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CCBS Annual Talk at the John Hewitt Summer School – 27 July 2016 “How have we remembered 1916?” Catriona Crowe, Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland (Numbers in bold, highlighted text refer to Catriona Crowe’s slides, [to be on website soon].) The Decade of Centenaries lasts from 2012 to 2023, from the anniversary of the third Home Rule Bill and the Ulster Covenant to the end of the Civil War. We are now four years into it, and arguably just past the high point for a lot of people – the 1916 Rising. It seems like a good time to take stock of where we are and how it all has gone so far. In 2012 I said, “The decade of commemorations upon which we have embarked is capable of all kinds of uses, abuses, interpretations, misinterpretations, illuminations, mischiefs, sublime new understandings and ancient bad tempers.” And all of these have been in play over the last four years, but on balance we have had more sublime new understandings than ancient bad tempers. Let’s remind ourselves broadly what happened during these years: On our small island on the edge of a powerful continent, and next door to a large imperial power, we embarked in 1912 on a decade of diverse thought processes, activities and interactions, often diametrically opposed to one another, which resulted in outcomes as varied as the establishment of a modern highly defensive Unionism in the northern part of the country, the birth of a modern trade union movement, mass participation in the most murderous war yet seen in the world, the achievement of the franchise for some women, the creation of a founding myth for the southern state, involving heroism, hopelessness, high ideals and self-sacrifice, the elimination of the political party which had enjoyed overwhelming nationalist support for three decades, the creation of a new nationalist party whose roots spread in many different directions, the partition of the island into two separate states, a vicious civil war, and most importantly, the deaths of around 40,000 people, and injuries, often seriously disabling, to many more.
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