‘any one in our care’ and offers the survivors counselling. However, Sr O’Donoghue ends by saying ‘But it is a long time ago, and it’s very difficult to assess the situation and at this point we are at the early stages of doing that.’ While it is heartening that she is so honest in the congregation’s collective regret for the abuse that went on in this orphanage, the assertion that it was ‘a long time ago’ and the difficulty of assessing the problems, somewhat undermines the nature of the apology. Sr O’Donoghue shies away from the implications of Buckley’s story and the phrase ‘it is a long time ago’ does not acknowledge the persistent traumatic effect of the past on the present. Nor did this programme, as the later series States of Fear managed to, lead to a State-level investigation of the allegations of abuse. There are two clear differences between Dear Daughter and States of Fear, broadcast three years later, in 1999. Firstly, whereas Christine Buckley was the emotional heart of Dear Daughter and the programme derived its impact and narrative arc from her story, States of Fear, written and produced by Mary Raftery, expanded its focus to consider the stories of many more survivors, and these collected stories illustrate the scale of the abuse that went on, and the sheer numbers of children who were affected. Secondly, from the opening minutes of the first episode, it is obvious that the programme is not content with simply laying the responsibility for the abuse at the feet of the religious orders who ran the institutions in question. Instead, the narrator tells us that the Department of Education was aware of instances of, for example, ‘starvation’ and ‘sadism’, and that they did ‘nothing’ or, worse, covered up evidence of abuse.29 As with Dear Daughter the testimony of the survivors is often harrowing to witness – the first episode of States of Fear opens with one man telling of how ‘The one good thing about Christmas Day was that there was no sexual abuse.’ This is certainly not easy viewing. These stories are hard to witness, to take in, to process and accept. But, as a solicitor for one of the victims argues, the time for ignoring these stories is over; ‘It’s not good enough to say that people weren’t being told … We need

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to nail that as a lie.’ And as Mannix Flynn, a survivor of institutional abuse, puts it, ‘it’s certainly not hidden Ireland, we have chosen to make it hidden’.30 The collective revelations of abuse thus testify to another collective, which was silent in its acceptance of the abuse. States of Fear mixes contemporary footage – often from RTÉ documentaries on the institutions – with photographs and interviews with the survivors. Each survivor is introduced with a painting (by Katy Simpson) of them as they are now and as a child. Again, as with Dear Daughter, the programme is clearly linking the adult testimony to their child selves, and this is apparent too in setting the interviews in the institutions they were incarcerated in as children. The programme makes it clear that the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy – the two largest religious orders indicted in this series – ‘declined to be interviewed’. Yet the evidence that the programme uncovers, from Department of Education files, academic testimony and occasional glimpses into the records of the orders, for example, the accounts of one Magdalen Laundry, combined with the personal testimony of survivors from a significant number of different institutions, makes overwhelmingly convincing and moving viewing.31 The government reaction to States of Fear makes it clear what a transformative effect the programme had, as then Minister for Education and Science, Micheál Martin told the Commission, after watching the footage, ‘I was left with the view they can’t all be wrong, they can’t all be false stories’.32 Furthermore, Bertie Ahern’s public apology on behalf of the government for the failures of the State, was made just hours before the broadcast of the final episode of States of Fear. The scope and reach of these documentary representations – and exposés – of abuse is clear, as well as the impact they had on shaping official remembrance and policy. Though there is still a lack of clarity over aspects of the institutional care of children in Ireland, the image of the abused child of Irish history is now accepted. However, this is no reason for complacency, and remembrance culture must further be interrogated for how it has represented and performed the traumatic memories of institutional abuse.

‘What did I do?’: representing boys Patrick McCabe’s critically and commercially successful novel The Butcher Boy (1992), and Neil Jordan’s film adaptation, released five years later, both create a parodic and nightmare vision of Irish childhood. Addressing many of the same issues, but within a resolutely realistic

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frame, Aisling Walsh’s Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), based on Patrick Galvin’s memoir of the same title (published in 1991), also exposes the nightmare of institutional abuse of boys. McCabe’s story is told from the perspective of Francie Brady, the eponymous butcher boy, who the novel tracks from early childhood to adolescence. His early years are marked by the suicide of his mother, and his ensuing rebellious behaviour results in his being sent to a reform school for boys. Following his release, his father’s death, and a brief stint in a mental hospital, Francie murders one of the townsfolk, Mrs Nugent, in response to his perception that she is to blame for all his misfortunes. Through the use of the grotesque, both McCabe’s novel and Jordan’s film attempt to convey the emotional truth and experience of an abused child. Indeed, talking of both the novel and the film, McCabe himself says that they portray ‘how things actually were’.33 Jordan confirms this when he argues that the film represents the Ireland he knew in the 1950s, that has largely disappeared with modernisation.34 Despite these claims to veracity, at the same time The Butcher Boy revels in its lack of specific historicity; the opening assertion famously evokes small-town Ireland, lost in mythic time: ‘twenty or thirty or forty years ago’. Moreover, as the story is entirely retrospective, it suggests that this is a narrative as much about how the past is remembered in the present, as it is a faithful portrait of the 1950s or 1960s.35 Indeed, the ironic representation of the fifties and sixties as an exaggeratedly kitsch era, combined with the matter of fact attitude to institutional abuse, speaks of a 1990s sensibility which is far from reverent about the past. From the retrospective opening of the film, innocence is dismissed. The opening voiceover is performed by Stephen Rea. Rea not only voices and plays the adult Francie, but also plays Benny Brady, Francie’s father, so that Francie’s self-destructive and cyclical future is inscribed in the soundtrack right from the beginning. Likewise, as Rea’s voiceover announces that the whole town ‘were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent’, the image is of Francie (Eamonn Owens) and Joe (Alan Boyle) playing Indians, as children before the spiral of destruction has really begun. So, it seems that Francie’s fate is inevitable, and the space of childhood innocence already corrupted by pre-echoes of the future. Furthermore, the fact that he and Joe play at Indians rather than cowboys, also signals Francie’s identification with the victims of history and his unavoidable exploitation and destruction. The emphasis on Francie’s inescapable fate is maintained throughout his story. In both novel and film, it is Mrs Nugent who first voices the

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idea that Francie had no ‘chance’ in life, due to the poverty of his background and his alcoholic father, as she says ‘God love him it’s not his fault’.36 This pronouncement is echoed throughout the story by other community members, in particular, by the local women: ‘Sure what chance did he ever have, the poor creature’37 and the Garda Sergeant: ‘Not that you could be any different’ (64). On the one hand, this is a common-place way of excusing Francie’s increasingly erratic behaviour, though it will not save him from the community’s damning judgement when he finally goes too far by killing Mrs Nugent. But this kind of clichéd explanation is also an excuse for the community; if Francie had no chance from the beginning then their failure to intervene is justified. Neither McCabe nor Jordan accepts these excuses; indeed both novel and film indict the community and the State’s social services for the manifold ways in which they fail Francie. Annie Brady, Francie’s mother, makes him promise that he will ‘never let me down’, a promise that he takes seriously, as seriously as his later promise to Joe to stay true to their blood-brother pact. But despite his attempts to keep the promise, the conflict between his parents, fuelled by his mother’s depression and his father’s violent alcoholism, drives him to run away from home. Though Francie returns, because he misses his mother too much, he is too late and she has committed suicide, an act for which he is made to feel guilty by his father. In the film, Jordan chooses to highlight Francie’s public grief (and guilt) timing his return for the day of his mother’s funeral. Effectively, Francie’s limited childhood ends here; his earlier jokes about his mother going to the garage now ring hollow, replaced by his knowledge that she had been in a mental hospital. Yet his imaginative – and evasive – way of dealing with problems is accelerated and every time that Francie has to voice something that he finds too disturbing, his response is to laugh; for example, when Joe refuses to believe him about Father Tiddly molesting him, he turns it into a joke and ‘I laughed till the tears ran down my face’ (98). The mixture of emotions here is typical of how Francie needs to express grief but has no outlet for it – when he tries to speak out, he is either blamed, ignored or disbelieved. In this, Francie is typical of the way abused children were treated, as it is only as adults that they have been able to tell their stories to an accepting audience; as children, they had no voice. Following the break-down of his family, Francie decides that it is the fault of the Nugent family and Mrs Nugent in particular. Francie blames Mrs Nugent, partly for her snobbish attitude to his family, but mainly because the Nugents represent everything he so desires: security,

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comfort, stability. To Francie, Mrs Nugent represents not only a demon to whom he must teach a lesson, but also the most desirable object of proper mother and perfect home-maker. In one scene in the novel, Francie is overcome by a vision of Mrs Nugent’s breast, a physical manifestation of motherhood that overwhelms and chokes him. This nightmare vision of the female and mothering body causes Francie to further blame himself for betraying his own mother, and this guilt drives his developing obsession with Mrs Nugent as he uses her as a symbol to represent all his guilt. Francie is thus unable to attribute blame and responsibility to where it truly lies, instead opting for a vendetta aimed at eliminating the evidence of his desire for a functional family. This aspect of Francie’s relationship to Mrs Nugent is largely absent from the film and instead the audience sees Mrs Nugent (Fiona Shaw) only as she is characterised by Francie; she is always dressed in green and her cartoon-like mannerisms and Anglophile accent mark her as the villainous outsider from the outset. When the immediate community can no longer handle Francie’s angry rebelliousness, he is dispatched to a reform school. Though Francie at points is aware that his actions might be wrong, he is also aware that the punishment of being sent to a reform school is out of proportion with his actual crimes. When his father visits him, Francie demands to know ‘what did I do ... what did I do?’ (86). His tirade against his father at this point, and his demand to be told what he is guilty of, is indicative of the way in which children were historically sent to reform schools for ‘crimes’ such as truancy. At the reform school, Francie is molested by Father ‘Tiddly’ Sullivan (Milo O’Shea), and the resulting fear of scandal leads to his early release. Though the ostensible reason he is released early is that he has, indeed, reformed, the real reason behind his release is the fear that ‘everybody would hear’ about the abuse (95); as the gardener says in Jordan’s version ‘They’re shiting themselves now in case the newspapers hear about it.’ This is, inevitably, more characteristic of the 1980s and 90s when revelations about abuse were given credence by newspapers and the public, and speaks to an audience familiar with the idea of institutional cover-ups of abuse. In the era that the novel and the film purport to depict, the response is more likely that characterised by Joe’s incredulous disbelief or, indeed, like the failure of the community, or Garda sergeant, to question Francie about his experiences at all. As James Smith argues, the novel ‘interrogates society’s sequestering of those it deems socially aberrant’,38 and indeed both novel and film interrogate not only the action of shutting Francie away, but Francie

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himself questions shutting his mother away, raging at his father that ‘you put ma in a mental home’ (85). The suppression of mental and behavioural problems by the town merely follows the pattern of failure; every single institution fails to help Francie Brady, from his family, his community and his best friend, to the police, the doctor and the Church. Jordan’s film also draws attention to the external pressures on Irish society of the early 1960s, highlighting the town’s awareness of the Cold War. There is much discussion in the shops and with those Francie meets of the threat of nuclear war, and when his parents are fighting, as his mother reaches for her pills, the television screen shows an image of a nuclear explosion. Later, Jordan depicts a nuclear explosion and mushroom cloud hovering over the same landscape that Francie and Joe played in. This is a strong way of keying into the Cold War fears of the early 1960s and linking these fears to Francie’s growing delirium. Yet for a 1990s audience the presence of fear and the threat of an explosion that will devastate every aspect of Irish life are also easily linked to the issues that McCabe and Jordan depict in relation to the family and the State. As Ruth Barton notes, it is not a bomb that will blow apart the community, but the revelations of institutional abuse.39 In one scene we see the idyllic landscape of the film blown to pieces, highlighting the extent to which traumatic visions of the Irish past also destroy the possibility of imagining the Irish past nostalgically. As the novel progresses, Francie begins to lose his grip on reality, indicated by his religious ‘visions’ of saints who he has read about (or in the film, hears about in Father Tiddly’s sermon). These visions have a curious ontological status in that Francie initially seems to invent them, yet subsequently they seem to be involuntary. This is especially the case in Jordan’s film as Sinéad O’Connor, a controversial figure for her vocal opposition to the Catholic Church, is cast as a radiant and comforting Virgin Mary, who appears spontaneously and cinematically when Francie is in need of counsel. Moreover, from this point on Francie starts to echo his mother’s behaviour; once he has been released from the school, he returns home and goes ‘whiz’ around the town, playing a dual role as ideal son and housewife for his father. His refusal to admit his father’s death results in him being sent to ‘the garage’, where the inefficacy of the mental health system is shown to the full when Francie is given electric shock treatment. Francie escapes and goes back to his previous life, launching a vicious – and fatal – attack on Mrs Nugent. After the murder, Francie returns to his job with the butcher Leddy and then uses his butchering tools to deal with Mrs Nugent’s body. There is

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a paradox here between his desire to do a good job for Leddy and the total social violation of murder. These are, of course, the two sides of Francie; on the one hand he tries to perfectly fulfil the social roles he sees around him, yet on the other he represents how far things can go wrong when every aspect of social care fails. In an attempt to elude the police after killing Mrs Nugent, Francie retreats to the ‘hide’ that he and Joe made as small children. The instinct to retreat to the relative security and innocence of childhood is analogous to Francie’s refusal to accept blame, and his mantra: ‘If only the Nugents hadn’t come to town.’40 We can thus read Francie’s struggle with blame as both childish and mentally unstable and this, in turn, can be extended to the refusal of the community and the State to accept either responsibility or blame for Francie and his ‘aberrant’ behaviour. The random and demented actions of Francie in demonising one member of society – Mrs Nugent – are thus paralleled by society itself as it demonises, incarcerates and, ultimately, contributes towards destroying Francie. Francie’s release from the reform school, due to fears that he may reveal Father Tiddly’s fondness for young boys dressed up in bonnets, is one of the artistic licences of McCabe’s plot as, in actuality, allegations of abuse were punished and the culture of silence surrounding abuse was almost total. This harsh and inescapable reality is represented in Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), a film directed by Aisling Walsh from the memoir and screenplay by Patrick Galvin.41 Whereas Francie’s childhood is rendered in technicolour and with irreverent humour, Walsh’s film is earnestly serious, signified by its visual palette of greys and browns. In the 1930s Galvin was sentenced to one year’s reform at St Conleth’s Reformatory School for Boys, Daingean, Co. Offaly, an institution that was notorious for the ‘extraordinary level of violence’ wielded by the members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate who ran the school.42 In 1982 the Old Limerick Journal published an account of life as an inmate at the end of the 1940s. Sean Bourke, sentenced to three years reform at the school, likened it to Alcatraz and recounts how he ‘lost my innocence’ on his second day there when he witnessed a Brother beat a boy so badly that the boy’s hands were reduced to a ‘bloody pulp’.43 Indeed, the Ryan Report states that ‘physical abuse of boys in Daingean was extreme’ under a ‘cruel regime of punishment’.44 Galvin’s memoir, the second part of a trilogy, certainly paints a grim picture of the institution, which he calls ‘St Jude’s’, where boys were dehumanised by violence and the policy of identifying them by number rather than name. What is also significant is that Galvin, in both Song

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for a Raggy Boy and the preceding short memoir Song for a Poor Boy, describes his home life as well, which, though poor, was full of love, music and stories. The death of Galvin’s mother, combined with his truancy and petty crimes – reminiscent of Francie’s situation – means that Galvin is sent to ‘St Jude’s’.45 While there his father visits him and sends him letters, getting their literate neighbour to write them for him. He is certainly not unwanted or unloved, and part of the injustice of the separation is the feeling that Galvin’s sentencing in no way took into account his relatively secure home life. This same sense is conveyed in the film when two young brothers are visited by their father. These two brothers are later beaten for hugging each other on Christmas day, conveying not only the enormous cruelty of the Brother in charge of punishment, but also the brutality of a system that forcibly breaks up families. There are two main abusers in the film, Brother John (Iain Glen) and Brother Mac (Marc Warren). Brother John takes almost vicious pleasure in corporal punishment, applying it liberally wherever he decides there has been an infraction of discipline. He sees the boys as ‘creatures’ rather than ‘intelligent human beings’ and his treatment of them is along these lines; he is not interested in their education but merely their obedience. When he is prevented by Mr Franklin, the new lay teacher, from beating a boy, he retaliates by punishing all the boys, an attempt to combat their loyalty and gratitude to Franklin. Franklin, played by the charismatic Aidan Quinn, represents the difference that an individual can make within a system. What Brother John most resents about Franklin’s tenure and increasing influence among the boys is his own concomitant loss of power, a power that he attempts to re-establish by increasing the level of his violence. The most rebellious of the boys, Mercier, leads many of the others in chanting ‘No Flogging’ in protest at Brother John’s beating of the two young brothers. In response, Brother John threatens to ‘crucify’ Mercier and, indeed, he fulfils his word, beating Mercier so violently that he is killed. Brother John is, by the end of this fatal assault, portrayed literally foaming at the mouth and his psychotic tendencies seem confirmed when he takes a clean handkerchief from his pocket to calmly dab at his mouth. The identification made here between Christ and Mercier is not developed by the film, but the boy’s death is represented as a sacrifice that ensures change and mercy for the other boys. After Mercier’s death, Brother John is punished in two ways – firstly, he is beaten by Mr Franklin and later he is sent by the Archbishop to do missionary work in Africa, where the film’s postscript informs the audience, he remained until his

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death in 1969. This postscript, informing the audience of the real-life outcome of what they have just witnessed, has the additional aspect of relating the events of the film to fact and reality. The witness to this fatal attack is Brother Mac, who waits until it is too late before summoning help. He runs to Mr Franklin’s classroom, choking out the words ‘It wasn’t me … it wasn’t me.’ But Brother Mac is guilty, not just by association with Brother John’s regime, but for his own abuse of the boys. Early in the film, he rapes the young boy Patrick Delaney and, when Delaney confesses this ‘sin’, Brother Mac punishes him for ignoring his warning to keep it secret. The film portrays Brother Mac as a nuanced character, naive and impressionable and, clearly, under Brother John’s power. He is shown as sensitive and artistic and capable of a sort of stern affection for the boys. After the rape, he is shaken by his own actions and at the end of the film he finally defies Brother John. Following his part in Brother John’s disgrace and, one assumes, following revelations of his sexual abuse of some of the boys, Brother Mac is sent to a parish in America (where, again, the postscript tells us, he still lived at the time of the film’s release). The dispatching of both Brother John and Brother Mac to other, distant, parishes, illustrates that the abuse of boys was not merely covered up, but facilitated. By not publicly exposing them, or using the law to punish the priests, the Church hierarchy enabled them to continue abusing elsewhere. Brother Mac’s treatment, however, is less severe than Brother John’s, both in terms of the Church’s punishment of his sins, and his depiction within the film. Brother Mac’s fear is of the missions in Africa and he manages to avoid them. In an analogous way, Brother Mac does not seem to be as harshly judged by Walsh as is Brother John. Indeed, in the film’s ‘Production Notes’, the rape of Patrick Delaney is called a ‘personal assault’.46 Though the actual rape scene is very distressing to watch, in other ways Brother Mac is deemed not as cruel as Brother John, even before the murder of Mercier, leading viewers to question whether the film is suggesting that sexual abuse is not as objectionable as physical abuse. This is an ambivalence that takes away from the overall impact of the film, which is otherwise unflinching about the level of abuse and the attitude and response of the hierarchy to that abuse, be it physical or sexual. The issue of sexual abuse and the characterisation of Brother Mac is differently handled in the memoir. In Galvin’s memoir (though he also wrote the film’s screenplay) there is no discussion of Brother Mac’s molestation or abuse of boys; there is the implication that he is attracted

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to the boys but the emphasis is on his supra-religiosity, his utter repression of his feelings and his regime of self-punishment, in an attempt to deprive the body of any pleasure or sensuality.47 Brother Mac’s response to the boys’ sexuality is to attempt to ban the younger boys from any kind of contact with the older boys. He thus persuades Father Damian, the school’s head, to build a wall separating the two boys’ yards (in the film this is implied to be Brother John’s scheme), out of a hysterical fear of the young boys’ developing sexuality. Indeed, in the memoir the presence of homosexual relations in the school is exclusively between the boys, including Mercier, though this is entirely absent from the film. The film thus separates and distils issues which are more complex in the memoir, presumably in order to simplify an audience’s response to the representation of the two Brothers. This is, perhaps, how the film’s somewhat sympathetic portrait of Brother Mac originates. It also, of course, helps the audience to see the boys as uncomplicated victims and non-sexual children. The portrait of Mercier is also altered between the memoir and film, with the crucial difference that Mercier’s death is not mentioned in the book at all. Mercier is also a more obviously brutal boy in the memoir, beating another boy, Rogers, much more severely than is depicted in the film. While one can certainly recognise the need to create uncomplicated plot lines and characters, it is regrettable that the film also divests its characters of some of their complexity, at least as Galvin had originally drawn them. Galvin, of course, also wrote the screenplay for the film, indeed he says that the process of making the film was an ‘exorcism’ that will ‘help him finally bury the demons of his past.’48 The fuller depiction of sexual abuse may well come from the desire for that final burial, one that is possible in the more sympathetic climate of the early twenty-first century. While in his memoir, Galvin uses novelistic techniques to draw in the background and character of Franklin, the film emphasises this and uses Franklin’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War to frame the Irish narrative. In one of the opening scenes, Franklin remembers the horror of war, in a flashback that shows his comrade being shot for refusing to kiss a statue of the Virgin Mary. There is thus, before the film even reaches ‘St Jude’s’, an opposition established between humanity and religion, or to put it slightly differently, the film connects brutality and religion. The production notes state that the connection between the war and ‘St Jude’s’ is that in both situations Franklin must ‘fight against fascism’.49 Yet unfortunately this is not developed as the film, after this opening flashback, uses the war to illustrate Franklin’s

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romance and marriage to one of his comrades, Rosa. Rosa is killed by the Republicans and the war is thus associated with doomed romance and lost love, rather than being used to make any real case about the connections between Ireland and Spain, or indeed, the connection between Catholicism and violence. This is typical of the kind of romanticisation that occurs in the film, at the end of which Franklin is dissuaded from leaving the school by Delaney’s recitation of Eva Gore-Booth’s 1916 poem ‘The peaceful night that round me flows / Breaks through your iron prison doors’.50 Though what is most apparent here is the influence of the boarding-school film Dead Poets Society, the other connection being made is that between armed revolution, defeated ideals and the abuse of power in the reform school system. Again, this is not developed as the film ends on the happy note of Franklin embracing the boys, the implication being that he will stay with them, rather than abandon them to the system. This is a film about personal integrity, rather than the revolution of the system. The director Aisling Walsh aimed for people to leave the cinema ‘hopeful’ as Franklin has ‘won’ the ‘battle for those children’, but the war is far from won, indeed, it is largely absent from this film.51

‘The women nobody wants’: representing girls and women Orphanages and industrial schools contained girls and boys excluded from society. Yet these were not the only institutions in which females were sequestered; there was also a network of institutions aimed at young girls and women who were pregnant with illegitimate babies, or who were arbitrarily thought to pose a risk of being a temptation to men. Unlike the industrial school system, these institutions were independent of the courts: instead of being sentenced by the court system, the women were signed in by a family member or guardian, and the parish priest.52 While the legal standing of the women was hazy, their powerlessness was clear, giving them the status of children, and in terms of public perception they were still criminalised by virtue of their incarceration in the laundry. Once signed in, the ‘penitents’ could only be released with the consent of a male family member, again infantilising them, and many women spent the rest of their lives within the laundry walls.53 There is now a small, but significant, body of theatre and film and television work representing the Magdalen laundries: Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed (1992) was the hit of the Edinburgh Festival and inspired the BBC documentary Washing Away the Stain (1993). Ten years later, two films were screened, Peter Mullan’s award-winning The

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Magdalene Sisters, which was inspired by the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4, 1998); and Sinners, directed by Aisling Walsh for BBC, testifying to the continuing importance of television in making public the stories of abuse. All of these works emphasise the systemic nature of abuse of girls and women in the laundries. In Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed, the action oscillates between the present day and 1963; in the present, Rosa is searching for evidence of her mother, Brigit, who had been incarcerated in the laundry after her birth. Rosa’s search triggers a flashback to the days of the laundry when Brigit and the other inmates cleaned the dirty laundry of the Bishop and the Athlone seminary. Though the women dream of the outside world and, in particular, of finding their children, they realise that they are not wanted by society; Mother Victoria shouts at one point that ‘No one else wants them! No one else wants them!’,54 a sentiment that the women clearly internalise as Brigit describes them, herself included, as ‘The outcasts! The women nobody wants!’ (34). In order to console themselves for their imprisonment, and to some extent to resist it, the women role-play, entering into a communal fantasy that they will one day be free and their dreams come true. When Mandy is depressed and feels that she will never leave the laundry, the others rally round to stage a mock wedding between Mandy and Elvis, dressing a mannequin up as the groom, kitted out with clothes from the laundry basket. This scene immediately follows Brigit’s outburst about being outcasts and illustrates both the solidarity of the women and the desperate longing to believe in something beyond the reality and truth of what Brigit has said. In one way this wedding scene acts as a form of escape in that the women are momentarily free of the constraints on their imaginations and the dull routine of the laundry, though this imaginative escape is still within the confines of the marriage plot which has, as they clearly perceive, the advantage of being a socially sanctioned form of feminine sexuality and thus relatively free. Yet by expressing themselves in acting out these fantasies, the women dispel some of their anxieties which, in fact, enables them to return the laundry business. Paradoxically the few moments of freedom that they achieve hold them back from collective rebellion against the status quo. There are, of course, moments of individual freedom, such as when Cathy escapes. She is a repeat escapee; at the beginning of the play she has only recently been recaptured and reprimanded by Mother Victoria (we later discover that she has also been beaten by the nun). However, we learn near the end of the play that Cathy’s final and apparently successful escape in a basket of laundry has proved fatal, as she suffocated

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under the weight of the clothing. In contrast, Brigit does manage to escape, but, as Rosa learns, she simply ‘disappeared’, and never managed to find her daughter (76). The fate of the women is thus either to remain within the ‘safe’ confines of the laundry, or to face at best anonymous survival, and at worst a lonely death. These women are representative of the thousands who went through the Magdalen system, down to Nellie-Nora who has became so institutionalised that now she is finally allowed to leave she cannot, saying ‘I–I don’t go out much’ (76). Though Mother Victoria is harsh and unforgiving, and ignores both the mental and physical needs of the women, another nun, Sister Virginia, provides an insight into the attitudes of ‘good’ nuns within these institutions. Sister Virginia grants the women some privacy and space, allowing them to be themselves, as a recompense for what she perceives as the shockingly harsh treatment of the women, particularly the lack of health care, which she blames for Cathy’s premature death. When she writes to the Archbishop to inform him of the circumstances, her letter is intercepted by Mother Victoria, leading to a confrontation between the two women and, metaphorically, between two different societal attitudes to women. While Mother Victoria quotes St Paul’s argument that it takes ‘seven generations to rid the blood of the sins of the flesh’, Sister Virginia retaliates that St Paul ‘hated women!’ (45). Indeed, while Mother Victoria sees the women as sinners who must do penance and suffer, Sister Virginia argues for mercy and puts forward the case that ‘Christ had many women friends’ (45). Sister Virginia has developed her own female-centric version of Catholicism which allows her to treat the Magdalen women as individuals, rather than symbols of sin. Sister Virginia’s fate is left obscure by Brogan and at the end of the play we do not know if she left the laundry or whether, in her own words, she was ‘brainwashed’ and ‘dehumanised’ so that she remained (31). What the role of Sister Virginia brings to the play is not just the presence of a good nun, but a re-imagining of Christianity as a femaleand mother-centred religion, in which Christ was borne by a woman and who ‘performed [his] first miracle at [his] mother’s request’ (31). Indeed, Sister Virginia’s emphasis on the vital role of women in Christ’s life highlights the harsh treatment of women by the Church. As a former inmate of a Magdalen laundry remarked after she had seen The Magdalene Sisters film, ‘Wasn’t Our Lady lucky? If she was in Ireland she’d have been put in a Magdalene laundry and Jesus would have been adopted!’55 Indeed, while Brogan’s play clearly voices the incongruity of women’s place within Christianity, both Sinners and The Magdalene

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Sisters further illustrate the sexism inherent in Catholicism and highlight the discriminatory practice of locking women up but leaving the men they had sex with free and unharmed. Sinners, broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in March 2002, focuses on the story of Anne-Marie Hegarty (played by Ann-Marie Duff), who has an incestuous relationship with her brother, leading to her pregnancy and incarceration in a Magdalen laundry.56 Anne-Marie’s entry to the laundry begins with the signing in, where her aunt and priest give her over to the nuns’ care; in this scene Anne-Marie must sign her own entry form also and this is the first stage of losing her self-control and self-identity. In the next scenes she is stripped, her breasts are bound and she must change her name – as one nun puts it, ‘Under the circumstances you don’t really want anyone to know your real identity.’ She chooses Theresa, after her dead mother; mothers are to be a theme in the film, from the unmarried mothers scrubbing the laundry, delivering their babies and then giving them up for adoption, to the nuns who must be addressed as ‘mother’ by the lay women. The women in the laundry are there for a range of reasons; one girl is thought to be too pretty and has been sent from the orphanage straight to the laundry, highlighting the wide system of institutions in the control of religious orders. Most women are there because of illegitimate pregnancies, though one older woman is there because she left her abusive husband and was sent to the laundry. To the girls’ horror, she bitterly says, ‘I’d rather be in here ironing cassocks than out there with that bastard.’ Though the life in the laundry is gruelling and abusive, to some it is truly a refuge.57 Most, though, remain in the laundry against their will. Kitty (Bronagh Gallagher), formerly a schoolteacher and one of the few to befriend ‘Theresa’, plans to escape the home and keep her baby by marrying Patrick (Gary Lydon), a Garda sergeant who is often in the laundry. But Patrick panics at the idea of marriage, particularly to the assertive Kitty, and backs out, citing his father’s saying that ‘You should never trust a woman who can add up faster than you.’ Kitty is not only angry at him for reneging on his promise, but for giving her hope. When her baby is taken away from her, she commits suicide, an act which is, like Cathy’s death in Eclipsed, branded ‘a tragic accident’. Anne-Marie is determined not to accept Kitty’s fate and during the distractions of a special visit by a government Minister, she escapes with her son Eamon, fleeing through the streets of the town. As the Gardaí pursue her, Anne-Marie takes refuge by breaking into a man’s house and at first it seems that he may shelter her, but when the Garda knocks on

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his door, he gives her up. When Anne-Marie is returned to the laundry, Eamon is given up for adoption in America – effectively erasing him from the story, and history – while she is beaten and shorn. The man whose house she broke into, Frank (John Kavanagh), visits the laundry to check up on Anne-Marie and when he is at first refused permission to see her he argues that if he ‘was a suspicious man I’d say you were hiding her from me’. When threatened like this, the nuns relent, and Frank is shocked to see Anne-Marie so changed and bruised. She is antagonistic towards him but they develop a certain rapport that leads, a couple of visits later, to Frank asking her to marry him. This represents her only chance to leave the laundry and, after much deliberation – and further abuse from the nuns for her refusal to work in the laundry – she agrees, on the condition that she doesn’t have to have sex with him. Frank at first retorts that ‘The Church says’ she must and that ‘You’d be my wife, it would be your duty.’ Though Frank capitulates and agrees to her condition, this scene underlines the comprehensive branding of women as sexual objects and the dual control of women’s bodies by the Catholic Church and social expectations. The final scene of the film depicts Anne-Marie leaving the laundry on Frank’s arm, smiling and free. That a sexless marriage to a much older and cantankerous man constitutes a ‘happy’ ending for the character speaks volumes about the kind of degradations women experienced in the laundries and the lengths to which they would go to leave. The slightly surreal aspect of the marriage and, indeed, the insertion of a marriage plot at the end of a story of abuse, also indicate the exceptional nature of any kind of escape from these institutions. In Peter Mullan’s film, The Magdalene Sisters, released the same year and also starring Anne-Marie Duff, three of the four central characters escape. Again, this is highly unusual and one of the things that survivors drew attention to as unlikely following a screening of the film.58 As in both Sinners and Eclipsed one of the inmates is punished for aberrant behaviour by being sent to a mental asylum, and all three works thoroughly depict the harsh and inhumane treatment of the women. Mullan’s film, like Sinners, starts with one girl’s story and The Magdalene Sisters uses music to set up the opening scenes of a girl who is raped at a family wedding by her cousin. As powerful ceilí and bodhran music plays, Margaret confides her rape to her friend Teresa, and, when the news of the rape spreads, the young man is taken outside. Though he is clearly reprimanded by a group of men, including his father and Margaret’s as well as the priest, when they return from outside the focus of the judgement shifts to Margaret. This is all relayed through

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the power of Mullan’s ability to capture the direction of gaze, shifting from Margaret’s point of view as the men gather to punish her cousin, to the men’s point of view, looking back at a tearful and frightened Margaret. As some critics have noted, this scene effectively captures the male hierarchy as Margaret’s fate is decided by a group of older men, yet what hasn’t been noted is the way in which Margaret’s mother (Deirdre Davis) functions in this scene. Her mother is entirely uninformed of the rape but notices the growing attention being directed at Margaret and her daughter’s distress. She almost immediately intuits what has happened and, crucially, what will happen. The camera focuses on her sad but knowing expression and, later, we see her with the same expression as she gazes from the window as her daughter is taken away by the priest to the laundry. This was not just a system in which men decided how to punish the rapists and how to banish the victims, but one in which women were also acquiescent. In fact, as the laundries prove, women were not merely acquiescent in a male system in which women were powerless, but were drivers of the cruelty themselves. Within the walls of the laundry, the nuns establish their own hierarchy in which the ‘penitent’ women are subjects while the nuns are in absolute charge, though it is also clear that even the Mother Superior has less authority than the priest. Treatment in the laundry is strict, with no talking or friendships allowed. Infractions of the rules in The Magdalene Sisters are punished with beatings and hair cutting administered by Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), and more subtle forms of cruelty used by other nuns, including stripping the girls and making fun of their bodies. In contrast to Sinners, The Magdalene Sisters shows the laundry as a clean and bright space, relying instead on the audience’s empathy for the women’s lack of freedom and the system of abuse that they suffer, to convey the horror of imprisonment within this institution. Much of the work done by the set in Sinners, where the laundry is dark, steamy and run-down, is thus shifted in Mullan’s film onto the emotional and physical suffering of the women. There are four central characters – Margaret, Bernadette, Rose and Crispina – who are all in the laundry for different reasons. Though we are given an insight into why each woman has been incarcerated (particularly in the very strong opening scenes focusing on Margaret), the majority of the film concentrates on how they each react to life in the laundry. Thus there are rivalries, as for example when Bernadette (NoraJane Noone) bullies Crispina (Eileen Walsh), as well as friendships; what unites them, however, is a determination to escape. At one point Margaret almost escapes, seeing an open door in the convent garden

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wall. She emerges from the closed world of the convent into a landscape of open road and green fields, but she returns to the convent, realising the futility of her escape as she has nowhere to go. The brief moment outside of the walls stands in contrast to the mostly interior setting of the rest of the film and, in Margaret’s brief exchange with the driver of a passing car, this scene also highlights the lack of dialogue at other times. The film is thus constrained by the same rules as the women lived by, forbidden from the outside world and forced into near constant silence. Almost the single exception to the enforced silence of the laundry is the celebratory Corpus Christi parade and open-air Mass. The women are proud and pleased to be allowed to parade outside of the convent and through the town to attend Mass in an outlying field, chaperoned by the nuns and the local Gardaí. Yet they are chastened when the townspeople go silent and turn their faces away from the ‘fallen’ women. The parade thus serves a double function; first, to remind the women that they are ‘outcasts’ and, second, to present the women as a material warning to the young people of the town of the danger of unlicensed sexuality. When the women reach the field for Mass, both the priest and Crispina are driven demented by a rash; earlier, Margaret, upon finding out that the priest is abusing Crispina, put an itching plant into his laundry so that during Mass he is overcome by the pain of the rash. However, Crispina is also affected by the rash as the priest has had sex with her and their relationship is thus publicly exposed. Crispina, belatedly realising the import and wrong of what the priest has done, repeatedly shouts after him ‘You’re not a man of God’. Though Sister Bridget tries to hush her, she unrelentingly continues.59 The explosive quality of this scene comes not only from the exposure of abuse, but also from the contrast between Crispina’s rasping shouts and the total silence of the congregation. Though Crispina cannot be hushed on the day, she is permanently silenced when she is taken in the middle of the night to the asylum, where she later dies of anorexia, an ultimate form of physical deprivation. What the parade and mass scenes effectively show is the level of awareness and acquiescence of the Gardaí and the public in the system of institutionalising those who are deemed to subvert the social rules of the day. This is shown also in Sinners through the presence of the Gardaí, as well as when the government Minister visits the laundry and thanks the nuns on ‘behalf of the State and the people I represent for taking in these, eh, unfortunate ladies’.60 As in the RTÉ documentary States of Fear, the message here is clear; the State co-operated at a high

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level with these institutions and turned a blind eye to any mistreatment that occurred within, systematically ignoring the abuse of the women and their rights to freedom.

Anti-nostalgia: confining trauma to history Unlike States of Fear, all these fictional works, while shocking, do not connect the traumas of the past to the present. The fictional representations are of a world that is now gone, ‘a long time ago’, and thus do not necessarily speak to a contemporary audience, or extend the criticism to the present system of institutions. Despite being set in the recent past – the 1960s, the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll – they are in many ways set ‘on a different planet’.61 Though both Eclipsed and Sinners gesture towards a somewhat modern musical context – Elvis and Dusty Springfield feature – most of these works strike an outdated tone, indicated by the traditional ballad which begins The Magdalene Sisters and, in The Butcher Boy, the emphasis (albeit satiric) on traditional Irish music, the Emerald Gems of Ireland.62 The landscape represented also visually accords with a vision of traditional, rural Ireland. The localities the fictions are based in are simply sketched, with the films often foregrounding shots of fields and lonely country lanes, and the few scenes in town emphasising their lack of modernity. The almost exclusively rural settings in all of the works, the traditional milieu and conservative social and sexual code, create an unfamiliar world rather than an identifiable social context for the reform schools and laundries, that might provoke recognition for an audience in the late nineties and early twenty-first century. Though The Magdalene Sisters makes the point in a postscript that the last laundry in Ireland only closed in 1996, a fact which invariably provokes a gasp from an audience, nevertheless there is relatively little connection being made in these works between a modern audience and the subject. The Ireland of all these works could not seem further away from progressive and confident Ireland of the 1990s and early twenty-first century, and is thus perhaps all too easily confined to the ‘bad old days’ rather than, for example, being connected to continuing abuses of children and negative social attitudes towards women. The anti-nostalgia of the Walsh and Mullan films in particular establishes an implied, yet powerful, boundary that cordons off the trauma of the past by representing it as entirely different to Celtic Tiger-era Ireland. The failure of the State to consider survivors of the Magdalen laundries under the remit of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse

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is not even mentioned by either Sinners or The Magdalene Sisters. And, furthermore, there is no reference in any of the works to the contemporary situation of child care institutions. This is significant given that many of the institutions where abuse took place were only closed in the 1990s, or were administered until very recently by the same religious orders, and that the Ryan Report found instances of abuse dating from as late as 2003.63 This finding indicates the continued failures of the State and the community to care for children, a failure which is not addressed by these fictions. The fictional representations of the reform schools and the laundries as archaic institutions may stem from the fact that they were remnants of a Victorian model of child care. Nevertheless, the anti-nostalgic framing of these institutions as part of a long ago traumatic history, prevents the traumas of the past from being associated with the present, or the criticisms of the religious orders and the Department of Education, from being meaningfully excoriating in the present. Furthermore, Mannix Flynn has criticised the attitude towards victims of abuse as ‘sentimentalising’, arguing that using terms such as ‘survivor’ and ‘victim’ engenders pity not change and fails to ‘tackle the problem’, and this is exacerbated by representing the children as belonging to a different era.64 One other major aspect of Song for a Raggy Boy, The Magdalene Sisters and Sinners insulates an audience from connecting the fictional representations with a ‘real’ Ireland, and that is the one-dimensional representation of the religious orders as inherently wicked. The laundry nuns are virtually psychotic, with little implication that they have any human feelings whatsoever, while the two Brothers to figure most prominently in Song for a Raggy Boy are both abusers. Though Father Damian, the head of St Jude’s, is kindly and understanding, he cannot either punish or expel Brother John, and so even the most benevolent religious figure in the film is a contributing factor in Mercier’s death. Sister Bridget in The Magdalene Sisters, while she is shown to have an ardent love for film, otherwise has no personality independent of her role as cruel director of the women’s suffering. While in The Butcher Boy, the whole scenario is so excessive that the portraits of the abuser priest and the reform school manager are understood as satiric caricatures. This sense of satire is missing from the response to many of these films. In an article anticipating the release of Mullan’s film, journalist Emer O’Kelly described priests and nuns – implicitly without exception – as ‘arrogant, unrepentant men and their hard-faced sisters’.65 Similarly, in his review of Song for a Raggy Boy, Michael Dwyer writes as if every child in every institution experienced abuse: ‘for the generations of

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Irish people who went to school in the decades when corporal punishment was legal and liberally practised the equation they were most likely to learn outside of maths class was that between violence, education and religion’.66 These kinds of caricatured representations prevent audiences from investing in or believing in characters and thus from perceiving them as real or, indeed, as a threat. Within the films, the one-dimensional ‘evil’ nuns inhibit audiences from connecting these events with real people, either nuns or those who allowed the system to continue. Indeed, there is almost a complete absence of lay people from these representations, as if the institutions were only staffed by religious, and abuse their exclusive terrain. The tendency for fictional works to edge towards anti-nostalgic melodrama thus turns the history of institutional abuse into a dichotomy of evil and good, the past and the present, rather than illustrating the failures of the system and the routine destructiveness of large institutions. This stands in contrast to Dear Daughter and States of Fear, which both mention good nuns and priests, yet place them in the context of a brutally administered system, which was abusive in itself. The contrast between these two modes of representation is important to recognise because of the way remembrance culture can shape public memory, from the sentimentalising and distancing propensity of anti-nostalgic remembrance, to the greater emphasis on introspection and analysis of documentary or official remembrance. The turn to melodramatic representation is also important to recognise as part of wider cultural representations of trauma which generate an emotional reaction, rather than a thoughtful response.

Shaping memory It is clear from all these representations of the boys, girls and women incarcerated in Ireland’s reform schools and laundries, that this is not the land of cosy homesteads and romping, sturdy children. In the case of the laundries the abuse was not limited to childhood but continued the nightmare of institutionalisation into adulthood. The cumulative effect of this remembrance culture – documentaries, memoirs, novels, films, and plays – is to break open the representation of childhood as a space of innocence and security and to almost inextricably link the idea of Irish childhood, and the Irish past, with trauma. Indeed, what has come to fill the vacuum of the rosy and glowing vision of traditional Ireland is an alternative mythology of trauma and abuse. As Ruth Barton notes, visions of the Irish past which are projected by films such

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The Politics of Irish Memory

as The Magdalene Sisters serve to establish the ubiquity of the miserable Irish childhood and the dysfunctional Irish family.67 Indeed, if we read the family – or the institution – allegorically, what we are left with is a vision of Ireland as a country which abuses its children, and which has destroyed the family-centered ideals of independence. This allegorical reading is exactly what Sinéad O’Connor performs in her 1994 rap song ‘Famine’. O’Connor’s lyrics project Ireland itself as an abused child, suffering a potato famine which was worsened by the colonial power of Britain. O’Connor connects this historical suffering with ‘the highest statistics of child abuse in the EEC’, unemployment and drug use.68 ‘Famine’ thus links colonialism, natural and national catastrophe, and child abuse, together under the banner of the Irish ‘race’ suffering through history.69 As projected by this song, and by the works discussed above, there is almost no escape from these historical traumas, as they have come, overwhelmingly, to define the Irish past. What we have now in Irish culture is the opposite of the old system in which maltreated children were ‘Barely seen and never heard’.70 Instead, Irish remembrance culture is over-run with images of the tortured Irish childhood, exemplified by the international success of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), as discussed in the next chapter. The market for these stories is huge; indeed, ‘misery literature’ is one of the most extraordinary recent phenomena of the international publishing industry, though it now shows signs of slowing down. The vast sales of stories of abuse begs the question as to why audiences and, in particular, readers are so avid in their consumption of these memoirs. They seem to confirm the worst suspicions and long-repressed fears not only of Irish society but of the global community, and establish trauma and anti-nostalgia as international commodities. Whatever the international implications, it is clear that in the Irish context the emergence of these stories has been largely beneficial not only for the survivors who are finally able to voice their stories and to be believed, but also from a historical perspective. As Diarmaid Ferriter argues, we need these subjective accounts of childhood in Ireland in the recent past in order to augment and correct an ‘official’ historical narrative that did not include these memories.71 Yet in the one-dimensional characters that some of the works I have discussed contain, there is the risk of creating an uncritical, unquestioning and strangely unrealistic version of history which does need to be scrutinised. Elizabeth ButlerCullingford asks in the wake of The Magdalene Sisters, why ‘so few Irish people have objected to his [Mullan’s] horrific vision of their immediate

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past?’72 The answer may be that the horror of the past strikes a chord with the Irish who saw the film, that it is a ‘horrific’ but necessary corrective to the former silence surrounding abuse, hence the standing ovation that it received at its first screening in Ireland at the Cork Film Festival. It may further be that Cullingford is right, however, in asking whether we have witnessed so many allegations in recent years that we no longer question the meaning or consequence of melodramatic representations of one-dimensional sadistic religious figures. The implication of this is, of course, that not only are religious communities becoming identified with abuse, but that the past is also being held up as a scapegoat. The Irish past is, like the representations of these institutions, being identified as a site of trauma. This traumatic representation of the past, while it may provoke anger and sympathy in equal measure, and has now resulted in a sustained critical examination of Ireland’s institutional history, in the form of the Ryan and Murphy reports, has not given rise to a significant number of criminal convictions. As the fallout from the publication of the Murphy report in particular has shown, the focus has tended to be on the resignation of individual religious figures, rather than on the intervention of the State, in the form of criminal investigations, or the responsibility of the State in monitoring both residential and non-residential institutions for the care of children in the more recent past and into the future. Furthermore, from a historical perspective, the danger here is clear; without full official or historical investigation, remembrance culture will perform a version of the past which is inaccurate. This distortion of remembrance culture and, by extension, popular history and cultural memory, is important because the past has implications for not only how we see our past, but also our future. One example of this risk is evident in Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, when the women are stripped and forced to parade in front of the nuns. What we see is a practice that was used to intimidate pre-adolescent children, but which is here transformed into a form of torment for older girls. While Mullan illustrates some of the sadistic practices that did occur in institutions, he is misrepresenting the laundries, which dealt with post-adolescent women, and conflating women and children. Without a historical record against which to measure this scene, the film risks crossing over from being a misrepresentation to being a form of misremembering. It is clearly important to be accurate about such details, not merely because the failure to do so does not allow us to distinguish between different institutions and thus brands them as

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all the same, but also because an integral element of remembering is the shaping of how we will think and behave in the future.73 We need to think about the past and how we are framing it not merely to recognise what went wrong ‘back then’, but also to consider, as Tom Dunne argues, ‘how much of that destructive inheritance still informs our public and private life today’.74 This is particularly the case if we consider that ten years separates Eclipsed and the two films which depict the laundries, and that the striking difference between the works is the former’s balanced presentation of the nuns and the latter’s caricatured ‘evil’ nuns. While this is perhaps due to Eclipsed author Brogan’s personal experience as a Sister of Mercy novice, it also points to the increasing tendency in the media to view all nuns and priests as potential abusers. This kind of partial and biased view of the past is extremely distorting, and is damaging in two respects: first, it fails to be true to the complexities of individuals and their past and, second, it allows contemporary audiences to distance themselves from the implications of what they are seeing. And, while it is easy to understand the impulse towards these caricatures, easy to understand this particular lack of empathy on the part of the film-makers, it is also important to recognise that cartoonish fictional characters do not function as a corrective but rather as a further clouding of the past. The melodrama that makes Mullan’s film, in particular, so affecting, is what prevents it from effecting change. Instead, what melodrama gives an audience is a moment of catharsis that, once over, then allows them to move on. The report of the closure of the laundries made in the end-title of the film thus gives an audience the sense that this is, likewise, a closed issue.75 In addition to the manipulations of the past for the use of antinostalgic melodrama, there is also the danger in discussions of these narratives, and the use of the trope of the abused child as metaphor for Ireland, of losing contact with the real issue, the abused child. While memoirs and films of institutional abuse are bestsellers, there is the risk that these well-publicised stories actually function to mask the fact that the government-led investigations into allegations of abuse have not been as far-reaching as they could, and should, have been. The continued absence of the Magdalen Laundries in official discussions of abuse is one clear example of how the State is continuing to fail to intervene and listen. Though the recent documentary The Forgotten Maggies, directed by Stephen O’Riordan (2009), has sparked off debate once more and led to meetings between representatives of the victims and the government, the laundries still fall outside the boundaries of official investigation.

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After the revelations: how to memorialise institutional abuse? Despite the absence of the Magdalen laundries from the remit of the Ryan investigation and Report, there have, however, been public commemorations of the laundries, such as the Magdalen Memorial plaque in St Stephen’s Green, in Dublin’s city-centre, erected to mark the discovery in 1993 of 133 graves of Magdalen women at High Park Convent.76 This plaque, which reads: ‘To the women who worked in the Magdalen laundry institutions and the children born to some members of those communities – reflect here upon their lives’, was unveiled by President Mary Robinson in 1996, illustrating Robinson’s role in bringing marginal issues to the centre. A second memorial to the Magdalen women of Galway, a statue entitled ‘Final Journey’, by Mike Wilkins, was unveiled by the Mayor of Galway in March 2009, with a public address by Patricia Burke Brogan. Brogan spoke of a ‘history of … great wounding, times when human beings inflicted great damage. History often avoids retrieving these areas especially if recalling them threatens to upset the status quo.’ Brogan ended with the hope that the ‘sculpture will heal our city’.77 The emphasis on retrieving the trauma of the past and, by doing so, healing it, was also to the forefront of the ‘March of Solidarity’ for survivors of abuse, held in Dublin on 10 June 2009 (seen in the cover image). The visible distress of many people on the march illustrates how this form of performing remembrance makes the past and the present contemporaneous with each other. The march also served to represent the survivors as both individuals and as members of a group, embodying both a personal and a collective past. The sense of loss was underlined by the symbol of children’s shoes, carried aloft by many on the march, while the banner carried at the front of the march by the Survivors of Institutional Abuse Ireland group read ‘Cherishing All of the Children of the Nation Equally’, a quotation from the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, and a reference to the failure of the State and Church to respect the rights of children in institutions. This march was a collective demonstration of all the individual stories that emerged after the publication of the report, including Michael O’Brien’s harrowing testimony on Irish radio and television when he recalled not only the times he was raped when a child, but also the nightmares that have continued to wake him all through his adult life.78 The general response to the Ryan Report, and in particular the march and individual testimonies, illustrate the continuing trauma of child abuse, trauma that still needs to be given voice to and heard.

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Recognition of the continuing need of the State, its citizens and its artists to respond to the issue of institutional abuse and, in particular, to the findings of the Ryan Report, was the rationale behind ‘The Darkest Corner’, a series of three plays staged by the National Theatre at the Peacock, Dublin, in April 2010. The series takes its name from Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s statement that the publication of the Ryan Report ‘shone a powerful light into probably the darkest corner of the history of the State’.79 For ‘The Darkest Corner’, the Abbey commissioned one new work, No Escape, from Mary Raftery, a documentary drama piece which presents an edited version of the Ryan Report to the audience. The other two pieces included in the series had previously been staged: James X by Mannix Flynn (first staged at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, in 2003) and The Evidence I Shall Give by Richard Johnson (first staged at the Abbey in 1961). All three pieces effectively illustrate the role that theatre and the arts have to play in publicly and communally addressing the problems and legacies of institutional abuse. Whereas Johnson’s 1961 play The Evidence I Shall Give was given a rehearsed reading, the other two dramatic pieces were given full productions – though only for a limited run. No Escape, compiled by Mary Raftery from the 2,700 pages of the Ryan Report, is the first piece of documentary theatre to be commissioned by the Abbey and it is a form that enables a profound engagement with the issues under examination by emphasising, through its focus on the actual words of testimony, the continuing need for survivors to be able to speak out, and to be listened to. The piece focuses on three iconic institutions – Artane, Goldenbridge and Letterfrack – and through these three institutions tackles the issues of physical abuse of boys and girls, sexual abuse, and the cover-up of abuse by the religious congregations. Testimony, delivered by an ensemble cast, is interwoven with short re-enacted scenes of public hearings and individual statements from various figures, including a concerned grandmother, and two priests who abused children. By listening and watching the testimony onstage, the audience also plays a key function in this drama as witnesses who must attend to each voice. Certain phrases recur, so that ‘I will never forget’, ‘I will never get over it’, ‘nobody came’ and ‘there is no way they didn’t all know’ become refrains through the play, their repetition an insight into the collective, as well as individual, experience of abuse.80 The way in which the institutional system of childcare worked to remove a child’s individuality is at the centre of James X, the third piece of the ‘Darkest Corner’ series. Mannix Flynn, as writer, director and performer, delivers a manic narrative of his life in and out of institutions for petty theft and truancy. When James X has seemingly finished his

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story, he turns to the audience and reads a written statement about a truth not contained in his ‘side-show story’: that he was sexually and physically abused by priests and brothers in three different institutions from the time he was aged eleven. When he has read this statement, slowly and deliberately, he takes the piece of paper and places it on the stage in front of the audience saying ‘This is yours.’ The responsibility is on the audience not only as witnesses, but also as agents of change. James X thus, alongside No Escape, calls for a true performance of ethical memory, to achieve justice for the past, and to ensure that these crimes never recur. All of these forms of reflective commemoration – from the march of solidarity, the plays at the National Theatre, to the physical memorials, as well as the factual and fictional works about abuse that predate the official investigations – raise questions for the larger memorialisation of institutional abuse in Ireland. One of the final recommendations of the Ryan Report, designed to ‘alleviate or otherwise address the effects of the abuse on those who suffered’, is the erection of a memorial, bearing the words of Bertie Ahern’s apology to victims of abuse. It remains to be seen what precise form this memorial will take, but it must, if it is to truly alleviate or address the problems of the past, reflect full recognition of the State, the Catholic Church and Irish society’s culpability for the sufferings of the children in the State’s care.81 For these reasons, however, there is some resistance to the idea that Ahern’s apology will be part of the memorial, given that it obscures the fact that the State did detect the pain of the children in many institutions. Mannix Flynn’s most recent work, Padded Cell and Other Stories (2009), an installation work that questions the official response to the abuse of those in its care, is a challenging reminder that the process of ethical remembering is incomplete. The installation includes a reconstruction of padded cells, which were used until recently in Irish prisons to hold prisoners deemed to be psychologically disturbed, as well as copies of the Ryan Report laid out on pews which sit in front of the padded cells. The incorporation of the Ryan Report into this installation suggests that despite its function in uncovering the truth of abuse, the report is not only an expression of the history of State abuse, but is somehow linked into that history and its cover-up. If we are truly to intervene, to detect and, through listening to their stories, belatedly come to the rescue of Ireland’s abused children, then we must insist that not only remembrance culture, but also Irish history and, crucially, the law-courts, represent the full stories of institutional abuse. Only then will Irish culture move towards ethically remembering and, in doing so, hold the past accountable to the present.

2 The Remembered Self: Irish Memoir, Past and Present Selves

Yet my life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant. Something in me must have been waiting to stand up and demand to be counted. Because eventually, when I was presented with an opportunity to talk about myself, I grasped at it. I’m on my own anyway, I thought. What have I to lose? But I needed to speak too. I needed to howl. (Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody?)1 In the opening pages of Are You Somebody?, Nuala O’Faolain justifies her decision to write a memoir, claiming a need to speak, to assert the significance of her life. There is something almost defensive in her tone – who is trying to make her accept her own life’s insignificance? – yet also something defiant in her burning and howling. This mix of deference, assertiveness and, at times, wonder, struck a chord with the Irish reading public. O’Faolain’s appearance on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show in October 1996, Ireland’s most important television entertainment programme, pushed the book to the forefront of the national consciousness and the book sold out.2 It might not have been this way, for the kind of narrative that O’Faolain presents is not a necessarily endearing or popular one, nor one perhaps that many can identify with in a literal way. However, it generated an enormous amount of emotional identification, particularly from Irish women, who not only bought the book, but wrote to O’Faolain, and stopped her in the street, to tell her what her book – as an act of speaking out – meant to them, and who felt that she had articulated their lives for the first time.3 52

The Remembered Self 53

O’Faolain’s appearance on The Late Late Show hints at the complexities of that iteration. The host Gay Byrne’s opening address to her was that he was both ‘astonished and amazed by the revelations’ in the book, and he went on to explain this by emphasising the ‘fairly lengthy list’ of men she had slept with over the course of her life. When O’Faolain protested ‘what is a woman supposed to do, is she meant to spend her whole life keeping herself for marriage?’ it became clear that O’Faolain had broken a taboo for Irish society – not merely that she was a promiscuous woman, but that she had made her sexual history public by writing about it. Byrne replied ‘I’m not judging you’, but O’Faolain held her nerve and, politely and softly, insisted ‘you are, you are’. Byrne, realising that this censorious note was not working, spent much of the rest of the twenty-five minute interview asking about O’Faolain’s parents’ relationship, and the impact that having an alcoholic mother made on her growing up and as an adult. Though his manner remained faintly patronising, Byrne shifted away from quizzing O’Faolain on her sexual past and dwelt instead on this other, less controversial, personal background. At the end of the interview, Byrne took one viewer’s call, from a woman who had been a pupil at the same school as O’Faolain, and who praised the book and talked about how much it had meant to her. This response is typical of the reaction to Are You Somebody?, as readers claimed that in some way O’Faolain’s personal memoir reflected their own experiences and emotions. Memoir can thus be both extremely personal and yet also inclusive, and consequently O’Faolain’s individual record became a focus for collective remembrance. Before her memoir made her a celebrity, O’Faolain was already well known as the writer of an opinion column in the national newspaper, The Irish Times. This, combined with her Late Late Show appearance, illustrates the multi-faceted nature of presenting the self publicly in Ireland in the latter half of the 1990s. O’Faolain’s father had been a well-known social columnist for the Evening Press and so she was well aware from a young age not only of the professional public life, but also of the disjuncture between the public version of the self and the private. Memoir, however, is in a different league from social diaries and opinion columns, promising access to the private self in a public forum, not only for the reader, but for the writer also. Through presenting a version of one’s life to the public, writers also grant themselves access to this private narrative; through the shaping of it for public consumption, they open it up for private digestion. The promise of understanding and clarity about the self is what draws both writers and readers to the genre of memoir, and as the last fifteen

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years have shown, this draw is only increasing in strength. There has been a memoir boom in the English-speaking world; memoir is one of the defining narrative genres of the 1990s, indicating the preference of an increasingly self-centred society, which places the individual at the centre of every story, to understand the past through this personal yet mediated form. The memoir genre was, in particular, ‘endemic in “Celtic Tiger Ireland”’ as Liam Harte argues, as the country experienced ‘an era of burgeoning narcissism and affluent secular individualism’.4 The predominance of memoir in contemporary Irish culture is indicated by the success of both individual memoirs and of the life-writing genre in general. The remembered – and recorded – self is increasingly omnipresent, in the form of online blogging, social networking and micro-blog sites. More serious approaches to life writing are represented by the Irish Life Writing Archive at University College Dublin, established in 2006, intended to preserve ‘first-hand accounts of Irish life’, and also by the publication in 2009 of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography, a nine-volume catalogue of ‘9,700 lives’ of Irish historical figures. These contemporary approaches to the recorded life draw on a strong tradition of Irish life writing from the island lives of Tomás ÓCriomhthain in An tOileánach (The Islandman), and Peig Sayers’ eponymous autobiography Peig, to the literary autobiographies of W.B. Yeats, Katherine Tynan, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Casey and Frank O’Connor. What distinguishes the recent memoirs from this long tradition is not only their immense popularity, but also the way in which these memoirs represent a dislocation between the present and the past, and thus contribute to the anti-nostalgia of contemporary Irish remembrance culture. Anti-nostalgia is a defining characteristic for the six works of memoir that this chapter will consider. Four of these were published in 1996, an annus mirabilis for Irish memoir. In addition to Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody?, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Dermot Healy’s The Bend For Home, and Seamus Deane’s autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark also appeared. Several years later, Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2003) and John McGahern’s simply titled Memoir (2005) constitute a second wave of literary memoir. Indeed, these two memoirs coincide with another second wave, as Frank McCourt, O’Faolain and Hamilton all published sequels to their original memoirs: Tis (1999), Teacher Man (2005); Almost There (2003); and The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). The appearance of these memoirs was greeted, almost universally, enormously positively, both in terms of individual reviews of the books,

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and their wider reception. Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir boomed after her appearance on The Late Late Show, selling over 50,000 copies in the first few weeks of publication in Ireland alone. But it is Frank McCourt’s memoir which stands apart by virtue of the publishing sensation that Angela’s Ashes became, winning a Pulitzer, among other prizes, selling to an almost mythic level, and being adapted to film in 1999, directed by Alan Parker. Healy’s memoir was admiringly reviewed, while Deane’s autobiographical novel won both The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Irish Literature Prize for 1997. Hamilton’s memoir was critically well received and a documentary programme was made about his childhood by the Irish-language television programme Leargas. John McGahern’s memoir, published relatively shortly before his death, was widely praised, and extracts were published in The Irish Times. Indeed, this kind of tie-in is notable for many of the memoirs, including interviews in newspapers and on television, and tie-in radio shows for all the memoirs. These memoirs, then, went beyond their remit as prose narratives, to colonise the Irish media generally, and to contribute to the anti-nostalgia of Irish remembrance culture in general. The anti-nostalgic Irish memoir casts the narrative of childhood and young adulthood in terms of the experience of a harsh and difficult childhood, and the paths of escape found, leading to the present in which remembrance and reflection are possible. This anti-nostalgia has been criticised for doing ‘little to progress the international view of the Irish as sophisticated and modern’.5 Yet this is perhaps one of the reasons for the local and international success of this genre, for allowing the reader access to an unsophisticated and pre-modern past, from the relative security of a more affluent and developed present. Furthermore, the hardship of the past, particularly in the struggle of the individual against a repressive society, as recounted in many memoirs, underlines and confirms the superiority of the ‘affluent secular individualism’ of the present. It is thus hardly surprising to find a distinct narrative of struggle, survival and success patterning memoir and, in the case of the six works discussed in this chapter, a notable emphasis on the emergence of the present self from a traumatic past. Fundamental to that emergence is the act of personal reflection, often through the process of writing itself, so that in these memoirs it is not only the escape from a past of personal hardship that is recalled, but the formation of the adult self from the naive and un-selfaware child. The past is thus viewed in these memoirs as a traumatic beginning out of which a literary consciousness can be formed, and in the process, a self made, mirroring the Celtic

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Tiger narrative of the emergence of Ireland from traumatic origins into a cultural and economic boom period. The simultaneity of remembrance and self-creation is thus a key element of memoir and, in particular, of the literary memoir. Memoir is founded on the assumption that memory is the storehouse of identity, and that in memoir that identity can not only be recalled, but also retrospectively shaped. This is what makes the critical analysis and interrogation of memoirs both necessary and rewarding. Moreover, if memory is identity, then the greatest fear which haunts memoir is the fear of losing memory and thus of losing the self. This anxiety of loss is suggested indeed by the act of writing a memoir in the first place, and is visible in the memoirs themselves through the emphasis on letters and diaries, artefacts of the past, on the one hand and, on the other, on the fallibility of remembrance and the possibility of conflicting versions of the past. The memoir thus not only negotiates between the self and the past, but also between remembering and forgetting. Despite the acknowledgment of the role of forgetting, however, what the memoir ultimately asserts is the power of remembering, and the role of memory in the invention of the self.

Remembering everything: Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt’s opening chapter to Angela’s Ashes asserts that his was ‘of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while’.6 Though this opening is grimly comic, it sets the tone for how the theme of childhood emerges in contemporary memoirs as a struggle – at worst for survival, at best for self-expression. McCourt, moreover, asserts that the Irish childhood is particularly ‘miserable’ and though the tone is still somewhat tongue in cheek, again it chimes with a version of Irish childhood, associated with poverty and abuse, that has now come to be popularly accepted (as discussed in the previous chapter). What McCourt’s tone also announces, however, is the distance of his adult self from that childhood, the distance that grants him an anti-nostalgic perspective. For McCourt, the distance that he has achieved is not only mental, but physical, as at the age of nineteen he left his Limerick childhood behind and re-emigrated to America, achieving a happy ending to his grim beginnings. This is key not only to the trajectory of the memoir’s narrative, as Frank goes from Brooklyn, to Limerick and back to New York again, but also to the doubleness of the memoir as object – Angela’s Ashes recounts McCourt’s grim childhood, but is also testament to his

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survival and now success as author of a best-selling memoir. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Angela’s Ashes was received so well in the United States, as it is such a ringing endorsement not only of the American spirit of self-reliance and success – the emergence of Frank’s adult self from a traumatic childhood is literally driven by his American dream – but also of the hallowed ground of America itself. Part of the wonder of Angela’s Ashes, however, is not simply the miracle of surviving the miserable Irish childhood, but, almost more miraculous, the survival of memory that this memoir represents. This is not a series of hazy recollections, but a forensically detailed and plotted narrative with a beginning (bad), middle (terrible), and end (salvation). A reader might question the sheer scale and detail of knowledge that the memoir displays, and indeed some have, questioning in particular the characterisation of his mother Angela, and the descriptions of the poverty of Limerick. Certain elements of Frank’s story – including his description of his conception – indicate that this is a narrative which uses invention as well as remembrance to construct the past. This is, as all memoirs are, a shaped narrative, told from the perspective of the present. Within Angela’s Ashes, however, the continuous present tense, and insouciant childlike tone, belie both the construction and retrospective shaping necessary to memoir, instead projecting the narrative as simply Frank’s awesome capacity for remembrance. In the course of his childhood, Frank moves away from both of his parents, establishing his own course in life, and crucially he decides that this will be very different from both of theirs. His driving aim is to reverse his parents’ original sin – not the ‘knee-trembler’ which resulted in his conception and their hasty marriage, but their departure from America back to Ireland and Limerick. For Frank the return to Ireland is a move which is decidedly anti-progress and nothing he describes of his experience in Limerick would contradict that idea for the reader. One of the ills of McCourt’s situation is that Frank’s father Malachy is often unemployed and spends what money they have in the pub, leaving his wife and children to go hungry and fatherless. When Malachy deserts the family, their financial woes become even worse, forcing Angela to move her family in with her cousin Laman Griffin, where Frank is increasingly unhappy. In all this hardship, reading and writing provide an escape for Frank. In particular, the library provides a vital space for Frank outside the home, a space of the imagination, in contrast to the bleakness of reality. Crucially, also, the library is a free service and part of the power of reading and writing is that they are democratically available, even to the poor. Later, Frank works as a newspaper delivery

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boy, then telegram boy, both of which associations with the world of writing help his self-development. When he secretly begins working for the local money lender, by writing elaborately scarifying debt-collecting letters, he confirms his tendency to use his literary abilities to climb out of the economic morass of his childhood. Frank’s role in this scheme is shameful but he protects it fiercely, saying of his savings that if ‘my whole family dropped from the hunger I wouldn’t touch this money in the post office’.7 Tellingly, the film voice-over changes this to ‘if the whole of Ireland were starving’, making even more explicit the comparison with the Great Hunger of a hundred years before. Furthermore, by depersonalising Frank’s reference to his family’s starvation, the film highlights the book’s insistence on the separation of the boy from his family, in order for him to achieve adulthood and freedom. McCourt’s memoir then washes not only his family’s dirty laundry in public, but exposes his own soiled conscience too, though he implicitly justifies this personal shame with the years of hardship that he has detailed so explicitly up till this point. Frank’s overwhelming wish to return to America is granted once he has saved enough money, and his leave-taking is, for him, a joyous occasion, going against the perception of the unwilling emigrant. Angela’s Ashes thus resists the association of ‘home’ with Ireland, and instead sees Ireland as the land of exile. McCourt chooses to end the memoir on a fantastical scene – far less believable in fact than the lengthy tale of trauma that precedes it, yet that has not attracted the same level of criticism. In this scene, Frank is conveyed from the emigrant ship to the American shore, not to the harbour as expected, but to a party in a waterfront villa, with a waiting cast of sirens. The ‘bad women’ at the party take Frank into a bedroom and seduce him, refusing to take no for an answer. Crucially, also, the women close the door in the alarmed priest’s face, locking him out. The triumph here, of course, is not simply that Frank is suddenly given access to the high life that he was denied in Limerick, but that he is finally himself on the right side of the door, suggesting that never again will the Catholic Church have the same power to shut him out as it did, repetitively, during his childhood. And if Frank spends much of his teenage years trying to deal with the strictures and restrictions placed on sex, here he is entirely freed, as the women force themselves on him, relieving him of any decision-making or responsibility. In contrast, Alan Parker chooses to end the film version on a much more chaste note, settling for a rousing orchestral soundtrack, as the young Frank finally gazes on the beauty of the Statue of Liberty, thereby resolving (by simply ignoring) the problem of female sexuality that runs through the memoir.

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While Angela’s Ashes represents an awesome achievement of remembrance, it never questions its own ability to remember and McCourt is unselfconscious in his role as narrator, despite the often ironic tone. This form of recollection is not, however, inevitable and other memoirists interrogate the role of remembrance and the lack of access to knowledge that the child observer has.

‘When you’re small you know nothing’: The Speckled People In The Speckled People Hugo Hamilton adopts a similar childlike tone to that of McCourt and a corresponding sense of wonder and naiveté. Hamilton, however, resists the omniscience of McCourt’s perspective and begins his memoir with the assertion that ‘When you’re small you know nothing.’8 Though Hamilton may not have understood as a child the whys and hows of the matter, he is an excellent observer and by the second chapter is astute enough to remark that ‘I know they don’t want us here’ (7). This memoir thus charts not only the early memories of a German-Irish boy, but also a journey into knowledge. The rest of the narrative functions to explain this intuitive reaction, why his family is unpopular, why he is bullied by his peers and why, perhaps most crucially, his parents aren’t like other people’s parents, for good and for ill. Born in Dublin to a German mother and a gaelgóir father, from the beginning of his childhood – and the memoir – Hamilton is aware of conflicting discourses of identity, and that these are performed by the language you speak and the clothes that you wear. Hugo’s father insists that his children speak no English, so instead they speak a combination of Irish and German. They are thus a hybrid of both of their parents, their father’s Irish nationalism and their mother’s nostalgia for the Germany of her childhood. Hamilton understands this as being ‘breac’, or speckled, rather than uniform and this is the case too for their outfits of lederhosen and Aran jumpers; as Hamilton says, ‘Irish on top and German below’ (2). This hybridity makes Hugo and his siblings special, though when you’re a child, as he points out, ‘you don’t want to be special … you want to be the same as everyone else’ (3). These outward differences of dress and language are not the only disparities between the Hamiltons and their neighbours. The residual anti-German feeling following the Second World War makes Hugo and his brother targets in the playground, while their father’s emphasis on Irish culture singles them out also. Hugo’s Irish speaking is so fluent that his school principal announces that he ‘should be on television as

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an example of how history could be turned back’ (236). Though Hugo’s father is trying to forge a future for the ‘new Irish’, this is a future based on looking backward to a pre-modern past. The greatest instance of family unity in the memoir is the holiday they take to the Gaeltacht, where they are finally among people like themselves and are no longer ‘special’. This experience stands in contrast to the rest of their lives when they are out of step with their immediate community, and as a result they must preserve it in memory, as a kind of ballast: Nobody was sad to go home the next day because my mother said we would remember this place for ever. Nobody was sad because my father said we would be coming back soon. Nothing would change, he promised, not one rock, not even one stone wall. We would come back and see that everything was still there in the same place as it was before. Nothing was going to be in the past. (186) What is prominent here is the eternal, timeless nature of the Gaeltacht, and the power of remembrance to stand outside, and even work against, normal temporal processes. If the past is refused as a concept, however, then the future is also; if the emphasis is always on preserving the past as a form of the present, then the future cannot be developed. Moreover, the past that his parents choose to reify is an isolated moment, based on one holiday rather than long-term experience, again weakening the foundations of any self based on such a narrow form of memory. In fact, Hugo’s father has carefully edited his own past so that discordant elements are not remembered. His own father served with the British Navy, a fact that he represses and conceals. As Hugo says, ‘Our German grandparents are dead, but our Irish grandparents are dead and forgotten’ (12). This statement reveals the political nature of family remembrance, mirroring the national repression of the memory of Irish involvement with British forces, and indicates that it is even worse to be forgotten than dead, as it implies a total erasure of identity. When Hugo explores this past and is caught looking for his grandfather’s photograph, his father warns him that ‘it was wrong to be more interested in the past than in the future. It was no use looking back all the time’ (167). His father’s statement contradicts his usual emphasis on the sacredness of the past and further highlights the process of editing within remembrance. Hugo’s mother also struggles to fully remember the past. When she tells her children stories from her own upbringing in Germany,

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including traumatic memories of the rise of Nazism and the impact on her family, she distances the trauma by framing the narrative as the plot of a film she once acted in. Later on, Hugo’s mother is able to relinquish fiction and acknowledge the story as her own, but only by typing it out, illustrating the power that writing has to open up memory and to mediate between the self and the past. Hugo’s mother’s need to relate her story indicates that while memory can be manipulated or temporarily repressed, it always emerges in some form, whether it is recounted as a ‘film’ or, in the case of Hugo’s grandfather’s war medals, found hidden at the back of the wardrobe. Hugo’s troubled negotiation of identity – between Irish, German and English culture – is thus played out against an equally troubled negotiation of the past, so that Hugo must reconcile not only disparate cultural elements within himself, but must also come to terms with his parents’ memories and their legacies. What Hugo learns from this is his own process of editing, as he makes sense of the fragments of the past and the present that he encounters, and assembles his own portrait of life. And though he may reject many elements of his father’s domineering character, he also adopts his strategy of only partially acknowledging the past. When he discovers that his father’s pro-Irishness went so far as to make him recommend antiSemitic measures, he is horrified: When you’re small you know nothing and when you grow up there are things you don’t want to know. I don’t want anyone to know that my father wanted Jewish people in Ireland to speak Irish and do Irish dancing like everyone else. I don’t want people to know that he was foaming at the mouth … (254) The journey into knowledge that the memoir promises at the very beginning, is thus not a straightforward series of positive revelations, but an uncomfortable and burdensome responsibility. And even in the tell-all form of memoir, which breeds the illusion of total parity with the writer and his memories, there are some ways of telling, but still holding back. In this case, Hamilton admits aspects of his father, while also being able to disavow them. In contrast, his relationship with his mother is a much more open and honest one. This is partly because of Hugo’s mother’s attitude towards the past, which may be distanced, but is at least fully acknowledged. And it is this that he has decided to inherit, and to mimic in his own memoir. The ways in which Hamilton and McCourt draw a distinction between their parents is one of the key similarities shared by the two memoirs;

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on the one hand a mother who embodies sacrifice and hardship, while on the other a father who has certain noble qualities, but is defeated by the simple demands of everyday life. This pattern is practically an archetype that we see recurring in many Irish memoirs, of a mother who represents integrity, and a father who is more fraudulent. And this is certainly the case in John McGahern’s Memoir, which idealises his mother and demonises his father. In this, McGahern is aware that he is reproducing ‘a certain primal pattern of the father and son’.9 Yet though this may be a pattern visible in all three of these memoirs, it is cut even more deeply into the surface of Memoir than the former two as the death of McGahern’s mother draws this parental conflict, and the child’s negotiation between the fixed positions of their identities, into stark relief.

Bringing the past into the light: Memoir Memoir covers in detail McGahern’s childhood, divided absolutely into before and after his mother’s death, and renders also some of his adult life, guiding the reader to the point where he became a writer and returned once more to settle in his native county of Leitrim. The narrative creates the sense of a child’s perspective on the world, but without the childlike tone of McCourt or Hamilton. The sense of the past in this memoir is one of discovery, as the adult narrator is unsure of his own claim on a precise past. McGahern’s text is thus full of phrases which remind the reader of the fallibility of remembrance, such as ‘probably’, ‘it must have been, and ‘I am uncertain’. This lack of certainty actually gives the memories recounted a credulousness, so that the moments recalled stand out; there must be a reason for them to have imprinted themselves so vividly, so permanently on McGahern’s mind. Indeed, in the short acknowledgments, McGahern thanks his sisters for ‘bringing back into the light two important scenes that had slipped my memory’. That a scene can be both ‘important’ and forgotten is one of the contradictions that this memoir fully acknowledges. Letters are also reproduced in the text and drawn on as sources, ways of accessing and knowing the past – in fact, ways of augmenting what you know of the past beyond what you could possibly remember. This adds to the adult tone of the exploration of childhood, as for example, through their surviving letters, McGahern gains insights into his parents’ marriage otherwise entirely unknowable to a child. Even still, there are letters missing and so emotions and responses have to be guessed at. This stands in contrast to the kind of imagined past

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that McCourt creates, in which he suggests that he has full access to a complete narrative of his personal history. Even if, as McGahern shows, there is a record of the past, it is still like so much jigsaw work, piecing together a picture, the details of which have become blurred and the edges frayed. Nevertheless, these letters put McGahern’s impressions in an indisputably ‘real’ context, creating a framework for his memories that supports his interpretation of the past, in particular of his father as an enigmatic and destructively wilful man. His mother’s letters, and those of her sister Maggie, both speak from the past, literally voicing the ways in which McGahern’s father Frank had to be resisted, cajoled, reasoned with and humoured. What they also testify to is that McGahern isn’t making this up. At the same time, there is a clear explicatory tone to the narrative, in which McGahern prefaces observations with phrases such as ‘in those times’ or ‘as was usual then’ to give context to a part of life which is now itself forgotten, passed from the memory of modern Ireland. This sense of full explanation lends the text depth, as country ways are explained to a readership that has no living memory of either rural life in the 1940s or, indeed, direct lived experience of rural life at all. It is also evidence of the evaluative, adult voice behind the child’s experiences and McGahern peppers the narrative of his early years with later facts and realisations, such as the final scene between his parents, followed by the observation that they ‘were never to see each other again’ (112). The simplicity of such a statement leaves the reader to make their own judgment, but references to this moment surface again later in the memoir, as when McGahern reveals that he is still angry, years, and even decades later, that his father never made the effort to see his mother while she was dying: ‘my father insisted on driving me everywhere for interviews and orals. He who couldn’t get leave when my mother was dying or for anything that didn’t interest him could now get away any time he wanted’ (208). Without saying it outright, it’s apparent from the tone that McGahern is scathing of his father’s mistimed show of parenting. By weaving the past and the present together in this way, McGahern creates his own jigsaw, or collage, of the past, constructed from his own perspective, making transparent that which time occludes, and connecting together otherwise divided events and emotions. Like Hugo Hamilton’s father, McGahern’s father is selective about what and how he remembers. In many ways, Frank McGahern simply does not acknowledge the past. When he is calm again after a rage, he acts as if what has just happened is beyond a distant memory, forgotten entirely. He does not tell his children about his own upbringing and

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clearly makes it difficult for them to remember their mother after her death. This ‘refusal of the past’ (49) is part of what McGahern identifies as his father’s obsessively secretive nature, a sign of how ‘he always sought to keep the world around him closed’ (148). Perhaps in the most perfect act of revenge, Memoir opens that world up, exposing the secrets that his father kept from his wife and children, and judging his father with a clear and ruthless eye. There are letters from his father to his mother’s doctor about her cancer, which expose his selfishness at even this time, and there are clear and full discussions of the brutality he visited upon the children after her death. Published in 2005 when it had begun to become clear the scale of abuse in Ireland’s residential institutions for children, McGahern shows the extent to which children in private homes were unsafe also. McGahern’s mother, in contrast, seems like an angel and he writes of her as someone who suffered great pain with great forbearance. Later in life he visits Katie, their housekeeper in his early years, who tells him that ‘she never met anybody who gave so little thought to herself and so much to other people’ (270) as his mother and this opinion, late in the memoir, reinforces his early portrait of her as near perfect. This denial of the self, ironically, runs counter to the insistence on the importance of the self that the genre of memoir represents. Another of Susan McGahern’s distinguishing features is that, as a teacher, she was never violent with any of her pupils, making her an exceptional figure at a time when corporal punishment was the norm. This is commented on not only by the young Sean, but in a letter also from his Aunt Maggie, again using memories and artefacts of the past to build up an irrefutable picture. McGahern’s sureness of his mother’s perfection is only clouded when he pauses to wonder why she married his father, a ‘self-centred, childish’ man (49). There is a self-consciousness here in the tone, as when he writes of the dream he and his mother share, that one day he will be ordained as a priest. This follows a period in which Susan McGahern was hospitalised for the breast cancer that would kill her within a few years. Sean is allowed to stay with his mother, before the other children return home from his father’s barracks, and he is ‘lightheaded with happiness, almost delirious’ when he is reunited with her; ‘My beloved was home and I was alone with her’ (62). The romance of the language and the setting self-consciously illustrate an awareness that he is substituting himself in the place of his father, that he projects upon his mother and their relationship a status ordinarily not available to children. This special relationship makes her loss harrowing, and the memoir form

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encourages McGahern to lyrically preserve their years together and his memories of her, so that the first half of the memoir is like an extended love letter, a paean to the love he knew and lost. An important aspect of this memoir is, in fact, its preservation in prose of the intimacy McGahern and his mother once enjoyed in life. This is, itself, inscribed in the Leitrim landscape, the lanes he walked with her and the flowers she identified to him as a child. The memory of walking these lanes opens the memoir, and an imagined journey down the lanes once more closes it, as he dreams which flowers he would pick for her, ‘the wild orchid and the windflower’ (272). The Eden-like quality of these early memories and late imaginings illustrates the overwhelming nostalgia McGahern feels for his early childhood, a nostalgia which only serves to heighten the anti-nostalgic tone of the memoir’s later sections. Life before and after Susan McGahern is clearly, even as an older man, the way in which McGahern conceptualises his past. His promise to his mother that he would become a priest, and his transformation of that into a quest to become a writer, is here recounted as an absolute and pre-determined vision for his life. Life is not always so, however, and we might guess at how much of this ‘plan’ became clear only in retrospect; hindsight may confer meaning and order on events which, at the time, may have had no meaning whatsoever, or a different meaning entirely. It is unsurprising in a memoir, which is by necessity selective, to edit out those events and thoughts which do not conform to the shape of a life, once it has been lived. There is something about McGahern’s Memoir that suggests the necessity of that shapeliness, as otherwise the connection with his mother and his life with her might be weakened. The traumatic schism in his life caused by her death can be overcome, narratively at least, in forging a connection between the present and the past, by insisting on the consistency of the self between now and then, and the aspirations and dreams of the adult and the child.

Interrogating the self: Are You Somebody? The process of moving from childhood to adulthood is, typically, often the central subject of the memoir, the memories of childhood gaining a vibrancy and meaning conferred by time, the backward look, and the eye of experience. This process is not always the focus of memoirs, however, and nor is the projection of life as a path forged from beginning to end always the narrative structure of memoir. It can be that the childlike sense of unknowingness continues, indeed, into adulthood. In Nuala

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O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? life is understood as something that happens to you, as opposed to something that originates from within you. Moreover, this sense of contingency is evident throughout the memoir, as O’Faolain considers her life up until now and views it as a series of ‘all kinds of accidents’.10 The process of writing the memoir pulls these accidents together, to forge the shape of a life, but it is one that veers left and right, rather than following a straight or straightforward path. Most of her memoir concerns O’Faolain’s adult life, and though it does describe her childhood, it does so in fairly broad strokes, evoking rather than detailing it with the forensic eye of a writer like McCourt. Her childhood was very troubled, with a largely absent and uninterested father and a self-absorbed, alcoholic mother. Her parents’ stormy relationship sours the atmosphere in the house and, though her father was a well-known newspaper and radio personality, the family ‘never had enough money’, and were dependent on hand outs (14). Like McCourt and McGahern, O’Faolain’s main thought is to escape this childhood and achieve some independence. Though Hamilton’s conceit that the journey from childhood into adulthood is a journey from ignorance to knowledge is evident also in O’Faolain’s memoir, this journey is made over a longer time frame. Indeed, the act of writing this memoir is the first time that O’Faolain consciously constructs a framework for her life, for viewing it and thinking about it. The approach is thus less of discovering the past, as discovering her self. McCourt and McGahern’s sense of destiny and self-reliance are entirely absent from O’Faolain’s conception of her experience of life. In O’Faolain’s account she perceives herself almost exclusively through the lens of what others think of her. There is, of course, a continuing personality throughout the memoir, largely based on the consistency of her love of reading and of being in company, one of a group. However, there is no strong sense of O’Faolain thinking of herself in terms of a defined identity with boundaries, rather her self is almost entirely relational. She comments on her development that, ‘I wanted to be liked, not helped. I had no sense of being at the start of a career. My aim in life was something to do with being and being loved’ (98). O’Faolain recounts her attitude to life as vague and directionless and entirely dependent upon others – a reactive, rather than active personality, lacking the propulsion of destiny that marks McCourt and McGahern’s understanding of themselves. This need to be loved as a way of being is allied to her early experiences at home, in which her mother existed purely in relation to her father and had no real life for herself outside the marriage.

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Retrospectively, O’Faolain notices these aspects of her life, having not had an analytic perspective on her life until now, and thus lacking the propulsion of destiny that marks McCourt and McGahern’s understanding of themselves. When she says of her life in London, ‘I felt I was not in life, I was looking at it’ (120), O’Faolain implies a kind of distance that would otherwise connote perspective, a skill vital in life, and essential to a writer and memoirist. But at this stage of her life it is not an analytic kind of ‘looking’ that she means, as she goes on, ‘I didn’t like thinking about the past, and I had no enthusiasm for the future’, and later that ‘It never occurred to me that I needed to interrogate myself’ (131). Memoirs are constructed around this very notion, that it is through interrogating the past and the self, and distilling it into a design for life, that the future is created. O’Faolain began to develop ‘a real watchfulness’ (126) when she became aware of politics in the 1970s, and in particular, feminism. She marched for women’s rights as part of a group, a condition she always seems to aspire to, and this new movement expanded her individual perspective, finding that ‘once your consciousness goes ping you can never again stop seeing’ (131). This represents the kind of coming into knowledge that we see in particular in Hamilton’s memoir, and the idea that life is not simply ‘being’ but a process of analysis and a negotiation between identities and roles. Feminism was one way for O’Faolain also to perceive that her blindness is not simply an individual failing, but a cultural condition, in which women’s experience of life is gendered so that they are expected – and expect themselves – to be wives and mothers. It is in this context that we should read O’Faolain’s comment that she conceived her path in life as ‘being and being loved’. Are You Somebody? powerfully embodies the central plot line of every memoir: that the coming into knowledge is not a single moment of epiphany but a process. In the same way, O’Faolain’s memoir makes it clear that life is ongoing, not simply a path with a destination. And for O’Faolain, memoir itself is a stage in that process, an attempt to map out past selves and achieve an understanding of the present self. There is no one bounded self, for not only is the past shifting and elusive, but the nature of identity is also. The task of memoir then, has to be both impressionistic and defining, if it is not to be either self-deluding or never-ending. O’Faolain accepts that remembrance is subjective and imperfect, particularly in the sequel to the original memoir, Almost There. The title of this second volume implies a destination, yet at the same time admits that perhaps it is one that will never be reached. In this follow-up book,

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which is a response to the first memoir, as well as an account of the ‘onward journey’, O’Faolain re-examines issues that she first brought to light in Are You Somebody? Several incidents, it emerges, were remembered differently by others, presenting O’Faolain not only with the existence of competing versions of the past, but also competing versions of her identity. Rather than try to fix one single narrative of memory and self, O’Faolain’s response is to accept that memory – and memoir – can only ever be partial and subjective.

Dialogues with the past: The Bend for Home The foregrounding of subjective perspective, and the documenting of the slow construction of the self, is a task that is taken on by another memoir, published within months of Are You Somebody? In The Bend for Home Dermot Healy embraces the instability of pastness and self, indicated by the opening of the memoir, which foregrounds the fallibility and plasticity of memory, and the insecurity of the past. Healy relates the circumstances of his birth: how the doctor fell asleep on the bed next to his mother and a female neighbour had to be sent for and brought back on the cross-bar of his father’s bike. And he goes on: At three in the morning the midwife delivers the child. Where the doctor was during these proceedings I don’t know. As for the child, it did not grow up to be me, although till recently I believed this was how I was born. Family stories were told so often that I always thought I was there. In fact, all this took place in a neighbour’s house up the road, and it was my mother, not Mary Sheridan, arrived on her bike to lend a hand. It’s in a neighbour’s house fiction begins.11 There are many layers here of remembrance: ‘family stories’ and myths that come to be completely identified with as personal memories, ‘fiction’ – the act of creating the myth – and ‘fact’ which is the actual version of events. In this memoir Healy blends these layers, and others, to create a textured version of the past and, in addition, he makes visible the process of storytelling, of constructing and writing. Like McCourt there are events related that Dermot could not have witnessed, but we understand how he came to know them and they are all the richer for that knowledge; this work reminds us why memoir is distinct from autobiography, it is not just a portrait of the self, but of a community of memories and storytellers.

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This inclusiveness is apparent in the structure of the memoir too. There are four movements to the book: the first catalogues his early childhood, his father’s retirement and their subsequent move to Cavan Town; the second his father’s illness and death; the third is a version of his teenage diary for the year following his father’s death; and the fourth is much later, the record of his time caring for his elderly mother, Winnie, and her sister, Aunt Maisie. Though these four parts are organised chronologically, the arrangement within the sections is often episodic and whimsical. So that it is not until chapter 5 that the reader is given some sense of linear history, for example, how his father and mother got married. Instead Healy weaves moments together that don’t chronologically belong, interleaving the present and the past. One early story tells of becoming stranded on a lake with his father, aunts and uncles as a powerful storm erupts above and around them: We are out there for hours. Then the keel softly parts the reeds … We are in the reeds for a long time. I will never forget their sound. And the sky cracking over. At last we touch land. All in the boat, except me, are dead. (7) The passage is evocative of both the terror and the beauty of the storm but the final grave statement seems to disturb the peace of reaching land. As one reads it, the first thought is that Dermot is the only survivor of this disastrous boating trip, the others have somehow mysteriously perished in the reeds. Yet, the real meaning is that in the present he is the only one of them still living. Omitting the word ‘now’ blurs the divide between past and present, achieving the simultaneity of memory and current thought. This shifting of time periods constantly reminds the reader that this is a narrative of the past created in the present, and that the present inevitably constructs the past. The later deaths of all those in the boat colour Healy’s remembrance of that day, and though it is the apocalyptic power of the storm and the desire to reach the security of land that forges the memory so that he’ll ‘never forget’, at the same time it is the subsequent deaths of those in the boat that makes the experience valuable and hence memorable. The interweaving of past and present is also indicative of the impressionism of the narrative; these acts of remembrance are often nonlinear, and fragmentary, as memories are. They combine into a montage that gives us a rich slice of the minutiae of Healy’s life, often given in a continuous stream of consciousness. This kind of impressionistic narrative reflects well the childlike gaze of wonder at the world and it

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broadens the frame of the memoir out to give a portrait of Cavan Town. The memoir is faithful to both sides of memory – the vivid snapshot of life, the intricate and unlikely details that we do remember, as well as the lapses of memory, the days that are not recorded, that exist only as absences. The narrative is shaped by Healy so that the past and the present coexist, or achieve a kind of simultaneity, as they do in the mind. In the diary of the year following his father’s death, he details all the nights out, the many girls he was involved with, and the lies he told his mother. Yet it is also interrupted by interjections from the ‘present’ as the middleaged Dermot sits with his 80-year old mother, re-reading the diary: June 11 [1963] Tues St Barnabas, Apostle … We sat by the fire and had tea. I told them all about the Ollie’s house and Virginia. You see, said my mother, how happy we can be when you stop at home. 12 Wed. … What has you on the streets, the cursed streets, lamented Mammy. I sat in the kitchen and Una dressed my face. The new shirt was ripped. In bed I could only lie on one side. Are the bins out? asked my mother. Yes, I said. You’ll stay with me? I will. Good. (178–9) The italics represent an interruption from the present and we can see how Healy moves from the events of 1963 when he can’t ‘stay at home’, and instead gets into fights out on the street, to the present when he is able, unequivocally, to answer his mother that he will stay with her. In writing the memoir and putting the ‘then’ and the ‘now’ into dialogue with each other, Healy reassures his mother in the present and, ultimately, answers her in the past also. This gives the reader a sense of continuity – a lifelong conversation between Dermot and his mother. Yet we also have a glimpse into a kind of dialogue between different versions of Healy himself, and the shifts that are undergone over the course of a lifetime. Healy uses this multi-vocal form of memoir to debate the purpose and use of memoir itself, as in the final section, as an adult, he wonders why he is going to the trouble of recording the banality of life caring

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for his mother, her repetitive questions, childlike behaviour, and the diminishing returns: Putting together the banal events of these days seems pointless, yet it gives me relief. It passes the time. It is a record of days I would otherwise not recall. (288) This final section of the memoir is valuable precisely for the everyday detail it communicates and preserves. It stands as a contrast to those unforgettable moments, infused with drama and importance, and illustrates the role of recording the present as a way of creating a memory of the past for the future.

The memoirist as detective: Reading in the Dark Healy’s self-conscious narrative, his use of diary and the impressionistic approach to one’s own life and memoir is a beguiling and narratively exciting mode of life writing. To go one step further, one might argue that the ultimate way of acknowledging the unknowability of the past and of how things really happened, is to embrace fiction. In Seamus Deane’s autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark, he does just this. Deane frames the novel as a detective story as a young boy tries to discover what happened to his Uncle Eddie, who disappeared before he was born. The novel follows the boy through his childhood, as he picks up clues and pieces the story together. In the course of this, he also develops himself as a boy, but it is less a simple coming of age story, and more a reading and negotiation of personal identity and the inheritance of family secrets, against the politically-charged context of Northern Ireland in the years before the explosion of the Troubles. The boy’s quest to find out what happened to Eddie is made more difficult by the fact that this is a cold case, with witnesses dead or disappeared themselves, and amnesia settled over the past like a sound-proof blanket. The tactics that the boy must use, are akin to those of the memoirist: looking for evidence in letters and memories, interrogating others for their version of events, reading for facts in the midst of anecdotes and community legends. These are, of course, individually wildly unreliable, but patched together they constitute a jigsaw picture of the past. Deane manipulates the narrative, so that rather than the usual significant events of birthdays and festivals, the large events marked and narrated here are a mix of deaths and revelations. The novel uses dates

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as section headings, and these divisions give the narrative pace, as there are dense periods of discovery, between for example October 1952 and February 1953. The dates are useful ways of building suspense as well as tracking the slow emergence of the story, with intervals in which nothing happens, or rather nothing that directly relates to the detective plot. Yet the dates also suggest that this is not merely a fiction, but has its roots buried deep in the factual as the form emulates the precision and recall of a diary or journal. In the process of constructing the answer to the mystery of what happened to Eddie, the boy alienates himself from his family, by digging up forgotten secrets and opening old wounds, the perennial risk of the memoirist. When he finally discovers that his mother is implicated in his uncle’s death, he attaches importance not to this as a fact or answer, but to what it means for him: ‘I went straight home, home, where I could never talk to my father or my mother properly again.’12 What the boy discovers is that this kind of knowledge separates you from those around you. The urge not only to know, but to analyse, the kind of selfconsciousness that O’Faolain complains she herself lacks, isolates the boy and creates a highly wrought self-awareness, when he should still be innocently and obliviously playing street games with his peers. The end of any good detective story is a show-down and a confession, while in a memoir revelations signify a meaning that has been arrived at, or conferred. However, in the boy’s kind of detective quest these are both impossible – his mother is the ultimate offender and she refuses to confess. For this novel the past is a silent presence, which is of course exactly opposite to the goal of both memoir and detective stories, so the boy has to push against the boundaries of remembrance. Like McGahern and McCourt, the boy opens up a deliberately repressed past, and fulfils the dangerous task of the memoirist which is to be true to the past, rather than to your family. There are many forms of silence in the novel, including kinds of articulated silence, such as speaking Irish to his uncomprehending parents, or the allegorical supernatural stories told by those around the boy. These are coded versions of the past, stories and legends about fairy children, mysterious disappearances, and, of course, devil women. The boy is frustrated by these coded versions, unable to read clearly their messages, and unwilling to accept their obscure versions of the past. In contrast, at school the boy is encouraged to think in uncomplicated grand narratives, as expressed in one history lesson: ‘History was about trends, not about people. We had to learn to see the trends … I was beginning to catch on at last. Global vision. I needed that’ (200). The

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ability to ‘see trends’ is about applying pattern and order to events. Through placing a distance between observed and observer, a ‘global vision’ can be achieved, which attempts to bring into focus those elements that are important, while discarding the rest. On the one hand memoir fulfils this dictum, by generating a distanced historical perspective. Yet on the other, its insistence on the self at the centre of the narrative, prevents any global or, indeed, objective vision. This is what the boy – and the novel – struggles with, as both try to reconcile the personal and the historical, the subjective and the global. Ultimately, Deane uses the memoir-like form of the detective story as a sorting house, a mechanism for classifying and clarifying both the past and the self, a kind of double reading in the dark. Deane, however, rejects the title of memoir, stating ‘it’s not a memoir. It’s a conflation of about three or four families’ histories, but a good deal of it I directly experienced. The fundamental story about Eddie and, in fact, all the disappearances, is family history.’13 While Deane elides the title of ‘memoir’, at the very least Reading in the Dark exploits the instability of boundaries between fiction and memoir. Indeed, the fragmentary nature of the novel’s progress, jumping over months in which nothing of importance or note happened, is comparable to the jagged edges of memory and its representation in memoirs. Deane’s use of fiction to explore the past thus also exposes the fictional strategies that memoirists use in order to create a linear or complete narrative. Deane’s mother never confesses to him, never brings him into her confidence, and so she remains to the end of her life unreadable. Silence triumphs over remembrance as his mother suffers a stroke and loses the power of speech. Though Deane could have created a fictional conclusion, replete with closure, he refuses to do so, mimicking the ways in which life refuses neat endings. While the novel champions the desire to fully know the past and to forge a new self out of the inherited stories and memories of your parents, at the same time its likeness to memoir suggests the impossibility of such a quest.

Writing the self What is perhaps the greatest risk of these memoirs – and of remembrance culture in general – is the risk of presentism, so that the past is only valuable in terms of explaining the present. In the case of memoir, this translates into the notion that only past events that bolster the idea of the self in the present are remembered and narrated. One of the attractions of memoir is that it allows the writer this power, to impose

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an order upon the past that was impossible within the life as it was being lived. Though this finds its way into the memoirs of McGahern and McCourt through their sense of a pre-destined path that they must follow, this is understandable in both cases as a personal myth they needed to construct in order to survive a series of hardships. So, McGahern as a young boy is able to resist his father’s decision to take him out of school, because he promised his mother before she died that he would become a priest. McGahern transforms this spiritual quest into a literary vocation, remaining faithful to his mother, yet also taking charge of the exact shape his future. McGahern writes that the dream of becoming a writer ‘set me free’ (205) from the narrow and constrained reality of life with his father. This dream replaces the earlier one of becoming a priest, and the communion with literature is an act that McGahern views as a ‘privilege’, an act of ‘grace, actual grace’ (171). McGahern is not alone in the belief that writing is a vital lifeline. For O’Faolain writing is a healing experience, as she argues that the distance necessary to writing about the ‘pain’ can ‘lighten’ the load.14 In addition, through writing about her life, she was able to ‘claim’ it.15 To author a life is thus not only to take responsibility for it, but to claim authority over it too. Similarly, writing is also a way for Dermot Healy not just to escape but to process what is happening in his life when he is caring for his ailing mother and aunt. At one point, dealing with his mother’s and aunt’s deteriorating health, he remarks ‘I feel powerless’ (272). There is an extent to which writing gives Healy a power within (if not over) the situation – far from a solution but perhaps some solace. And it is important that what is recorded is not just the misery of approaching death but the often hilarious interchanges between the two sisters, as well as the touching bond that clearly remains between mother and son. Writing can also be an escape from the tyranny of silence. In Hugo Hamilton’s memoir, it is not his escape but his mother’s. In writing down her memories of Germany, Hamilton’s mother is ‘putting down all the things that she can’t say to anyone, not even my father. Things you can’t say in a song, or a story, only on the typewriter for people to read later on sometime, on their own, without looking into your eyes’ (147). Writing provides a release, while also functioning as a distancing mechanism that enables the writer to articulate past traumas. By typing out her painful memories, Hamilton’s mother is preserving them for herself, as well as making them available to others. In this way, writing is understood as a storehouse of memory, and thus essential to fully understanding the self, a self which is not accessible by ‘looking into your eyes’, the traditional windows of the soul. We can sing songs,

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and tell stories about who we are, and evoke the past in myriad oral and communal ways, but what these memoirs suggest is that writing is integral to the process of fully remembering the self. Writing in this way is one way of mapping the terra incognita of memory and identity. In the late stages of Healy’s The Bend For Home, his mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and as she loses her grip on life, she also loses her grip on the past. Healy’s memoir counteracts this loss of memory, and if memory is identity, then what all these memoirs suggest is that writing is essential to the connection between the past and the self.

The maternal voice Mothers figure largely in all these memoirs and it is this fact that perhaps most strongly unifies this group of books. While each of the memoirists details their deep and often fraught relationships with their fathers, it is their relationship with their mothers that is defining. Perhaps this goes back to that ‘primal pattern’ that McGahern identifies in which the mother is the object of love and desire in a way that the father isn’t (though this isn’t the case for Nuala O’Faolain). It is not just that these memoirists loved their mothers, however, but crucially it is from their mothers that they get their love of the imagination, of writing and reading. It is their mothers that told them stories, or that read by the fire, inspiring them in turn to tell their own stories, to involve themselves in the world of reading and writing. Yet these are women without access to ways of openly or publicly writing their own stories. Though McGahern’s mother is a teacher, a public role that conferred a particular status, in her private life and letters she has to edit what she says. The boy’s mother in Reading in the Dark represses her own voice to the extent that she is entirely silent by the end. The novel thus represents an indirect way of allowing the mother’s story to finally be told, by telling it for her with love and sympathy. Likewise, Hamilton presents the story of his mother’s past alongside his own, while Dermot Healy enables his mother to speak directly into his own story. Even McCourt, who rejects his mother in shame, gives a balanced picture of her struggles to make herself heard on behalf of her children, in turn strengthening his own desire to be heard. Nuala O’Faolain’s mother, disappointed and heartbroken, and isolated entirely from her husband’s social life as a journalist, gave up her voice, retreating into silence, alcoholism and the world of reading. O’Faolain, writing about her mother’s loneliness, exposes the private and silent desperation that, until now, was hidden. For O’Faolain this is also a significant element of

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narrating her own life, as she says, ‘people my age feel, “look I’ve had a life, nobody realises I’ve had a life and there are things I want to say.”’16 That phrase, ‘nobody realises I’ve had a life’, is key to understanding the power of memoir to give a public voice to otherwise marginal private experiences. In creating a record of their own lives, then, each of these memoirists not only remembers the self, but performs it publicly. Furthermore, they articulate their mother’s stories, giving voice to women that otherwise would go unnamed, unheard, unrecorded. * By returning to the past in memoir form, the writer works out not simply what happened, what was said, and what it meant. Rather, the memoirist discovers (or decides) who she or he is in the present by working out who they were in the past, and what their relationship to that past self is. This is what gives so many of these narratives a sense of quest, from the boy’s hunt for secrets in Deane’s Reading in the Dark, and the young Hugo Hamilton’s raking through his father’s wardrobe for clues to the past, to McGahern’s reading through old letters for the adult stories he was unaware of as a child. There is a search going on here as each writer tries to reveal or expose something otherwise unremembered about the past, and thus also the self. By uncovering forgotten or silenced memories, and synthesising them with those remembered, into a single narrative, the writers describe not only their own development, and identify key moments in their personal trajectories, but set up a dialogue between past and present selves, across the temporal divide. In this way, the memoirs forge a coherence – or at least a conversation – between their present selves, their voice and their past. This is necessarily contrived, and in this way memoir is about both self-discovery and self-creation. This relationship between the present and past self can also be read as that between self and other, and is clearly expressed in Dermot Healy’s memoir. In the house of Healy’s childhood in Cavan Town, there was a large mirror, taking up one wall of the dining room: That mirror had given my family and me a second identity. We ate looking at ourselves in it. We were never fully ourselves, but always possessed by others. When someone entered the room we spoke to them through the mirror. The family, when they conversed, never had to look directly at each other. We all spoke through the mirror. We learned faithlessness and duplicity from an early age.

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… This distance between my mind and my body has always remained and is insurmountable. (73–4) The self-consciousness and self-awareness that Healy depicts here is evident within the memoir form, as reflection is necessarily distancing, creating a second, remembered self. In some ways this division parallels the anti-nostalgic dislocation between the past and the present. While these memoirs are certainly anti-nostalgic in the view that the past is a space of trauma, underlining the ascendancy of the present, at the same time, the idea of the self that is created in these memoirs attempts to surmount division and dislocation. Despite acknowledging the distance between past and present selves, the memoir form, above all, attempts to forge a constant self out of the inconstancies of identity and memory. The act of writing about the past allows the writer, within the memoir, to wrest meaning and control from the contingencies of life, and to impose an order and continuity upon the disorder and discontinuity of identity. Moreover, the writing of the self also bridges the gap between the remembered Ireland of the past and the lived Ireland of the present, which both, within the memoir, constitute imagined spaces. Ultimately, then, memoir expresses the needs of the self in the present, for unity and stability, by inventing and performing a single, and singular, remembered self.

3 The Exiled Past: The Return of the Irish Emigrant

In late 2003 Guinness debuted their latest television advert, shown only in Ireland, called ‘The Quarrel’.1 The one-minute advert depicts a young man striding across Ireland, reaching the Cliffs of Moher, diving off and swimming across the Atlantic. When he reaches the shore of America, with the Statue of Liberty in the distance, he walks across downtown New York, until he finds and enters a crowded bar. He slowly approaches a seated man and, while the action around him seems to pause, finally speaks one word: ‘Sorry’. The two men hug, the crowd erupts and the quarrel is over. On a very straightforward level, this ad shows two men reconciling, yet on an allegorical level, it conveys much about Irish attitudes to emigration in the first years of the twenty-first century. The Ireland that the man walks across is a recognisable montage of green fields (populated by cows or, in one shot, a derelict car), the deserted Burren landscape and the awesome beauty of the Cliffs of Moher. The New York that the man encounters is likewise true to type: recognisable as much for its gritty, noisy and crowded street scenes, as from the towering bulk of the Statue of Liberty. In this short piece, the Old World reaches out to the New World, easily undertaking an impossible journey in order to apologise for past hurts. By imagining this journey, the Guinness ad asserts the importance of the relationship between Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, and in doing so performs the injunction of President Mary Robinson, who eight years earlier asked Ireland to reach out to its forgotten and displaced emigrants. On 2 February 1995, President Mary Robinson made a rare address to the joint houses of the Oireachtas on the subject of ‘Cherishing the Irish Diaspora’. Robinson spoke of the need for Ireland to recognise the worldwide community of people who claim Irish identity and to incorporate the Irish Diaspora into the ‘concept’ or ‘definition’ of modern 78

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Irishness.2 In her speech, Robinson quoted Eavan Boland’s poem, ‘The Emigrant Irish’ and the lines: ‘Like oil lamps we put them out the back, / Of our houses, of our minds’,3 and with these she invoked the Oireachtas to cherish the Irish Diaspora not simply in sentimental terms, but ‘to include them in our sense of ourselves and not to forget their contribution’. Robinson gave examples of emigrants and their descendants who declared their Irish heritage by speaking the Irish language, telling stories, and holding particular cultural values seen to be Irish. In this, Robinson proposes a concept of Irishness as a cultural identity, created through performance and ritual, as opposed to an official identity based on territorial or birth rights. Two years later, the incoming President, Mary McAleese, echoed Robinson’s words, referring in her inauguration speech to the ‘global Irish family’ who ‘have kept their love of Ireland, its traditions and its cultures deep in their hearts so that wherever we travel in the world there is always a part of Ireland’.4 These two presidential invocations to inclusively remember have, indeed, resulted in the greater visibility of the Irish Diaspora at the front of our minds, not least because in the years immediately following these speeches, the Irish Diaspora came home. This chapter will discuss the implications of these homecomings, and the representations of return on the Irish stage and screen. The chapter will firstly consider the social and cultural context for performing return, and secondly will focus discussion on six works of drama and film that depict the struggle for homecoming.

Patterns of emigration and return Large-scale emigration has been a feature of life in Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century when the Great Famine forced approximately one million people to emigrate to America and England. Indeed, for the next century, from the 1840s to the 1950s the population of Ireland was in constant decline. This tide of emigration enabled the country to survive economically, as the Irish abroad sent money back, or fostered younger brothers and sisters who could not be supported at home.5 Despite a brief fall in emigration rates in the 1970s, in 1989 there were well over 70,000 emigrants from Ireland, an all time high figure for a single year.6 The impact of this scale and consistency of emigration cannot be underestimated – these numbers reflect the fact that this was not just a desire to live in a foreign country, to broaden horizons, but was, rather, a wave of involuntary emigrants. Though these emigrants might continue to think of Ireland as ‘home’, to return to Ireland was

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traditionally seen by many as shameful, ‘an admission of failure that would marginalize them in their native society for decades’.7 The attitude to returning home and the concept of home itself have undergone parallel changes, following the modernising economic and social reforms stimulated by the first Programme for Economic Expansion in 1959. More recently, over the last fifteen years there has been a reversal of the trend in emigration – emigration still remained high in the first half of the 1990s at about 40,000 per year,8 but in 1995 the gap closed with immigration of around 37,000 per year and in 1998 a record high when immigrants outnumbered emigrants by over 20,000.9 Much of this shift can be explained by the attraction of Ireland for those wanting to work in a more prosperous economy as well as for those seeking political asylum.10 Yet in addition to these non-Irish immigrants there has been a significant number of return migrants claiming Irish citizenship. Indeed, in 1998 more than half of all immigrants to Ireland were Irish nationals, concentrated in the 25–44 age category.11 These shifts in Ireland’s emigration patterns are not strange in themselves; indeed they bring Ireland into line with most other European countries, but it is the pace of change that is extraordinary. Why do these former emigrants return? Though there are still factors which push many to emigrate, since the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger expanded in the mid-nineties, there have also been significant ‘pull’ factors. The development of the pharmaceutical and computer industries required a skilled workforce and most returning emigrants were highly educated and skilled.12 In addition to these developments, which provided a favourable economic context, the continued process of social liberalisation seemed to match the expansion of the economy, creating a more receptive social context for returnees.13 Yet alienation – for both the returning emigrant and the home community – was still an issue as the return home involves a complex negotiation of past and present identities, and a disruption not only of community patterns, but of communal memory too. Ireland in the 1990s was, then, an economically and socially attractive place to return to, but most returnees cite another reason for their homecoming – nostalgia. They came home because of a deep-rooted longing for community, tradition, and the quality of life that both these social factors seem to promise.14 However, the relatively small amount of sociological work that has been done with returning emigrants seems to indicate that the returnees have great difficulty reintegrating with their communities and readjusting to contemporary Ireland.15 Indeed one former emigrant notes that ‘leaving is the easy bit’.16

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The two centres for migration studies in Ireland at University College Cork and Queen’s University Belfast have in recent years carried out an all-island collaborative oral project entitled ‘Narratives of Migration and Return’, a qualitative study of ninety-two former emigrants. The interviews with these men and women are collected in an online and library-access oral archive of life narratives, and preliminary work suggests the varied reasons for not only the initial emigration, but also the reasons for, and experiences of, return. One analysis of the women’s narratives, in particular, suggests that emigrants imagined their return as not only a homecoming but a fulfilment of the self, a return to a sense of wholeness and authenticity after the dislocation of emigration.17 Yet, that hopefulness is not always fulfilled as the experience of return can be yet another dislocation, a disruption of the self and the remembered version of Ireland. Returning emigrants often find that they miss the countries that they had emigrated to and are dissatisfied with what they perceive as Ireland’s persistent backwardness, despite wanting to return to reconnect with tradition.18 For many, however, it is the absence of tradition or authenticity which makes it hard to adjust and which leads returnees to experience Ireland as foreign to the country they left. This experience of homecoming is thus not as harmonious or simple as the returning emigrants might wish, and this is fore-shadowed in the inevitable clash between nostalgia and reality, forced by the confrontation of return. In her speech on cherishing the Diaspora, Robinson addressed this issue of exile and remembrance: When I was a student, away from home and homesick for my family and my friends and my country, I walked out one evening … and [found] at the back of the news stand, almost to my disbelief, was The Western People. I will never forget the joy with which I bought it and took it back with me and found, of course, that the river Moy was still there and the Cathedral was still standing.19 Robinson’s fear that the river may no longer be there, or that the Cathedral would no longer be standing, illustrates the anxiety of the emigrant that the act of leaving Ireland could destabilise both physical and symbolic certainties. Moreover, while Robinson had left Ireland in order to develop herself as a student, orienting herself towards the future, it was equally important to her that the country she left behind remained unchanged. This is the simple yet impossible demand of emigrants: that the past be perfectly preserved, not only in their memories,

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but in reality also. Inevitably, however, the remembered Ireland is not the country that emigrants actually return to. This dislocation between memory and reality is experienced not only by the returnee, however, but also by those who never left. Moreover, the nostalgic expectations of the returnee often sit ill with the future-oriented outlook of the home community, creating disturbance and upheaval for both sides. Irish culture has long been dealing with this duality; the dislocation of emigration and the trauma of return. In the mid-twentieth century, playwrights such as M.J. Molloy and John B. Keane recorded the phenomenon of rural depopulation in plays such as Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering (1953) or Keane’s story of the fatal return of an Irishman from England in The Field (1965).20 In film, the scenario has been more comically framed, as in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), in which Sean Thornton returns from America to his mother’s birth-place in the west of Ireland. Sean’s nostalgic naiveté comes into conflict with the traditional local customs, but he eventually forces a confrontation that both performs and declares his right to return. The resolution depends on compromises by both sides, so that the nostalgia of the returning emigrant can be reconciled with the conservatism of the native community. A decade later, the early work of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy gives a full sense of the psychic disturbance caused by emigration and return, as emigration symbolises for both playwrights a condition of emotional and cultural, as well as physical, exile. Friel’s breakthrough play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), is set on the eve of departure as Gar O’Donnell faces up to leaving his home and all he has ever known and loved. Two years later Friel produced a counterpart to the narrative of departure in The Loves of Cass McGuire in which Cass returns home. In this play Cass’s return is far from triumphant and her illusions about ‘home’ are well and truly shattered by her return. Likewise, Tom Murphy’s A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant (1969) explores the issues that an emigrant must face before he can leave Ireland, while the later Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), represents the personal failures that neither emigration nor returning home can solve. What this play also articulates is the uneasiness of the home community surrounding the return of the emigrant, an emotional attitude that Murphy has continued to explore. Irish novels tend to focus on the emigration, rather than the return, of the central characters, but one exception to this is Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes in which Catherine McKenna returns to Ireland after the death of her father.21 With this trope, MacLaverty echoes the pattern of many of the texts discussed here in the connection between death

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and Ireland. Cataloguing both the act of emigration and return, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn imagines the journey of Eilis Lacey, as she emigrates for a period to Brooklyn, New York, before returning to settle in Ireland, a journey which reflects the emigration patterns of the 1990s, rather than the 1950s when the novel is set.22 The trial of emigration is thus a well-worn trope in Irish culture of the past sixty years, yet it is one which is constantly being renewed.23 The six works this chapter will consider from the last two decades are: The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989) by Dermot Bolger; I Could Read the Sky (1999), a film adaptation by Nichola Bruce of the original photographic novel by Steve Pyke and Timothy O’Grady; After Easter (1994) by Anne Devlin; The Wake (1998) and The House (2000) by Tom Murphy; and Shiver (2003) by Declan Hughes. All six works depict emigrants who want to return home but in doing so are forced to question the idea of home itself and to reconsider their nostalgic impulse to return. These works thus chime with the tradition of representing emigration, yet they do so in a vastly different social context. The social changes of the past twenty years add further depth to the notion that an emigrant cannot return home to the same place as they left, indeed since 1995 the meaning of emigration itself has changed. By concentrating on the specific phenomenon of returning Irish emigrants, rather than addressing the dynamics of new immigrants into Ireland, these works all bring into focus the relationship between past and present versions of Ireland, through the perspective of the returnee.24 The representation of emigration is, however, not simply about where one lives, or even the contested question of ‘home’, but centres on the threat to stability – of identity, of belonging and, crucially, of memory – that the returning emigrant poses. In all of these works the return is not simple or straightforward, but rather the returnees disrupt their communities and cause themselves further dislocation. Though they may fight to remain in Ireland, most of them must admit defeat as their homecomings confirm for them that a permanent return is, in fact, impossible.25 What emerges from considering these texts together is not just a remarkably similar attitude towards emigration and return, but also an insight into the perceived disjuncture between past and present versions of Ireland.

The fragmented past: A Lament for Arthur Cleary and I Could Read the Sky Dermot Bolger is one of the leading Irish writers of urban hardship, representing that other Ireland, beyond the kitchen sink and the country

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cottage. His 1989 play A Lament for Arthur Cleary is the first part of A Dublin Quartet, dramatising the poverty and breakdown of community in the city’s economically deprived suburbs. The play is modelled on the eighteenth-century Gaelic poem, ‘Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire’. This lament tells of Art O’Leary, who came home to Ireland after fighting on the Continent, only to become an outlaw in his own country for refusing to bow to English law and give up or sell his horse. O’Leary was shot dead and the lament both mourns him and calls for revenge, a mixture of grief and anger. The modern-day Arthur Cleary has wandered Europe, restless and unable to either settle abroad or return to Ireland. When he does return, it is too late – his mother is dead and the city has changed for the worse. He nostalgically visits a nightclub where he used to spend time when he was younger but the club has changed, his friends are no longer there, and the doorman is both aggressive and territorial, refusing to entertain Arthur’s memories of the past. This is typical of Arthur’s experience as he tries to get back to what he remembers of Dublin, and as he is forced to realise that he stayed away ‘too long’.26 Arthur’s attempts to access the past involve returning to specific locales; what the play illustrates is that it is not merely people who have moved on, but the physical geography which has changed, so that his memories are displaced from the evolving map of the city. Arthur tries to move on with his life, finds love with a young girl, Kathy, who appreciates his honesty and his ability to tell stories that conjure up a ‘special’ Dublin, different from the drab and deprived suburbs she knows, and they move into his mother’s flat on the estate where he was born. Though he returns to his birthplace, he has become an outsider, illustrated by the gossiping of the neighbour women: ‘Never had that class of yoke here before he came back’ (48). The oxymoronic nature of this remark both denies and admits Arthur’s right to return and illustrates the liminal status of the returnee in memory as both insider and outsider, and who performs both a remembered journey into the past and a new journey into an altered present. Arthur is not just a figure from outside, but also from the past and this is both his entry point back into his community and the element which makes him dangerous and subversive. He is determined to remember the past, but this is resisted by everyone he comes across. As an old friend he meets in the dole queue tells him, it is not like ‘long ago’ (45). The past is dead, and so is the future, as he goes on, ‘We’re all fucking dead, Arthur, or as good as, in this kip’ (47). The association of Dublin with a living death is refused by Arthur and he pushes against the

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deathly aspects of the new Dublin, including Larry Deignan, the local loan shark. Larry claims to be Arthur’s old ‘school pal’, and remembers him as a notorious rebel who was expelled from school. While this memory is not challenged directly by Arthur, he rebuts Larry’s story with a memory of his own: Larry’s mother ran the corner shop and one day she sold a firelighter to a ‘young tinker lad’, pretending it was a coconut sweet (42). The boy was so harmed that he was never able to speak again. Larry sees Arthur not as someone to ‘look up to’ but as a threat, and he kills him, silencing Arthur just like the ‘young tinker lad’. The connection here between the Traveller boy and Arthur is indicative of the way in which the migrant is an unsettling figure in Irish society. Arthur is a threat because his memories constitute an alternative narrative of the past, and undermine Larry’s sanctioned version. Larry, who is settled, versus Arthur who is a traveller, triumphs and maintains the power status quo. Bolger conveys Arthur’s sense of alienation and fragmentation not just in the searingly critical images of Dublin at the end of the 1980s, but also through the form of the play. Actors play multiple roles, use masks to represent the gossiping neighbours, and the stage is spare and split into different levels. Placeless and timeless scenes of confrontation between Arthur and a Frontier Guard also fracture the chronology of the play, as Arthur tries to travel by train across Europe. We assume that this is an echo from his past, as he is haunted by the years in ‘limbo’ on Autobahns, on trains, at borders (51). Yet it transpires that this border is, in fact, the final one, not just between countries but between life and death. Arthur is reliving his past from his position in limbo, unable to let go of the last months in Dublin before he was beaten to death by Larry Deignan. In particular, he is holding on to the idea of Kathy and the hope that that relationship represented for both of them. At the end of the play, the audience understands that what they have been watching is a series of performed memories. This explains the fragmentary structure, the central role of Arthur in every scene, the time ellipses. Yet the performance is not eternal. Just as the landscape of memory changes, so too the link of memory and life weakens, so that Arthur’s performance of his memories becomes less and less tenable. Years have passed since Arthur’s real-life death and, instead of continuing the cycle of memory performance, the Frontier Guard advises him to ‘Let go’ (68). Arthur has to battle his instinct to cling on to memory but eventually lets go and truly finds peace, or at least silence and memory-lessness, in death. In this, the play finally suggests that memory not only constitutes identity, but also life.

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This is, of course, reminiscent of that final journey by Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s 1979 play Faith Healer. Frank too is an outsider returning home after years of wandering and, as with Arthur, he is unable to leave things be and is beaten to death as punishment. Like Faith Healer, Bolger’s play shows the compulsive power of memory – to evoke the past, to bring it to life, to perform it night after night. In both plays the past is represented in fragments, a chorus of disjointed voices, as if the past were itself a dream play. Fragmentation is also the mode of expression in Nichola Bruce’s film adaptation of Steve Pyke and Timothy O’Grady’s photographic novel, I Could Read the Sky. This is a haunting and dream-like film, in which shots and images are often unclear and hard to decipher. The narrative voiceover, spoken by Dermot Healy, mumbles and seems to be an act of personal recollection, rather than public storytelling. The plot is a familiar one: unable to sustain themselves on the farm, the sons of a rural family emigrate to England to find work labouring. The life is insecure and harsh, the only relief is found in drink. In the novel, based on interviews and recollections of real-life emigrants, the photographs counterpose the text, so that one image of a newly-painted door, with a sign reading ‘Wet Pain’, ironically underlines the bleakness of the story as the men lead a feckless life working as labourers and drinking their wages.27 The film mixes video and digital footage, combined with dissolves, overlays and grainy effects, to create a collage of images and memories, mimicking the confusion of the narrator – who remains un-named – and trying to give the audience an impression of the disorientation and dislocation of being an emigrant. The film is framed as the remembrance of a life, as the man sits in a squalid bedsit in North London at the end of his life. When the man recites his abilities, from ‘I could read the sky’, to ‘I could forget my own name, lose the music ... come home for death’, the list suggests the fragmenting effect on identity of losing a hold on life, and crucially on memory, through the instability of emigration. The man does experience happiness and, like Arthur Cleary, this is linked to love as he meets and marries a woman, Maggie, who stabilises him and takes him away from the drink. Together they move back to Ireland, making plans for the future and settling on the family farm. Again, the return is to the place of origin, and the promise is of a healing of the psychic and temporal wound of dislocation, as he says ‘there was Maggie and there was light and there was a road ahead to receive us’.28 The possibility of a future is key here, and the light that Maggie represents is shed not only into that future, but also on the past,

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allowing the man to return home and establish the kind of life that he was prevented from having the first time round. This is an image of wholeness and integration. This is a short-lived dream, however, as Maggie dies suddenly, inexplicably, and he cannot stay in Ireland but returns to a solitary, alcoholic life in London. His refrain ‘No way back now, no way back home now’ is a heart-breaking acceptance of a life of permanent exile. His narrative is thus an admission that, for the emigrant, home exists only in memory. Following this, the man only returns to Ireland for funerals: in an extraordinary scene he has to dig the grave for his father’s coffin, which entails also digging up his mother’s coffin and deepening the grave. This act functions as a metaphor for the burying of the past in an ever-deepening process of repression, another form of ‘no way back home now’. As it is for all of the emigrants in this chapter, Ireland is associated most strongly with the past and with death. It is unsustainable, or perhaps more accurately, is unable to sustain this man and his peers. Like Arthur, however, through narrating his memories and, in the film, performing them, this man finds some kind of resolution, a kind of ending through assembling the memories into a meaningful narrative. The fragmentariness of the mode of narration in the film acknowledges the incomplete and disconnected nature of emigration, memory and the past. Though this is an impressionistic work, the total is larger than the sum of its parts in that it powerfully and movingly evokes the process of emigration, return, and permanent exile. Yet it cannot, in fact it does not, aspire to be a unified or smooth narrative, rather it projects the act of remembering as a disjointed performance. In this it visually and thematically echoes the split stage and alienated self of Bolger’s play, and taken together these two works evoke the disconnections of memory.

Woman and home: After Easter and The Wake A comparable sense of the struggle to survive in the present plagues Anne Devlin’s central character Greta in After Easter (1994), who is not only exiled from her home and family in Northern Ireland, but also from her new family in England; depressed and confused after the birth of her third child, she has been committed to a mental hospital by her English husband. Greta complains of visions that displace her from reality and that separate her from everyday life, yet she refuses to ‘let go’ and battles against everything that threatens to overwhelm her. Greta is far from at peace with either herself or the idea of home – be it England or Northern Ireland. Her mother thinks that she has betrayed

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her family and her religion by allowing her children to be brought up outside the Catholic faith and some element of this sense of betrayal must seep through to Greta as she is plagued by quasi-religious visions of death and the devil, which leave her depressed and unable to cope with normal life. Greta’s sisters come to rescue her from the mental hospital and take her to stay with them. That night, however, she sees a banshee, a traditional augur of death. When she and her sisters then find out that their father has been taken to hospital after a heart attack, Greta’s vision seems to have credibility. They return to Ireland to keep vigil at his deathbed and, later, to bury and wake him. While the father is laid out in their house, the night before the funeral, Greta watches over him. She talks to him in this scene and the audience witnesses the father come to life and respond to Greta, acknowledging the truth of her assertion that the boundaries between life and death, the natural and the supernatural, are not as rigid as her sisters would like to believe. Devlin establishes the theatre as the space in which to trespass across those borders, to unsettle us as an audience, and perhaps to disturb the boundaries themselves. Greta grew up in Belfast, a city divided by sectarianism and army roadblocks, and the family home in North Belfast is, in fact, their second home, as they were driven out of their first by the resentments of the dominant Protestant community. Moreover, while her mother is a strict Catholic, her father was a communist, adding another layer of personal and political division. The idea of home as a peaceful haven is thus already compromised, riven by seemingly mutually exclusive oppositions. Greta’s actions can then be read as a response to these oppositions – she strives to make her family and the wider world question binaries and boundaries; in response to a vision, she takes the communion wafers out of the church and distributes them freely on the street. Greta’s refusal to accept the rigid divide between the spiritual and the secular is confirmed when her cousin, Sister Bethany, offers her refuge from her tormenting visions, if she becomes a ‘nun in the community’.29 But Greta is unwilling to bow to the institutional rules that would bind her, define her, seeing it as another kind of exile. Despite Greta’s refusal to accept the protection of the Church and its rules, in order for her to function properly in the world, to be able to mother her children, she recognises the need to reinstate some kind of boundaries in her own life, between reality and the uncanny, sanity and insanity. While it is doubtful that her strategy of confronting her family, her homeland, and the past is entirely successful, Greta is closer to a balance by the end of the play.

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Early in the play, Greta calls the banshee ‘Mother’, suggesting the long-running conflict with her actual mother, which comes to a head after her father’s death. Now that her father is dead, however, the competition between Greta and her mother for his attention is ended and the banshee can, in a way, be exorcised. Greta’s relationship with the past, and with Northern Ireland, is thus framed by her relationship with her parents, which she is slowly resolving. The past – for instance memories of her mother’s distraught attacks upon her when she was thirteen, for her adolescent courting of her father’s attention – can thus, alongside her father’s coffin, be laid to rest. Although the journey home is beneficial for Greta, it is clear that she cannot remain in Northern Ireland. She returns to England with her sister Helen, and together they scatter half of their father’s ashes into the Thames, thereby physically incorporating the ideas of home and family into a landmark of elsewhere. Both sisters finally recognise that identity is ‘a magical place … inside me. I carry it wherever I go’ (74). We can read this in two ways. In one respect, both Greta and Helen have separated out the ideas of self, home and Ireland, no longer seeing the three as inextricably linked. Their journey home and their father’s death have released them in a sense from the past and their habitual selves. In another respect, what they carry within them is memory, and it is the memory of home that they have reconnected with over the course of their journey back that enables them to move forward. In this respect, memory is the terrain of identity. This is complicated when Helen says that it is ‘my memory that stops me from seeing. So I’m concentrating on forgetting’ (74). What Helen and Greta attempt to forget is the pain of their pasts, what they remember, however, is that they are able to achieve their true selves by creating their own stories and thereby rewriting the past. In response to the realisation that home, and memories of home, can be rewritten into a liberating, rather than confining, identity narrative, Greta starts to hear a baby laughing and instead of an image of death, there is suddenly an image of life. The effect of Greta’s homecoming can be judged by this shift and, indeed, by the shift between her opening and closing monologues. At the play’s opening, Greta’s monologue is delivered in the presence of a psychiatric doctor, and focuses on destructive maternity, protest and stasis. But at the play’s end when she is reinstated as a mother, she rocks her baby and tells a story of creation, with the emphasis on movement, hope and transcendence. Greta authors her own creation myth and in doing so effects a form of productive forgetting; having confronted the past, she can put those divisive memories to one side and create her own origin myth. Devlin’s

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play consistently comes back to the idea that it is your past – your family and your home – that defines you. But by going back and understanding those roots, and learning to use memory and narrative productively, her characters can begin to move on from that past, into a fulfilled and fulfilling future. For all three of these central characters, then, Ireland is an impossible place to live in. While Arthur Cleary is killed for his failure to re-adjust to the new status quo, death forces both the unnamed male narrator of I Could Read the Sky and Greta to leave Ireland again. For Greta there is a double recognition: in order to make sense of her life she must return to Ireland, yet in order to survive she has to leave it once more. This pattern of recognition and sacrifice is also followed by Vera O’Toole, in Tom Murphy’s play The Wake. Vera returns home from America after the death of her grandmother, to wake her and to deal with her inheritance. Vera’s life abroad is far from rosy, she works as a call girl, and in some ways her return to Ireland is not just a quest to connect with her family but an attempt to run away, albeit by running backwards into memory, re-enacting aspects of her childhood. As a girl Vera was fostered out to her grandmother and so her first port of call is her grandmother’s house. When Vera meets the neighbour, Mrs Conneeley, she learns that her grandmother’s death was indirectly due to the callousness of her family, the root of which is greed for money and power. The action of the play springs from Vera’s dawning realisation that she will be the next victim of her family’s greed, as her brother plans to cheat her out of her inheritance, the hotel left to Vera by her mother. Vera’s response to her family’s aggression is to break the social boundaries that are most important to them: she rekindles her romance with Finbar, who is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks. She then seduces her brother-in-law Henry, an alcoholic, and the three of them conduct a very public orgy in the lighted windows of the hotel and in full view of the implied audience of the town. As with Greta, Vera challenges boundaries and definitions and, as a result, transforms her own life. The Wake is, like much of Murphy’s work, a scathing attack on smalltown life, where a respectable façade masks the haunting realities of depression, alcoholism and avarice. When Vera goes too far, in her family’s eyes, by consorting with Finbar and Henry so publicly, they and the local doctor manage to have her sectioned and committed to a mental hospital. Mary Jane, the most conniving of the sisters, wants to ‘lock her up’ to ‘give her a shock’30 and so Vera is contained, much like Greta. Yet while Vera is no more insane than Greta, she similarly realises that she must respond to the real world, rather than reverting

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to anarchic behaviour. Vera does a deal with her family and in exchange for ending her shaming of the family name, she gets a wake, a fiction of familial harmony. Vera is here waking the idealised image of family and home that she, as emigrant, has constructed, and this wake enables her to both mourn and move on. Vera seems to accept her isolation and the disintegration of the myth of family unity. Her final response to her family’s machinations is, simply, to give them her inheritance – the hotel, itself an image of migrancy – and leave Ireland once more, cured of the belief that return is possible. Yet this is not to say that Vera has anything to go back to in America either; at the end of the play she is more than ever at sea, without the comforting fantasy of a family to keep her anchored. But with the loss of this fantasy, she is able to leave Ireland again and to perform a kind of forgetting. For both Vera and Greta, then, the journey home enables them to leave once more, to make their emigration permanent and thus reinvent the conjoined ideas of home and family. This pattern is at least more positive than Arthur Cleary’s fatal journey. Yet, despite these women’s pragmatic ability to survive, they are still by no means made happy or whole by their abortive journeys home.

