Competing Narratives of Irish Independence
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Date
2023
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Abstract
The present paper focuses on some of the most salient aspects involved in the rebranding of Irish national narratives of the 1916 Easter Rising between 1916 and 2016. In the Irish Republican nationalist tradition, the 1916 Easter Rising was a heroic stance of a few hundred brave men and women which came to be “regarded as the foundational event of the Irish Republic.”37 In the 1970s, however, the Southern establishment took to revising the national narrative. By the time the centenary came around in 2016, the Rising that had set Ireland on the course of war and eventual freedom from 750 years of British rule, was seen by many as essentially misguided, or outright wrong, unnecessary, and undemocratic. Perhaps, the most telling embodiment of the sensitive and inclusive approach of the Irish government to “all the different traditions” within North and South came in the form of the Remembrance Wall in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery.