Ireland's Heritages

Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity

Mark McCarthy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754640127
• eBook ISBN: 9781351926201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book is the first sustained attempt to incorporate critical scholarship and thought at the cutting edge of contemporary geography, history and archaeology into the burgeoning field of Irish heritage studies. It seeks to illustrate the validity of multiple depictions of the Irish past, showing how scrutiny of heritage practices and meanings is so essential for illuminating our understanding of the present. Examining Ireland's heritages from a critical perspective that celebrates notions of heterogeneity and uniqueness, the distinguished contributors to this book scrutinise the multiplicity of complex relations between heritage, history, memory, commemoration, economy, and cultural identity within various historical, geographical and archaeological contexts. Using several examples and case studies, this book raises issues not only from a uniquely Irish perspective, but also investigates the memorialisation and marketing of the Irish past in overseas locations such as the USA and Australia.

Part I
Commemoration and the Politics of Heritage

Chapter 2
Commemorative Heritage and the Dialectics of Memory

Guy Beiner¹

Ireland Ireland: ‘Theme-parks and Histories’ Revisited

In England England, the novelist Julian Barnes took contemporary critique of the 'heritage industry' to an extreme by envisaging an eccentric and ruthless entrepreneur who recreates and relocates all of England's cultural and historical treasures (including the royal family) to the Isle of Wight in order to produce the ultimate heritage project:

We are not talking theme park. . . We are not talking heritage centre...we are talking quantum leap... We shall offer far more than words such as Entertainment can possibly imply; even the phrase quality Leisure, proud though I am of it, perhaps in the long run, falls short. We are offering the thing itself.

Once the barriers between reality and make-believe are removed, 'authenticity' is rendered meaningless. Actors identify with their role with such empathy that they ultimately assume their character. Robin Hood engages in unlawful violence, smugglers are repeatedly caught with contraband and a quirky Samuel Johnson does not always prove to be a pleasant dinner guest. In planning the presentations, history is cleansed of complications so that the Celtic (alongside the queer) elements of British heritage are pedantically purged: 'the sub-Committee banned porridge for its Scottish associations... Welsh rarebit, Scotch eggs and Irish stew were not even discussed'. Nonetheless, a representative Schama-esque television historian demonstrates the profession's characteristic ability to adjust to new conditions by starting off as an expert advisor and ending up as a functionary, who provides patrons with vital biographical, genealogical and archival services. And what about poor old England? Left without its heritage, an impoverished and weakened Albion declines into a neo-Medieval rural society in which antiquarians claim to re-discover 'authentic' culture, while newcomers invent traditions (Barnes, 1998).

Several prominent heritage schemes in Ireland appear to be local examples of such aberrations of Plato's Cave, whereby replicas unashamedly purport to oust originals. The evacuated Great Blasket Island off the shore of county Kerry, which had sustained a vibrant Irish-speaking culture into modern times and inspired an impressive vernacular literature, was shamelessly offered for sale in 1987 (Kiberd, 1992, pp. 277-80). A redemptive initiative then sought to reclaim the site as a National Historic Park:

a place where the visitor will be brought into immediate contact with much that our European civilisation has half forgotten, a habitat in which the wild life of the western seaboard can continue to flourish and a historic monument to the genius of the Blasket writers and to the courage and tenacity of the people of the island.²

Nevertheless, cultural tourists who wish to explore first hand this iconic jagged landscape of Gaelic Ireland may find it difficult to actually visit the island. For the great majority, the informative audio-visual and pictorial exhibition at Ionad an Bhlascaoíd Mhoír, the interpretive centre at Dunquin – just over a stone's throw away on the mainland, will suffice. Similarly, day trippers to the Boyne Valley, who are pressed for time when visiting the World Heritage site at Newgrange, need not queue up to enter the megalithic tomb. Instead, they can experience a substitute recreation of the ancient burial chamber in the adjacent visitor's centre, where year-round the rays of an artificial solstice are guaranteed to shine (Thompson, 1998). In Dublin, a less successful attempt to lure away aficionados of traditional airs from the surviving havens of local live music in the Smithfield neighbourhood offered a multimedia experience at Ceol (music), where visitors could 'interact' with digital recordings of performing artists.³ In what is offhandedly labelled a post-modern era, it may seem that heritage obscures history by undermining the validity of meaningful cultural encounters with the historical past and substituting them with artificial and commercialised presentations.

Throughout the 1980s, prominent English critics vehemently denounced the flourishing of heritage projects (for example Hewison, 1987; Wright, 1985), which they understood to be a reactionary trend, a form of neo-traditionalism in the service of conservative politics. To an extent, this critique can be retrospectively historicised as part of a wider anti-Thatcherite discourse, which by now has run its course. Nonetheless, over a decade later, several noteworthy Irish historians revived this dismissive anti-heritage rhetoric in order to castigate the mushrooming of local interpretative centres. Particular criticism was directed towards Bord Failte (the Irish Tourist Board) for instigating the commodification, packaging and marketing of heritage as part of a deliberate 'strategy to interpret Ireland's history and culture for tourism' through a framework of themes and storylines (Boyce, 2001, pp. 257-8; Foster, 2001a, p. 24).⁴ Indeed, with tourism serving as a catalyst, the map of official heritage sites, which after 1989 benefited from fifty per cent of EU Structural Fund capital grant expenditure in the Republic of Ireland, has been substantially revamped. Though Bord Failte's Head of Development Planning and author of the Tourism Development Plan 1994-1999 maintained that 'attractions should be authentic, designed to enhance a genuine feature of the heritage of the area where they are developed' (Browne, 1994), critics emphatically insist that heritage, by its very essence, epitomises artificiality. However, this dogma has not kept abreast of developments in the burgeoning field of heritage studies, which have identified a hybrid intertwining of 'genuine' and 'authentic' that juxtaposes 'education and entertainment, scholarship and fun, both history and lifestyle, both getting an idea of the past and buying bygones'. Accordingly, it has been acknowledged that in many cases 'cultural tourists see beyond staged authenticity', or at least that there are 'heritage consumers who "both believe and don't believe" but who have come ready to suspend disbelief' (Hannabuss, 2000). Geographical analysis has argued that heritage serves to 'evoke and provoke diverse responses in our reading of the relationship with the past' (Johnson, 2000), while ethnographic observation reveals that cultural tourism to commercialised heritage centres does not necessarily imply passive reception of shallow interpretations and can in fact accommodate multiple and complex readings (MacDonald, 1997). Comprehensive evaluation of the many inherent conflicts in heritage management has concluded that, despite the 'dissonance of commercialisation', 'fun and enlightenment need not be contradictory experiences' (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996, pp. 264-5). Moreover, a comparative perspective suggests that Irish policy is in line with general developments in heritage management theory, which consciously aim for 'creative synergy between culture and enterprise' in order to allow educational programmes and exhibitions to benefit from 'equity audits and marketing', so that 'cultural tourism becomes simply life-enhancing rather than life-consuming, not a spectacle but an experience' (Fladmark, 2000).

Though the contemporary vogue for Irish heritage is evidently part of a worldwide heritage boom, it has been linked to insular debates on the relationship of academic and popular history. Recycling an earlier assertion that 'academic revisionism has coincided with popular revivalism' (Foster, 1983; Foster, 1993, p. 18), Roy Foster, the doyen of contemporary Irish historical revisionism, penned a caustic essay on 'Theme-parks and Histories' that posed the question:

why do we now see a boom in pop history, with a distinctive make-believe feel to it, and the revival of simplistic and fusty versions of the Story of Ireland, just at the point when it seemed that the analysis of Irish history had reached a new level of professionalism, impartiality and nuance? (Foster, 2001a, p. 33).

In particular, he observed that 'one of the sites where some very interesting historical "marketing" has been going on is the industry of commemoration' and called attention to 'the re-creation of "Ireland" by communal acts of remembering and celebration' (Foster, 2001a, pp. 23, 28). Within the wider context of heritage, this kind of activity can be labelled 'commemorative heritage'.

Encouraged by the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, the 1990s generated a spate of commemorative activities in Ireland, which reached an interim crescendo in the sesquicentenary anniversary of the Great Famine (marked in 1995-97), though this event was shortly later matched, if not surpassed, by the bicentenary commemoration of the Rebellion of 1798. Denounced for grossly simplifying and misrepresenting history, these large-scale exhibitions of commemorative heritage purportedly substituted the complexities of historical research with crass presentations of, what Mary Daly has termed, 'history à la carte' (Daly, 2003). Official commemoration of the Famine has not only been labelled 'bad history', but also 'bad memory', insofar as it evoked a 'collective memory' that is removed from documented 'folk memory' (Ó Gráda, 2001). In his acerbic critique of the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion, Tom Dunne lambasted the 'reduction of the rebellion to "heritage"' as a mindless transition from comóradh (commemoration) to ceiliúradh (celebration) (Dunne, 1998b). Once again, commemorative heritage was controversially described as an expression of 'dubious history', which falsified memory by stifling recalcitrant 'subaltern voices' that had been recalled as oral traditions in folk memory (Dunne, 1996; Dunne, 1998a).⁵ To quote Foster again, in 1998 commemoration allegedly functioned as a 'cardboard simulacrum' through which 'historical memory was bewilderingly recycled into spectator sport and tourist attraction' (Foster, 2001a, pp. 211-34; Foster, 2001b).

Commemorative heritage stands in the dock, accused doubly of commercialising and of selectively inventing, in other words, falsifying, history. According to this argument, memory deceptively manipulates and misrepresents the past. It follows that 'remembrance' in modern Ireland actually denotes forgetting! Compelling as it may seem, this conviction needs to be further qualified. A critical examination of the tangled relationships that intertwine commemoration, history and folk memory may serve to refocus, perhaps even revise, the categorical dismissal of heritage.

Reconstructing the Heritage of Collective Remembrance

In Siegfrid Lenz's perturbing and thought-provoking novel Heimatmuseum (1978), translated to English as The Heritage, a zealous curator of local historical and cultural treasures is confronted with sentimental nationalists, who wish to ethnically cleanse a multi-cultural past. He eventually torches his rare collection, concluding that he 'had no choice but to destroy the museum' even though it was the only one of its kind. Memory, however, persists in spite of the physical damage. Just as acts of damnatio memoraie in antiquity, which irreverently smashed statues and erased inscriptions, did not result in oblitio memoraie but actually signified 'a highly symbolic, universal display of pantomime forgetfulness' (Stewart, 1999, p. 167; Hedrick, 2000, pp. 88-130), heritage cannot simply be laid to rest:

The treasured finds have crumbled away, the traces have been obliterated. The past has received back what was its own to keep and what is has lent us for a while. But already memory has gone to work, searching, gathering evidence in the uncertain stillness of the no-man's land (Lenz, 1981, p. 458).

Memory does not merely preserve fragmented recollections of the past but first and foremost reconstructs them.

The study of memory has an illustrious pedigree and throughout time many of the great...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: COMMEMORATION AND THE POLITICS OF HERITAGE
• PART II: SPACES OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY
• PART III: HERITAGE, ECONOMY AND CONSTRUCTS OF IDENTITY
• Index