‘I’d kill for here’: The House Since his 1985 play Conversations on a Homecoming Tom Murphy has been chronicling the inability for emigrants to enjoy either simple or straightforward homecomings and this is also the case for Christy Cavanagh in his 2000 play The House. The play is set in the 1950s, during the summer months when the migrant workers return for their annual holiday. This influx of life into the town generates an ambivalent mixture of resentment and pleasure in the locals and, while the local pub sponsors the first drink for the men back from abroad, as a celebration of their return, it also sponsors the last drink. The returning migrants bring new stories and new wealth back home with them, but they also cause a great deal of emotional and social upheaval. In fact, the drunken behaviour of some of the returnees lands them in the cells and when they face the judge they are reminded of their liminal status: GOLDFISH: That’s what he said to me, the judge. ‘I don’t know where you come from but in this town we respect private property … And it’s my business to see that the likes of you and your kind back from England respects it too.’

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When Goldfish points out that he works in America not England, that he is from ‘this town’ and that to his knowledge ‘You, Your Honour, sir, … is the one that’s not’ he is given short shrift and a heavy fine.31 Christy is different to these men, however: he always returns to Ireland for the full summer, not just two weeks, and this time round he intends not to leave at all. As in the case of Vera it is implied that his work in England is not all above board – he has more money than he could possibly earn from casual labouring and he may be a pimp, a ‘user’ (29). Like Vera too, on his return the remembered version of home and family threatens to dissolve and he must do everything he can to protect it. Christy’s mother was a servant at the Big House, owned by the de Burca family and Christy has been fostered by them; Mrs de Burca recalls him as a child saying ‘I’d like to be this family please’ (28). In fact, he is confused when she asks him how things are at home, thinking that ‘home’ is at the de Burca’s house. His devotion to Ireland, symbolised by the de Burca homestead, can be gauged by his prophetic outburst one night in the pub: ‘I’d kill for here! Would you kill for here? I’d kill!’ (43). When Christy returns, he sees that the Big House has fallen into disrepair, because as an exilic observer, he perceives what the home community take for granted. Christy is troubled by this realisation and does everything he can, literally, to repair the fences and keep the fantasy alive. When it becomes clear that the house will be sold, he determines to buy it and achieve his childhood dream of being ‘this family’ and hence to prevent the past from evolving. But there is one fly in the ointment: the youngest de Burca daughter, Suzanne. Suzanne knows Christy’s type; she also lives in England and her finery and coquettish ways speak of an illicit lifestyle. She knows the ways of the world, telling her sister Louise, ‘You should spend a few years abroad and you’ll find out!’ (29). She cannot bear that her home is being sold – she also needs the memory as an anchor – nor that the son of a servant should be the one to buy it. Suzanne arranges to meet Christy one night, and when she taunts him with his class position he hits out in retaliation, killing her. Christy now has blood on his hands and is desperate. He finds an alibi, but though he is safe from the law, he is driven to confess to Mrs de Burca, childishly imploring her not to tell on him. Mrs de Burca dies from the shock of this revelation, appearing to give in and let go of life (113). Christy is now a double-murderer, tragically fulfilling his promise to ‘kill for here’. In addition to destroying the family he thinks of as his own, Christy’s wish for a permanent return to Ireland disrupts the pattern of emigration

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and thus disturbs the entire rhythm of the community. Like Arthur, Christy poses a threat to the stability of the community, because he transgresses the boundaries not only of class, but also of who belongs and who does not. Furthermore, the fall of the Ascendancy family, and Christy’s purchase of the ‘Big House’, indicate both the ending of a long-standing tradition and the socio-economic changes of post-colonial Ireland, changes which Christy tries to halt. Christy’s actions are thus an attempt to freeze or undo the social changes of modern Ireland, as well as a personal attempt to recapture his halcyon memories of childhood, both of which are symbolised by the house. While Christy is the only one of the five characters so far considered who manages to stay in Ireland and to get what he wants, it turns out that this is not the answer either as it misunderstands the temporal process of emigration. While the idea of ‘home’ becomes reified for the emigrant, the reality evolves, and going back is thus an inevitably doomed project. Though he reclaims the literal territory of the past, Christy has sacrificed the happy memories associated with it, and in some ways he dies, just as Arthur does, because he can no longer perform the remembered childhood dream of ‘I’d like to be this family please’, and instead he epitomises the utterance of the man in I Could Read the Sky: ‘no way back home now’.

An impossible journey It seems, then, that contemporary Irish writers are unanimous in their attempt to dismantle the harmonious or heroic myth of return; ‘home’ is a remembered and therefore impossible destination. Yet though some of the works, particularly Bolger and Devlin’s plays, are set against the very real political and economic background of modern Ireland, the other works avoid directly confronting the issues of modern Ireland, instead setting the drama in the past or mythologising Ireland as a nation of ghosts, wakes and visions. Furthermore, the conclusions of all of these works reinforce the idea that exile is permanent, when in the 1990s as these works were being performed, read and screened, the phenomenon of the returned emigrant was booming. There are a number of playwrights, however, resolutely setting their work in the present-day, attempting the difficult task of holding the mirror up to a constantly shifting nature. In Homeland (2006) Paul Mercier tackles the joint themes of emigration and political corruption, as Gerry Newman returns to Ireland in order to deal with the legacy of his corrupt property and political deals. Gerry’s trip goes disastrously wrong and the play ends with his eleventh-hour escape from Ireland,

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back to the security of exile. The play is chaotic, an example of how difficult it is to put shape on a reality which is still unfolding. Yet what Mercier has to say about emigration is consistent with what has gone before: there is no going back. The characters of Declan Hughes’s play Shiver, however, have a tenacity that enables them to remain in Ireland. Yet, as with every previous returnee, this is not as straightforward as it first seems. In Shiver the central characters follow Christy’s lead in The House: they have made money working in America and come back to Ireland to buy a ‘home’ and create new, better lives for themselves. There are as many differences between these plays though as similarities – these characters seem more successful, more articulate, more assured. Yet nothing goes quite according to plan and Hughes illustrates, just as much as Murphy does, that the fantasy of home is a destructive illusion. Jenny and Richard return to Dublin from America and the play opens with their introductory narrative to the audience: RICHARD: So, ‘home we came at last … ’ JENNY: ‘Home we came?’ You sure about that, Richard? RICHARD: I think so. Well, we came home, didn’t we?32 From the outset, the notion of returning home is interrogated by Jenny, and Richard’s certainty, his stylish opening direct address to the audience, is destabilised. They are joined onstage by their neighbours and new best friends, Marion and Kevin, who have swapped traditional roles: Marion is the bread-winner, Kevin the stay-at-home dad. Their bickering, however, undermines the smooth, progressive, and well-adjusted façade, illustrating the difficulties of this trade-off. Instead of being excited by the possibilities of this brave new world, the audience is immediately aware that Shiver is a play about the insecurity of home and of traditional social structures such as family, community, religion. Indeed, there is a huge question mark over the viability of any of the new structures or ideas ostensibly being touted by the play, revealing a subtext of fear in the otherwise uber-confident Celtic Tiger. When Richard constantly reassures Jenny and himself that he is positive about their future and that of their website, ‘51st State’, the audience is fully aware that neither Richard nor the future of the company is a sure thing. Part of the problem, of course, is that Jenny and Richard are entirely invested – personally and professionally – in the new ‘dotcom’ industry, which audiences in 2003 would know enjoyed only a brief period of boom before levelling out, taking many of the start-ups with it.

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As Fintan O’Toole pointed out in a review, the moment of the play ‘already belongs to history’; the narrative is always retrospective. O’Toole sees this as an inevitable result of the fact that the economy has changed so quickly in the past ten years, that attempting to represent it is always going to be impossible.33 The play itself recognises this in an indirect way, wrestling with the idea of history itself. While Jenny takes issue with Richard’s stylised and ‘retrospective’ introduction of their return to Ireland, she does admit that ‘you need a little history’ (6). Though three of the four characters in this play seem to want to leave history behind, to talk only of the future and repeat their slogan, ‘the day after tomorrow’, Shiver is partly about the impossibility of leaving history behind, especially in a country in which the landscape is a reminder of the ‘living connection’ between the past and the present; the swish house that Jenny and Richard move into is built with granite from a centuries-old quarry, once mined for gold, that exists as an off-stage reminder of the labour of others and a metaphor for the folly of a gold-rush mentality. This metaphor of the gold-rush and its association with California, the Wild West, and new frontiers are apposite for the way in which Jenny and Richard attempt to import American money and attitudes into Ireland. Their online magazine is called ‘51st State’ in recognition of the increasing impact of American culture on Ireland; emigration is no longer necessary, Ireland has become so globalised that it is America’s newest member state. Led by Jenny’s anti-nostalgic reaction against the traditional imagery of Irish culture, she and Richard refuse to include Seamus Heaney’s poetry on the 51st state site, because it represents what ‘we’ve had enough of … dead mammies and peeling potatoes and farms and bogs’ (43). Yet the play constantly undercuts this; Kevin argues that Heaney is ‘brilliant’, ‘a genius actually’ and Kevin’s genuine appreciation of poetry for its own merits contrasts with Jenny’s superficial espousal of cultural politics and global markets. Just as damning, however, as the cultural emptiness is the financial bankruptcy of both 51st State and the multinational company that Marion works for. Marion has ‘sold out’ artistically in order to achieve financial security but this seriously backfires when she is made redundant, leaving the family penniless and facing the repossession of their home. What does the day after tomorrow hold for these four characters? It turns out that it looks startlingly like yesterday, ‘dead mammies and peeling potatoes’. When Richard’s mother dies and 51st State folds, the couple is forced to return to basics and, in a way, to the past. They hit upon the solution of starting a catering company; though Jenny failed at being the creative force behind 51st State, it turns out that she is a really good cook,

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while Richard turns into quite an efficient business manager and delivery boy. Their new company thus returns them to more traditional gender roles, further confirmed when Richard reveals that Jenny is pregnant. What this transformation also confirms is that the returning emigrants are unable to import ideas and practices from elsewhere, instead they are forced to adapt back to Irish lifestyle and business practices. A similar process occurs in the next-door household after Marion’s company declares bankruptcy, and she returns to her role as mother and housewife, while Kevin is made redundant as a stay-at-home dad. The family’s situation is further devastated when Kevin is found dead at the bottom of the local quarry. Over the course of the play he has become obsessed with the history of the quarry, and at the same time he has become extremely pious. It is unclear whether Kevin fell accidentally from the top of the quarry or whether he jumped, but Marion chooses to read his death as a kind of ‘Christlike’ sacrifice, as the payout from his life insurance will redeem their financial sins. Though Kevin as narrator remains onstage and refutes Marion’s belief that his death must have been deliberate, what actually happened is never confirmed for the audience. Hughes strongly suggests that new, post-nationalist economic and social models simply do not work in Ireland where family, religion and history are omni-present, visually communicated by the final stage direction: ‘the ruined church spire casts its shadow’ over the characters (81). The failure of 51st State implies that we should not stray too far from our roots, while Kevin’s death in the quarry can be darkly construed as suggesting that a re-identification with the past can be a kind of investment in the future. Shiver is certainly superficially very different from the five earlier representations of returning emigrants, especially as the returnees in this play do not display nostalgia for the past, but rather frustration at Ireland’s continued traditional culture. At a deeper level, however, Hughes’s play has much in common with the patterns of other representations of returning emigrants, emphasising their inability to fit back into their communities, the clash between their expectations of Ireland and the reality, as well as the association of Ireland with death. In all of these works Ireland is associated with the past and with death – Arthur, Kevin and Suzanne all die, while the man in I Could Read the Sky, Vera and Greta come home for death. For all the characters their remembered version of Ireland is revealed as an impossible fiction. While both Vera and Greta survive, their return to Ireland serves only to re-confirm the resolution to leave in the first place. And still that resolution is not ideal. On the one hand, emigration itself is by no means fulfilling, indeed in the case of Murphy’s plays it is consistently

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figured as morally suspect, and the language, tone and fragmentariness of both Bolger’s play and Bruce’s film effectively evoke the loneliness and ‘limbo’ of exile. On the other hand, however, as far as these works are concerned, returning home is an inadequate solution for the ills of emigration, and only leads to further conflict and tragedy. How do these works, which represent the returnee as a disruptive figure, and the homeland as a place of trauma and death, fit with the affirmative image of the Celtic Tiger? What these plays diagnose is an anxiety about the interrelated ideas of belonging, home and family in Ireland that does not end with the onset of prosperity, and that is not exclusive to the emigrant. The inability to be at ‘home’ is felt not only by the returnee, but also by those who never left. Impermanence, change and mobility now characterise Irish reality as much as other developed countries, leading to what Fintan O’Toole has called an experience of ‘internal exile’, where ‘people feel less and less at home in Ireland’, as the rapid pace of social and economic change makes the once familiar seem strange or, indeed, disappear altogether.34 This is now particularly the case as the economic recession since 2008 has led not only to a return of high levels of emigration, but the collapse of the property market has literally made people insecure in their homes, with widespread reporting of the rise of mortgage arrears and house repossessions. These plays of return now have a new resonance as the gilded Celtic Tiger period fades under the harsh glare of economic dispossession. Indeed, in Dermot Bolger’s more recent play, The Parting Glass (2010), he again documents the struggle to return, this time during the period of the Celtic Tiger and the recessionary aftermath. When Eoin (a character from Bolger’s earlier emigration play In High Germany (1990)) gives in to his yearning to return to Ireland after twenty years of living in Germany with his wife Frieda and son Dieter, he encounters an Ireland he no longer recognises and he feels a foreigner at ‘home’. Disaster follows the initial act of return, as Frieda is killed in a traffic accident on her long commute to work, Eoin is laid off from work (a ‘stone-age concept in the new Ireland’), and then finds that his new apartment is in negative equity. Finally, driven by the absence of jobs, his mother’s death and his father’s insolvency, Dieter decides to emigrate, and Bolger shows how after the short-lived boom, the cycle of emigration begins again.

‘I don’t know where you come from’ The insecurity over belonging expressed in these plays matters, not simply for what it tells us about the familiar phenomenon of emigration,

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but also for what it tells us about more recent aspects of Irish society and memory. For the social and economic changes which have modernised Ireland are also guilty of mirroring some of the alienating effects of emigration itself. Both phenomena cause social change and, in doing so, the disintegration of tradition. In response to this disintegration, Irish remembrance culture has developed two patterns. On the one hand, there has been a turn towards nostalgia, particularly evident in Irish film, mimicking the emigrant’s focus on the past. On the other, however, there has also been an explosion of anti-nostalgic culture, as the past is viewed as a place to escape from, not return to. The figure of the returning emigrant forces a confrontation between the past, that the emigrant embodies but the home community wants to distance itself from, and the present or future, that the emigrant often feels ambivalent about and the home community wants to orient itself towards. The conflict between the returnee and the home community thus centres on the discordance between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia. When the emigrant returns with his or her memories, he or she is out of step with the community, as illustrated in Bruce’s I Could Read the Sky in which the man, driving through Ireland, realises that the Irish landscape is not pristine and pre-modern as he remembered it, but rather is full of signs of modernity, represented by the housing developments he sees out the window of the car. Paradoxically, when the man returns to his bed-sit in Kentish town, North London represents a more stable and traditional landscape than that he leaves behind in Ireland. The conflicts that arise out of these different and clashing versions of Ireland are illustrated in The House by Goldfish’s argument with the Judge as to who has greater claim to calling the townland ‘home’ in the present, and in After Easter by the extremely disruptive presence of Greta in her community and her family home. The anti-nostalgic outlook of the home community means that the returning emigrants are, moreover, unwelcome for the way in which their presence suggests the lack of distance between the past and the present. In this way, the returnee is a haunting figure, reminding the home community that the past cannot be entirely left behind. The returnee represents a fractured temporal narrative that conflicts with that belonging to those who stayed in Ireland, who have their own remembered version of the past, a linear line of progression that anchors them and, further, that justifies their future-oriented personal and social outlook. Since memory is the foundational ground for individual identity, and cultural memory grounds community identity, these conflicts over belonging and laying claim to the past (and thus

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also the present), are tremors that threaten to fissure both of these foundations, thereby destabilising the social structure itself. For these reasons, as illustrated in all these works, the home community attempts to either oust the discordant returning figure, or force them to conform. This is far from the ideal of cherishing the Irish Diaspora advocated by Mary Robinson. Instead of making the return home an easier project, the advent of the Celtic Tiger and the opening up of Irish society created new difficulties for both the returnee and the home community. Indeed, the age-old difficulty of homecoming has only been exacerbated by the recent pace of change in economic and social areas. The works that are considered here are all consumed by unease – about emigration, immigration, the fate of modern Ireland and, crucially, the past – and they thus undermine the feel-good factor of the Celtic Tiger, so that they are now more in line, strangely, with the post-Celtic Tiger gloom. In these works, the idea of home and thus also of homecoming, is inevitably also a return to the past, to remembered places and selves, and this provokes more conflict than reconciliation. The inability of most characters to reconcile the past and the present, and the litany of deaths, signify the trauma of emigration and return. Though there are characters such as Vera and Greta who transform the dislocation of emigration into a more positive outlook, they cannot do so and remain in Ireland. These works all grapple with what are both traditional and modern questions for a country with a diasporic consciousness: the issues of home and self, belonging and exile, presence and displacement. Yet even in the context of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the answers to these questions were not hopeful, provoking worries for how recession Ireland will answer the same questions.

4 Embodied Memory: Performing the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes

The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace. (Padraic Pearse, 1915) Victory is not won by those who can inflict the most, but by those who can endure the most. (Terence MacSwiney, 1920) The Northern Irish Republican commemorative calendar marks the anniversaries of four major events: the 1916 Easter Rising, Internment (August 1971), Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972), and the 1981 Hunger Strikes.1 Both the Easter Rising and the Hunger Strike commemorations are organised around a gallery of martyred men, who died for Ireland and who inspire the fight to continue. Pearse’s maxim on ‘our Fenian dead’, first delivered in 1915, and inscribed in the 1980s on a mural on Beechmount Avenue, Belfast, accurately prophesies the use of the dying and dead republican body as a weapon. This juxtaposition of death and life, and the idea that death can paradoxically feed a living struggle, is based on a shrewd understanding of the power of sacrificial imagery combined with the potency of Irish remembrance culture. This chapter will consider the role of performance in remembering the hunger strikes. From installation and video art, to the small but significant body of films, and most recently, a major play, Irish remembrance culture tackles not only the hunger strike as an event in Northern Irish history, but negotiates the political terrain of how the events of 1980 and 1981 should be remembered. Fundamentally, this negotiation revolves around decisions over how to represent the 100

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hunger strikers themselves, as victims or victimisers, political militants or human sacrifices. In W.B. Yeats’s 1904 play, The King’s Threshold, a poet undertakes a hunger strike in protest against his king. In the original version of the play, the poet fails to follow his protest through to the bitter end; however Yeats re-wrote the ending in 1922 so that at the end of the play the poet’s life is extinguished. This re-writing was undertaken as a response to the deaths in 1920 of three Irish republican strikers: Joseph Murphy (who died after seventy-six days, the longest strike on record) and Michael Fitzgerald in Cork gaol, and, most famously, Terence MacSwiney in Brixton prison. MacSwiney lasted an incredible seventythree days, surprising many whose expectations were for a swifter death (there being little medical knowledge about prolonged hunger strikes). The British government decided not to intervene in the strikes, after the negative publicity surrounding the forced feeding of Suffragettes on hunger strike, and in 1917 the fatal attempt at tube feeding the striker Thomas Ashe, former president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Due to the length of MacSwiney’s strike in a British prison, and the almost constant sense of the imminence of his death, the international media followed the story closely, generating not only sympathy for the individual, but also for the republican cause. MacSwiney was, at the time of his arrest, the Lord Mayor of Cork, but his political status did not save him. Six decades later, in 1980 and 1981, republican prisoners again went on hunger strike in Northern Ireland, to claim their right to be identified as political prisoners. Two of the strikers in 1981, Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty, were also members of the British and Irish Parliaments, elected during their strikes, but again this political status did not save them.2 This parallel between the 1920 and 1981 hunger strikes is underlined by MacSwiney’s famous words, which cement together ideas of suffering and heroism, that it is endurance rather than might that brings victory. Certainly, the hunger strikers, both in 1920 and 1980–1 endured the bodily suffering of selfstarvation, but their ultimate endurance is as icons of the republican struggle.

Protesting for political status The 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes were the result of two protracted prison protests, known as the ‘Blanket Protest’ and the ‘No Wash’ or ‘Dirty Protest’. Following the British declaration in 1976 that political status was to be removed from paramilitary prisoners, the IRA men

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imprisoned after that date refused to wear the prison uniform, and were reduced to covering themselves with blankets, earning the moniker ‘blanketmen’. The Dirty Protest was an escalation of the Blanket Protest, when the prisoners, put on twenty-four hour lock up and refused the right to visit the toilet or to slop out, retaliated by pouring their urine under the doors into the corridor, or out the window – until these were blocked up – and the prisoners had to resort to smearing their excrement on the walls of their cells. After four years of these extreme forms of physical resistance, in 1980 ten prisoners – seven men in the Maze and three women in Armagh prison – went on hunger strike, protesting for the right to be recognised as political prisoners. The strike was called off after fifty-three days, in response to the British government’s seeming accession to the prisoner’s demand for political status, including the right to wear their own clothes. However, this proved to be a false concession – as prison uniforms were simply redesigned as ‘civilian-style clothing’ – and the strike had thus failed. Bobby Sands, the republican commanding officer of the Maze H-Blocks, was determined that the hunger strike in 1981 would be different, and he devised a strategy to maximise exposure and heighten the pressure on the British government. Rather than a mass hunger strike, Sands went on hunger strike on 1 March by himself, followed after two weeks by Francis Hughes and, a week after that, by Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara, with each striker replaced as he died. During this second strike, the women prisoners in Armagh did not take part. The tactic of successive strikers was designed to exploit the publicity surrounding the strike and to raise their profile as much as possible. In this it was certainly successful, though it also had the effect that Sands became the undisputed icon of the whole strike. The hunger strike dominated news in Northern Ireland, and it was visible in many other ways too, including posters with slogans such as ‘Hungering for Justice’, mass marches and rallies to support the strikers, and murals. Street mural painting was a powerful and public way of visualising and commemorating the otherwise invisible bodies of the prisoners and the strikers. They also functioned to claim the streets as politically owned – and controlled – territory, projecting and enforcing a political message to both the local (or internal) audience, as well as to non-nationalist viewers. Murals displayed anonymous blanketmen, imprisoned and tortured, yet still defiant, or they bore the features of one of the strikers, most usually that of Sands. The poster images of the strikers, pasted up on walls around Belfast and Derry, were updated daily with the total count of days without food (daily newspapers also noted this count).

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Following Sands’ death there was ‘an explosion of murals’ in nationalist areas of Belfast, Derry, Armagh, Lurgan, Newry and Strabane.3 Though the prison-themed murals became less of a strong presence in Northern Ireland as the 1980s and 90s wore on, the twentieth anniversary of the hunger strikes in 2001 saw a resurgence in mural commemorations of the ten dead strikers, memorials in the form of large carved ‘H’ monuments (such as the one at Free Derry Corner), and large public events such as marches or rallies visually marked by the flying of black flags.4 Many of the placards carried on marches and rallies bear the image of Bobby Sands’ face, so over-photocopied as to be almost unrecognisable, were it not for the iconicity of this single image, upon which the weight of so much meaning depends. The memorialising of the strikers thus began before they were dead, and this process was accelerated once their deaths occurred, which represent a bleak ending, but key aspect of the performance, as shown by their monumental funerals, and echoed down the years by the strategies of remembrance and commemoration of significant anniversaries.

Iconography of the protests The images of the strikers, in particular the smiling face of Bobby Sands, have become short-hand for the sacrifice they made and the armed conflict they died in the name of. Indeed, in Anne Devlin’s 1985 play Ourselves Alone, the opening scene in a nationalist club in West Belfast is dominated by black and white banners bearing the dead men’s faces, images that overshadow the action of the play. Devlin’s play implies the negative impact of the philosophy of martyrdom on young people in Northern Ireland, and in an artistic context Devlin suggests that it is almost impossible for writers to escape from the myths and iconography of republican martyrdom, and to forge a new set of images. Though one of the central characters, Frieda, asserts that Bobby Sands ‘beat his wife’, her voice is powerless in terms of destabilising the fixed image of Sands as a martyr and victim.5 An illustrative example of the public familiarity with the image of Sands is Philip Napier’s art installation ‘Ballad No. 1’, first exhibited in 1992 at the British School in Rome. The installation consists of a pixellated template of Bobby Sands mounted on the wall and attached to an accordion, powered by a motor which originally belonged to a diplomatic car. This installation work incorporates the image of Sands within two contexts – both the historic ballad tradition suggested by the accordion, and the political context of Northern Ireland represented by

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the diplomatic engine. The engine in Napier’s piece, far from resolving or bringing the struggle to an end, actually drives the tradition of republican sacrifice, while the accordion is, likewise, connected to the portrait and thus both feeds into and off the myth represented by Sands’ image. As Luke Gibbons says of the piece, ‘by linking the famished body with mourning and collective memory, the off-key image becomes, in effect, a living monument’.6 Yet the ‘off-key’ image is pixellated, illustrating both the breaking down of the myth by the work overall, as well as the way in which this image has become so over-used that it is breaking down itself.7 Though art works such as Napier’s, and the work of two artists discussed at the end of this chapter, problematise and diversify the images which represent the strikes, film and to an extent theatre, has followed the representational cues of the performances of the hunger strikers themselves, imagining the male and female hunger strikers as victims of an oppressive system, rather than as perpetrators of violence. Five works of film and drama considered now attempt to give an insight into the events of 1980–1 from the prisoners’ perspective: Some Mother’s Son, written and directed by Terry George, with script collaboration by Jim Sheridan (1996); H3, directed by Les Blair (2001); Silent Grace, directed by Maeve Murphy (2001); Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (2008); and Chronicles of Long Kesh, written by Martin Lynch (2009).

Dramatising the 1980–1 protest period In Some Mother’s Son, Terry George places the film’s focus on the struggle of two mothers who have to come to terms with the arrest and imprisonment of their sons, and then to face the consequences of both men going on hunger strike.8 For both mothers, Annie Higgins (Fionnuala Flanagan) and Kathleen Quigley (Helen Mirren), the hunger strike is their worst nightmare, and their increasingly desperate actions, first to get Bobby Sands elected, and then to intercede in the behind-the-scenes negotiations, are a battle against time as their sons are hospitalised and go through the latter stages of the strike. George’s film dramatises how Kathleen is politicised by the experience, as she not only campaigns for Sands, but votes for him, the first time she has ever voted. In this the film acknowledges the move towards electoral politics of Sinn Féin, sparked by the 1981 hunger strike. While Annie stands by her son, Frank (David O’Hara), and his wish to die, if necessary, on the strike, Kathleen decides that she will not and takes her son Gerry (Aidan Gillen) off the strike. Some Mother’s Son thus emphasises the emotional cost of the

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strike to the strikers’ families and, of the films discussed here, does the most to contextualise the 1981 hunger strike in the paramilitary and governmental politics of the time. In contrast, H3, directed by Les Blair, and written by two former republican prisoners Brian Campbell and Laurence McKeown, focuses almost exclusively on the world of the H-Blocks in the Maze prison.9 McKeown and Campbell had previously written a hunger-strike play, The Laughter of Our Children, and this production toured to Belfast, Derry, Dundalk and the village of Bellaghy, home of dead strikers Francis Hughes and Tom McElwee, playing to nationalist audiences in the main.10 The reach of H3 was much more mainstream, however, as despite its low budget it showed on sixteen screens across Ireland. The central characters of this film are three prisoners: new prisoner Declan (Aidan Campbell), his cellmate Seamus (Brendan Mackey), and Seamus’ close friend Ciaran (Dean Lennox Kelly). The narrative of the film follows the prisoners as they struggle with the hardships of the Blanket and Dirty protests, and how they agree to take on a hunger strike as a last resort. The focus is not, however, on the strike itself, but the impact it has on the other prisoners. Declan organises the men in a letter-writing campaign, while it is the role of Seamus to draw up a list of strike volunteers, a process he agonises over. Meanwhile, Ciaran has stopped his Dirty Protest, unable to cope any longer with the inhumanity of the situation. However, when news filters into the prison community that Bobby Sands has died, Ciaran rejoins the non-conforming prisoners, illustrating the role of the strike within the prison in strengthening prisoners’ resolve. The reunion of Ciaran and Seamus provides the emotional climax of the film and thus Blair stresses the men’s friendships above the divisive politics of the time. Silent Grace, written and directed by Maeve Murphy, takes a different angle on the strikes, firstly by locating the drama in the women’s prison at Armagh during the 1980 hunger strike, and secondly by focusing on a non-republican prisoner and her reaction to the Dirty Protest and the strike.11 Aine (Cathleen Brady) is not a member of the IRA, but when she is sentenced to prison for theft and joyriding, in an adolescent fury she claims the status of IRA prisoner. Aine is placed in a cell with IRA prisoner Geraldine (Dawn Bradfield) and they form a friendship. She is also coached by a mentor figure, Eileen (Orla Brady), and through these two relationships she comes to recognise the integrity of the women and their protest. Eileen is the republican commanding officer for Armagh and she goes on the hunger strike to demonstrate allegiance to, and equality with, the male prisoners in the Maze prison. She is saved at the

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last moment, however, when the Governor of the prison intervenes, using legislation developed to deal with Suffragette hunger strikes. In this, Silent Grace foregrounds a parallel history, often forgotten, of women’s prison protests. Whereas Silent Grace focuses on communal solidarity, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen and written by McQueen and Enda Walsh, emphasises the isolation and vulnerability of the non-conforming prisoners.12 The film is in three parts: the first part focuses on the world of the prison, from the dual perspectives of the prison officers and the nonconforming prisoners. The two main characters in this section are the officer Ray Lohan (Stuart Graham) and the new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan). This first section stresses the horror of the Dirty Protest and the violence of the prison regime. The middle section of the film is a twenty-minute scene between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and community priest Father Moran (Liam Cunningham). This is the first time that the film foregrounds Sands as a character as he has previously only been seen in group shots, during scenes of violent cell transfers. The film’s third section then focuses exclusively on Sands, as he undertakes his hunger strike. This is the only film to fully depict the process of the strike and the wasting of the striker’s body, and because of this focus it is also the film which least contextualises the hunger strike as a historical event. The most recent work that this chapter discusses is Martin Lynch’s play Chronicles of Long Kesh which is, of all the dramatic works, the most balanced in its depiction of prisoners and prison officers. Lynch’s work dramatises the Maze (also known as Long Kesh) prison, from the perspective of both republican and loyalist prisoners, and frames the play with the narration of the prison guard Freddie. Music is central to the play as the prisoners use song to express themselves and their situations, and to make parallels with situations outside the prison. The play depicts both the 1980 and the 1981 strikes, as well as representing what happened to the men after their lives in prison. In this, Lynch attempts to create a chronicle of the whole period and to show the impact of the strikes on both prisoners and the wider community. In order to write Chronicles, Lynch interviewed over forty prisoners, prison officers, welfare workers and families.13 This is typical of the emphasis on authenticity which is evident in all these works, and the reactions to them. The generation of an aura of authenticity works to compensate for the distance between the experience and the representation, the original performance of the protests and strikes, and the cultural performances years later. In reviews of Some Mother’s Son, Terry

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George’s prison experience is often referred to, as he had been interned twice in the Maze and knew both blanketmen and hunger strikers, giving ‘the work an unshakeable sense of authenticity’.14 Likewise, H3 has a strong claim on credibility, as the writers, Brian Campbell and Laurence McKeown, were both formerly prisoners in the H-Blocks and McKeown had been a hunger striker himself.15 The most recent film, Hunger, doesn’t have any such ‘authentic’ link, but the production team stress in promotional material that the film was made in Belfast with an entirely Irish and Northern Irish crew.16 McQueen also explains his interest in making a hunger-strike film because of his first-hand memory of seeing Bobby Sands’ face on the evening news every night.17 Many of the films also include images of newspapers of the time with headlines declaring the strike’s progress, shots of hunger strike murals and posters and, most notably, images and clips from speeches by Margaret Thatcher, responding with government rhetoric to the politics of the strikes. These techniques interweave fictional and factual performances of the history of the hunger strikes, and in doing so blur the edges of the context of dramatic and imagined representations by using real cultural artefacts to underscore the veracity of what is being depicted.

Representing the protests Driven by a desire for material authenticity, the producers of both H3 and Hunger applied for permission to film in the Maze prison itself. Both requests were refused and the sets for these two films were thus constructed instead as exact replicas of the H-Blocks, suggesting the iconic image of the prison itself. Beyond the material and visual authenticity that the sets convey, the environment of the prison also establishes how the prisoners and the guards are positioned in relation to each other. In Silent Grace, for example, the women’s cells are in the prison dungeon, spatially illustrating their disempowerment and isolation.18 Furthermore, the physical environment of the prison cells has to be carefully introduced by each film, so that the horror of the Dirty Protest – in particular the cell walls covered in faeces – does not overwhelm the audience, countering, decades later, the grim images of newsfootage of the cells shown at the time. The films thus use the figure of a new prisoner as a way of entering the prison, using his or her perspective to mediate what the audience sees. In Hunger, the process of entering the prison is shown as Davey arrives at the Maze and asserts his identity as a political prisoner by refusing to wear the prison uniform. The audience then watches, along with the prison officers, as Davey slowly and

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fearfully removes his clothes. The next shot shows Davey walking down the prison corridor, his head bleeding from an unseen beating, and entering a prison cell that is already dirty. Davey’s slow and horrified gaze around the darkness and filth of the prison cell is an onscreen correlative to the audience’s horror at such dehumanised conditions. These scenes play out in almost total silence, adding to the strangeness of the experience, and implying that it is beyond language. In H3 the awfulness of the Dirty Protest is tackled with humour, as the new prisoner Declan is unsure of how to ‘go to the toilet’ and horribly embarrassed at having to squat in the corner of the cell, but his cell-mate Seamus reassures him that he’ll get ‘my own back later’. In Some Mother’s Son, though the emphasis is on life outside the prison, the film shows the process of entering the prison for prisoners Gerry Quigley and Frank Higgins. Gerry’s confidence in the court room, as he asserts his refusal to recognise the British court’s jurisdiction, is somewhat lessened when he reaches the prison and has to walk naked down the corridor to his cell. His expression when he sees into the cell for the first time is further chastened, though it lightens when he recognises his cell-mate: Bobby Sands (John Lynch). Sands’ greeting to him echoes the humour of H3, saying ‘Do I look that bad?’, to which Gerry responds, ‘You look like Jesus Christ’, a self-conscious acknowledgment of the Christ-like image generated by the blanketmen, and exploited by contemporaneous murals and posters. In Silent Grace the introduction of a new prisoner is dealt with slightly differently in that, unlike the other films, Aine is not a member of the IRA. When she enters Geraldine’s cell she is distressed by the smell and refuses to respect the IRA women for their protest as they do not, in her eyes, deserve political status: ‘Youse run rackets and rob banks. Sure half the Lower Falls are payin’ out to youse.’ While the Armagh women were exempt from the Blanket Protest as there was no formal uniform for female prisoners, they were still prevented from wearing what was identified by the prison authorities as paramilitary clothing – black berets and green jackets. In Silent Grace when the women are caught wearing contraband clothes, they are punished by having their cells violently searched and put on 23-hour lock up, forcing them to resort to the Dirty Protest. In Silent Grace, as Aine is slowly integrated into the IRA community, led by her friendship with Geraldine, and her admiration for her mentor Eileen, she also joins the Dirty Protest. Her horror at having to wipe her excrement on the walls for the first time is amply illustrated when she vomits afterwards, but, as Eileen tells her, they have to do it ‘with

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dignity’ so that the filthy walls are a reflection of their treatment by the prison authorities, rather than an expression of their own ‘dirty’ natures. In representing the women’s Dirty Protest, Murphy had to engage with the perceived violation of the women’s femininity as well as their humanity. As she says, ‘Men wrapped in blankets: there is something quite stoic about that. Women with shit on the walls and menstrual blood and all that kind of stuff is more uncomfortable territory for some people.’19 For audiences of Silent Grace this may be their first realisation that women prisoners were also on the Dirty Protest and on the 1980 hunger strike. While this may be explained by the smaller numbers of women prisoners, and the relative anonymity of the 1980 hunger strikers in general, it is also a sign of the dominance of the Christ-like images of protesting male prisoners, with heavy beards and long hair, wearing only a blanket. While this image is shocking, it is also mediafriendly and, though it carries unwelcome connotations of animalistic behaviour and the ‘dirty Irish’, it successfully created an iconography of a savage system which stripped the men of the trappings of civilisation. The openness of the Christ-like image of the blanketmen to further representation is illustrated by Richard Hamilton’s art work ‘The Citizen’ (1981–3), a life-size painting of a blanket man, Hugh Rooney, and his ‘art’ work created with his excrement smeared on his cell walls.20 The same kind of imagery could not be created out of the women’s protest, and perhaps as a result the women’s protests were under-reported at the time, relative to the coverage of the H-Block Dirty Protest.21 As critic Mary Corcoran has argued, this can be partly explained by the fact that ‘the women’s no-wash protest … transgressed codes of feminine propriety’ and reinforced the stigma of the Dirty Protest with the ‘horror of women’s secreting bodies’. 22 Aine only joins the protest because she is fostered by the community of women in the prison. Likewise, community is an important support and source of resistance in H3. When he arrives in the Maze, Declan is made welcome by the other non-conforming H-Block prisoners, who quiz him on life outside the prison, including football results and the music charts. Declan even begins to play a role in the nightly ‘concerts’ that the men hold by shouting to each other through the cracks between the cell door and wall. When the men think that their demands to wear their own clothes have been met, there is much querying as to whether their clothes will still be in fashion and they look bemused when Declan describes the new styles of trousers. This kind of banter and camaraderie is most evident in the scene when the men end

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their no-wash protest and have showers for the first time in years, and there is an almost schoolboy atmosphere at this point. This is not to say that prison is represented in H3 as a happy experience, as this camaraderie is in stark contrast to the representation of the violence and brutality inflicted on the prisoners during cell shifts and mirror-searches. Rather, these bursts of violence against the prisoners serve to make the cold and filthy cells appear as a relatively safe haven for the men, and to show up their nightly ‘concerts’ as the strategies for survival that they are.23 These strategies are crucial not simply in creating a sense of community that bolsters the prisoners’ morale, but also in creating a sense of freedom within the prison. In particular, the men use their voices to transcend the barriers of prison walls and cell doors. In Martin Lynch’s play Chronicles of Long Kesh this is powerfully represented as the men sing to each other, creating a feel-good factor for both the prisoners and the audience. The songs are often about challenged romance, from ‘Tears of a Clown’ about stoically covering up heartbreak, to ‘All my lovin’ about a long-distance relationship, both underscoring the men’s situation, isolated from their loved ones. Music is just as important in H3 though the men’s singing abilities are less impressive. What is impressive instead is their ability to speak to each other in Irish, so that their political messages can be broadcast by them, yet not comprehended by the guards. Gaelic – or Jailic as the H-Block men called it – creates a linguistic freedom, while it also reinforces the concept of cultural separatism. In Silent Grace the nightly ‘concerts’ take the form of quizzes, recreating within the prison the forms of popular entertainment that belong to the outside world. This quiz, however, is interrupted when one of the prison officers beats up Geraldine and the women’s physical entrapment comes home to them as they can only listen and not act. When the attack is over, Eileen comforts the women by reciting the Hail Mary, and the shot shows a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the background. This Marian imagery helps to reinforce the women’s solidarity and again shows the power of culture as a form of resistance. The power of cultural solidarity is visually represented in H3 when, following a brutal attack by the prison officers on the men in their cells, they sing ‘A Nation Once Again’. The camera cuts to an overhead shot of the prison, with the men’s singing on the soundtrack, visually illustrating the transcendent power of their unified voices. The prisoners are not, however, the only figures trapped within this system. In an attempt to create balance, and to counterpoint the onesided representation of prisoners as victims, all of these works suggest that the officers and prison authorities are also damaged by the protests.

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In both H3 and Silent Grace there are sympathetic prison officers, while in Some Mother’s Son George strives to show the British Foreign Office representative as a reasonable man. Moreover, in H3, Campbell and McKeown tried to tone down the violence within the prison so that the prison officers were not entirely demonised.24 It is in Chronicles and Hunger, however, that there is the strongest emphasis on the lives of the prison officers and the ways in which they were subject to the brutality of prison life themselves. In Chronicles, because there are both loyalist and republican characters, the play is more politically inclusive in its structure, and this is strengthened by the well-rounded character of Freddie, the prison guard who narrates the play. Freddie is a soft and sympathetic Protestant voice, who suffers himself as he loses his marriage and becomes an alcoholic, largely through the demands of working in the H-Blocks. At the end of the play, Freddie is still alive but his wife has died and his daughter emigrated, leaving him alone with the memories of the men he guarded for so many years, illustrating the all-encompassing nature, and isolating effect, of the prison system on all its inmates. The opening scenes of Hunger are shot from the perspective of a prison officer, Ray Lohan. Lohan prepares for his day at the Maze with various rituals from soaking his cut and bruised hands, to getting dressed and eating his breakfast. Finally, Lohan checks under his car for a bomb, watched nervously by his wife, before driving to the prison. The following scene is set in the prison yard, as Lohan smokes and watches a rat moving along one wall, while snow falls, carpeting the yard. Both of these opening scenes are extremely slowly paced and almost entirely silent, with some small diegetic noise. The images narrate their own story, and give the officer’s character some depth. It’s crucial that these scenes come at the beginning of the film, as later Lohan is shown being brutally violent with the prisoners, and the audience realises that his scabbed hands were injured from hitting the IRA men, as opposed to wounds that were inflicted on him. The construction of Lohan as a victim of the system, imprisoned in a sense himself, is amended by this later scene, as the film builds – despite this early structural attempt at creating balance – towards its exclusive concentration on Sands’ hunger strike.25 Like Sands, Lohan’s fate in the film is death; he is assassinated by the IRA for being one of the harshest officers on the H-Block. Unlike Sands, his death is brutal and short, and has none of the sense of being a willing sacrifice. Notwithstanding attempts at balance, the intense concentration of Hunger, and indeed all the films, on the prisoners, thus privileges their perspective and effectively prevents real balance.

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Representing the prisoners: victims or victimisers? The only work that visually represents its central characters engaging in paramilitary violence, is Some Mother’s Son, in which audiences are shown the crime for which Gerry and Frank are sentenced to prison: a mortar bomb attack on an Army jeep. Yet, though the film shows the devastating effects of the attack – the jeep exploding, and a local school being badly damaged – the sound track at this point is exciting and upbeat, scored by Bill Whelan of Riverdance fame. The heavy, intense beat of a bodhran creates a sense of excitement in the scene, and this same music plays again on the soundtrack when a prison officer is executed by the IRA later in the film. This use of music attracted criticism on the film’s release, arguing that it glamorised terrorism.26 Indeed, the conjunction of violence, death and exhilarating music is an uneasy one, and does much to undermine the film’s overall relatively balanced representation of the hunger strike’s effects on the families of the strikers. In Chronicles of Long Kesh, though the crimes of the men are talked about, they are often represented ironically, obscuring audience concerns about the real loss of life. When Thumper, one of the Loyalist prisoners, is sentenced to eighteen years, he quips that ‘So fuck, if there’s two IRA taxi drivers less to worry about.’27 Addressing the phenomenon of IRA executions, in Silent Grace Eileen and Aine discuss the assassination of a prison officer, yet the audience never see the assassination itself, or indeed any republican violence at all. In fact, these works all fail to effectively represent the paramilitary conflict outside the prison. In Chronicles, when a prison officer beats up five republican prisoners, his accompanying diatribe describes how the IRA have ‘shot fathers in slow motion in front of their wives and children. Left bombs knowing innocent people were goin’ to be killed’ (51). But his words carry far less impact than the visual power of seeing him brutalise a prisoner. By not showing the paramilitary crimes for which the prisoners were sentenced, the works show the republican characters solely within the context of the prison, with the result that the prisoners are only shown as the victims of violence and not the perpetrators. The audience is thus encouraged to engage sympathetically with the prisoners, rather than to see them in the fuller, and less sympathetic, context of paramilitary violence. In Chronicles the central role of music and song not only makes the prisoners seem accessible, but underscores the representation of the men as political prisoners, rather than criminals. When Bobby Sands dies, while one republican prisoner, Toot, recites the Hail Mary, Oscar

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marks Sands’ death in his own way, by singing ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, famously sung by Sam Cooke. The song’s lyrics describe the racism of a society which makes it ‘too hard living’ and, when the man asks for help from his ‘brother’, he is knocked ‘back down on my knees’. Cooke’s song emerged out of the civil rights and anti-segregation movement in the early 1960s and was associated closely with Martin Luther King. More recently, the song has been linked to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and his election as the first black president of the United States. The song thus links the prisoners and, in particular, the hunger strikers, to a tradition of fighting for liberty within and against an oppressive society. Yet, crucially, the civil rights movement was nonviolent and this, combined with the positive connotations of Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ election, shifts the politics of the hunger strike away from paramilitary violence towards an uplifting representation of a quest for freedom, one that resonates both with the history of the civil rights movement and the liberal politics of the early twenty-first century. This representation of the prisoners distances them from the paramilitary war outside the prison, and this strategy is underlined by publicity for the films, in which the humanity of the men is often stressed over their political or paramilitary identities. As Laura Hastings-Smith, one of Hunger’s producers puts it, the film’s representation of the men is ‘about what happens to humanity when put in this extreme place under these extreme circumstances’.28 For Hastings-Smith it was vital that Hunger represent the humanity of all the characters, from prisoners to prisoner officers and riot squad men. What her comment glosses over, however, is that though the Blanket and No Wash protests were a response to the British Government’s removal of political status from paramilitary prisoners, and to the inhumane conditions of 24-hour lock up, the prisoners themselves had often committed extreme acts in order to be ‘put in this extreme place’. This is something that many of the works struggle with; though there is some attempt to represent the paramilitary violence outside the prison, for the most part, the focus on the disempowered situation of the prisoners overwhelms any attempt to create a balanced portrait of them as both victimisers and victims. Instead, what is foregrounded is their battle as freedom fighters against an oppressive force, the brutalised and isolated prisoner against the monolith of the prison. Though the films do represent the prisoners’ discussions of their political status, and the protests are clearly framed as their attempts to be identified as political prisoners rather than as ‘ordinary decent criminals’, by excluding the actual paramilitary conflict outside the prison, the prisoners are

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in effect removed from both their political and paramilitary context. The effect of this is that the prisoners are represented first and foremost in terms of the violations against their humanity forced upon them by the prison, while what is omitted is the paramilitary violence that has led them to prison in the first place.

‘Another hunger strike. Only this time we have to see it through.’ Though most works concentrate on the 1981 hunger strike, both Chronicles and Silent Grace represent the 1980 strike. In Chronicles, this first hunger strike is over relatively quickly and the major stress centres on whether Eamon, one of the central characters, will put his name down as a volunteer. In this case, Eamon decides against volunteering, partly out of deference to his cell-mate Oscar’s feelings (though he does later volunteer for the second strike). For the women in Silent Grace, the strike is undertaken in solidarity with the men in the Maze prison, and as a response to the brutal conditions in Armagh, following the burning of their mattresses, 23-hour lock up, and the attack on Geraldine. After several weeks, Eileen is taken off the strike by the prison Governor, just as the men in the Maze are also calling off their mass strike. The prisoners’ demands, however, were not granted, and the effects of the false end of the strike and the Dirty Protests are depicted in both H3 and Hunger. In H3 the men are overjoyed at ending their Dirty Protest, but they are horrified when they realise the prison’s false concession of ‘civilian-type clothing’. In response they refuse the clothing and break up the furniture in their clean cells. Not all the men participate as one, however, as Ciaran is so crushed by the prospect of having to return to the Dirty Protest, that he cowers in the corner of his cell. The following morning, Ciaran comes off the protest and conforms, agreeing to wear the prison uniform and be integrated with the ‘ordinary decent criminals’. In Chronicles, the 1981 strike is heralded when Eamon says, ‘Another hunger strike. Only this time we see it through.’ In representing the 1981 hunger strike, both H3 and Chronicles focus on the process of assembling a list of volunteers and deciding who will be the next to refuse food. In both works, the cost to the men’s families is stressed as a key part of the decision over volunteering, as men put forward their names and later withdraw them. This is one of the few times where the relationship between the outside and the inside of the prison is brought into sharp relief; within the prison the isolation seems total – especially as prisoners receive only one visit per month, and then only if they

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compromise and wear the uniform to the visiting room. In many ways the prison seems to be completely divorced from the real world, outside the walls, in which time progresses, whereas within their fetid cells and stalemate situation, time is arrested. This is, of course, antithetical to the purpose of the protests and the strike, which was to bring the paramilitary struggle into the prison.29 Hunger provides the least context and lead-up to the hunger strike. Though viewers see the hardship of the Blanket and Dirty protests, as well as the violence of the prison guards, and the mockery made of the men over the ‘civilian-type clothing’, the possibility of the hunger strike is not communicated until the mid-section of the film, in which Bobby Sands has a protracted discussion with Father Moran over the ethics and efficacy of a strike. Sands only emerges as an important character in Hunger at this half way point, having been seen previously being beaten by the guards, but not identified as the prisoners’ commanding officer. In this conversation with Father Moran, Sands puts forward his case for why a hunger strike is necessary, and why it must be undertaken by him. In response, the priest puts forward the counter argument that community activism is more effective, and that Sands is embracing death instead of compromise. Much has been made by reviewers of this scene’s stylistic qualities, as it is a single shot from a fixed position, lasting over seventeen minutes, creating a tableau of the two men whose ideological positions are as intractable and frozen as the shot. What is also notable in this way of framing the hunger strike is how McQueen and Enda Walsh’s script constructs the strike as an individual quest. The scene is set in a deserted visiting room, and Sands has thus moved out of the communal context of the H-Blocks and into his own, solitary zone. This is confirmed in the following scenes of his wasting away and death, where silence and solitude are the two strongest elements of his environment. In contrast to Hunger’s vision of the strike as a solitary mission, in the other works the communal nature of the strike is stressed. In H3 Sands is represented relatively briefly and, when he is moved to the hospital wing, the film stays in the H-Block with the other prisoners, playing their ‘supportive role’ by writing letters and campaigning for Sands’ election. The depression that descends on the men when they hear that Bobby has died, is lifted in part when Ciaran, also hearing of Bobby’s death, returns to the H-Block. The role that the hunger strike played in boosting the resolve of the prison community is thus emphasised, as well as the friendship between Seamus and Ciaran, vital now that the former has chosen to go on hunger strike himself. In Some Mother’s Son,

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in counterpoint to the unity of the strikers, George portrays the solidarity of the strikers’ families and the wider community, by making the most important relationship in the film not that between mother and son, but between the two mothers.

Dying on the strike In the representation of the hunger strikers themselves, the key moments are at the point they are poised to die. In Some Mother’s Son and H3, Sands is depicted on the strike and at the point of death with long dark hair and beard and pale face, lost against the pillow. In reality, Sands had his hair and beard cut on the first day of his strike, and thus this filmic depiction is a form of mis-remembering, that visually connects the Christ-like image of the blanketmen to the sacrificial meanings of the hunger strike, fusing them into a single icon of selflessness. In Hunger the focus on Sands’ death is much greater than in any of the other works, as his strike constitutes the whole third movement of the film. This is the only film in which the actor chose to lose a significant amount of weight, over the course of ten weeks, in order to be ‘believable’, and the camera lingers on his starving body in close up, complete with bed sores and wasted muscle. Unlike the other films, Sands is accurately depicted with short ginger-ish hair, yet this focus on his physique results in a similar fetishisation of his image, as his body, not his politics, is the object of cinematic scrutiny. The most obvious aspect of the strikers’ appearance in all four films is the purifying effect of the hunger strike. No longer are they ‘dirty’ but, in their willingness to starve to death for their cause, they transcend the soiled condition of being an ordinary criminal towards the purified image of the political prisoner. Thus, in Silent Grace, Eileen’s extremely wan face and dark hair make her seem saintly, an image that, as one review put it, ‘is inappropriately beautiful’.30 Furthermore, her surroundings in the upper level of the hospital wing are bright white, far from the dungeon-dark of her cell. Her hunger strike has thus helped her to literally rise above the darkness of prison as she moves towards the light of death. This is also emphasised in Hunger by the long-drawn out sequences depicting the starving Sands in a pristine white hospital room, suffused with clear light, as his painful body is laid gently on pure white sheepskin, and covered with a white sheet. As in Silent Grace, the bleached palette of the film at this stage contrasts starkly with the darkness of the first prison-cell scenes. Though Sands’ body is naked in both parts, the stillness and calm of the final movement of Hunger,

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as he is ministered to by white-uniformed hospital orderlies, denotes a state of transcendence. In H3 Seamus argues that though electing Bobby Sands to the British Parliament means they have ‘won the argument’, death will be ‘winning the battle’, and this is confirmed by the aesthetics of the films’ scenes, which represent the hunger strikers as cleansed martyrs. The image of the striker as calm and pure is essential to the larger conceptualisation of the hunger strike as a politically pure mission and the strikers themselves as political martyrs. As argued above, this image stems from the films’ decision that the men are victims, rather than victimisers, and follows the rubric of republican memorialisation of the strikes. In Some Mother’s Son, however, though the image of Sands on his deathbed is tranquil and Christ-like, the portrayal of the final stages of Frank and Gerry’s fasts are far less peaceful. In one scene Frank is shown in spasm, dry-heaving as his body fails and his mother watches, powerless to help or intervene. The hospital rooms are low-lit in these scenes, emphasising the night vigils of the families, as opposed to the bright, sterile calm of the hospital in Hunger or Silent Grace. The imagery here is vital to creating a context in which Gerry’s mother Kathleen is viewed sympathetically for taking her son off the strike, as there is no sense that she is interfering in the creation of a martyr, but rather that she is stopping a brutal process. When, in the waiting room, Kathleen witnesses the head of Sinn Féin, Danny Boyle (Ciaran Hinds), arguing with the representative of the Catholic Church, Father Daly (Gerard McSorley), their voices are faded out so that Kathleen watches the silenced shouting match as a meaningless conflict between two egos. In the background, we see two women from earlier in the film, ‘ghosts’ as George calls them, both of whom lost men to the conflict. In the construction of these scenes, George represents Kathleen’s choice as an honourable one, as both the politics and the strike are exposed as brutal and inhumane. Gerry is thus transformed from a paramilitary soldier – but not into a political martyr, rather he is changed back into being his mother’s son. In Silent Grace there is also an intervention, initially from Aine, who hears on the radio that the men’s strike has been called off in the Maze H-Blocks. This serves to underline how isolated the women are from the main structure of the protest, as Eileen’s life hangs in the balance. Simultaneously, however, she has been taken off the strike by the Governor, who refuses to have a martyr created in his prison. He intervenes using ‘Cat and Mouse’ legislation, which gives her early release, created in response to the Suffragette hunger strikes, aligning Eileen

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with a history of women’s resistance, as opposed to the men’s strike. The Governor is motivated not only by the desire to prevent martyrdom, however, but also by personal regard for Eileen who he thinks is ‘a remarkable woman’. Throughout the film, the relationship between the prisoner and her custodian is framed partly in political terms – he oversees the searching of her cell for paramilitary contraband – and partly in personal terms – as for example when he tells her ‘I had a dream about you last night’. This emphasis on the personal connection between Eileen and the Governor creates an emotional suspense to the end of the film that is at odds with the politics of the situation. In both H3 and Chronicles, the deaths of the strikers are represented remotely, removing the need to represent the final sacrifice. In Chronicles this sense of remoteness is emphasised as the deaths are conveyed to the audience by quick-fire reactions and announcements by the prisoners, newsreaders and a Tory politician, blending together into ‘a cacophony of voices’ (63). The end of the strike is also marked in a monologue by Freddie, the play’s longest speech, which takes account not only of the ten men dead on the strike, but also the men killed outside the prison, not only the prison officers and soldiers, but ‘the ordinary Joe Soaps. They died too’ (64). Freddie’s conclusion, ‘Damn everybody’, lets no one off the hook, from Margaret Thatcher to the strikers. But the play does not dwell with the dead or the damned, for while it is a chronicle of prison life in Long Kesh, it is also the story of the survivors. Paradoxically, despite the inevitability that the central character, Seamus, will die on the hunger strike, H3 is also more about the living than the dead. In the final scene of H3, what is represented is the importance of the bond of friendship, as Ciaran returns to the H-Block and is embraced by Seamus. As McKeown, one of the film’s writers, says of the community of republican prisoners in the Maze, ‘You just wouldn’t have that degree of comradeship or friendship outside’ and, according to the production notes, ‘ultimately it’s that bond of friendship and commitment that the film celebrates’.31 What comes across most clearly in H3 is the intensity of the H-Block life, so that audiences can try to understand why these men would die in solidarity with – and for – each other. In the final stages of Hunger, Sands is guarded by medical orderlies rather than prison officers yet this is still a politicised situation, illustrated by one orderly who has ‘UDA’ clearly tattooed across his knuckles. This orderly is grim-faced instead of gently sympathetic (as the main orderly is) and in one scene he watches Sands collapse, rather than help him. The orderly is the only character we are presented with in this

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film who is clearly identified with the Loyalist paramilitary side, and he is represented as burly, confrontational and vindictive. In contrast, Sands is weak and vulnerable and, as a result, wins the sympathy of the viewer. Likewise, his slow and aestheticised death is not only more sympathetically represented, but is given far more screen time than the sudden death of the prison officer Ray Lohan. The ending of Hunger confirms the tendency of the film to view Sands’ death as an extreme but dignified sacrifice. In his conversation with Father Moran, Sands relates the story of when, as a young boy, he competed as a cross-country runner. Sands and some of his team-mates found a distressed foal in a stream and Sands, seeing that its death was inevitable, took the traumatic decision of breaking its neck to save it further pain. He was punished, but accepted the punishment, knowing that the action and the punishment had gained him the ‘respect’ of the other boys. This story has an allegorical relationship to the hunger strike that Sands is about to undertake; he can see the inevitable pain and trauma of the situation and he is shouldering the burden and gaining the respect of the other men. In this allegory, Sands is simultaneously the executioner and the executed. In the final minutes of the film, Sands hallucinates that his younger self appears in his hospital room, and the film represents his death with a flashback to Sands running as a young boy through a deserted and wintry landscape. Sands is thus freed from his prison bonds and is truly purified by his acceptance of death, returned to the state of childhood innocence. In addition, the endurance of the cross-country runner is analogous to the determination of the striker, though it is notable that Sands is pictured running alone, without the company of the other boys on his team. This is in keeping with Hunger’s representation of Sands as a figure apart from the others, not only the leader but a solo traveller on this quest, quite different from the more accurate representation of the collective hunger strikes in Some Mother’s Son, for instance.32 This entire sequence finally denudes the film of its politics by misrepresenting the death of Sands as a solitary and sentimental quest for individual freedom.

The resisting body What Hunger does recognise is the primacy of the body and the primary role the body played in the prison protests from 1976 to 1981. When Margaret Thatcher asked, ‘Will somebody please tell me why they are on hunger-strike? … Is it to prove their virility?’33 she was stating the obvious, for the hunger strike was about nothing if not about the power

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of the body. As Mary Corcoran writes, quoting Michel Foucault, in relation to the women’s Dirty Protest in Armagh prison, the body is a two-way conduit for forces of domination in that ‘after investing itself on the body [power] finds itself exposed to a counter attack in that same body.’ This dual meaning of the self as a ‘weapon of war’ emerged where women described their bodies as both objects of retribution and as instruments of resistance.34 The Blanket Protest arose from a literal refusal to wear a prison uniform, as a symbolic refusal of the label of ‘ordinary criminal’. The No Wash Protest, likewise, was a literal dispute over controlling the body’s functions, and a symbolic refusal of the most basic aspects of civilisation and culture. The prison response, as depicted in these works, is violence, in the form of forcibly cleaning the prisoners, thereby imposing prison demands upon their bodies, and the mirror-searches, which literally violated the privacy of the prisoners’ bodies and symbolically subjected their bodies to the all-powerful, all-seeing prison gaze. After four years of these combined protests, the hunger strike was the ‘only option’.35 The hunger strike was an escalation of the two former protests; though it may look different, it arises from the same battle over who will control the prisoners’ bodies and, by implication, their political and personal identities. The hunger strike, like the blanket and dirty protests, uses the body as a weapon, by refusing not only cultural norms, but also biological needs. In this, it needs to be understood as an act of violence. When Thatcher’s comments that the prisoners ‘have turned their violence against themselves in the prison strike’ are heard on Hunger’s soundtrack, the pronouncement is only partly correct, as it is also, in its status as a symbolic protest, a violent act against both the micro-control of the prison and the macro-control of British authority in Northern Ireland. The films depict the battle over the body in stark terms, by showing the dirty cells, the mirror-searches and, perhaps most tellingly, by showing the prisoners’ nakedness. Their nakedness means different things at different points, however: when, for example, they refuse prison uniforms their naked vulnerability is fortified by their ideological steadfastness. Yet, when the men are being moved cells, their naked bodies are disempowered in relation to the clothed – and armed – prison officers. In H3 when the men experimentally end their no-wash protest and bathe, their bodies are still naked but the meaning of this nudity is completely changed, now it is joyful and innocent. When they are returned

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to their cells, without their clothes, not only are their bodies cold and vulnerable again, but they are once more symbols of both disempowerment and non-cooperation. When the hunger strike begins, the prisoners take control not only of the outward appearance of their bodies, but also the internal meanings, and the strike thus represents the ultimate control over and assertion of the privacy of the individual body, as well as the final stage of the symbolic politicisation of the body. In Hunger Sands tells Father Moran that the blanketmen are ‘no longer good propaganda’. This recognition on Sands’ part that the protest was failing and had become a stalemate necessitated not a change, but an escalation, of the strategy of the resisting body. Sands’ comment in Hunger also recognises the essential part played by an audience – both the original audience of the prison protests and the film’s audience – particularly a sympathetically-minded audience, and this is again an obvious element of the films. The films’ choice to prioritise the prisoners’ humanity and to show their victimisation within the prison, rather than their roles as paramilitary soldiers outside the prison, displaces the actual violent politics of the situation and replaces it with the politics of identity. As a result, audiences are able to sympathise with the prisoners in a relatively unproblematic and straightforward way. Yet it is also, in a way, a misreading of the symbology of the protests and the hunger strike – by reading the prisoners’ bodies in the light of their individual humanity, rather than their organisation’s ideology. As works of dramatic art, films and plays have to negotiate how they will represent the protests and this is extremely difficult given the way in which the protestors and the strikers created their own mythology and made icons of themselves. As Fintan O’Toole has commented, by using and displaying their bodies, the hunger strikers have attained the status of art objects in themselves.36 What the films must decide in their portrayal of the blanketmen and the strikers, given the binaries that the prisoners straddle, is how to negotiate these opposite political meanings and identities. For, while the men and women as vulnerable prisoners are made passive, their resistance also makes them active. Likewise, even as the striker’s body is dying, they are symbolically strong. And, finally, while the suffering of the prisoners’ bodies is implicitly at the hands of the prison authorities, it is, as Thatcher repeatedly pointed out, also self-inflicted. In this, the prisoner is both victim and victimiser, a duality which parallels their paramilitary identity as both the perpetrator of violent acts and the unwilling subject of the perceived illegitimate authority of the British state. As argued above, however, the films decide to place most emphasis on the prisoner as victim, who is not helpless by

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any means, but who is disempowered nonetheless. The final, purifying process of the hunger strike, cleanses both the striker and the other paramilitary prisoners, and in a sense achieves what the prison authorities could not, transforming them into ordinary decent men. The 1981 hunger strike has become the defining memory of the 1976–1981 prison protest period. When the focus of remembering, however, is exclusively on the 1981 hunger strike, what happens is that all else is excluded or downgraded in importance, and other aspects of the protests become overshadowed by the enormity of the ten dead martyrs. One casualty of this almost exclusive focus is public knowledge about the details of the Armagh women’s Dirty Protest and their involvement in the 1980 strike. Indeed, though Silent Grace is set in 1980, a fact clearly announced in the opening titles, the newspaper coverage of the film regularly cites the date as 1981.37 The second major absence – apart from the relative scarcity of film or drama that concentrates on the Loyalist experience of the Troubles – is the acknowledgment of the deaths outside the prison, from British soldiers to the ‘ordinary Joe Soaps’ that ‘everybody forgets about’ (64). In Chronicles, Freddie’s anguished monologue following the end of the hunger strike tallies the death toll as ‘ten men dead inside and 67 dead outside’ and this is one of the few references in any of these works to the scale of the paramilitary killings ‘outside’ the prisons. In the final titles of Hunger, the audience reads that ‘16 prison officers were killed by paramilitaries during the “blanket” and “no wash” protests’, but this is only one of five information screens, and the other four concern the fate of the republican prisoners.

The Maze The insistence in both H3 and Hunger that the sets were exact replicas of the Maze H-Blocks, suggests the degree to which the Maze prison itself was a vital part of the prisoners’ stories. The Maze prison, however, no longer exists. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the prisoners of the Maze were slowly released or relocated, and the prison eventually closed on 29 September 2000. As a symbol of the Troubles, and as a weapon in the war itself, its closure was part of the symbolic decommissioning of the Northern Irish landscape. The future of what is left of the site and buildings, however, remains unclear. When Martin Lynch was researching Chronicles, he took five ex-prisoners from ‘different factions on a tour of the prison, before most of it was knocked down. I had at least one major sceptic out of that group, who thought

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that [the prison] was a sore or a blemish on our society … He felt it should be wiped away. After the tour there wasn’t one single dissenting person who didn’t think that something had to be retained.’38 The need to retain something of the Maze prison itself, as well as its role in social history, is reflected in two works of art that memorialise the material history of the Maze. ‘Billy’s Museum’, one part of the Keeper installation by Amanda Dunsmore, and Deconstructing the Maze, a photographic ‘survey’ by Dara McGrath, both document the material reality of the Maze prison and reflect on its changing symbolic meaning. In 1999, as the Maze prison was winding down, one of the prison officers, Billy Hull, revealed his collection of prison artefacts, many of which were contraband objects confiscated from prisoners, which he had collected over a fifteen-year period. Hull displayed his collection in a disused prison laundry building and showed it to artist-in-residence Amanda Dunsmore, who filmed Hull as he toured the exhibit and discussed each item. Dunsmore entitled this video ‘Billy’s Museum’, and also interviewed Hull on his recollections of his career in the prison service, including the Dirty Protest and the ‘gruesome’ hunger strikes. ‘Billy’s Museum’, argues Hull, keeps ‘the history of the prison alive’ and by foregrounding the material history, the stories of the whole period are included also.39 The third and final part of Keeper is a silent video-installation, shown on two television screens, facing each other atop two separate columns. The screens show two former Maze prisoners, one a republican and one a loyalist, staring across the space of the gallery at each other. While the republican is not easily recognisable, the former loyalist prisoner is David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (2002–7). Including Ervine illustrates just how integral the prison was to the conflict in Northern Ireland. The conjunction of video art, with the physical objects collected by Hull, gives the spectator of Keeper both a sense of distance and physical contact. Hull’s instinct to retain the physical history of his experience of prison life, displays not only that experience, but also the instinct for musealising, created by Hull’s awareness that living through this extreme period of history needed to be recorded – retained – somehow. McGrath’s work, Deconstructing the Maze, is a different kind of recording. A photographic survey of the prison during demolition, the series of photographs show the former Maze H-Block buildings as they are levelled to make way for a new structure on the site and are thus about absence as well as presence.40 The empty and derelict edifice is naked itself here, denuded of the prisoners and staff which gave the buildings meaning, though still displaying the traces of human presence, such

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as children’s toys in the playroom, or racks of now-useless keys. This focus on the building – both its decaying walls and its empty spaces – reinterprets the Maze prison, so that it is no longer a symbol of fear, but a ghostly arena, meaningful now for its association with memories of violence and protest, rather than as a living and menacing space. The importance of documenting the process of demolition is that it simultaneously captures the physical and symbolic decline of the building. Both Dunsmore and McGrath’s art works commemorate and preserve aspects of the Maze history, yet crucially, the bodies of the prisoners are absent in these representations. This absence enables Dunsmore and McGrath to focus on a different kind of history, and to tell a different story. The haunting power of Keeper and Deconstructing the Maze attest to the fact that these different versions of remembering the Maze prison are as important as the myths that came out of it. The limitation of the dramatic works considered in this chapter is that they are more concerned with the myths than the history. If, as Hugh Linehan has argued, filmmakers choose to focus on the situation of the hunger strikers, then the films will inevitably be dramatically limited due to the ideological parameters of the story.41 Viewed in this light, it is clear that the films are not trying to escape these visual or ideological parameters, or to rewrite the narrative. In the depiction of Sands on hunger strike with beard and long hair, or indeed, in the representation of all the strikers as sacrificial victims, the films confirm rather than challenge the received iconography of the 1981 hunger strike. There is a deep irony, however, in the fact that these works depend on the context of the Peace Process in order to be made, and yet their political content is completely antithetical to the politics of compromise and conciliation. The images produced by the Peace Process, such as John Hume and David Trimble accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, or more recently Martin McGuinness and the Revd Ian Paisley sharing a stage, are positive counterpoints to the starving image of the hunger striker. Yet, as these films attest, that image endures. The persistence of the image is partly due to the fact that it serves to confirm the superiority of the present. The inhumanity of the Blanket and Dirty protests and the hunger strikes, point up the more positive, if also complex and difficult, politics of the Peace Process. The fatal outcome in 1981 of the refusal to compromise, and the damage done to both sides of the confrontation, underline the need, in the present, for conciliation. Nevertheless, despite the positive implications of the films’ meanings for the political situation of Northern Ireland in the present, the enduring representation of the blanketmen and the strikers is problematic

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because dominated by sacrificial imagery. This is a de-contextualised representation as they are remembered not as the perpetrators of paramilitary violence, or indeed, as political prisoners, but as victims of an oppressive system. The over-riding reason for this endurance is that the Blanket and Dirty protests were always intended as performances, and the sacrificial image of the hunger striker was designed from the beginning not simply to be literally horrifying, but to be a symbol of subjection to a horrifying system. Crucially, however, the way that iconography of subjection is handled by the films and, to a lesser extent by Lynch’s play, divorces the strikes from their original, historical context, consequently making them palatable in a post-conflict context. This is partly due to the fact that plays and films are less embedded in a real context than murals and marches. However, it is also a result of the dramatic choices made by the writers and directors. In representing the prisoners as victims rather than victimisers, these works erase a significant part of the politics of the situation in order to stress the humanity of the men. Though there is discussion or some representation in each of the works of the violence outside the prison, the focus is kept on the suffering of the prisoners and the cost to their humanity of the extreme conditions within the prison. By doing so, the crisis is located by the films, and Lynch’s play, primarily within the prison, rather than being linked to the wider context of the Troubles. Devoid of much of the larger context, these five dramatic works can thus relatively unproblematically sympathise with these men and their increasingly desperate protests. The hunger strikers are thus tragic figures, rather than agent provocateurs, having undergone a filmic version of decommissioning. While the representation of the prisoners is political in the sense that the works are clear that the protest is for the sake of political status, at the same time, the violent realities of paramilitary politics are virtually absent. Indeed, the prisoners’ paramilitary identities are effectively left outside the prison, along with their clothing. In this way, these works ultimately misread the protests themselves. For, by using their bodies as weapons, and by rejecting not only the most basic elements of civilisation such as clothing and sanitation, but starving their bodies, the prisoners aimed to bring the paramilitary struggle within the prison itself by aggressively insisting on, and performing, their status as distinct from ‘ordinary criminals’. The decision to represent the prisoners primarily in terms of their humanity actually undermines this insistence, and chooses instead to represent the strike in emotive and visceral terms, rather than analytically.

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Following the general release of Hunger, McQueen was asked if his film was political, and in his response he commented that ‘what happens to Bobby Sands is extraordinary. Obviously, as a storyteller, you follow that. I am not a nationalist. I am not a unionist. The human element overrides all that nonsense. Before you are Irish or British, you are a human being.’42 McQueen’s simplistic statement suggests that the strike was something that happened to Sands, rather than being driven by him – something that the film actually does not echo, as it emphasises Sands’ determination to undertake the strike. McQueen, however, also reduces the political and paramilitary struggle to ‘nonsense’ and as a result he – along with all the other storytellers – fails to represent the symbolic meaning and import of all the political status protests between 1976 and 1981. And, in that failure, ultimately, these works fail also to understand that the prisoners’ political identity as republican paramilitary soldiers ‘overrides all that nonsense’ about humanity.

5 In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War

During the Great War (1914–1918), approximately 200,000 Irish men volunteered for the British Army. Of those volunteers, 35,000 were killed, representing almost three per cent of the eligible male population in Ireland.1 The scale of these numbers speaks to the fact that there was no single cause for which these men volunteered, rather their reasons range from the political, to the personal, to the purely economic. Yet if their participation stemmed from a multiplicity of factors, the commemoration of their deaths has often caused this complex background to be interpreted in simplistic and narrow ideological terms. This chapter will consider strategies of commemoration, from drama and novels, to official modes of marking the significance of the Great War. Within a nationalist context the Irish soldiers of the Great War have often been forgotten in the larger purpose of remembering Easter 1916, while in a unionist context the entirety of experiences of the Great War has been refined into the remembrance of the Battle of the Somme, July 1916. While these are two very different and, indeed, mutually exclusive mythologies, they emerge from a very similar decision to construct and commemorate the past in political terms. Thus Keith Jeffery argues that the Irish soldiers who fought in the Great War were left on the margins precisely because they were not politically central to the new, independent Irish state.2 On the other hand, as it were, the absolute centrality of the Great War to the political identity of Ulster Unionists, in particular the Battle of the Somme, has led to what Fran Brearton calls an ‘overdose of ceremonial remembrance’.3 The Great War thus suffers from both an absence and an excess of memory, both of which forms of memory have ossified over the decades into an intransigent, entrenched political remembrance culture. 127

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Since the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland in 1994, and the development of the Peace Process, there have been significant attempts at transforming this remembrance culture. In the Irish Republic, an increasing emphasis on inclusion has resulted in the restoration of the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge, Dublin, while crossborder remembrance initiatives led to the construction of a Peace Tower in Messines, Belgium. In Northern Ireland, the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, opened in 1994, commemorates the involvement of both the 36th Ulster Division and the 16th Irish Division in the Battle of the Somme, and the 10th Irish Division at Gallipoli, as well as exploring the Home Rule ‘Crisis’, the political background to both nationalist and unionist involvement in the war. The restitution of the experience of Irish soldiers in the Great War to the mainstream historical narrative was confirmed in November 2008 by a series of documentaries, films and public debates aired on RTÉ television and radio, as part of the series ‘1918: Ireland and the Great War’, broadcast to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice.4 This series included a Would You Believe? special programme on the twenty-six Irish-born soldiers who were court-martialled and shot during the war, part of the ‘Shot at Dawn’ campaign to have the executed Irish soldiers retrospectively pardoned. This campaign was lent official support by the Irish Government to secure pardons. There was also a series of talks hosted by the National Museum in November 2009 and special focus on the First World War as part of their wider exhibition galleries ‘The Irish at War at Home and Abroad’. These exhibitions, broadcasts, monuments and centres focus collective remembrance, attempting through inclusive remembrance to transcend the political divisions of the past and of the island. Historians have played a central role in uncovering this forgotten past, and excavating around entrenched forms of remembrance in order to create some open ground.5 Paralleling the thrust of history, part of the role of writers and artists is to imagine that open ground, and to act as a catalyst for change within official remembrance culture, perhaps particularly so in the case of drama which is such a public forum for the imagination. Plays such as Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup (1983) and My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1989), and Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom (1995), as well as his celebrated novel A Long Long Way (2005), respond to the challenge of history and try to imagine how we might move across that ground.

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‘We’re not making a sacrifice … we are the sacrifice’: Frank McGuinness Frank McGuiness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is taut with the tension between remembering and forgetting, and identifies the human cost of sacrificial remembrance culture. The play opens in a kind of present-tense, where the lonely figure of Pyper wakes onstage, the only survivor of his First World War regiment. Pyper is tormented by the invocation to remember the past: PYPER: Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to tell each other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing. Silence I do not understand your insistence on my remembrance. I’m being too mild. I am angry at your demand that I continue to probe. (97) Pyper is commanded by a silent, absent, ‘dark’ force to remember, yet though he appeals to the ‘Lord’ to release him from this act of remembrance, his address is implicitly directed to the audience, recognising the imperative of theatre to perform again, as always, again. Although Pyper initially refuses the command, his assertion of amnesia breaks down as he admits that ‘Yes, I remember’ (98). Both what and how he remembers is what this chapter will explore. Pyper says of the war, ‘Invention gives that slaughter shape. That scale of horror has no shape’.6 This is the crucial question that the play poses: how to put shape on the Unionist experience of the First World War, culminating in the Battle of the Somme, and how that experience should be remembered. Part One, in which the Elder Pyper is forced to summon up the past, frames the action of the play, so that when the audience watches the following three parts, in which the soldiers meet, suffer the first traumas of war and, finally, are poised to die, to sacrifice themselves for King and Country, what the audience sees is always viewed through the lens of memory and remembrance. In Part One when Elder Pyper allows himself to remember details of the Battle of the Somme, the ghosts of his fellow soldiers Craig, Roulston and Crawford appear, as if called forth. As Pyper keeps talking, more ghosts rise, till all seven of his comrades stand before him. When words fail him, Pyper ‘holds his arms to the ghosts’ and as he tries to enact an embrace with these spectral figures, his own younger self

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appears, signalling that this is the realm of memory, and that the Elder Pyper – and we as the audience – are being transported into the past. Part Two: Initiation restores to the ghosts their life force and they are once again young and energetically alive. The pain and melancholy of Part One: Remembrance is banished by the energy of these young men. Craig and Pyper are the first onstage and the young Pyper cuts his finger, appealing to Craig to kiss it better, a first suggestion of his homosexuality and his attraction to Craig. When Pyper repeatedly comments on his ‘remarkably fine skin’, and describes his marriage to a woman with three legs, the ‘middle one shorter than the normal two’ (127) his sexual difference brands him ‘a rare boy’ (129). Though Craig is initially mistrustful of Pyper, asking him does he think he is ‘a fit man for this life’ (104), as the scene progresses Craig’s own attraction to this unpredictable man is also suggested, leading Pyper to extend to him the title of ‘rare’. When Pyper slices his hand open with a knife, Craig bandages the hand, as they recite ‘Red Hand. Red sky. Ulster. Ulster’ (138). Pyper’s evocation of the Red Hand of Ulster is not here a claim to territoriality, or a symbol of a militaristic clenched fist. Instead, Pyper’s association of his own reckless death-wish with the image of the Red Hand is an overt suggestion of the self-inflicted destruction and desire for blood sacrifice that he identifies within Unionism, and that inflects the rest of the play. The break between Parts Two and Three covers five months when the men are ‘over there’ training and fighting. The men that we see in Part Three: Pairing have been altered by their first experiences of war, and in these scenes we witness their process of rehabilitation during home leave, as they attempt in their different ways to make sense of their experience of war, and to accommodate it into their formerly secure and established identities. The horror of war is not directly dramatised, but is implicit in every exchange between the men, as they are paired off, occupying four different parts of the stage, each space representing a landmark, and which together represent Ulster: ‘Boa Island, Lough Erne, carvings [Craig and Pyper]; a Protestant church [Roulston and Crawford]; a suspended ropebridge [Millen and Moore]; the Field, a lambeg drum [McIlwaine and Anderson]’ (118). Craig has brought Pyper to Boa Island in Lough Erne, where he shows Pyper ancient stone carvings, and asks him to decipher them for him; the meanings of the carvings are lost, forgotten, so that they have to be read interpretively. Craig is drawn to the island because of its isolation and also its mystery. In part this is due to the in-between nature of his relationship with Pyper, a relationship that is consummated on

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the island. However, it is also the pull of forgetting. Craig’s response to the trauma of war is to try to forget about it, to wash himself clean of it, and to retreat to a space which is free of the divisive politics of war. The carvings predate not only the current conflict, but also the conflict between Protestant and Catholic, Unionism and Nationalism and, as such, represent a space free of dogmatic memory and culture. It is not coincidence that it is in this free space that Craig and Pyper can consummate their relationship, and that Pyper can begin to think of creating art once more. While Craig wishes to wash himself clean of the remembrance of fighting, the other men also go through some form of memory crisis. The clearest trauma is that suffered by Moore who is haunted by his memories of the battlefield, unable to disentangle himself and his present reality from the recent traumatic past. Moore attempts to walk across the suspended rope bridge, but cannot due to his broken nerves. Millen, his eternal companion, invokes Moore to imagine his fellow soldiers on the bridge for support, but ultimately, Moore must reassert his sense of himself through his pre-war memories of his life as a dyer, using colour to represent his own personal past and to project his life into the future. For McIlwaine it is the absence of community and the concurrent failure of communal memory which shakes his identity most strongly. Having missed the July Twelfth celebrations of the Battle of the Boyne, Anderson and McIlwaine decide to re-create their own private march. But alone they cannot command the same sense of joy or celebration. McIlwaine declares: It’s no good here on your own. No good without the speakers. No good without the bands, no good without the banners. No good without the chaps. No good on your own. (148) What McIlwaine realises is that the commemorative aspect of Orange culture only makes sense, is only fulfilling, when it is a group activity, and when it is public, communal memory that is being re-enacted. Individually, on your own, it is ‘no good’. Though Anderson and McIlwaine do eventually manage to summon the energy to beat the drum and deliver the rhetoric, it is still not the same ‘on your own’. McGuinness represents what this means to McIlwaine and Anderson on a personal level, but this failure of commemoration, combined with the later failed re-enactment of the Battle of Scarva in Part Four, suggests that Unionist commemorative culture is vulnerable and weakened

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after the men have direct lived experience of the horror of the battlefield. Ironically, this culture was strengthened after the First World War, when commemorations were reinvigorated by living memory, as the Battle of the Somme became a keystone of Unionist mythology. In despair, Anderson bitterly comments of their role in the war that ‘We’re not making a sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice’ (148). Anderson’s bitterness is not simply at his presumption that they will die, but at the failure of military strategy that led to so many thousands of deaths. For audiences, however, there is the additional knowledge that the Lambeg drum Anderson beats in this scene, is now beaten not only to remember the Battle of the Boyne, but also the fallen heroes of the Somme. The exclusivity of these performances of remembrance is what projects such as the Somme Heritage Centre is designed to counter and circumvent. In Part Four: Bonding the inevitability of death is palpable. The fighting spirit of the men is profoundly challenged by the combination of fear and the knowledge of what awaits them in battle. In this scene there are two versions of communal memory which are confronted. First is the myth of the Easter Rising, as narrated by McIlwaine. In this version, the Rising was started in the GPO when Pearse ‘walked in to post a letter and got carried away and thought it was Christmas’. Pearse is later executed not by the British Army, but by his own mother, who says ‘That’ll learn him, the cheeky pup. Going about robbing post offices’ (175). McIlwaine is upfront about the fact that some of these details are invented, as he’s ‘very imaginative. I play the drums, you see … To hell with the truth as long as it rhymes’ (176). There is an incongruity here, however, as McIlwaine mixes metaphors – drumming doesn’t rhyme. What his reimagining of the Rising myth suggests is that the rhythm of Republican mythology is out of step with him as a Unionist, and with jealous mockery he recasts it so that it ‘rhymes’. To extend this further, in Part Three McIlwaine realises that war has put him out of step with Unionist remembrance culture, and so this later re-imagining of the Rising myth implies that in the context of war, all myths are out of step with his experience, an implication which is strengthened when the myth of the Boyne stumbles later in the scene. This sense that myths are not sustainable in the reality of war is further established by Part Four’s second dialogue with the past, which is less deliberately parodic. In an attempt to rouse the men and ‘make the blood boil’ (181) Anderson organises the men into a re-enaction of the sham Battle of Scarva, with Crawford as King Billy and Pyper as his horse, facing Moore’s King James and Millen as his horse. Grumblingly,

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Millen objects to being King James as ‘He has to get beaten’, but as it unfolds history is unstable and subject to rewriting. It starts well, as Anderson provides a roaring commentary, but King James and his steed keep avoiding death, to the annoyance of Anderson, whose voice rises to insist, ‘this time James will fall’. But just as ‘the victor stands poised before the victim’, the positions are reversed, Pyper trips and Crawford’s King Billy ‘crashes to the ground’ (183). As Moore says, it’s ‘Not the best of signs’ (184) for the men as they prepare to go into battle, defending the historically glorious Unionist cause. There are several reasons why this re-enactment is key. First, by performing a re-enactment of seventeenth-century history, the men integrate historical with present-day Unionism. Indeed, Pyper’s earlier line that the ‘Sons of Ulster will rise and lay their enemy low, as they did at the Boyne, as they did at the Somme’ (98) acknowledges the Unionist commemorative strategy of positioning these two events as if they were contemporaneous. Second, while the men choose to perform Scarva as opposed to the Boyne for logistical reasons, as they have so few men, McGuinness’s choice of Scarva is a more complex reference to the different registers of Unionist remembrance culture. In the Unionist commemorative calendar, Scarva is not, in fact, a real battle, but the site of a Sham Fight, a staged re-enactment of the actual historical Battle of the Boyne. So the instability of myth is already implicit within the play as the soldiers are performing a purely commemorative event, that is, a version of a version. Furthermore, the festival which is held to mark the Sham Fight of Scarva on 13 July places its emphasis on religious themes, as opposed to the military prowess of the Unionist tradition celebrated at the Twelfth parades, and it is also less dominated by paramilitary regalia, making it a less aggressively tribal event for the men to perform within the play.7 The play’s distancing of the men from the Boyne, and the failure of King Billy, in fact, pre-empt real-life shifts in Unionist remembrance culture, as increasingly Unionist parades and murals have moved away from the triumphalism of the Boyne, towards the more sympathetic commemoration of the Somme. In this, Unionism has perhaps learned from the Republican tradition, that it is even more powerful to be remembered as the martyrs of history, rather than the victors.8 Moreover, as with McIlwaine’s sham version of the Easter Rising, the fall of King Billy here clearly illustrates that history and tradition are always mediated by people and politics, and thus subject to change. If traditions are vulnerable, as already shown by Anderson and McIlwaine’s failed July Twelfth ‘parade’, then the cultural identities based on those

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traditions are also vulnerable. This is particularly the case given that King Billy is here played by Crawford, who is, unbeknownst to the other men, half Catholic and as such represents a flaw in the uniform Unionist identity. The fall of Pyper, the least Unionist of the men, and Crawford, a hybrid of self and other, thus suggests certain fissures in the unity of the Unionist identity. Yet still, the sons of Ulster must ‘rise and lay their enemy low’, and as the men face the approaching battle they turn again to tribal signs to fortify them. Each man takes out his Orange sash, with the exception of Pyper who has none. Anderson insists on giving Pyper a sash, so that ‘we’ll recognize you as one of our own’ (193), but Pyper at first refuses to accept it, and it is only when Anderson insists that Pyper ‘snatches it’ (194). After Roulston has led the men in a final prayer, the men don their sashes, though again Pyper resists and doesn’t wear his. Craig, seeing that Pyper does not want to wear the sash, decides to bond them all by giving his own sash to Moore, inspiring the other men to swap sashes, forging a symbolic single cultural identity. The individuality of the men is now submerged into a true group identity and even Pyper accepts Roulston’s sash, a sign of resolution as Roulston is the man to whom Pyper has been most oppositional. Throughout the play Pyper has been the outsider, but by accepting another man’s sash he becomes one of ‘us’. It is a well-established legend – and most likely an inaccurate one – that the 36th Division went into the Battle of the Somme wearing their Orange sashes and that they went ‘over the top with cries of “No Surrender” and “Remember the Boyne”.’9 But here McGuinness uses the sash in terms of its personal meaning of friendship, above and beyond the public institutional meaning of Orangeman. This is the journey of the play, to show how Pyper can be socially and culturally integrated, though it is only when facing death, and when the sash is understood as a sign of brotherhood, not simply of traditional Unionism, that this becomes possible. The imminence of death and his acceptance of the sash, jointly inspire Pyper to pray for the men, imploring God that ‘If you are a just and merciful God, show your mercy this day. Save us. Save our country. Destroy our enemies at home and on this field of battle’ (196). Pyper’s war-mongering sermon equates the Battle of the Somme with the battle against Home Rule in Ireland. The reality of the men’s subsequent deaths not only suggests that God is not, in fact, ‘just and merciful’, but also implies that if they were not saved, then neither was their country. The parallel between the Somme and Ireland being made here does not work in the favour of the Unionist cause, for though partition

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to some extent vindicated the Unionist stance, ‘a Protestant state for a Protestant people’, it divided the province, a division and loss highlighted within the play by the men’s repeated references to Ulster as a single and whole entity. Pyper ends with the chant of ‘Ulster. Ulster. Ulster’ and the men take it up, turning it into a battle cry. Yet what the chant brings forth is not the frenzy of battle but the returning figure of the Elder Pyper, the figure who represents the darkness, loneliness and despair of modern, partitioned Ulster. The chant ceases as the men become witnesses to the reunion of the two selves of Pyper, delayed since the first part. The words exchanged by these two selves – ‘Ulster.’ ‘The temple of the Lord is ransacked.’ ‘Ulster.’ – are tersely and self-consciously mythic and strangely abstract. The gesture that accompanies them, though, is far more human and humane as ‘Pyper reaches towards himself’’ (197). The younger and older selves reach across the decades towards each other, representing a final, healing moment. This moment of personal reconciliation parallels that of Pyper’s integration into the Orange identity, and the end of the play is thus a reconciliation with himself and with his tribe. While the heroic public myths embodied by both Pearse and King Billy are undermined, the personal is constructed as an alternative myth that can be invested in instead. McGuinness here emphasises the potentially positive role that memory can play in reconciliation, as opposed to the divisive power of public and traditional forms of commemoration.

‘Carson may be dead, but his spirit, never!’: Christina Reid While McGuinness’s play explores the impact of the battlefield on both public and personal commemorative culture, Reid’s plays Tea in a China Cup (1983) and My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? (1989) are set on the home front. Reid suggests that the traumas of war and stultifying Unionism prevent both public and personal acts of reconciliation. In Tea in a China Cup Reid portrays three generations of a family, each of which has sacrificed something for war. The Grandfather still bears a piece of shrapnel in his leg from the First World War, his son Samuel dies in the Second World War and his grandson Sammy is in exile, for as a soldier of the British army in the early 1970s, it is not safe for him to come home to Belfast. The portraits of the Grandfather and Samuel, dressed in uniform, hang on the back wall of the set, illustrating the extent to which the family’s home life is always lived in the context of war. The play is refracted through the memories of Beth, the

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granddaughter who wants to break away from the traditional pattern of working-class Belfast Unionism. Beth’s mother, Sarah, is dying and her last wish is to live long enough to see the July Twelfth parades. She lingers on, watching the men marching outside and hearing the bands, and, fulfilled, she dies. Sarah has lived her life dedicated to the Unionist cause and suffered poverty and violence, both forms of hardship compensated for by her fervent, almost spiritual, belief in the traditions of Unionism. The portraits of the men in uniform are one aspect of this tradition, but the other, more feminine tradition, is having ‘tea in a china cup’, the apotheosis of which is represented by the Belleek china set that Beth acquires through her marriage into an upper-middle-class Protestant family. At the end of the play, Beth is left alone and her final action is to keep just one of the Belleek teacups and saucers for herself, selling the rest of the set. Beth’s action thus simultaneously preserves the culture of her past, yet also fragments that tradition, so that it is now incomplete. There is hope for Beth at the end of the play because she neither represses nor accepts uncritically her family’s legacy. The single Belleek cup is thus both a talisman of the past and for the future and, crucially, it also represents a private and personal feminine ritual, versus the public, masculine performance of Unionism represented by the soldiers’ photographs and the remote sounds of the Orangemen marching. Reid deftly illustrates how communal identity is an inherited tradition that resists interrogation and deviation. Beth is brought up to believe that Catholics are ‘dirty’ and they ‘go about cryin’ poverty and puttin’ a poor mouth on’; Beth’s Aunt Maisie would rather ‘cut my tongue out before I’d demean my family like that’.10 The staunch women of the Protestant Unionist community, which is in the play poorer than their Catholic neighbours, consider it a badge of honour to never complain, but to endure. When Beth, as a young girl, questions why this is the case, she is told to be quiet and not let them down ‘in front of the neighbours’ (25) in an acknowledgment of the vital importance of public identity. The sacrifice of their sons to war is only one element of these women’s lives in which they submit their own wants and needs to the diktats of their cultural identity as Protestant Unionists. The hardship and divisiveness of this way of life is made clear by Reid, indeed it is a theme that threads through many of her plays. In My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? Reid presents not a community of women onstage, however, but a grandfather, a veteran of the Great War, and his estranged grand-daughter. The stage is divided between Andy, the last surviving man from his army regiment, who sits in his room at

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the old people’s home in Londonderry, and Andrea, his namesake, who is in a prison cell for her part in an anti-war protest. Here, even more than in Beth’s case, Reid points up not only the issue of generational inheritance, but also intergenerational conflict as a younger generation questions the older culture. In common with Reid’s earlier play, My Name makes it clear that staunch Protestant Unionism is a dying tradition, suffering from psychic starvation. The beginning of the play bears comparison with Observe the Sons as Andy sits alone onstage remembering his past. Like Pyper, Andy is entirely determined by his past, yet unlike Pyper, for Andy recollection and remembrance are a welcome refuge from the contradictions of the present reality. For Andy, fighting in the Great War was a heroic enterprise, and he is respectful rather than bitter about the sacrifice of men’s lives that the war led to, and devoted to the sacrificial remembrance culture which the catastrophe of the Somme has given rise to. As a child, Andrea was taken by her grandfather to see the painting ‘Battle of the Somme, The Attack of the Ulster Division’ by J.P. Beadle, an iconic piece of public commemoration of 1916 which hangs in Belfast City Hall, depicting the men as they went over the top, complete with their mythic orange sashes. The painting makes an impression on Andrea and she reads through with her grandfather’s help the poem below which commemorates the ‘bivouac of the dead’. In this scene Reid interweaves a voiceover of the young Andrea as she sees the painting for the first time, with lines from the adult Andrea on stage who now knows the full significance and meaning of the painting. When the young Andrea asks her grandfather simple questions like ‘Why is that man wearing short trousers?’ she is given answers by Andy such as ‘He’s the officer’. But the adult Andrea is there to fill in details, recounting that ‘young English officers, barely trained, were posted straight to the Somme from India. They arrived wearing tropical uniforms.’11 Andrea’s interjections into the aural memory voiceover turn her childlike question into an attack, undermining Andy’s acceptance of what he sees in the painting and highlighting his own refusal to question the remembrance of the Battle of the Somme. There is no irony when Andy reads the title of the painting as ‘Their Finest Hour’, though for so many soldiers it was the hour of their death. Indeed, for Andy the only dishonour associated with the Ulster Unionists who fought at the Somme is that attached to Edward Reilly, his former best friend, who subsequently denounced the war. Reilly actively campaigned upon his return from France against the mythologisation of the war as a glorious victory through sacrifice. Andy’s

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inability to cope with Reilly’s political about-face leads him to brand Reilly as a ‘traitor’ and to cut him out of his life entirely, as Andrea tells us he even cuts his image out of the photograph of their local Derry division: They were together in the middle of the photograph, and he cut Edward out and stuck it together again. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders. Heads together. So to get rid of Edward Reilly, he had to cut himself out too. (261) In order to maintain the myth of a united Unionist identity and a glorious vision of the war, Andy has to sacrifice himself as well as the ‘traitor’. This bitterness is not restricted to Andy alone. When Andrea stays with a Unionist family in London, their version of the photograph is complete, but with Reilly’s face blacked out instead. Andrea’s questioning of this partial remembering of the war is further cultivated when she discovers that the memorial poem under the painting of the Battle of the Somme was, in fact, written to commemorate Kentucky soldiers in the America-Mexico war and not for the 36th Ulster Division. This confusion of memories, symbols and meanings adds to the sense that the Unionist view of the past is not only biased, but it is profoundly inaccurate. Throughout the play both Andy and Andrea sing snatches of songs, all of which are political in nature. While Andrea twice sings a jingle about Carson killing ‘rats’, Andy sings along to the tune of ‘We are the Billy Boys!’ that he overhears being played by the marching military band at the Somme Commemoration Parade (274). What Reid does not include here are the song’s other lyrics, which include ‘We’re up to our necks in Fenian blood, Surrender or you’ll die, ‘Cause we are the Billy Boys!’ Andy’s Unionism is not simply based on his loyalty to the Crown, but on his hatred and total opposition to Catholics. Reid uses song to demonstrate this, partly as an illustration of the transmission of cultural hatred, but also as a way of illustrating the pervasiveness of cultural identity and the interlinked nature of glorious remembrance and present conflict. In addition, the strains of the song come from the offstage space, suggesting the extent of the commemorations being performed collectively throughout Northern Ireland. While Andrea is sceptical of her grandfather’s misremembered version of the war, it is the bigotry inherent in Unionism which finally drives a wedge between them, when he finds out that she is pregnant by, and marrying, Hanif, a British-Pakistani man, whom he calls a ‘nig-nog’ (270).

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For Andy, ‘No Surrender’ has become an all enveloping personal and political credo, and he refuses to separate his public Unionist identity from his private one as a grandfather. As mentioned above, the stage is divided and Andy sits on one side, interned in his old people’s home, taken out only to be paraded as a still-living symbol at the Somme Commemorations. Andrea, in turn, is a prisoner of Her Majesty’s Government, locked in Royal Holloway for having protested at Greenham Common, branded by Andy, like Edward Reilly, as a ‘conchie’. Near the end of the play Andrea transcends the confines of her cell and crosses the stage to talk to Andy, at which point he tells her to ‘Get out of my sight!’ (270). The divisions onstage replicate the insurmountable division between these two generations, and further, the fissures within Unionism itself. Whereas the Elder Pyper’s remembrances transport the play back to 1916, Andy’s memories are articulated from present-day Northern Ireland. In Observe the Sons the conflict is not between Catholic and Protestant, but within Unionism and, moreover, it is a conflict which is resolved at the end in personal, if not political, terms. Reid cannot perform such a resolution and she cannot fulfil the gesture of love that Andrea enacts when she, reaching out, crosses the stage to her grandfather. Reid’s world is not a world of ghosts, but a still critical conflict. This contrasts both in form and meaning with the spectral nature of Observe the Sons and that play’s evocation of Unionism as a ‘sunken culture’.12 Yet even though Unionism is thriving in both of Reid’s plays, they were first performed in a context in which the political and cultural status of Unionism was changing. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher signed the AngloIrish Agreement, a fact which Andy deplores, claiming that ‘Lloyd George couldn’t defeat us in 1920, and Maggie Thatcher won’t defeat us in 1986. Carson may be dead, but his spirit, never!’ (272). Yet Carson’s spirit increasingly held less sway in Britain, as evidenced not only by the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but by the waning membership of the Orange Order, and, indeed, by the BBC’s discontinuation of live coverage of the Orange Order parades in the mid-1980s.13 The echoes within Reid’s play reverberate not just with political slogans, but with the names of the soldiers who died during the war. Both Andy and Andrea recite the names of Andy’s fellow soldiers, men who did not return. Likewise, Pyper calls up his fellow soldiers by naming them, a roll-call of the dead. This emphasis on naming draws attention to the plays’ self-conscious appeal to history. Both plays attempt to commemorate the lost men and do so by insisting on their names – at once creating a sense of their individuality as well as their solidarity. While

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Pyper’s recitation is a call to the dead, and represents McGuinness’s self-conscious appeal to the ‘the other side, the Protestant people’,14 Andrea’s intonation of the men’s names takes on a new meaning when she joins to them the names of Edward Reilly, her grandfather Andy, and her husband Hanif. These three men are still alive, yet to Andrea they are also sacrifices on the altar of war. This shared emphasis on naming illustrates a felt need to articulate the past in a human way and thus not only to understand the past, but to understand what has been lost. If, as McIlwaine says, ‘we are the sacrifice’ then it is important to know who that ‘we’ is.

‘The heaving swell of history’: Sebastian Barry Both Reid and McGuinness’s plays are performances of northern Protestant Unionism, but this customary identification of religion and political identities is questioned by Sebastian Barry in his representation of Irish Catholic Unionism. Barry’s work has often meditated on his own family history, from plays such as Prayers of Sherkin (1990) to his most recent novel, The Secret Scripture (2008), all of which explore aspects of forgotten Irish identities, thereby creating a collage of the Irish past composed of personal and imagined memories. In The Steward of Christendom (1995), set in the 1930s, Barry represents his great-grandfather Thomas Dunne, former Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), now a withdrawn and forsaken man, while in A Long Long Way (2005), Barry writes about Dunne’s son, Willie, who volunteered for the British Army and died during the Great War. Neither Dunne nor his son fit easily with the nationalist version of Irish history and Barry tries in both these works to sensitively repatriate them, as it were, by creating characters that the audience can understand and take to heart. In the ‘Introduction’ to The Steward of Christendom Barry writes that his great-grandfather was omitted from Irish history: ‘fellas like him don’t figure in history books as names, they become part of the general story of the demonic nature of the times’.15 Again in Barry’s words the importance of naming is key; Dunne had no name, and as one of those ‘demons’, he needed to be restored to personal, if not official, history.16 Both George Boyce and R.F. Foster have described this lack of official memory as a form of ‘intentional amnesia’ about Ireland’s other history, the non-nationalist past.17 Barry’s play was produced by Out of Joint theatre company, directed by Max Stafford-Clark and first performed at the Royal Court Theatre

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in London in 1995. On its transfer to Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1996, it received the accolade of a Presidential visit by Mary Robinson. After the show, Robinson met the company backstage and ‘talked of the play’s achievement in restoring a piece of Irish history’.18 Robinson was not the only one who recognised the profundity of the play’s achievement. Following another night’s show, the director Max Stafford-Clark received a phone call from an audience member who ‘wanted to tell someone what the play had meant to him. His mother and his aunts had always listened to the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day, but he had had to keep this a secret from his friends and indeed the rest of his family’.19 Both of these reactions to Barry’s play mirror his own sense of his great-grandfather and speak of a tradition of silencing and repressing stories and feelings that were somehow deemed shameful, and thus should be concealed rather than openly remembered; this is a parallel, silent history to the loudly proclaimed remembrance culture of Northern Unionism. In The Steward of Christendom Barry depicts the face of Catholic Unionism through his great-grandfather Dunne, imagining for him a life post-independence in which Dunne remembers his past as Chief Superintendent of the DMP. In contrast to his days as steward of the city, of Christendom as he sees it, in de Valera’s Ireland he is reduced to poverty and senility. Dunne’s sustaining loyalty to Britain is crowned by his speech on the inspiring ‘pride’ of Queen Victoria, for whom he made ‘everything peacable’ and kept ‘order in her kingdoms’ (14). Dunne mourns the past, ‘all the proud regiments gone, the Dublin Rifles and the Dublin Fusiliers. All the lovely uniforms. All the long traditions, broken and flung out, like so many morning eggs upon the dung heap’ (27). In this moment of sadness, Dunne uses an image from his childhood of farm life, with eggs and dung heaps, in order to understand the catastrophe of his adult life, the loss of tradition and memory. Dunne’s losses extend to his children; his son Willie who died in the Great War and whose memory was also ‘flung out’ of history. Despite Dunne’s ‘pride’ in his loyalty to Victoria and his role in the DMP, there is also implicit shame in Dunne’s account of the past, or rather in his omissions about the DMP. Dunne mentions caretaking the ‘great streets and squares’ of Dublin but chooses not to mention the Lockout of 1913 in which four men were killed by the DMP, in a charge he may have jointly led.20 Moreover, when the orderly, Smith, a nationalist who despises Dunne for his unionism, arrives to give Dunne a bath, Dunne becomes totally incoherent, babbling childlike nonsense. Dunne is clearly senile and has many lapses of consciousness, where he retreats

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into memory, but in this scene he becomes entirely unintelligible. Though the physical threat of Smith and his blackthorn stick may indeed push Dunne into this mode, it is also possible that Dunne has learnt to adopt this incoherence as a strategy for avoiding Smith’s nationalist taunts and accusations; this is Dunne’s form of ‘intentional amnesia’. Dunne’s memories haunt him, and this leaks into the performance as Willie appears onstage in the final moments of the play. Dunne is comforted as Willie’s ghost helps him to bed and then ‘lies in close to him’ (65), placing his arm ‘protectively across his father’s chest’.21 The play thus closes with an implicit act of forgiveness and acceptance between the generations of father and son, and resolution with the past for Dunne. Through the strategy of moving familial stories and the reconciliation between father and son, the audience is willing to accept Dunne, to reconcile him with history and, by extension, themselves, though they may be at odds with his Unionism. This is the kind of open-ness and acceptance that is completely alien to Andy in Reid’s My Name, but that echoes the embrace of the past and the ‘other’ at the close of Observe the Sons. It is this impulse to reconciliation and acceptance that has led to the play being called by Nicholas Grene, ‘a new sort of imaginative reaching out in Irish drama’.22 Before Smith leaves Dunne, he reads aloud the only memento that the old man has of his son, a letter from Willie, written from the trenches. From this letter the audience has a glimpse of the character of this young boy, who admired his father above all else. His ghostly figure, childlike in his army uniform, appears in the background, as if the son and the soldier are part of the unconscious of the play. In Barry’s novel, A Long Long Way, published ten years later, Willie is a fully realised character, and we also see Dunne at the height of his powers, before he set foot upon the road to the county home. Willie here is still the innocent child, while Dunne is an authoritarian patriarch, though one capable of great tenderness. When war breaks out in 1914 Willie enlists in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, going to fight for the rights of the small Catholic nation of Belgium. For his father this represents a continuation of his own service to the Empire, while for Willie it is more a personal quest to make a man of himself, and, of course, to prove himself to his father; being a soldier was ‘bloody manhood at last’.23 For Willie the war is not just a journey into manhood, but into knowledge as well and this is key to the way in which Barry presents the politics of the time. When Willie wants to go to war, he can hardly articulate his explanation to his beloved Gretta, saying only that he wants to protect women

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like her from attack by the Germans. It is only following his own enlistment that he learns from ‘a long account of it in the Irish Times [sic]’ (14) that a host of men were prepared to fight for the promise of Home Rule. His father, however, comments ‘with fervent approval’ on the Ulstermen who joined in order to prevent Home Rule, and so within the first two chapters, Barry sets up the conflict that in many ways will be at the heart of the novel. Willie is established as an innocent, joining up for purely personal reasons, to be a man and to protect women, like his ‘angel’ Gretta. However, Willie’s innocence stands in contrast to the political motivations of both Home Rulers on the one hand, represented by the rhetoric of John Redmond, and Unionists on the other, represented by his father. For Willie the conflict thus becomes whether he should follow a path which is slowly revealing itself to him, under the guidance of others, or whether he should remain staunch in advocating his father’s belief system. When Willie sets off to war, with only vague notions of why he is fighting and what he is fighting for, he ‘hoped his father’s fervent worship of the King would guide him, as the lynchpin that held down the dangerous tent of the world’ (22). The absence of Willie’s own fervour is notable here and his father’s worship is to prove insufficient to fill that gap. Slowly, Willie moves away from his adoration and automatic acceptance of his father and when he learns inadvertently of his father’s involvement in the 1913 DMP charge against the Lockout strikers, in which four men were killed, he is deeply shocked. He does not confront his father with this immediately, but it sows a seed within him that will later bloom, after the disillusionments of 1916, both the Rising and the Somme. The ending of Willie’s first home leave coincides with the Easter Rising, and his regiment are detoured to fight the rebels of the Rising on the streets of Dublin. Willie is horrified and deeply traumatised when he witnesses a young boy of nineteen, his own age, dying ‘for Ireland’. After the skirmish, Willie questions his fellow soldier, Jessie Kirwan, about what the Rising meant, and what the rebels were fighting for. When Willie expresses his total confusion and complete ignorance of the politics of the event, Jesse says ‘You can’t be this thick’ (95). The entire point of Barry’s narrative strategy, however, is that Willie is ‘this thick’, indeed he has to be in order to be the innocent, the man who has no side, but is open to all sides. Increasingly Willie is unable to think of his role at the front and the political changes ongoing in Ireland as separate, saying at one point that the ruined houses of ‘Dublin and Ypres were all the one’ (124),

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mirroring the Unionist concept in Observe the Sons that the fight in France is also the fight over Ireland’s future. For Willie it is the deaths of fellow ‘soldiers’ in the Easter Rising that so affects him, from the young man whose blood stained his tunic in Dublin, to the executed leaders. When he discusses it with a friend, Pete O’Hara, they both agree that though they cannot accept that as soldiers of the British Army they are now the rebels’ ‘enemy’, yet they also ‘wish they hadn’t shot those fellas all the same’ (139). This is further complicated when Willie, learning of the multitude of deaths of the 36th Ulster Division at the Somme, feels ‘an odd love … for the brave Ulstermen’ (150).24 Willie expresses himself at this point ‘surprised at this change’ in his political outlook; though his views are still very confused, this is an articulation of political opinion, something which is ordinarily absent from Willie’s world view. Later in the novel, he further realises that the changing politics at home have left him stranded in France as an anachronism, a man with ‘no country now’ (286). When Willie finally acknowledges the distance he has travelled from his father’s guiding doctrine, and his growing interest in the Home Rule movement, he writes to his father who is outraged by the political betrayal he perceives in Willie’s confused allegiances. What Barry is determined to make clear is the emotional cost of political identification. Willie, though he does it seemingly unconsciously, is aware enough to know how to make amends to his father: by retreating from the no man’s land of politics. In his final letter home Willie talks only of his childhood and the noble job that his father did of raising four children without a mother. Willie puts politics to one side because ‘I believe in my heart that you are the finest man I know’ (279). Though he does not live to read his father’s reply, Dunne responds in kind, putting aside his own political experience and position to empathise with his son, and to forgive him. The ending of the novel is thus extremely moving, and it is so because of the final ascendancy of the personal over the political. Willie’s death is represented in characteristically ‘pure’ terms, while at the same time acknowledging the weight of history that this one ‘small man’ carries upon his shoulders: Willie saw four angels hanging in the sky. He did not feel it was unexpected … A soul in the upshot must be a little thing, since so many were expended freely, and as if weightless. For a king, an empire and a promised country … Some thirty thousand souls of that fell country did not register in the scales of God.

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Under that heaving swell of history was buried Willie and all his kindred soldiers, in a forgotten graveyard without yews or stones. He saw four angels, but angels in those days were common sights. (290) Willie at his death becomes angelic, his four angels are four of his ‘kindred soldiers’, and through their blood sacrifices they have all transcended the horror and abjectness of life, and also of history. Willie is connected in death to all who sacrificed themselves, those who fought for the union, those who fought as Home Rulers, as well as the rebels who fought for ‘a promised country’. The unifying force of death brings about a form of reconciliation, which can be forged only retrospectively and only within the novel’s humanistic understanding of history, rescuing Willie and his ‘forgotten’ comrades from the ‘heaving swell’.

The tyranny of memory What Barry succeeds in achieving in A Long, Long Way is to rescue the memory of individual experience from collective amnesia. The assertion of the individual is essential in all these works, which insist on the particularity of experience, an insistence which complicates and in many cases undermines the tendency of commemoration to think only in broad brush strokes and generalities. In McGuinness, Reid and Barry’s plays, the acts of remembrance that the three central figures embark on are unique to them, and as such project a vibrant reality: from Thomas Dunne’s homage to Queen Victoria, and Andy’s affectionate remembrance of showing Andrea the mural in Belfast, to the pulse of anarchic life in Elder Pyper’s vision of his younger self. Yet at the same time as these moments and scenes carry a great deal of power, they are permeated by a thread of ambivalence. Dunne’s memories throw his current state into stark relief, Andy’s memories are manipulated by him to create the version of the past that he wants to remember, while Elder Pyper’s railings against the act of remembrance itself are angry and bitter. Though there is some catharsis at the end of Barry’s and McGuinness’s plays, there is none for Andy and Andrea in Reid’s play. And, since all three are dramas which must be performed again and again, the cycle of painful remembrance must be repeated over and over. This painful repetition, particularly felt in Elder Pyper’s hostility to remembrance, illustrates that in all three plays, memory is a tyranny. The tyranny of memory can be identified easily in Reid and McGuinness, in the rituals of parades, murals, sashes and re-enactments,

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and the jarring rhetoric that the Unionist characters pronounce. This overly ritualised public culture of memory is sunken and spectral, and out of step with the rhythm of life. In Observe the Sons Parts Three and Four, the failure of the two forms of official commemoration – the July Twelfth parade and the Battle of Scarva – combined with the parodic version of the Rising, suggests that there is something bankrupt, or broken, about these forms of remembrance. In their place, what the play creates is a form of personal commemoration, a private ritual in which symbols such as the sash are removed from their political context, in order that they can be identified with sympathetically. Pyper’s acceptance of the sash is primarily about joining a brotherhood of his fellow soldiers, men with whom he has bonded. Their war cry of ‘Ulster. Ulster. Ulster’ is, by the end of the play, a form of personal identification, and a cry for home. The play is still about sacrifice, and its tone is still elegiac, but it is not bitter in the same way as Pyper is bitter at the play’s opening. If Pyper in Part One: Remembrance is isolated and broken, it is because after the war he turned towards the forms of Unionism he previously rejected, which lead him to voice the triumphalist rhetoric of Unionist slogans, an act of cultural ventriloquism, because he believes that this is the way to honour and remember the comrades, and lover, he lost at the Somme. What McGuinness creates in the rest of the play is an alternative, and more positive, way of remembering them. Likewise, Reid’s plays illustrate how personal memories can be salvaged from a politically divisive remembrance culture. It is vital to mark and to preserve positive elements of the past, from Beth’s Belleek teacup and saucer, to Andy and Andrea’s shared fond memories of her childhood, because these provide an alternative form of remembering to the politically sanctified version of the past embedded in Unionism. This narrow and blinkered form of remembering, however, endures, and Reid shows how both Beth and Andrea are isolated by their deviations from tradition. In particular, Andrea’s failed reunion with Andy illustrates the impossibility of reconciling these different performances of remembrance. Sebastian Barry’s work is based on the necessity for, and the possibility of, reconciliation, though both The Steward and A Long Long Way recognise that this is only achievable within the realm of the personal. Though both Barry’s works originate in a post-ceasefire context, Barry sustains a similar emphasis on the personal versus the political as McGuinness and Reid. In particular, the divisive force of politics is circumvented in Barry’s work by emphasising the relationship between father and son. In A Long Long Way Willie is a victim of history, yet the

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combination of the horrors that he must go through, and crucially his political innocence, redeem him; though it is, finally, his devotion to his father that makes readers love him. In The Steward Barry acknowledges the difficulty of recognising the merit of a man who committed violence in the course of his work and who rigorously opposed Irish independence. In order to sidestep this difficulty, Barry constructs the play as an elegy for Thomas Dunne, an emotive call for the accommodation of one man’s memories into the present, and the forgiveness of past mistakes. In the final moments of Observe the Sons, the war cry dies away as the Elder Pyper walks onto the stage, reaches towards and, in many productions, embraces his younger self. This act of reconciliation of past and present versions of the self happens in the realm of memory. But it is personal memories, as opposed to the rigidly narrativised public acts of remembrance, which are invested with meaning and the hope that a divided identity can be overcome. What these writers suggest in these five works is that certain forms of memory are divisive and destructive, and need to be dismantled. Though the works all perform a desire to uncover the past and, by bringing forgotten stories into the light, to inform the present, they are also deeply ambivalent about the status and role of memory as it is so often performed within Irish culture.

Remembering ‘us’ now In an attempt to respond to the changes in the political divisions of north and south, and to mark the paramilitary ceasefires, in 1994 Observe the Sons was produced in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre. The opening night had an unusual invitation list, including twenty-four representatives of the Shankill Road community, the Táiniste Dick Spring, and the Taoiseach Albert Reynolds (though the latter sent his apologies half an hour before curtain-up). No members of Sinn Féin were invited; this was not a cross-party conference but a deliberate project to ‘reach out’ as it were to Northern Unionists. The following days’ newspapers commented on the importance of the National Theatre of Ireland staging the play and in this context. Of the Irish papers, The Sunday Business Post ran a two-page feature article on the reaction of the Unionist members of the audience to the play. Among comments about the play’s representation of Unionism, John Cowan questioned the project itself: ‘That all happened 75 years ago, so you can’t really equate it with the present … Do they want to understand us now or do they want to understand us then? If they want to understand us now, they’ll have

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to come up to the Shankill.’25 This comment contrasts with much of the critical reception of the play, for example, as Nicholas Grene puts it, ‘What the play represents is not just a re-creation of the past but an attempt through that re-creation to understand the pathology of the present; it is as much about 1980s Northern Ireland as it is about the Great War.’26 If Grene is right about the play’s intentions, then we really need to consider what this play, and indeed Reid’s, are attempting to say about 1980s Northern Ireland and how they sit with commemorative strategies since. Both playwrights put forward a vision of Ulster Unionism as doomed or dying – even Reid who recognises the still current power of Unionism, represents it as fanatically identifying with a dead past, rather than a dynamic future. What both playwrights are ultimately saying is that Unionism is defined, not so much by what it chooses to celebrate, as by what it chooses to mourn. However, as Cowan’s comment about Observe the Sons suggests, Unionism has changed not only in the interim between the Great War and the 1980s, but also between the time of the play’s writing and the mid-1990s, when Unionist politics were moving towards political compromise and conciliation. Given that changed context, Cowan suggests that McGuinness’s play is a history play in more than the literal sense of its setting, as the 1980s are now also a part of Unionist history. This shifting understanding of both history and identity is also identifiable in the Republic as understanding ‘us’ now is a more inclusive task, an opening up of Irish history that was pioneered by plays such as McGuinness’s. In the early 1990s, Terence Brown wrote that ‘The Great War is one of the great unspokens of Irish life’ but it is fair to say that since the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, the topic has become far less taboo. Indeed, in 2007 A Long Long Way was promoted as the founding text of the Dublin Municipal Library’s ‘Dublin: One City, One Book’ project, which aimed to ‘encourage everyone in the city to read and discuss the same book during the month of April’. If the memories of the Great War were sacrificed in the interests of a coherent and congruous history of the emergence of the Irish State, then in the context of the Peace Process, when Irish remembrance culture has sought to come to terms with its recent fraught history, those memories have become politically – and culturally – central. Whereas in the plays and fiction discussed here, the emphasis is on moving away from political to personal commemoration as a way of transcending division, in public and official forms of commemoration the emphasis in the past two decades has been on inclusive public

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performances of remembrance. Following the 1998 Belfast Agreement, President Mary McAleese opened the Messines Peace Tower in Belgium on Armistice Day. The tower was constructed by workers from north and south of the Irish border and partially built with bricks from the ruins of a Mullingar workhouse. In her speech at the Island of Ireland Peace Park, McAleese acknowledged the symbolic power of the tower, a symbol which emerges out of the ‘culture of consensus promised by the Good Friday Agreement’.27 McAleese urges not only that the past be remembered, but that it be remembered ‘differently’ in a spirit of consensus, reconciliation and mutual respect. This speech follows on from other official, belated attempts to perform inclusive kinds of remembering and reveals the underlying understanding of history as subject to ideological interpretation. In the same year as the Abbey’s revival of Observe the Sons, the Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge was officially opened, having been built in the 1930s but suffered decades of neglect.28 Twelve years later, in 2006, the Islandbridge gardens were the location for an official commemoration of the Irish soldiers who died during the Great War and, in particular, at the Battle of the Somme. This cross-border ceremony was attended by representatives from Northern Ireland, as well as the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, and was a parallel event to the parade held earlier in the year to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. These two events thus attempt to provide symbolic and official loci for inclusive performances of remembrance. This official recognition in the Republic of the contribution of Irish soldiers to the Great War has only emerged in recent years and illustrates a transformation in Irish remembrance culture. The parallel changes within Unionist remembrance culture are more mixed. Though Northern Irish culture acknowledges the role of both southern Irish and Ulster soldiers in the Great War, illustrated by the inclusive nature of the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, the history of the Somme within Unionism remains relatively exclusive. Indeed, Fran Brearton argues that the overwhelming focus on commemorating the Great War in Northern Irish Unionism is ‘problematic ... because it has been so politically determined’ and this makes the transformation more difficult than the expansion of nationalist histories.29 To remember the Great War differently then is an ongoing challenge. This challenge is exemplified by the annual crises surrounding Orange parade routes on the Twelfth of July. As Neil Jarman argues, since the Northern Irish paramilitary ceasefires in 1994, the right to parade has become a major political issue.30 This is not simply a question of exercising power over the urban geography of Northern Ireland, but

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of asserting the right to perform cultural remembrance. In Portadown, Orangemen have been banned since the late 1990s from parading down the Garvaghy road, a predominantly Catholic street.31 Orangemen have protested the ban, claiming that they have the right to continue to march down ‘the main street … as they have done for about two hundred years, long before there were housing estates on it’.32 The objections to the changed parade route are constructed in terms of tradition, which precedes – and thus takes priority over – modernity. The act of marching the same route each year is assumed to grant the present-day participants direct contact with two centuries of history, so that their performance of this ritual maintains that history as an active memory in the present, rather than a lost or disengaged past. It is exactly this kind of dogmatic ritual which McGuinness undermines in Part Four of Observe the Sons. The disputes which arise over whether or not this form of remembrance culture will be permitted continue to disrupt not only the marches and the residents, but also Northern Irish politics, illustrated in 2009–10 when the issue of parades constituted a major challenge to the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly.33 Over a period of nearly thirty years, since McGuinness and Reid’s plays were first written and performed, Irish remembrance culture has undergone a shift in its meanings, embracing the ‘other’, and restoring forgotten aspects of Irish history. In this regard, official political commemorative strategies, such as the ceremonies at Islandbridge or the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, emphasise political reconciliation between opposing sides and histories, as a model of cross-border, cross-community and trans-historical co-operation and understanding. As the current Taoiseach Brian Cowen said in a speech to the Institute for British-Irish Studies in May 2010, the upcoming centenary commemorations of the period 1916–1922 constitute an ‘opportunity … to reflect on and better understand our shared identities … [as] part of one historical whole’.34 Cowen’s conjunction between commemoration of a divided past, and the performance of a shared present and future, is a response to the ever-current question of how to put shape on the horror and memory of war and conflict. It is not simply what is remembered that is at issue, but how that remembrance is framed and what performances are endorsed. The difficulty of resolving the issue of parading in Northern Ireland, however, illustrates the deep-rooted nature of remembrance culture and the challenges to finding a non-divisive modality for communal affirmation and commemoration. Furthermore, Cowen’s evocation of a single ‘historical whole’ threatens to over-ride what are

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in fact important distinctions between different historical experiences and traditions, thereby effacing history and memory, in order to create a palatable narrative which suits a post-conflict future. Though many of the works considered in this chapter predate the Peace Process, each of the five works sound a warning note which echoes in Irish and Northern Irish remembrance culture, as they call for the emphasis to be shifted away from politically-determined public and official modes of commemoration, because these modes are dependent on over-determined and ideological narratives. In the place of traditional remembrance culture, these works foreground individual stories and private attempts at reconciliation. Though that reconciliation is not always possible, these works all suggest that this form of reconciliation, with self as well as with history, is the only viable way of resolving traumatic and divisive histories. Though public and official commemorations are important strategic performances of inclusive remembering, the symbolic narratives that they generate cannot accommodate either individual experience, or divided histories. In contrast, these writers propose an alternative form of remembrance culture and attempt to craft new rituals, artfully transferring meaning from the public and the political to the private and the personal.

6 Haunted Pasts: Exorcising the Ghosts of Irish Culture

In 1997 the National Museum of Ireland was partially relocated from Kildare Street in the city centre (next to the parliament Dáil Eireann) to Collins Barracks on the north banks of the Liffey in Dublin. The barracks has a long history: constructed in the early years of the eighteenth century, it is reputed to be the oldest military barracks in the world. Originally known as the Royal Barracks, the building was renamed after Michael Collins when it was taken over by the Free State in 1922. The barracks figures prominently in Irish military history, particularly in the story of the 1798 rebellion, after which the leader Wolfe Tone was imprisoned there, and courts-martial were held there also. The executions of the 1798 rebels took place outside the barracks walls and the bodies were disposed of in the ground between the barracks and the river, which became known as Croppies’ Hole, or Croppies’ Acre. The relocation of the National Museum to Collins Barracks instigated a campaign by the National Graves Association to have Croppies’ Acre, and the mass grave of the 1798 rebels, officially preserved and commemorated. The campaign was successful and the Office of Public Works and the National 1798 Commemoration Committee created a new park on the ground, the Croppies’ Acre Memorial Garden. This memorial, adjacent to the National Museum, coalesces issues of the status of memory and the role of commemoration in national identity. The Garden was officially opened on 22 November 1998 by the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern who spoke of the need for ‘a process of commemoration and retrieving of memories which have been deliberately suppressed’. The process of commemoration, however, was not only in order to uncover the past, but to underline the politics of the present: ‘By getting behind these commemorations, we reopen 1798 as an event in the history of Presbyterians as much as in the history of the 152

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Catholics. By elevating politics out of the sectarian rut in which it has been largely confined since 1798, the dead weight of the continuous past can be lifted.’1 Ahern’s argument is that by the process of uncovering and commemorating formerly repressed memories, the present is freed from the ‘dead weight of the continuous past’. By creating a strong and open remembrance culture of the past, paradoxically, Ireland can move forward into the future. This journey into the future is not, however, always straightforward. Ahern’s assertion that the present is haunted by the ‘dead weight’ of the past, argues for an ethical remembrance culture which is future oriented. Yet the opening up of the Irish past falls short of full ethical remembrance because too often it has been politically and aesthetically shaped, or is still subject to the perils of amnesia. Indeed, Ahern’s speech, and the Irish government’s approach to commemorating 1798, are guilty of reading the past through the political lens of the present. One illustrative example of this again involves the site of Collins Barracks: as part of the 1798 bicentenary commemorations, the National Museum (with the National Library and Ulster Museum) mounted an extensive exhibition on the history of the Rising and its legacy. Though the exhibition drew attention to the distortion of the history of 1798 in nationalist and republican versions of history, and the exclusion of the role of Presbyterians in the rising, nevertheless, the main focus of the exhibition was still on the suffering of Catholics under the Penal Laws.2 In addition, the Irish government’s use of 1798 and the ideal of a nonsectarian republic espoused by Wolfe Tone, as a comparative framework for thinking about the peace process in the 1990s, is a fusing of two different moments in history, without consideration for the complexities of the 1790s, or the ways in which the situation in the 1990s is distinct from the past. By comparing the two events – the 1798 Rising and the 1990s Peace Process – the political needs of the present are projected upon the past, and this undermines the sense of ethical remembering implicit in the belated commemoration of the scores of rebels buried at Croppies’ Acre. For Ahern, the commemoration of the executed men of 1798 makes peace with the past, and is also useful as a way of reconciling the politics of sectarianism in the present. The ghosts of 1798 can thus be symbolically laid to rest. The controversy that this political remembrance strategy provoked among Irish historians, however, and the continued wrangling over the story of 1798, illustrate the still contested nature of this history and contradict the notion of a past that has been completely laid to rest.3 The dead weight of the past then, continues to haunt Irish history and

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politics and, by extension, Irish culture. A key example of the anxieties surrounding and within Irish remembrance culture is the presence of ghosts on the Irish stage and screen. Ghosts are unwanted haunting presences, yet they also testify to a fascination – even obsession – with the past. Ghosts thus embody the tension between forgetting and remembering that runs through Irish remembrance culture. How the ghosts of the present that haunt Irish theatre, however, can be laid to rest is another question. This chapter will consider the spectres of the past that haunt the plays of Marina Carr, Conor McPherson and Stewart Parker, as well as Mike Nichols’ film Into the West, and analyse how these works have resurrected the victims of the past, probed beyond the boundary of death, spoken with the dead.

The ghostly figure on the Irish stage Ghostly liminality has been a notable feature of Irish drama over the past thirty years, from the dead voices of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) to the spectral confessors of Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus (2007). As Anthony Roche argues, ‘Ghosts are a strong and recurrent feature of Irish drama … the past is always living as a potential to be resurrected in the endless present of the theater.’4 What Roche identifies is the embodiment of the past in the figure of the ghost, the perpetual eruption of that ghostly figure into the present, and the special ability of theatre to provide a home for these ghosts in which death and the past, as imagined spaces, co-exist with life and the present. Christopher Morash also notes this preoccupation with the past and with ghosts, stating that ‘one of the major concerns of Irish theatre in the 1990s’ was the sense that ‘the past is a living presence’.5 We might push this argument about the revenant past further, to say that ghosts represent not only the past returned to haunt us, but given their effect on the present, and the way they move between past and present, that ghosts are best understood as fragments of memory. It is the need to probe the recesses of memory, and to explore the consequences of memory in the present, that keeps the ghosts and by extension, the audience, coming back for more.

That dead unsilent world: Marina Carr The places of Marina Carr’s dramas represent the combination of a return to a Yeatsian haunted literary landscape with the more general trope of the Irish cultural fascination with a folkloric or mythic past. In the haunted landscape that Carr creates there is no safe refuge from

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either the past or the present. In her Midlands Trilogy of plays – The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats… – each of the central women is so haunted by the past that she is unable to conceive of, let alone create, a future for herself. In part this is due to the fact that the female characters are victims of specific past and present traumas, yet it also more generally reflects the liminal position of women in Irish society. In The Mai (1994), there are two returning figures: Robert, the errant husband of The Mai, and Millie, her daughter, whose adult self returns obsessively to her memories of her childhood and the period leading up to her mother’s breakdown and suicide. The play opens in The Mai’s home, which she has built on the edge of Owl Lake, in an attempt to woo Robert back. The strategy works, but it is not as successful as The Mai had hoped and Robert does not transform into the faithful husband that she needs. Though she fights to win him to her forever, her actions are futile, and, in despair, she drowns herself. This fate, however, has been foretold by the very mythology surrounding Owl Lake. The myth tells that the lake was created by the tears of Coillte, who was separated from her lover Bláth by an evil witch, and who cried so much that the land flooded. The witch finds Coillte on the shore of the lake, pushes her in, and Coillte drowns. This myth is typical of Carr’s work, which imagines a landscape which is itself haunted and haunting. This is as much a literal landscape as it is a cultural one, and by occupying this haunted landscape of lakes and ghostly stories, Carr’s characters become haunted in turn. In addition to the place lore, The Mai must also contend with the personal mythology of her mother, Grandma Fraochlán, who was so passionately dedicated to her lover that she says, ‘I would gladly have hurled all seven of [my children] down the slopes of hell for one night more with the nine-fingered fisherman.’6 The Mai’s suicide, then, represents a similar sort of sacrifice for the sake of unrequited love, killing herself, and also killing her children’s futures. Carr sets out the idea that the culture of love and life that we inherit from our mothers and grandmothers is fundamentally damaging and, indeed, haunting. As Millie says, she is haunted by memories of her mother that persist ‘on and on till I succumb and linger among them there in that dead silent world that tore our hearts out for a song’ (184). In this image, it is Millie – the living character – who becomes ghostly, haunting the past, rather than living in the present. Maternity is a destructive force in Carr’s work, leading mothers to abandon their daughters and, in the third play of the trilogy, to the spectre of a mother killing her own child. Carr’s representations of

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destructive motherhood may be an oblique reference to the fraught issue of unplanned pregnancy which had been rehearsed through the 1980s and 90s: including the abortion referendums of 1983 and 1992, as well as traumatic individual cases such as in 1984 the death of the fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett and her baby in childbirth, as well as the Kerry Babies case, or, in 1992, the X-Case. More generally, however, Carr’s work suggests the unstable position of women in Irish society as the three mothers depicted in the Midlands Trilogy are deeply insecure in their own lives and unable, as a result, to be steadfast anchors in their children’s lives. Their self-destruction further links the idea of motherhood with trauma, so that mothers in Carr’s work are not only haunted, but haunting figures. Carr’s heroines are essentially lost women, associated with the fluid – and deadly – element of water, women who feel a greater connection with death than with life, who take their own lives despite, or perhaps because of, the shame and destruction they will bring to their own families, because it is the last selfish, taboo-breaking and perversely selfpreserving act, they see left open to them. Above all else, Carr creates the certainty within each of them that their fate is inescapable and in all three plays that fate is suicide. The structure of both The Mai and Portia Coughlan (1996) makes their deaths a certainty as the non-linear chronology of each play reveals their suicides in the middle, rather than at the end, so that the women’s characters become ghosts in the machine in the final stages of both plays. In The Mai, Millie both witnesses and narrates her mother’s death at the end of Act One, as Robert carries The Mai’s prone, drowned body onstage. Likewise, Portia’s drowned body is raised out of the Belmont River at the beginning of Act Two. Though, in an allusion to Greek drama, the audience does not see the actual deaths of either of these women, this death-in-life structure ensures that there is no escape for them; even as the audience watches in later scenes their struggles to remain in this world, to maintain their identities, their dignity, the audience knows these women are doomed and their final acts are thus not heroic but tragic, with the poignancy of finality. Portia has always had a sense that she was heading for disaster; however, when her twin brother waded into the Belmont River aged fifteen, she managed to resist and stayed on the bank. Gabriel drowned, but Portia survived and she now has to live not only with the guilt at his suicide, but her own sense that she wrongly escaped death. As she tells her husband Raphael, to ‘stay in’ the world ‘has always been the battle for me.’7 Like The Mai, Portia’s fate is inscribed in the landscape around

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her. As she tells one of her consorts, Finbar, the salmon in the Belmont River are ‘born knowin’ the route they’ll travel’ and this sense of destiny clearly appeals to Portia (219). She also tells Finbar about the mythology behind the name of the river itself, as a local woman was once branded a witch, staked there and left to die by the community. However, she was rescued by the river god Bel, who ‘came down the Belmont Valley and taken her away from here, and the river was born’ (219). Yet, unlike this unnamed woman who is rescued by a heroic, pagan god, there is no rescue coming for Portia and she follows a fate much closer to that of Coillte and The Mai, drowning herself in her beloved river. Though Portia imagines the source of her destiny to be mythic, her aunt Maggie May sees the situation differently. At Portia’s wake, Maggie May reveals the incest in Portia’s family history as her parents were half-siblings, leading Maggie May to conclude that Gabriel was ‘insane from too much inbreedin’ … and walked into the Belmont River be accident’ (245). Portia is not simply haunted by a ghost – though the audience both sees and hears Gabriel and so witnesses the haunting – but by her own share of this congenital madness. Portia tells Finbar that when Gabriel was alive he ‘used hear the girl when the river was low; said she sounded like a aria from a cave’ (219). Now, however, it is Gabriel’s ghost who has become the mythical presence lingering on the river’s banks, and it is his voice that haunts Portia. She hears his singing constantly and such is its power that it can ‘come over and take her away’ (200). This siren call seems to Portia to be summoning her back to the river and to her death, a death that she wrongly escaped when she was fifteen. At first Portia seems to want to shut out the sound of Gabriel’s voice, drinking or putting on a CD to ‘drown’ it out with noise if not with water (195). By Act Three, however, Portia is increasingly out of touch with Gabriel, in stage directions his voice ‘grows fainter, she strains to hear it’ (232). When Portia pursues the sound of his voice to the river, Gabriel disappears and his singing stops completely so that she is left with nothing. The fading of Gabriel’s voice points up to Portia how much she needs this contact, and the fear is thus not that she cannot forget Gabriel but rather that his ghost will forget her.8 When, at the end of the play, Portia admits that she cannot be without Gabriel, his voice sounds, ‘triumphant’ (255). Gabriel at last claims Portia as his own, finally sealing their incestuous love, having haunted her to the extent that she has ruined her living family and there is only him left; the triumph of his voice at the end betrays the extent to which ghosts of the past can manipulate the present.

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If The Mai and Portia are to some extent aware of the need to move on, to leave the past behind, in order to ensure their survival, then to Hester Swane in the closing play of the trilogy, By the Bog of Cats… (1998), it is blindingly obvious. Hester Swane lives on the edge of the bog in a house built for her by her long-time lover Carthage Kilbride, who is the father of her child Josie, but who has left her for the younger, richer and more conventional Caroline Cassidy. Hester is rejected by Carthage because of her drinking and violence, and by the settled community because she is a Traveller. She refuses to accept the fact that Carthage has left her for good, disrupts his wedding reception, burns his house and his cattle and, finally, kills both herself and her daughter Josie, in an echo of the Greek tragedy Medea. Catwoman is the first to directly warn Hester of the destruction that lies ahead: ‘Lave this place now or ya never will’9 and Catwoman’s words are echoed later by Hester: the ‘only way I’m lavin’ this place is in a box’ (324). Catwoman’s is not the only warning; Hester is besieged by signs of her impending death. The play opens at dawn, with Hester dragging the body of the dead swan Blackwing across the bog. When she encounters the Ghost Fancier, who has mistaken the liminal time of dawn for dusk, Hester discovers that dusk is the appointed time for her death. At this, she reacts angrily, shouting after him that ‘I can’t die – I have a daughter’ (267). But the corpse of the swan that Hester holds insists upon her death, as her mother Josie Swane had placed her in the bird’s nest when she was a baby, telling Catwoman that Hester ‘will live as long as this black swan, not a day more, not a day less’ (275). Though Catwoman had tried to break the connection by taking the baby out of the swan’s nest, the curse still seems to have power – though as the play progresses we might argue that curses only have the power that we give them ourselves. But although Hester has the strength to avoid the curses put upon her by her mother and the Ghost Fancier, she will not, and instead she becomes an active agent in her own death. For, despite her earlier protestations that she needs to survive for Josie’s sake, she sets out on a wilfully destructive path, returning to drinking, baiting Xavier when he threatens her with a gun, and provoking Carthage by burning his cattle. Hester may at first seem to resist the idea of death but in the same scene as she tells the Ghost Fancier that she is alive and aims ‘to stay that way’, she also tells her neighbour Monica Murray that she wishes the ice age would return and ‘do away with us all like dinosaurs’ (267). Hester’s comment to Monica suggests that she accepts her own extinction as a ‘dinosaur’ and much later in the play she tells the ghost of

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her brother Joseph Swane that she feels she is ‘already a ghost’ (321). In this Hester mimics Millie in The Mai as they are both made ghostly by the continued trauma of having been abandoned by their mothers as children. Like Millie, Hester has never recovered from the trauma of separation, so that in her adult life she cannot commit to living in the present. This is added to, of course, by the presence of her brother Joseph’s ghost, whom she murdered years earlier in an act of jealousy at his closer relationship with their mother. Joseph’s return, and the guilt and trauma that he represents, add to Hester’s already determinedly selfdestructive binge. However, though Hester is aware of the danger she is driving towards, at the end of the play, as she cradles the dead body of Josie, whose throat she has just cut open, she confesses that ‘I knew somethin’ terrible’d happen but I never thought it’d be this’ (339). Hester, for all her faults, strives to be a good mother. Though she kills Josie, it is ostensibly an act of mercy and love as she refuses to condemn her daughter to the years of ghostly longing for a mother that Hester herself has had to endure. Yet Hester is nothing if not contradictory and, while Josie’s murder seems driven by pity rather than anger, it is also consistent with her earlier assertion to Carthage that she would keep his daughter from him ‘if it’s the last thing I do’ (290). There is thus perhaps more of Medea’s revenging spirit in Hester than admitted by her in the final scene. But death, Carr suggests, will not in fact be the end, as Hester promises Carthage that she and Josie will haunt him and the Bog of Cats, like a ‘purlin’ wind’, elusive and inescapable, ‘Ya won’t forget me now’ (340). Hester recognises that she can be more powerful as a ghostly memory, than she ever was in life. Furthermore, in death Hester will become part of the landscape. This connection is powerful, for in all three of these Midlands plays, Carr demonstrates the persistence of the mythical power of landscape as a dangerous and haunting cultural space. Hester’s connection with the world of the dead, along with her ‘tinker blood’, is what makes her so unpopular with the townsfolk, as they distrust and are fearful of both these aspects of her identity. Indeed, Hester’s sense that she is a ‘ghost already’ is not simply an acknowledgement of her proximity to death, but also her status within the community. For Travellers are often viewed, like ghosts, as unwelcome visitors, while to others they are simply invisible. Yet this very fear, though it excludes Hester from the mainstream, also gives her a form of cultural power in a society that, despite the façade of modernity, still believes in ghosts and the dark arts. Hester’s ability to remind people of their own guilty secrets, a result of her obsession with the past combined with a sense of

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divination, is one expression of this power. As the concluding play of the trilogy, Bog of Cats blends the landscape of Irish ghosts and Greek tragedy, with a more modern version of Ireland, a land of contracts and chequebooks. Ultimately, however, Carr’s vision of the Midlands sees it populated with strange, feral and ghostly creatures, which resist the power of ‘progress’. Fairies and ghosts: Conor McPherson Carr’s women are figures that in life roam the landscape and in death become supernatural shadows upon it, custodians of the ‘fringe[s] of the world’. If Carr’s ghosts belong to the outside, however, then conversely Conor McPherson’s ghosts are phantoms of the interior. In McPherson’s internationally successful play The Weir (1997), the stories told in the pub one dark and stormy night conjure up fairies and ghosts who attempt to invade the domestic space, threatening to evict the living owners. In response, the haunted cling to their hearths in the hope that morning will come and liberate them but, as Valerie’s story shows, the living must retreat ever further as the ghostly world finds new ways of breaking and entering. The Weir is set in a country pub, of which Finbar, who left his farm for the town years before, says, ‘sure half the townland used to nearly live in here’.10 The walls of the pub are hung with black and white photographs of historic moments, a catalogue of those now dead or, like Jack, past their prime, suggesting the role of the pub as a museum for the community. The photographs are the only reference to the weir of the title, as in one image from 1951, the seven-year-old boy Jack stands alongside both Finbar and Brendan’s fathers by the new hydro-electric weir, displaying their modernity. In more recent times, however, the pub has become isolated and run down, standing now as a refuge to the last remaining members of the rural community, more open to the ghosts of the townland than the living. The closed world of Brendan’s pub is opened up by the arrival of Valerie who has bought a cottage from Finbar; it is Finbar who offers to show her the local sights, and brings her to the pub that night. The local men – Brendan, and the pub regulars Jack and Jim – are disturbed by Finbar’s behaviour around Valerie, with the implication that he is trying to have an affair with her; Brendan is particularly shocked that Finbar might use the bar ‘for that sort of carry on’ (24). Though Finbar protests his innocent motives, Jack has a go at Finbar’s ‘cod’, ‘bringing [Valerie] around an all … Bringing her up the Head and all’ (53). This is not simply a communal reinforcement of morality but a sign of how angry

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and disturbed these three single men are at the idea that the one married man might violate an institution they themselves are excluded from. Valerie is from Dublin and so is an outsider, who disrupts the sexual status quo both in terms of her gender and the attention that Finbar is paying her, yet even Finbar’s unexpected presence upsets the quiet balance of the pub, as he has not been in for a long time and clearly his success, as well as his courting of Valerie, rubs the men the wrong way. As an extension of his role as tour guide, it is Finbar who initiates the conversation about the folklore of the townland, asking Jack to tell the story of the fairy road and only belatedly remembering that it centres on the house he has just sold to Valerie. From the outset, the stories, though fairly harmless at the beginning, conjure up a parallel world to the one that the audience sees onstage – a supernaturally charged landscape where the living are at the mercy of the fairies and the dead. When Jack starts telling his story he makes sure to set the scene, elaborating the details, and relating it with ‘relish’ (36). Jack’s story is about old Maura Nealon’s house, now Valerie’s, and how one night back in 1910 or 1911 the fairies knocked at the doors and the windows, trying to get through the house which was built across the fairy road. The threat of supernatural retribution for the disruption of old patterns is clear here, particularly as the story is set at a time when being dispossessed of an ancient right to land was a powerful political and cultural idea. The attachment to land in the nineties, however, is not as deep, as Brendan is being encouraged by his family to sell his top field – the location of the fairy fort – and turn the land into a direct form of revenue. Jack’s story, however, and the following ghost stories, suggest that, as in Carr, though Ireland is both modernising and urbanising, belief in the fairies and the folklore of the landscape lingers on. Finbar tells the next story, and this time it is a ghost story and the ghost, unlike the fairies, cannot be stopped by keeping the door closed. As a young, single man, returned home one night from a séance, and still grieving the recent death of his father, Finbar was rooted to his seat by the conviction that a ghost was watching him. He sat until dawn convinced of the reality of the ghost, only to dismiss it in the security of the morning light, calling himself a ‘loolah’. Yet that night caused Finbar to give up not only smoking but on the rural life itself and he moved to town. The profound and lasting effect of that night’s ghostly encounter is thus clear despite Finbar’s declaration that ‘Obviously there was nothing there’ (43). Yet he also acknowledges the loneliness of his situation, and his story suggests that it was not so much the fear of being haunted but of being alone that drove Finbar to move to the

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town, fleeing and also hastening the process of rural depopulation. Since being alone is of course still the situation of the others in the bar this night, his story has a direct connection to them, though he himself has escaped, as Jack puts it, ‘down into the lights’, leaving them, by implication, as custodians of the darkness (44). Following Finbar’s story the men joke and let off steam, but then Jim tells of how when he was younger and sick with flu he took on some extra work grave-digging in Glen, a parish beyond his own townland. While standing at the open grave, exhausted from the work, he was spoken to by the ghost of the dead man who asked to be buried not in his assigned plot but in the grave of a young girl instead. Jim was confused and only realised the significance later when he learned that the man had a reputation as a ‘pervert’. This is the first story in which there is a direct confrontation with a ghost and, though Jim was sick with flu and drunk on poteen, his story is hard to reject completely. It is also, with the introduction of a child, the most disturbing of the stories, and a reflection of the haunting revelations of child abuse becoming current at the time of the play’s first production in 1997. When Jim is finished speaking there is a pause, until Finbar reacts with ‘Jaysus, Jim. That’s a terrible story to be telling’ (51). Though Jim blamed the experience on drunkenness and fever, Valerie seems to want to believe that it was more than ‘a, an hallucination’ and is clearly upset by it, and, looking ‘peaky’, she excuses herself then to go to the bathroom (44). On her return, however, it is Valerie who tells the next story, following the pattern of increasingly personal and disturbing narratives. Valerie’s story is of the death of her daughter Niamh by drowning, her inability to accept Niamh’s death, and her subsequent encounter with Niamh’s ghostly voice imploring her for help over the telephone. The story and the deeply personal impact of it makes sense of why it has been Valerie at the end of each story who, as Clare Wallace argues, ‘gently supports the possibility that the inexplicable and supernatural may exist, as a means of coming to terms with the traumatic loss of her daughter’.11 Yet the story also moves onto another level, the ghostly encounter is over the telephone, indicating that in the modern world, ghosts find new ways to invade the domestic space, and that the new forms of telecommunications are also new modes for absence and presence; her daughter is not even a shadow but, even more than Carr’s Gabriel in Portia Coughlan and Joseph in Bog of Cats who sing to their sisters, Niamh is an entirely disembodied spirit. Valerie’s story differs in tone from the ones that have gone before; this is not folklore but a modern and personally damaging tale. It is

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telling that she has retreated from the modern city to a rural backwater, a place where she can tell her story to a willing and primed audience, for as she says ‘It’s something that happened. And it’s nice just to be here and … hear what you were saying. I know I’m not crazy’ (61). Yet it is only Brendan who seems to believe Valerie, the other men all try to reassure her that it was ‘a dream’ or, in Finbar’s case, to undermine all the other stories so that Valerie’s is indirectly undermined also. The intensity of the reality of Valerie’s story seems to shock the men, and they only belatedly comfort her for the loss of her daughter, the trauma that the ghost story has enabled her to talk about. The reaction of the men to the story is a clear indication that Valerie is capable of out-manoeuvring the men at their own storytelling game; if the men started telling stories as a way of teasing or testing Valerie, she has well and truly responded in kind. When Finbar, Jim and Jack comfort Valerie they not only tell her how ‘sorry’ they are ‘about what’s happened’ but Jim adds that ‘You enjoy your peace and quiet here now. And we’ll see you again. You’re very nice’, while Finbar tells her that ‘we’ll make sure you’re alright and settling in with us. You’re very welcome’ (63). Through sharing her loss Valerie has demonstrated that she is as – if not more – lonely and isolated as the men, and as a result is welcomed into their damaged community; no longer is she the threatening outsider, but a ‘welcome’ addition to the pub. Both Finbar and Jim leave after Valerie’s story, but Jack and Brendan keep faith with Valerie a little longer and, following her cue, Jack completes the stories with one of his own, and instead of using the coded supernatural world of fairies and ghosts, he speaks directly of his own loneliness and the loss of the woman he loved but rejected. The story is not a ‘ghostly’ one yet is haunting in its own way and ends the play on a mixed note of sorrow and sentimentality. The irony of Carr’s trilogy and McPherson’s Weir is that while these plays are set in a myth-ridden countryside, they are performed at a time when the actual rural landscape was changing, indeed disappearing, at an unprecedented rate. The countryside was increasingly being built up with housing estates, becoming a liminal space positioned awkwardly between urban and rural. On the one hand, we might argue that this is a case of a modernising Ireland not being reflected by its culture. Though television culture was changing in the 1990s to reflect the changed face of Irish landscapes and lifestyles – illustrated by the end of the longrunning series Glenroe in 2001 and the advent of new programmes such as Dublin-based The Clinic (2003) or gritty rural dramas such as Pure Mule (2005) – many of the country’s leading dramatists were still setting

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plays in an ultra-traditional world of ghosts and fairies.12 On the other hand, however, it is possible to view the evocation of a rural, mythic Ireland in these plays, not as a representation of this landscape as the dominant physical or cultural reality, but instead as a performance of a once-powerful cultural signifier – rural Ireland – as a way of indicating the waning of this symbol and, indeed, suggesting that these rural spaces are, particularly in the case of Carr’s work, toxic. In this way, the plays themselves, in harking back to a pre-modern Ireland (and Irish literature), are ghostly elegies for this mode of imagining Ireland. Furthermore, the idea of a haunted Irish rural landscape has now, in 2010, taken on new meaning. With the collapse of the housing market, many rural housing estates are unfinished and completely uninhabited, giving rise to the term ‘ghost estates’, and standing as a haunting signifier of Ireland during the boom and after the bust. The sense of isolation and the need for community in McPherson’s work is not, however, limited to rural Ireland, but something that runs through all of McPherson’s plays, and emerges strongly in his recent play The Seafarer (2006) in which a group of men gather not to tell stories but to drink and play cards, and where the outsider is not a woman but the devil. But the play that most clearly resonates with The Weir is Shining City (2004), set in Dublin, in which every character we see is defined by their loneliness and desperation for human contact. In Shining City, John, a man in his fifties, seeks psychiatric therapy after the violent death of his wife Mari in a car crash. John is afflicted by guilt and cannot sleep or continue to live in the house he shared with Mari, convinced that her ghost is haunting him. His sessions with his therapist Ian, and the fact that Ian believes him, enable him to move on and lay her ghost to rest. The play ends, however, with the shocking revelation that far from being a psychological projection, Mari’s ghost is very real indeed, and in the last moments of the play her ‘terrifying’ presence makes itself felt. The resurrection of Mari’s ghost works against the superficially therapeutic narrative of the play, which proposes that past trauma can be straightforwardly overcome, and instead suggests that trauma not only lingers on, but is transferable, so that Ian is now the haunted figure. In The Weir, the audience is asked to decide whether or not ghosts are external realities, visited upon Finbar, Jim and Valerie, or whether they are signs of psychological trauma that are projected by the ‘haunted’ onto graveyards and telephone lines. In Shining City McPherson seems to answer the question and suggests that ghosts are an external – and inescapable – reality. What Shining City and Valerie’s story both also

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suggest is that haunting is not limited to rural spaces, but invades the city also. Furthermore, Mari’s malevolent presence illustrates that not only are we never far from the world of ghosts, but that these ghosts will actively seek us out.

The return of the repressed But why do the ghosts return and what are they actively seeking? In Portia Coughlan, Gabriel has a clear agenda, to reclaim Portia as his own. He appears on the banks of the river at the opening of the play and when Portia’s body is recovered from the river. Perhaps most importantly his voice sings triumphantly when she finally acknowledges that she cannot forget him and, implicitly, accepts that she will join him in the river. Hester’s brother Joseph appears to Catwoman at the wedding and then, directed by her, finds Hester just as she has set light to the house and Carthage’s cattle sheds. Joseph demands nothing of Hester but his ghostly return represents the return of her guilt at killing him, what Catwoman intuits early in the play as ‘some fierce wrong ya done that’s caught up with ya’ (274). To Catwoman this is the most powerful threat to Hester’s life, more than the swan curse put upon her by her mother, or Hester’s inability to let Carthage go. Though Hester’s acts – disrupting Carthage’s wedding and burning his cattle – seem self-motivated, they occur just at the point that Joseph’s ghost appears, establishing a haunting link between her guilt at his death and her selfdestructive behaviour. In The Weir the fairies and ghosts are somehow wronged, from the fairies who cannot pass along the fairy road, to Valerie’s daughter who feels lonely and abandoned and wants her mother to rescue her. Each of these presences demands something of the living, to make retribution for the past – and the formerly repressed guilt and fear of past actions are thus manifested in these supernatural encounters. The response of the living, moreover, demonstrates how beholden the present is to the past. The power of these manifestations is demonstrated by both Finbar and Valerie, who were driven to change their lives dramatically – in opposite ways – by their encounters with ghosts. All the stories – including Jack’s less ‘ghostly’ tale – speak of a deep loneliness and isolation and, in particular, Valerie’s story speaks of the trauma of losing her daughter, her sense of guilt, and her unwillingness to come to terms with her loss. Collected in these plays are the multiple reasons why we feel haunted – from guilt and traumatic loss, to the awareness and fear of death and

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our continued need for the presence of those who have died. As the psychoanalyst Colin Davis argues, the response of the living [to the dead] is characteristically ambivalent. We are doubly angry at the deceased. How could they leave us, and why do they not leave us alone? The desire to keep the dead amongst us, to refuse the scandal of death, competes with the desire to be rid of them for good, to stop the dead from returning and disturbing our fragile peace of mind.13 Thus while Valerie leaves Dublin in an attempt to move on with her life, at the same time, it is necessary that she tell the story of Niamh’s death and haunting, insisting on its truth, in order to keep some element of Niamh with her. The haunting also gives Valerie a way of narrating her daughter’s death, just as for Portia being haunted by Gabriel enables her to keep his memory fresh, despite the fact that he’s been dead for half her life. Thus for both Portia and Valerie, while the ghosts are a curse they wish to escape, they are also longed for embodiments of memory, a way of imaginatively recuperating the past, a road backwards into personal history.14 These journeys backwards are, however, traumatic and disturbing, and the deaths of The Mai, Portia and Hester illustrate just how destructive a fascination with death can be. The message is clear, in order to survive, we must learn to let go. Though Jack tells Valerie that she would be better off elsewhere and not ‘Hiding yourself away. Listening to old headers like us talking about the fairies. Having all your worst fears confirmed for you’ (70) perhaps she is doing the right thing, leaving the trauma of Niamh’s death behind and making a new life for herself, despite the fact that she is retreating to a world that in other ways represents the past. Furthermore, what Valerie has done in narrating Niamh’s death and haunting, is to articulate and share her individual traumatic memory so that it is transformed into a communal memory and is, as a result, less isolating. In this reading, the narration of ghost stories is a necessary part of exorcising the past more permanently, reliving traumatic memories in order to heal them. Though in theatre, with its mission to replay night after night, there is no single or final moment of exorcism possible. In popular fiction, the grotesque figure of the ghost disrupts the living in order that it may be exorcised or dispatched permanently so that the proper moral and symbolic order can be reasserted. The ghost thus returns in order to be sent away again.15 Yet in these plays – and Irish

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culture in general – the ghosts that return are not so easily dismissed. Gabriel claims Portia, Hester and Josie will forever be ‘ghostin’’ Carthage, and the spectres raised in Brendan’s pub are long-lasting ones, illustrated by the vividness of both Finbar and Jim’s tales. These ghosts thus seem to demand much of – and to exact a price from – the living and thus they must be read as malign presences that seek to disturb the symbolic order permanently. These ghosts must be confronted and exorcised, so that, as Christopher Morash argues, the past ‘might be accepted and healed’.16 Read allegorically, the ghosts represent the issues of the past that haunt modern Ireland: a violent past that will not go away, the taboo of suicide, the marginalisation and victimisation of women, the ostracism of Travellers, the depopulation of the rural landscape, the lonely desperation of unmarried men, and the trauma of child abuse. If, as Carr’s heroines suggest, the ghosts and guilt of the past are not to drown the future, then traumatic memory must be constructively dealt with so that the present can incorporate the past without sacrificing itself to it.

Releasing the dead weight of the continuous past The process of how to accept and heal the past, and to move towards a full sense of ethical remembrance, is suggested in two further examples of ghost stories: Into the West (1992), directed by Mike Nichols, and Pentecost (1987), written by Stewart Parker. In both these works, the past haunts the present, but these ghosts can be set free by fully acknowledging the trauma of the past and, in so doing, finding a way to live with it in the present. In Mike Nichols’ film Into the West a Traveller family, settled in a tower-block council estate in north Dublin, is integrated back into their Traveller community and cultural heritage.17 Papa Reilly and his two sons, Tito and Ossie, have settled in Dublin after the death of Mary, Papa’s wife, and mother to the two boys. Papa’s unresolved grief at her death turns him into an alcoholic and his self-destruction alienates his children and his community. The boys’ grandfather, however, introduces the boys to a mystical white horse who, he claims, comes from the mythical land of ‘Tir na nÓg’. The boys run away from home on the back of Tir na nÓg, and the horse takes them out of the city and into the rural landscape, moving always ‘into the west’. This movement takes the boys back towards their Traveller heritage, and pushes Papa Reilly to reconnect with his Traveller friends in a bid to ‘track’ them, rescue them and, in the process, to rescue himself. Papa Reilly follows

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the boys all the way to the west coast of Ireland, where the horse, wildeyed from the chase, plunges into the sea, with Ossie still on his back. Ossie nearly drowns, but is saved by his father who dives under the waves to find him. Under the water, however, Ossie sees a vision of his dead mother, whose hand pulls him back to the surface. The mythical land of ‘Tir na nÓg’, which lies under the waves, is revealed as a land not of eternal youth, but of death. In this way, the film suggests that while following the horse rescues the boys from their impoverished and grim city life, the journey into the past is also potentially fatal. This interpretation is confirmed by the final scene of the film, in which Papa Reilly burns the traditional caravan that belonged to his wife Mary. Papa has insisted on the preservation of the caravan, against Traveller custom, as a way of maintaining a link with the past. In burning the caravan, Papa finally releases his wife’s spirit and, moreover, rescues himself from drowning under the dead weight of the past. Papa and his two boys are thus ultimately reintegrated into their Traveller community and heritage, and this is framed by the film as a positive relationship to the past, in contrast to Reilly’s former repression and denial of his wife’s death. The ritual of burning is key to the transformation of traumatic memory into a positive form of remembrance, as it accepts the need to destroy certain aspects of the past – to exorcise the ghosts – in order to move forward, unencumbered, into the future. This act of closure thus reflects the sentiments behind the official acknowledgement of the mass grave at Croppies’ Acre. A similar attitude towards remembrance is evident in Stewart Parker’s 1987 play Pentecost. Set in 1974, against the background of a violently changed and changing sectarian society in Northern Ireland, a group of four young people shelter in an old house in Belfast. The original occupant of the house was Lily Matthews, and her ghost now haunts the space, disapproving of the new occupants, Marian and Lenny, Ruth and Peter. Marian is official custodian of the house, and she is determined to preserve it exactly as Lily left it, so that it can become a museum of Belfast’s working-class, Protestant past. This is an almost ironic gesture in a state in which, as Lenny says, ‘every bloody day in the week’s historic’.18 The fundamental mistake that Marian commits is in her attitude to the past, so that it becomes more real, more important, than the needs of the present. As Marian says herself, like Millie it’s she who is haunting the past, not the other way round (210). In this, Marian misconceives of memory and the past as ‘eternal’ objects, fixed and unchanging, rather than dynamic forces that can shift and change according to the needs of the present.

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As the play progresses, Marian’s research into the history of the house reveals that, far from being an archetypal house, ‘eloquent with the history of the city’, Lily had an unhappy life in the house, and that after she secretly gave birth to and surrendered her illegitimate child, the house became a living coffin for her (192). This realisation forces Marian to recognise that the preservation of the past is ‘a wrong impulse’, and that the house must be transformed in order for the future not to be marked by trauma. Instead of maintaining the house as a museum to the past, she decides to open it up to ‘air and light’ (238). This opening up of the past – both literal and metaphorical – sets Lily’s spirit free and her ghost vanishes. In so doing, Marian, like Papa Reilly, also sets herself free, and this freedom enables her to acknowledge her own invisible ghosts – in particular, that of her dead infant son, Christopher. It is only in the last moments of the play that Marian speaks of her son and acknowledges ‘the ghost of him that I do still carry, as I carried his little body’ (244). This acknowledgment is the first step towards living in the present, rather than haunting the past. Like Valerie, Marian’s narration of the life and death of her child has a Pentecostal power that allows her to accept and heal the past. Marian has much to teach Irish culture of how to deal with ghosts; she uncovers the repressed memories of the past, narrates them, and brings closure. This is not, however, a closure which involves forgetting, or further repression, but an acknowledgment of the scars and ghosts that ‘we carry … within us’ (245). Marian’s rejection of the musealising of the past further illustrates that the past cannot be fixed into a symbol, packaged with rhetoric, or resolved with a simple therapeutic narrative. Instead, memory can function to produce an ethical narrative which is oriented towards justice for past wrongs, in the form of personal reconciliation or, in the larger case of Irish society, in the form of public recognition. The two underlying traumatic presences in Pentecost that need to be resolved are the ghosts of two absent children: one given up, the other dead. These two children – the memories of whom are carried by Lily and Marian – recall the abused children of recent Irish history, whose stories are slowly emerging from private individuals brave enough to articulate their pasts, and through public discourses such as the Ryan and Murphy investigations and reports. These children have yet to achieve justice, even though their stories are being heard, and these are thus still the most haunting presences in contemporary Irish society and culture. In Irish remembrance culture, memories of the past are brought to life and it is vital that the living enter into a dialogue with all the dead

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voices, just as it is vital that the present fully acknowledges the past, no matter how traumatic. In this way, we should be haunted by the ghostly memories of guilt and shame for past wrongs. Yet at the same time, the traumas of the past should not be narrated in the service of politicallydetermined narratives, and nor should Irish culture become so in thrall to a fixed idea of the past that it cannot move on. Ghosts are disturbing because they force us to confront our past, a past which we would rather, anti-nostalgically, leave behind. It is important to excavate the past, but as the examples of Marian and Papa Reilly show, the past should not be preserved eternally within formal and static structures because this too represents a form of repressing memory. These formal structures must be opened up to air and light, to usher in a full acknowledgment of the past, in order for the trauma to be released, and for the future to be able to ‘forget’. What is paramount in the present is to be able to create a positive, and ethical, living remembrance culture. While it is, of course, vital that Irish culture is founded on an intricate and intimate sense of the past, the disturbing presence of ghosts in Irish culture implies that the constant re-enaction of memories and traumas of the past in the present is disabling rather than enabling. Instead of continually rehearsing the wrongs of the past, those wrongs need to be addressed properly and then moved on from. The recognition of trauma entails a responsibility for bringing justice to the traumatised, whether that is achieved through the cathartic articulation of personal grievances, the judicial conviction of those who perpetrated the abuse in the past, or the public commemoration of the past as a way of opening it up and healing it. Remembrance culture is central to the resolution of past traumas. Yet how we frame that remembrance culture will define whether the past can be laid to rest, and the dead weight lifted, or whether the past will continue to haunt the present, and the future. We must learn to carry the ghosts within us, yet not be ghostly ourselves.

Notes Introduction 1 Pat Cooke, ‘Letter to the Irish Times’, 5 April 2006. 2 Editorial response to Pat Cooke’s letter, 5 April 2006. 3 See http://www.irishtimes.com/focus/easterrising/monday/. Accessed June 2010. 4 Sunniva O’Flynn, ‘Letter to the Irish Times’, 8 April 2006. 5 Tanya Kiang, ‘Letter to the Irish Times’, 12 April 2006. 6 O’Flynn, 8 April 2006. 7 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p.25. 8 Pierre Nora, quoted by John Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p.8. 9 As Conor McCarthy argues, in the 1960s ‘modernistion became a narrative in terms of which the “imagined community” of the Republic understood itself and envisioned its future.’ Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p.30 10 See Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). 11 Lady Augusta Gregory, Selected Writings, eds. Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p.311. 12 W.B. Yeats, ‘The Man and the Echo’, Yeats’s Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), p.469. 13 See Joep Leerssen for a discussion of the Ordnance Survey and its representation in Translations, in Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp.102–3. 14 For a critical discussion of Riverdance see Aoife Monks, Comely Maidens and Celtic Tigers: Riverdance and Global Performance, Goldsmiths Performance Research Pamphlet (London: Goldsmiths, 2007). 15 Ruth Barton has named this genre ‘Irish heritage cinema’. See Barton, ‘From History to Heritage: Some Recent Developments in Irish Cinema’, Irish Review, v.20–1 (1997), 41–56. 16 Mary Daly, ‘History à la carte? Historical commemoration and modern Ireland’, Commemorating Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Eberhard Bort (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), p.36. 17 Daly, p.39. 18 Margaret Kelleher, ‘Hunger and History: Monuments to the Great Irish Famine’, Textual Practice, 16.2 (2002), 249–76. 19 Kelleher, 261. 20 Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘After the Famine Fever’, Irish Times, 19 May 2001. 21 Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber, 1990), p.1. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 171

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22 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) 5–11; 10. 23 Ricoeur, p.9. 24 Speech given by Bertie Ahern at the opening of an exhibition on 1916 at the National Museum, 9 April 2006. Printed in the Irish Times, 10 April 2006, p.6. Ahern singled out the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic, the 1937 Constitution, Treaty of Rome in 1972, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, as the ‘four cornerstones of independent Ireland in the 20th century’. 25 See Anne Dolan for a discussion of the ways in which the civil war have been commemorated historically and locally, in particular the focus on the figure of Michael Collins. Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also worth noting is the forthcoming book from the research project ‘The Dead of the Irish Revolution 1916–1921’, by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithi O Corrain. 26 The full title of the Mahon Tribunal is ‘The Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters and Payments’, set up in 2003 to address corruption in planning processes. 27 Kevin Whelan, ‘Between Filiation and Affiliation: The Politics of Postcolonial Memory’, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp.92–108; p.93.

1 Past Traumas: Representing Institutional Abuse 1 Judge Sean Ryan, in a statement predating the hearing at which Ahern gave testimony, 7 May 2004. Cited in Bruce Arnold, ‘What was the real reason for Bertie’s apology to State’s abuse victims?’, Sunday Independent, 18 February 2007. 2 Constitution of Ireland, Article 41.1.1–41.1.2. 3 Following the Taoiseach’s apology in 1999, the government proposed a referendum on strengthening the rights of the child in the Constitution. This referendum has not been carried out, though in 2009 there were proposals published for the 28th Amendment to the Constitution on the rights of children. 4 See Timothy O’Grady ‘Presentation to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse’, 12 May 2005, Vol. No. 57, Joint Committee on Education and Science. O’Grady calls attention to the fact that the government had been aware of allegations of abuse since at least 1982. 5 States of Fear, prod. Mary Raftery, RTÉ (1999). 6 Mannix Flynn, Nothing to Say (Dublin: Ward River Press, 1983), Paddy Doyle, The God Squad: A Remarkable True Story (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1988); Mavis Arnold and Heather Laskey, Children of the Poor Clares (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985). Doyle continues to comment on the emerging story and treatment of abuse on his website ‘The God Squad’ at www.paddydoyle. com, while Mannix Flynn has written for the stage (including James X a stage play which addresses industrial and reform schools, first produced

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at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2002), and produced art installations which reflect on the issue of abuse in Irish society. Heather Laskey ‘Programme Note’ Stolen Child, Archive of Play Programmes, Dublin City Library, Pearse Street. Mary Drennan, You May Talk Now (Cork: OnStream Publications, 1994). Dear Daughter – about the survivor Christine Buckley, narr. Bosco Hogan, dir. Louis Lentin, Crescendo Concepts for RTÉ, 22 February 1996. Gerardine Meaney, ‘The Sons of Cuchulainn: Violence, the Family, and the Irish Canon’, Éire-Ireland, 41:1&2 (2006), 242–61; 253. Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (New York: Continuum, 1996), pp.189–95. Mary Raftery, Letter to the Irish Examiner, 30 August 2000. Raftery and O’Sullivan, p.79. Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Air Brushing of Abused Suffering from Records’, Irish Times 23 September 2005. The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report), 2009, Volume 4, Chapter 1. This is the rationale behind the play being chosen as one part of the ‘Darkest Corner’ series of plays staged at the Peacock Theatre as the National Theatre’s response to the Ryan Report. Raftery and O’Sullivan, p.385. Ryan Report, Volume 1, Chapter 6. Brother Michael Reynolds, evidence to the Investigation Committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, cited in Diarmaid Feriter (2005). These comments are made in the Report specifically in relation to St Conleth’s Reformatory School in Daingean, Co. Offaly: the Department of Education ‘knew that its rules were being breached in a fundamental way’ but ‘would not interfere’. Ryan Report, Volume 1, Chapter 15. See The Report of the Commission of Investigation, Dublin Catholic Archdiocese, 2009, Part One, Chapter One, p.4. Justice Mary Laffoy, Letter to Mr Dermot McCarthy, Secretary General, printed in Irish Times, 8 September 2003. Timothy O’Grady, ‘Presentation to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse’, 12 May 2005, Vol. No. 57, Joint Committee on Education and Science. The Ryan Report states that ‘in excess of 800 individuals were identified as physically and/or sexually abusing the witnesses as children’, Executive Summary, Volume 1, Chapters 7, 9 and 13–18. Mannix Flynn, ‘We can’t get on with our lives. It’s just not that easy’, Irish Times, 21 May 2009, p.14. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Memory and Forgetting’, in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 5–11; 10. Mary Raftery, ‘Report a monument to a society’s shame’, Irish Times 21 May 2009, p.18. As Joan Burton, in a speech to the Dáil in January 2010 reported: ‘Just before Christmas last year, the Justice for Magdalene group met senior officials in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. At that meeting, Mr. James Martin, an assistant secretary at the Department, stated that after the passage of the Criminal Justice Act 1960, the State routinely placed women on remand in the Magdalene institutions and paid a capitation grant for each woman so referred. I welcome the admission by the Department that women were routinely referred to various Magdalene asylums via the Irish

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

Notes court system in an arrangement entered into by members of the Judiciary and the four religious congregations operating Magdalene laundries in the State. Women were also placed in Magdalene laundries “on probation” by the Irish court system, in some cases for periods of up to three years.’ Dáil Debates, 21 January 2010, http://www.kildarestreet.com/debates/?id= 2010-01-21.467.0 (accessed February 2010). John Waters, ‘A stick to beat the past with’, Irish Times 20 October 2003. States of Fear, Episode 1. For a discussion of the Kennedy report, see Raftery and O’Sullivan, pp.378–82. Ryan Report, Volume III, Chapter 2. Dear Daughter, dir. Louis Lentin, Crescendo Concepts (1996). States of Fear, Episode 1. States of Fear, Episode 1. In the follow-up book, Suffer the Little Children, Raftery and O’Sullivan include ‘testimony’, or narratives, from twenty-one institutions, many of whom were interviewed as part of States of Fear. The book and programme also refer to a further number of industrial schools and more modern care homes, such as Madonna House. Ryan Report, Volume 1, Chapter 1. Patrick McCabe interviewed by Alan Riding, ‘Challenging Ireland’s Demons with a Laugh’, New York Times, 29 March 1998, p.18. Neil Jordan, ‘Production Notes for “The Butcher Boy”’, unpublished, pp.3–4. Irish Film Archive. See also Martin McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p.217. Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (London: Picador, 1992), p.4. Future references to the novel will be in parentheses in the text. Neil Jordan, The Butcher Boy (Geffen Pictures, 1997). James M. Smith, ‘Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: “Telling” Stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear’, Éire-Ireland, 36.3–4 (2001), 111–30; 125. Ruth Barton, Irish National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), p.146. Jordan (1997). Aisling Walsh, Song for a Raggy Boy (Fantastic Films, 2003); Patrick Galvin, Song for a Raggy Boy (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1991). Raftery, Suffer the Little Children, p.298. See http://www.offalyhistory.com/articles/160/1/Daingean-Reformatory-sentto/Page1.html (accessed February 2010). Ryan Report, Volume 1, Chapter 15. Patrick Galvin, Song for a Poor Boy (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1990). ‘Long Synopsis’ in ‘Production Notes for Song for a Raggy Boy’, unpublished and unpaginated, Irish Film Archive. See, for example, the reporting of boys kissing each other, Patrick Galvin, The Raggy Boy Trilogy (Dublin: New Island Books, 2002), p.169. Patrick Galvin, ‘On the Film ... Song for a Raggy Boy’, in ‘Production Notes for Song for a Raggy Boy’, unpublished and unpaginated. See also ‘Sun Shines on Galvin’s Raggy Boy’, Patrick Galvin interviewed by Ciaran Carty, Sunday Tribune 16 February 2003, p.3. ‘Long Synopsis’ in ‘Production Notes for Song for a Raggy Boy’.

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50 Eva Gore-Booth, ‘Comrades, to Con’, printed in The Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (London: Virago, 1987), p.128. 51 ‘Long Synopsis’ in ‘Production Notes for Song for a Raggy Boy’. 52 See note 24. 53 Though, as James M. Smith argues in his book-length study of the asylums, the State was ‘an active agent and willing partner in the operation of the nation’s Magdalen laundries’, James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p.47. 54 Patricia Burke Brogan, Eclipsed (Knockeven: Salmon Publishing, 1994), p.31. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 55 Mary Norris interviewed by Patsy McGarry, ‘Revisiting the Nightmare’, Irish Times, 5 October 2002. 56 James M. Smith takes issue with this film, arguing that women never gave birth in Magdalen Laundries and thus this is a conflation of the laundries with Mother and Baby homes, which were temporary homes for unwed mothers. See Smith (2007) p.224, note 12. 57 For a discussion on the founding of Magdalen asylums in the 18th century, as refuges to ‘rescue’ unmarried mothers or ‘penitent’ women, see Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.77–92; and in the 19th century, the establishment and running of convent asylums, pp.93–114. 58 Patsy McGarry, ‘Revisiting the Nightmare’, Irish Times, 5 October 2002. 59 Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford characterises the scene as one of ‘gothic horror’, objecting to the heavy-handed tone, in ‘“Our Nuns are Not a Nation”: Politicizing the Convent in Irish Literature and Film’, Éire-Ireland 41.2 (2006), 9–39; 27. 60 Aisling Walsh, Sinners (BBC Northern Ireland, 2002). 61 Gerry McCarthy, ‘Washing Catholic Ireland’s Dirty Laundry’, Sunday Times, 20 October 2002, pp.6–7; p.6. 62 For a discussion of the use of ballad in The Magdalene Sisters – in particular the priest’s song, which deals with incest and is thus both unsuitable for a wedding yet also an apt context for the rape that occurs, see James M. Smith (2007), pp.142–3, and Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford (2006), p.25. 63 Ryan Report, ‘Conclusions: Emotional Abuse’, Volume 5, number 43. 64 Mannix Flynn, ‘We can’t get on with our lives. It’s just not that easy’, Irish Times, 21 May 2009, p.14. 65 Emer O’Kelly, ‘The new Magdalene whitewash’, Sunday Independent, 15 September 2002. 66 Michael Dwyer, ‘School of Scandal’, Irish Times, 10 October 2003. 67 Barton (2004), p.145. 68 Sinéad O’Connor, Universal Mother (Chrysalis/EMI Records, 1994). 69 O’Connor’s song has been identified by Richard Haslam as a key use of the ‘child-nation motif’. See Richard Haslam, ‘A Race Bashed in the Face: Imagining Ireland as a Damaged Child’, ‘Special Issue: Ireland 2000’, Jouvert, 4.1 (1999), 1–28; 13. 70 Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Suffer Little Children? The Historical Validity of Memoirs of Irish Childhood’, Childhood and Its Discontents, eds. Joseph Dunne and James Kelly (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002), pp.69–106; p.102.

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71 Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘A world of pain laid bare’, Sunday Business Post, 31 May 2009. 72 Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford (2006), p.37. 73 This is thus why Smith’s argument that Sinners distorts the picture of the Magdalen Laundries is so important to acknowledge also. 74 Tom Dunne, ‘Penitents’, The Dublin Review, VI (Winter 2001–2), 74–82; 82. 75 The DVD in the United States, however, also includes the documentary ‘Sex in a Cold Climate’, enabling the viewer to confirm the reality of The Magdalene Sisters by watching real-life testimonies. 76 Also, see Smith for discussion of Gerard Mannix-Flynn’s extallation ‘“Call Me By My Name”: Requiem for Remains Unknown, 1899–1987’, which commemorated these Magdalen women whose graves were exhumed, their remains cremated, and reinterred at Glasnevin cemetery in 1993, and memorialised in St. Stephen’s Green in 1996, Smith (2007), pp.177–82. 77 Brogan’s speech was reported in ‘“Magdalen women” memorial unveiled’, Lorna Siggins, Irish Times, 11 March 2009. 78 Michael O’Brien described his experiences of abuse in St Joseph’s Industrial School in Clonmel on Newstalk Radio, and RTÉ’s Questions and Answers, on 25 May 2009. His comments on Questions and Answers were printed in full in the Irish Times, ‘Ex-Mayor tells of abuse’, 27 May 2009, p.9. O’Brien also decried the operation of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, arguing that he was treated as a ‘liar’ and interrogated when giving evidence. 79 Brian Cowen speaking in the Dáil, 11 June 2009. 80 Mary Raftery, No Escape, unpublished manuscript courtesy of The Abbey Theatre. 81 The membership of the committee includes Paddy Doyle and Bernadette Fahy as representatives of the survivors of abuse. The budget for the memorial is €500,000.

2 The Remembered Self: Irish Memoir, Past and Present Selves 1 Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody? The Life and Times of Nuala O’Faolain (Dublin: New Island Books, 1996) p.4. 2 The Late Late Show, RTÉ, broadcast 18 October 1996. 3 See O’Faolain’s ‘Afterword’ in which she discusses the public response to the book, pp.189–206. 4 Liam Harte, ed., Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), ‘Introduction’, p.1. 5 Edel Coffey, ‘The Sins of Our Writers’, Sunday Tribune, 17 March 2002. 6 Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes (London: Harper Collins, 1996), p.1. 7 McCourt (1996), p.390. 8 Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p.1. Further references to the memoir will be in parentheses in the text. 9 John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p.9. Further references to the memoir will be in parentheses in the text. 10 Nuala O’Faolain (1996), p.130. Further references to the memoir will be in parentheses in the text.

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11 Dermot Healy, The Bend for Home: A Memoir (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p.3. Further references to the memoir will be in parentheses in the text. 12 Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p.126. Further references to the novel will be in parentheses in the text. 13 Seamus Deane, quoted in ‘The Deane of Studies Faces Identity Crisis’, by Helen Meany, The Irish Times 10 September 1996. 14 Nuala O’Faolain, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (London: Michael Joseph, 2003), p.36. 15 O’Faolain (1996), p.102. 16 Nuala O’Faolain, quoted in ‘I Am Somebody: The Very Real Face of Nuala O’Faolain’, http://www.iol.ie/resource/ga/archive/1996/Nov28/news/17. html (accessed July 2009).

3 The Exiled Past: The Return of the Irish Emigrant 1 ‘The Quarrel’, 2003, directed by John Brown. This advert was the first of Guinness’s ‘Things That Matter’ campaign. 2 Mary Robinson, ‘“Cherishing the Irish Diaspora” Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas by President Mary Robinson, On a Matter of Public Importance’, 2 February 1995. Available on the Oireachtas website: http:// www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/addresses/2Feb1995.htm (accessed February 2010). 3 Eavan Boland, ‘The Emigrant Irish’, in The Journey and Other Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986). 4 Inauguration speech by President Mary McAleese, 11 November 1997. Available on the Áras an Uachtaráin website: http://www.president.ie/index. php?section=5&speech=6&lang=eng (accessed February 2010). 5 One public exploration of this issue was the Prime Time programme Ireland’s Forgotten Generation on the role of the Irish in London and the financial contribution they made to the Irish economy (RTÉ, 22 December 2003). 6 Mary P. Corcoran, ‘The Process of Migration and the Reinvention of Self: The Experiences of Returning Irish Emigrants’, Éire-Ireland, 37.1–2, (2002), 175–91; 176. 7 Matthew J. O’Brien, ‘Transatlantic Connections and the Sharp Edge of the Great Depression’, in New Directions in Irish American History, edited by Kevin Kenny (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p.91. 8 Piaras Mac Éinrí, ‘Some Recent Demographic Developments in Ireland’, Études Irlandaises, 21.1 (1997), 145–64; 152. See Jimmy Murphy’s play Picture of Paradise for an account of those who were still forced, despite the booming economy, to emigrate. Published in The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays, ed. Frank McGuinness (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). 9 Corcoran (2002), p.177. Of course, the economic conditions in Ireland have shifted again since 1998 and migration levels are returning to the pattern of higher emigration and lower immigration. As the CSO states, there has been a ‘resumption of net outward migration for the first time since 1995’. ‘Annual Population and Migration’, September 2009. Available at www.cso.ie. 10 In 1994 there were 362 people seeking asylum, in 1998 there were 4,626 people seeking asylum, and in 2002 11,634 people applied for asylum.

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12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Notes In 1991–1999 there were 344,700 immigrants to Ireland, and 282,100 emigrants from Ireland. Source: CSO, Dublin (www.cso.ie). Corcoran (2002), p.177. Over 67,000 former emigrants returned to Ireland between 1991–1996, with most returning to the greater Dublin area or the west, Richard C. Jones, ‘Multinational Investment and Return Migration in the 1990s: A County Level Analysis’, Irish Geography 36.2 (2003), p.157. Corcoran (2002), p.179. Ireland underwent what some have called a ‘social revolution’ causing difficulties for returnees. See Mac Einrí for an overview. Corcoran (2002), pp.189–90. Corcoran (2002), p.178. Fiona McCann, ‘There’s no place like home’, The Irish Times, 24 February 2007, Saturday Magazine section. Breda Gray, ‘Breaking the Silence: Emigration, gender and the making of Irish cultural memory’, University of Limerick, Department of Sociology Working Paper Series, Working Paper WP2003–02, 20 pages, see p.8. Corcoran (2002), p.178. Robinson, ‘Cherishing the Irish Diaspora’. In the film adaptation of Keane’s play, the outsider figure is re-imagined as an Irish-American. The Field, directed by Jim Sheridan (Granada Television and Sovereign Pictures, 1990). Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997). Colm Toibin, Brooklyn (London: Viking, 2009). See also, for example, Mary Lavelle by Kate O’Brien (London: Virago, 2006; 1936), Edna O’Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss (London: Phoenix, 2007; 1964), and John McGahern’s Amongst Women (London: Faber, 1990). Barbara Freitag discusses the trope of return in Irish literature, but almost none of the characters she identifies as returnees are central characters. See Freitag, ‘Come Back to Erin? The Returned Emigrant in Anglo-Irish Literature’, Journal of Irish Literature, 21.3 (1992), 34–48. Many of the same issues of integration pertain for these new immigrant groups also, as represented in recent drama such as Hurl, written by Charlie O’Neill and produced by Barabbas in 2003. This is in contrast to the real-life returnees who find that after a year they settle back into Ireland, see Corcoran (2002), pp.178–9. Dermot Bolger, The Lament for Arthur Cleary (London: Methuen, 2000), p.17. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke, I Could Read the Sky (London: Harvill Press, 1997), p.93. O’Grady and Pyke, p.150. Anne Devlin After Easter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p.28. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. Tom Murphy, The Wake (London: Methuen, 1999), p.76. Tom Murphy, The House (London: Methuen, 2000), pp.101–2. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. Declan Hughes, Shiver (London: Methuen, 2003), p.5. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Reviews’, The Irish Times, 1 April 2003. Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Ex-Isle of Erin: Emigration and Irish Culture’, in Location and Dislocation in Contemporary Irish Society: Emigration and Irish

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Identities, edited by Jim Mac Laughlin (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997), pp.158–78; p.169.

4 Embodied Memory: Performing the 1980–1 Hunger Strikes 1 For a discussion of commemorative strategies in relation to Bloody Sunday, see Brian Conway’s book-length study Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: Pathways of Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 2 Bobby Sands was MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Kieran Doherty TD for Cavan-Monaghan. Both men were elected while on hunger strike in 1981. 3 Bill Rolston, Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1991), p.79. 4 ‘Strike at the Heart’, Mic Moroney, Magill, October 2001, 46–9; 47. Moroney notes that the commemorations of the strike were ‘far more muted’ in Dublin than in Belfast (47). 5 Anne Devlin, Ourselves Alone (London: Faber, 1986), p.39. 6 Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p.174. 7 The work was first exhibited at the British School at Rome and later at the show ‘From Beyond the Pale’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994. It has also been included in exhibitions in London, Los Angeles and Mexico City and is now in the collection of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. 8 Some Mother’s Son, directed by Terry George from a script by George and Jim Sheridan (Castle Rock Entertainment, 1996). 9 H3, directed by Les Blair, written by Laurence McKeown and Brian Campbell (Metropolitan Films, 2001). 10 Moroney (2001), 48. 11 Silent Grace, written and directed by Maeve Murphy (Crimson Films, 2001). 12 Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen, from a script by McQueen and Enda Walsh (Blast! Films, 2008). 13 Lee Henry, ‘Chronicles of Long Kesh’, 18 December 2008, available at: http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/article.aspx?art_id=2417 (accessed February 2010). 14 Mike Casey, Review of Some Mother’s Son, Film Ireland, August/September 1996, 35. 15 McKeown’s background is mentioned in every article and review of the film, and is prominently discussed in the film’s ‘Production Notes’, unpublished, Irish Film Archive. 16 See the interviews with Steve McQueen, Laura Hastings-Smith and Robin Gutch, DVD Extras, Hunger. 17 Interview with Steve McQueen, DVD Extras, Hunger. 18 Silent Grace was filmed on location in Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol. 19 Maeve Murphy, interviewed by Donald Clarke, ‘Grace Under Pressure’, Irish Times, 2 July 2004, C6. 20 Richard Hamilton’s piece ‘The citizen’ was created in response to the World in Action 1980 documentary on the prison protests. It now belongs to Tate Gallery, London.

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21 Marie Gavagan, interviewed by Marina Cantacuzino, ‘The forgotten protestors’, Guardian, 9 February 2004. 22 Mary Corcoran, Out of Order: The Political Imprisonment of Women in Northern Ireland 1972–1998 (Devon; Portland: Willan Publishing, 2006), p.178; p.179. 23 Allen Feldman comments on this distinction between the cell as a relatively safe and private zone, versus the dangerous public spaces where prison officers had total control, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.209. 24 As McKeown says in relation to writing H3: ‘we have made the staff more humane than was the case’ in the interest of representing the ‘human element’ of the guards. Interview with Laurence McKeown, Brian Campbell and Les Blair, ‘A World in 10’ x 8’’, Tony Keily and Mark Venner, Film Ireland, October/November 2001, 24–6; 25. 25 There is also an attempt at balance by representing one of the riot prison guards as young and upset at the brutal implementation of the mirror search and forced washing – this scene is extremely affecting because of its violence and lack of humanity. However, it fails entirely in its attempt to make the guard a sympathetic figure, his tears at the conflict in no way parallel what is going on. This is by far the least successful element of the film. 26 See Andy White, ‘Those Riverdance feet’, Irish Times 25 September 1996, 14. 27 Martin Lynch, Chronicles of Long Kesh, unpublished script, p.38. All further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 28 Jason Solomons interview with Laura Hastings-Smith, DVD Extras, Hunger. 29 David Beresford, Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (London: Harper Collins, 1987), p.33. 30 Guy Westwell, ‘Silent Grace’, Sight and Sound, March 2004, 60. 31 H3 ‘Production Notes’, p.2, Irish Film Archive. 32 In this flashback sequence, Hunger shows circling birds, flying up from the treetops, perhaps an oblique reference to the lark twisted and imprisoned in barbed wire familiar in Sands’ drawings and writings, and from murals. For an example of this image used in a Belfast mural, see Rolston (1991), p.82. 33 Margaret Thatcher, quoted in David Beresford (1987), p.275. 34 Corcoran (2006), p.171. 35 As Bobby Sands says in H3, it is ‘our only option’. 36 Fintan O’Toole, ‘“Hunger” fails to wrest the narrative from the hunger strikers’, Irish Times, 22 November 2008, B8. This view is reinforced by Maud Ellmann’s book on anorexia and fasting, which also considers the 1981 hunger strike, see Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artsists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 37 In these reviews the film’s story is ascribed to 1981: ‘Dirty War’, Irish Times, 2 July 2004, C9; ‘Silent Grace’, Sight & Sound, March 2004, 60; ‘Silent Grace’, Film Ireland, July/August 2004, 34. While Donald Clarke sets the film in ‘the early 1980s’, ‘Grace Under Pressure’, Irish Times, 2 July 2004, C6. 38 Martin Lynch, quoted by Henry (2008). 39 Part of ‘Billy’s Museum’ and the Keeper installation can be viewed at: http:// www.lit.ie/dunsmore/LONGK/billy.htm (accessed February 2010). 40 McGrath’s work can also be compared to Donovan Wylie’s photographic exploration of the Maze site, many of the images from which are published in The Maze, Donovan Wylie and Louise Purbrick (London: Granta Books,

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2004). Wylie’s work also documents the destruction of the Maze and his later 2008 exhibition as part of ‘Belfast Exposed’ shows the reintegration of the prison spaces with the outside world (http://www.belfastexposed.org/ exhibitions/index.php?show=past&year=2000&exhibition=69). One current possibility for the future of the Maze prison site is as a centre for conflict and reconciliation. 41 Hugh Linehan, ‘Making a good story of the North’, Irish Times, 28 July 2001, B5. 42 Steve McQueen interviewed by Donald Clarke, ‘It’s just a film … that’s all it is’, Irish Times, 1 November 2008, B6.

5 In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War 1 Fran Brearton, The Great War in Irish Poetry: W.B. Yeats to Michael Longley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.4. 2 Keith Jeffery, ‘Irish Prose Writers of the First World War’, in Modern Irish Writers and the Wars, ed. Kathleen Devine (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999) 1–17; p.2. 3 Brearton (2003), p.35. 4 See www.shotatdawncampaginirl.org (accessed February 2010). 5 See, for example, David Fitzpatrick, ed., Ireland and the First World War (Dublin: Trinity History Workshop, 1986); Philip Orr, The Road to the Somme: Men of the Ulster Division Tell Their Story (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1987); Terence Denman, Ireland’s Unknown Soldiers: The 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1992); Myles Dungan, Irish Voices from the Great War (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995); Thomas P. Dooley, Irish Men or English Soldiers? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995); Thomas Hennessey, Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition (London & New York: Routledge, 1998); Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). In 2005 Sebastian Barry pays tribute to many of these works as ‘pioneering’, stating that A Long Long Way ‘could not have been written without them’, Barry, ‘Acknowledgments’, A Long Long Way (London: Faber, 2005). These kinds of factual histories are necessary precursors for the imaginative remembrance of the war by those who do not have first-hand experience. 6 Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme in Frank McGuinness: Plays One (London: Faber, 1996), p.97. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 7 See Neil Jarman’s discussion of the different types of Orange parade in Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1997), pp.116–17. 8 For a comparative discussion of this issue, see Guy Beiner, ‘Between Trauma and Triumphalism: The Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Crux of Deep Memory in Modern Ireland’, Journal of British Studies, 46.2 (2007), 366–89. 9 Beiner (2007), 380. Fran Brearton also argues that this is a ‘grossly exaggerated’ story, see Brearton (2003), p.32. 10 Christina Reid, Tea in a China Cup in Christina Reid: Plays One (London: Methuen, 1997), p.24. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text.

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11 Christina Reid, My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name? in Christina Reid: Plays One (London: Methuen, 1997), p.257. Andy and Andrea’s competing answers can be further added to: the website of the South Belfast Friends of the Somme Association list the reason for the short trousers as being because of the heat in July in France. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 12 Brearton (2003), p.175. 13 For a discussion of the decline in Orange Order membership see Jarman (1997), pp.94–5. However, Jarman is clear in pointing out that membership of the Orange Order is still politically important and Orange marches still a central part of Unionist culture. 14 Frank McGuinness, ‘Introduction’, Frank McGuinness: Plays One (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p.x. 15 Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom (London: Methuen, 1996), p.vii. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 16 In fact, Barry re-names his great-grandfather from John Dunne to Thomas Dunne. See Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford, ‘Colonial Policing: The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty’, Éire-Ireland 39.3–4 (Fall/ Win 2004), 11–37; 14. 17 R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), p.472. George Boyce, The Sure Confusing Drum: Ireland and the First World War (University College of Swansea, 1993). 18 Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark, Taking Stock: The Theatre of Max Stafford Clark (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007), p.194. Of course there is another version of the Presidential story, that Robinson did indeed come backstage, but said instead ‘It’s not really the sort of play you can talk about … you don’t mind if I just go home?’, Donal McCann quoted by Barry, The Steward, p.xv. 19 Roberts and Stafford-Clark (2007), p.193. 20 For more on Dunne’s role in the Lockout see Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford’s discussion of the play, Cullingford (2004), 15. 21 Max Stafford-Clark, in Roberts and Stafford-Clark, p.189. 22 Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: From Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.244. 23 Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way (London: Faber, 2005), p.21. Further references to the novel will be in parentheses in the text. 24 There are moments when the Irish political oppositions within the army come to the surface, as in the boxing match between the Ulsterman William Beatty and the Southerner Miko Cuddy. The match starts out antagonistically, with each side of supporters trying to outdo each other and a ‘brief melée of soldiers, broken up quickly by some watchful NCOs’ (197). Typically, Willie is not directly involved and reports the ‘pungent remarks’ with some objectivity. Moreover the narrative retreats away from this un-sanctioned violence quickly, back towards a general consensus and ‘horror-struck happiness’. Tellingly, however, it is the southerner, Cuddy, who wins the bout ‘against all the odds’ (199). 25 John Cowan, interviewed by Eddie Doyle, Sunday Business Post, 23 October 1994, ‘Agenda’, p.26. 26 Grene (1999), p.258.

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27 Mary McAleese, speech, ‘Messines Peace Tower, Belgium, 11 November, 1998’, available at www.president.ie/index.php?section=5&speech=172 &lang=eng (accessed February 2010). 28 The Irish National War Memorial at Islandbridge was built in the 1930s, but not officially opened until 1994. Its placement at Islandbridge, on the outskirts of Dublin, aptly illustrates the marginalisation of remembrance of the Great War in Irish culture and society. For a discussion of this, see Jane Leonard, pp.99–114; and Anne Rigney, ‘Divided Pasts: A Premature Memorial and the Dynamics of Collective Remembrance’, Memory Studies, vol. 1 (2008), 89–97. Leonard, ‘The Twinge of Memory: Armistice Day and Remembrance Day Sunday in Dublin since 1919’, in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds) Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1996). 29 Brearton (2003), p.35; p.30. 30 Jarman (1997), p.130. 31 This ban is in response to protests by the Garvaghy Road Residents Association and is imposed by the Parades Commission, which was established in 1997. The ban has resulted in dramatic and protracted stand-offs near Drumcree Church as Orangemen insist on their right to parade down the road. 32 Harvey Cox, quoting one Orange protestor, ‘Keeping Going: Beyond Good Friday’, The Long Road to Peace in Northern Ireland: Peace Lectures from the Institute of Irish Studies at Liverpool University (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp.153–68; p.153. 33 The Democratic Unionist Party argued to have the Parades Commission abolished, while Sinn Féin insisted on its retention. 34 Brian Cowen, ‘A Decade of Commemorations Commemorating Our Shared History’. Speech by An Taoiseach, Mr Brian Cowen TD, Institute for British-Irish Studies, UCD, 20 May 2010. Available at www.taoiseach.gov.ie (accessed May 2010).

6 Haunted Pasts: Exorcising the Ghosts of Irish Culture 1 Bertie Ahern, Speech at the Opening of Croppies’ Acre Memorial Gardens, 22 November 1998. Reported in ‘Croppies’ Acre is dedicated by Taoiseach as a 1798 memorial’, Alison O’Connor, Irish Times 23 November 1998, p.14. 2 See Gemma Reid, ‘Redefining Nation, Identity and Tradition: The Challenge for Ireland’s National Museums’, in Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) pp.205–22; p.211. 3 The history of 1798 is still a contested history, see for example: Kevin Whelan, The Fellowship of Freedom: United Irishmen and 1798 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998). Whelan’s narrative of 1798 is broadly in line with the Irish government’s emphasis of unity and non-sectarian ideals in the United Irishmen. For reactions against this narrative see, for example, R.F. Foster, ‘Remembering 1798’, in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Tom Dunne, Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2004). 4 Anthony Roche, ‘Ghosts in Irish Drama’, More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, eds. Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha (New York; London: Greenwood Press, 1991) pp.41–66; p.63.

184

Notes

5 Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.263. 6 Marina Carr, The Mai in Marina Carr: Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) p.182. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 7 Marine Carr, Portia Coughlan in Marina Carr: Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.255. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 8 As Colin Davis argues, the only thing greater than the fear of ghosts is the fear that we have been deserted by the dead. See Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.158–9. 9 Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats… in Marina Carr: Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.276. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 10 Conor McPherson, The Weir in Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004), p.24. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text. 11 Clare Wallace, Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity & Citation in 1990s New Drama (Prague: Literraria Pragensia, 2006), p.67. 12 See Vic Merriman for a discussion of the disjuncture between Irish drama and reality, in ‘Decolonisation Postponed: The Theatre of Tiger Trash’, Irish University Review Autumn/Winter 1999 (29.2): 305–17. 13 Davis (2007), p.3. 14 See Kathleen Brogan for a discussion of ghosts as an ‘imaginative recuperation of the past’, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1998) p.4. 15 Davis (2007), pp.2–3. Davis also uses the trope of carnivalesque to illustrate the temporary suspension of normal rules in order that these rules be reconfirmed at the end of the haunting. 16 Morash (2002), p.259. 17 Into the West, directed by Mike Nichols, from a script by Jim Sheridan (Channel Four Films, 1992). 18 Stewart Parker, Pentecost in Plays Two (London: Methuen, 2000), p.200. Further references to the play will be in parentheses in the text.

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Index Abbey Theatre, 11, 21, 50, 147 abortion referendums, 156 Ahern, Bertie, 14–15, 18–19, 22–3, 27, 51, 149, 152–3, 172 n.24 alienation, 80 amnesia, 15, 22, 71, 129, 140, 142, 145, 153 Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), 139 anti-nostalgia, 7–11, 43–5, 54ff., 65, 77, 95, 98 Armagh, 103 Armagh prison, 102, 105, 108, 114, 120, 122 Arnold, Mavis Children of the Poor Clares, 19 Artane Industrial School, 21, 50–1 Ascendancy, 93 Ashe, Thomas, 101 asylum see political asylum audience, role of, 4, 10, 14, 25, 41, 43, 48, 50–1, 63, 88, 112, 121, 142, 164 autobiography, chapter 2 passim Barry, Sebastian, 128, 140–5, 181 n.5 A Long Long Way, 128, 140–5, 146 Prayers of Sherkin, 140 The Secret Scripture, 140 The Steward of Christendom, 128, 140–7 Barton, Ruth, 31, 45–6, 171 n.15 BBC, 20, 36, 139 BBC Northern Ireland, 39 Beadle, J.P., 137 Beiner, Guy, 181 n.8 Belfast, 103, 105 Belfast Agreement (1998), 149 Bellaghy, 105 ‘Big House’, 93 Black, Cathal Our Boys, 19 Blair, Les, 104

H3, 104, 105, 108, 109–10, 114ff., 118, 120 ‘Blanket Protest’, chapter 4 passim ‘Bloody Sunday’ (1972), 100 Boland, Eavan, 79 Bolger, Dermot, 83–7, 97 A Dublin Quartet, 84 In High Germany, 97 A Lament for Arthur Cleary, 83–7, 90, 91, 93, 96 The Parting Glass, 97 Bourke, Sean, 32 Bowen, Elizabeth, 54 Boyce, George, 140 Boyne, battle of, 131ff. Boy’s Town orphanage (USA), 21 Brearton, Fran, 127, 149 Brogan, Patricia Burke, 20, 36–43, 48, 49 Eclipsed, 20, 36–43, 48 Brown, Terence, 148 Bruce, Nichola, 83, 86, 98 I Could Read the Sky, 83, 86–7, 90, 93, 96, 98 Buckley, Christine, 25 Burton, Joan, 173 n.24 Butler-Cullingford, Elizabeth, 46–7, 175 n.59 Byrne, Gay, 53 Campbell, Brian The Laughter of Our Children, 105 ‘Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire’, 84 Cardiff, Jack, 1 Carr, Marina, 154–60 By the Bog of Cats, 155–60, 165, 166, 167 The Mai, 155–7, 165 Portia Coughlan, 155–60, 165 ff. Casey, Mike, quoted 107 catharsis, 24–5, 48, 145, 170 Cavan, 69–70, 76 ceasefire, see Peace Process 195

196

Index

Celtic Tiger, 11, 43, 54–6, 80, 94, 97, 99 child abuse, 2, 4, 13, chapter 1 passim, 162, 167, 169 childhood, 3, 45, chapter 2 passim Christian Brothers, 19ff. civil rights, 113 Civil War (Ireland), 15 Clinic, The (RTÉ), 163 Cold War, 31 Collins Barracks, 128, 152ff. commemoration/memorialisation, 1, 3, 9–10, 49–51, chapter 5 passim, 152ff., 170 Commission of Investigation (Dublin archdiocese) see Murphy Report Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 4, 19ff., 43–4, 176 n.78 Constitution, Irish, 18–19, 172 n.24 Corcoran, Mary, 109, 120 Cork Film Festival, 47 Cowan, John, 147–8 Cowen, Brian, 23, 50, 150 Croppies’ Acre, 152 ff., 168 cultural identity, 6, 8, 79ff., 133–4, 136, 138 culture and remembrance, 4–6, 8, 13, 15–16, 20, 47, 98, 150 culture as resistance, 110 Dáil Éireann, 23, 152 Daingean Reformatory, 32 Daly, Mary, 9 ‘Darkest Corner’ play series, 20, 50–1 Davis, Colin, 166, 184 n.8 Dead Poets Society, 36 Deane, Seamus, 54, 71–3, 76 Reading in the Dark, 54, 71–3, 75, 76 Derry, 103, 105 de Valera, Éamon, 6, 141 Devlin, Anne, 83, 87ff., 103 After Easter, 83, 87–91, 96, 98, 99 Ourselves Alone, 103 Diaspora, 8, 9, 78ff., 99 Dictionary of Irish Biography, 54 ‘Dirty Protest’, chapter 4 passim documentary theatre, 50–1 Doherty, Kieran, 101, 179 n.2

Dolan, Anne, 172 n.25 Dowling, Joe, 12 Doyle, Paddy 19, 172 n.6, 176 n.81 The God Squad, 19 Drennan, Mary You May Talk Now, 20 Dublin Catholic Archdiocese, 22 Dublin Municipal Library, 148 Duff, Ann-Marie, 39, 40 Dunne, Thomas, 140ff. Dunne, Tom, 48 Dunne, Willie, 140ff. Dunsmore, Amanda Billy’s Museum, 123–4 Dwyer, Michael, 44–5 Easter 1916 see Rising Education, Department of, 19ff., 26, 44 Ellmann, Maud, 180 n.36 ‘Emerald Gems of Ireland’, 43 emigration, 2, 4, chapter 3 passim Ervine, David, 123 exile, 4, 58, chapter 3 passim, 97 exorcism, 16–17, 35, 89, chapter 6 passim Fahy, Bernadette, 176 n.81 fairies, 160–5 Famine, Great Boston memorial, 9 commemoration of, 8–11, 14, 46, 58, 79 commodification of, 10 Fassbender, Michael, 106 feminism, 67 Ferriter, Diarmaid, 21, 46 Fianna Fáil, 15 Fine Gael, 15 Fitzgerald, Michael, 101 Flanagan, Mgr Edward, 21 Flynn, Mannix, 19, 23, 27, 44, 50–1, 173 n.6, 176 n.76 James X, 50–1 Nothing to Say, 19 Padded Cell and Other Stories, 51 Ford, John, 1, 82 The Quiet Man, 82 Young Cassidy, 1–2

Index Foster, R.F., 140 Foucault, Michel, 120 French Revolution, 6 Friel, Brian, 7, 11–13, 82, 86, 154 Dancing at Lughnasa, 11–13, film of 12 Faith Healer, 86, 154 The Loves of Cass McGuire, 82 Phildelphia, Here I Come!, 82 Translations, 7 Gaelic Revival, 6 Gallery of Photography, 2 Gallipoli, 128 Galvin, Patrick Song for a Raggy Boy, 20, 32–6 Gate Theatre, 12 George, Terry, 104 Some Mother’s Son, 104–7, 108, 111, 112, 115–16, 117, 119 Getty Images, 1–2 ghosts, 16, 117, 129–30, 139ff., chapter 6 passim Gibbons, Luke, 104 Gillespie, Rowan, 10 Glen, Iain, 33 Glenroe (RTÉ), 163 Goldenbridge Orphanage, 25, 50–1 Good Friday Agreement, 122ff., 149, 172 n.24 Gore-Booth, Eva, 36 ‘Great War’ see World War 1 Gregory, Lady Kathleen ni Houlihan, 6 Grene, Nicholas, 142, 148 Guinness, 78 Hamilton, Hugo, 54, 66, 67, 74, 75, 76 The Sailor in the Wardrobe, 54 The Speckled People, 54, 55, 59–62, 67, 74 ff. Hamilton, Richard, 109, 179 n.20 Harte, Liam, 54 Hartmann, Erich, 2 Haslam, Richard, 175 n.69 Hastings-Smith, Laura, 113 H-Blocks see Maze prison

197

Healy, Dermot, 54, 68–71, 75, 76, 86 The Bend for Home, 54, 68–71, 74, 75, 76–7 Heaney, Seamus, 95 High Park Convent, 49 history as images, 2 as trauma, 151 homecomings, 79, 91–3 Home Rule, 128, 134, 143 Hughes, Declan Shiver, 83, 94–5 Hughes, Francis, 102, 105 Hume, John, 124 hunger strikes, 5, chapter 4 passim iconography, 103 insecurity, 94, 97–8 see also uncertainty, instability instability, 86 see also uncertainty, insecurity Institute for British-Irish Studies, 150 institutional abuse, chapter 1 passim internment, 100 IRA, chapter 4 passim Irish Film Archive, 1 Irish Financial Services Centre, 10 Irish Life Writing Archive, 54 Irish Literature Prize, 55 Irish Museum of Modern Art, 179 n.7 Irish National War Memorial, 15, 128ff., 149, 183 n.28 Irishness, 79 Irish Times, 1–2, 53, 55 International Fiction Prize, 55 Jarman, Neil, 149, 181 n.7 Jeffery, Keith, 127 Johnson, Richard, 21, 50–1 The Evidence I Shall Give, 21, 50–1 Jones, Robert, 12 Jordan, Neil The Butcher Boy, 20, 27–32 July Twelfth, 135, 146, 149–50 Kavanagh, John, 40 Keane, John B. The Field, 82, 178 n.20 Kelleher, Margaret, 9

198

Index

Kennedy Report (1970), 21, 24 Kerry Babies case, 156 Kiang, Tanya, 2 Kilmainham Gaol, 1 King, Martin Luther, 113 Laffoy, Judge Mary, 23 Landscape, 43, 65, 78, 95, 98, 119, 154ff., 167–70 Laskey, Heather Children of the Poor Clares, 19 Late Late Show (RTÉ), 52–3, 55 Leersen, Joep, 171 n.13 Lentin, Louis, 20 Dear Daughter, 20, 25–7, 45 Letterfrack Industrial School, 50–1 Limerick, 57ff. liminality, 154, 163 Linehan, Hugh, 124 Literary Revival, 6, 8 Lockout (Dublin, 1913), 141, 143 Long Kesh see Maze prison Lovett, Ann, 156 Lynch, Martin, 104, 122–3 Chronicles of Long Kesh, 104, 106, 110 ff., 114, 118, 122 McAleese, Mary, 79, 149 McCabe, Pat, 20, 27–32 The Butcher Boy, 20, 27–32, 43 film of, 20, 27–32 McCann, Donal, 182 n.18 McCarthy, Conor, 6, 171 n.9 McCourt, Frank, 46, 66, 74, 75 Angela’s Ashes, 46, 54, 56–9 film of Angela’s Ashes, 55, 58–9 Teacher Man, 54 ’Tis, 54 McCreesh, Raymond, 102 McElwee, Tom, 105 McGahern, John, 54, 62–6, 74, 75, 76, 178 n.23 Amongst Women, 178 n.23 Memoir, 54, 62–5, 74, 75 McGrath, Dara, 123–4 Deconstructing the Maze, 123

McGuinness, Frank Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, 128, 129–35, 137, 139, 146, 147–8, 150 McGuinness, Martin, 124 McGuire, Martin, 21 McKeown, Laurence, 105, 179 n.15, 180 n.24 The Laughter of Our Children, 105 MacLaverty, Bernard Grace Notes, 82–3 McPherson, Conor, 154, 160–5 The Seafarer, 164 Shining City, 164 The Weir, 160–3, 164 ff., 169 McQueen, Steve, 104, 106, 126 Hunger, 104, 106, 107, 111, 113, 114, 115–17, 118–19, 120ff. 126 McSorley, Gerard, 117 MacSwiney, Terence, 100–1 Madonna House Report (1996), 21 Magdalen laundries, 20, 24, 27, 36–43, 48, 49 Magdalen Memorial plaque, 49 Mahon Tribunal, 15–16, 172 n.26 Martin, Micheál, 27 martyrs/martyrdom, 6, 100, 117, 133 see also sacrifice Mason, Patrick, 12 Maze prison, chapter 4 passim Meaney, Gerardine, 21 Medea, 158 media in Ireland, 55ff. mediation, 4, 11, 54, 61, 107, 133 memoir, 4, chapter 2 passim and fiction, 71–3 memorialisation see commemoration memory as identity, chapter 2 passim, 89, 98–9 communal, 131, 166 and ethical remembering, 4, 13–15, 20, 23, 51, 153, 167, 170 and Ireland, Introduction passim and narrative, 87 as trauma, 166–7 tyranny of, 145ff. Mercier, Paul Homeland, 93–4 Merriman, Vic, 184 n.12

Index Messines (Belgium), 128, 149 ‘misery literature/memoir’, 46 Molloy, M.J. The Wood of the Whispering, 82 Morash, Christopher, 154, 167 mothers, 75–6, 156 Mullan, Peter, 20, 36–7, 47–8 The Magdalene Sisters, 20, 36–48 Murphy, Jimmy Picture of Paradise, 177 n.8 Murphy, Joseph, 101 Murphy, Maeve, 104 Silent Grace, 104, 105–6, 107, 108–9, 110 ff., 114–16, 117, 122 Murphy Report, 22ff., 47, 169 Murphy, Tom, 82, 83 Conversations on a Homecoming, 82 A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant, 82 The House, 83, 91–3, 98 The Wake, 83, 90–1, 99 Murphy, Judge Yvonne, 22 myth/mythology, 74, 93, 103, 124, 127, 132, 155, 157, 163, 168 instability of, 133, 138 naming, 139ff. Napier, Philip, 103–4 narrative/narration, 2, 6, 15, 24, 28, 46, 53ff., 68, 81, 85, 128, 143, 151, 166, 169 and memory, 87 National Graves Association, 152 National Library, 153 National Museum, 14–15, 128, 152 National 1798 Commemoration Committee, 152 Nichols, Mike Into the West, 154, 167–70 Nora, Pierre, 6 Northern Ireland, 5, 8, 14, 71–3, 87, 89, chapter 4 passim Northern Ireland Assembly, 150 nostalgia, 7–8, 11, 31, 65, 80, 98 Obama, Barack, 113 Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 32 O’Brien, Edna Girls in Their Married Bliss, 178 n.23

199

O’Brien, Kate Mary Lavelle, 178 n.23 O’Brien, Michael, 49 O’Casey, Sean 1, 54 O’Connor, Frank, 54 O’Connor, Pat 8, 12 Circle of Friends, 8 Dancing at Lughnasa, 12 O’Connor, Sinéad, 31, 46 Ó Criomhthain, Tomás An tOileánach, 54 O’Donoghue, Sr Helena, 26 O’Faolain, Nuala, 52–5, 65–8, 72, 74, 75–6 Almost There, 54, 67–8 Are You Somebody?, 52–3, 65–8, 74, 75–6 Office of Public Works, 152 O’Flynn, Sunniva, 1 Ó Gráda, Cormac, 10 O’Grady, Timothy, I Could Read the Sky, 83, 86 O’Hara, Patsy, 102 O’Keeffe, Batt, 22 O’Kelly, Emer, 44 Old Limerick Journal, 32 O’Neill, Charlie Hurl, 178 n.24 oral memory, 5, 75, 81 Orangeism/Orange Order, 131, 134–6, 139, 149–50, 182 n.13 Ordnance Survey, 7, 171 n.13 O’Riordan, Stephen The Forgotten Maggies, 48 O’Rourke, Timothy, 23 O’Rowe, Mark Terminus, 154 O’Sullivan, Eoin Suffer the Little Children, 21 O’Toole, Fintan, 95, 97, 121 Out of Joint theatre company, 140 Paisley, Revd Ian, 124 parades, 135, 139, 146, 149–50 Parades Commission, 183 n.31 Parker, Alan Angela’s Ashes, 55, 58 Parker, Stewart, 154, 167–70 Pentecost, 167–70

200

Index

past as trauma, 3, 5, 7, 14, 16, chapter 1 passim, 74, 131 and identity, 67 Peace Process, 14, 15, 124, 128, 148, 151, 153 Peacock Theatre, 20, 50–1 Pearse, Padraic, 100, 132, 135 Penal laws, 153 performance, 3–5, 49, 79, 85, 87, 93, chapter 4 passim political asylum, 80, 177–8 n.10 Presbyterians, 153 Presley, Elvis, 43 Prime Time (RTÉ), 20, 22, 177 n.5 Proclamation of Irish Republic (1916), 49, 172 n.24 Programme for Economic Expansion (1959), 80 Progressive Unionist Party, 123 Project Arts Centre, 50 Pure Mule (RTÉ), 163 Pyke, Steve, I Could Read the Sky, 83, 86 Queen’s University Belfast, 81 quest, 72, 76, 115, 119, 142 Quinn, Aidan, 33 Radio Telefís Éireann, 19, 20, 27, 42–3, 128 Raftery, Mary, 21, 24, 26, 50–1 No Escape, 50–1 Suffer the Little Children, 21 Rebellion (1798), 6, 8, 152–3 bicentenary of, 9 reconciliation, 135ff., 149, 151, 153 Redmond, John, 142 Reid, Christina, 128, 135–40 My Name, Shall I Tell You My Name?, 128, 135–40, 142, 145–6, 148 Tea in a China Cup, 128, 135–40 remembrance, Introduction passim, 20–25, 87 see also culture Republic of Ireland (1948), 15 Residential Institutions Redress Board, 19, 24 revenants, 154 Reynolds, Albert, 147

Reynolds, Br Michael, 22 Ricoeur, Paul, 14–15, 16 see also memory, ethical Rising (1916), 1–2, 6, 14, 100, 127, 132, 143, 149 ritual, 4, 146, 150–1 Riverdance, 7–8, 112, 171 n.14 Robinson, Mary, 3, 49, 78ff., 99, 141 Roche, Anthony, 154 Rooney, Hugh, 109 Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 142 Royal Irish Academy, 54 Ryan Report (Judge Sean Ryan), 21–4, chapter 1 passim, 169 sacrifice, 6–7, 116, 119, 124, 135ff. Sands, Bobby, chapter 4 passim, 179 n.2, 180 n.32 Sayers, Peig Peig, 54 Scarva, battle of, 131–2, 146 self, formation of, chapter 2 passim Sex in a Cold Climate (Channel 4), 37 Shankill Road (Belfast), 147 Sheridan, Jim, 8, 104, 178 n.20 My Left Foot, 8 Shure, Robert, 9 Simpson, Katy, 27 Sinn Féin, 104, 117, 147 Sisters of Mercy, 26 Smith, James, 30, 175 n.53, n.56 Smurfit, Norma, 9–10 Somme, battle of, 15, chapter 5 passim Somme Heritage Centre, 128, 132, 149–50 South Belfast Friends of the Somme Association, 182 n.11 Spring, Dick, 147 Springfield, Dusty, 43 Stafford-Clark, Max, 140ff. States of Fear (RTÉ), 19ff., 26–7, 42–3, 45 storytelling, 75 stream of consciousness, 69–70 Suffragettes, 101, 106, 117–18 Sunday Business Post, 147 supernatural, 5, 16, 72, 88

Index Survivors of Institutional Abuse Ireland, 49 Synge, J.M. The Playboy of the Western World, 21 television, role of, 36–43, 163 Thatcher, Margaret, 107, 118, 119–21, 139 ‘Tir na nÓg’, 167–70 Tóibín, Colm Brooklyn, 83 Tone, Wolfe, 152–3 tradition, 97–8, 150 trauma, 2–5, 14, chapter 1 passim as entropy, 16–17 and history, 8–9, 15, 43–5, 151 of loss/separation, 159, 165 and motherhood, 156 release of, 170 and remembrance, 14, chapter 2 passim of return, 82, 99 of war, 135ff. Treaty of Rome (1972), 172 n.24 Trimble, David, 124 Troubles (Northern Ireland), 14, 71–3 dramatisation of, 104–7 Tynan, Kathleen, 54 UDA, 118 Ulster Museum, 153 uncertainty, 62 Unionism, 127ff., 147

201

University College Cork, 81 University College Dublin, 54 Vanek, Joe, 12 Vatican, 23 victims/victimisation, 112–14, 124 Wallace, Clare, 162 Walsh, Aisling, 20, 32–6 Sinners, 20, 37, 43–4 Song for a Raggy Boy, 20, 32–6, 44 Walsh, Enda, 106 Washing Away the Stain (BBC), 36 Waters, John, 24 Westrell, Guy, quoted 116 Whelan, Bill, 112 Whelan, Kevin, 16 Wilkins, Mike, 49 women’s rights, 67 World War One, 5, 13, 15, chapter 5 passim World War Two, 59 Would You Believe? (RTÉ), 128 writing and memory, chapter 2 passim Wylie, Donovan, 180 n.40 X-case, 156 Yeats, W.B., 6, 54, 101, 154 Kathleen ni Houlihan, 6 The King’s Threshold, 101 Ypres, battle of, 143–4