Abstract
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.
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Notes
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.
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).
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.
Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.263.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clare Wallace, Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity & Citation in 1990s New Drama (Prague: Literraria Pragensia, 2006), p.67.
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.
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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© 2011 Emilie Pine
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Pine, E. (2011). Haunted Pasts: Exorcising the Ghosts of Irish Culture. In: The Politics of Irish Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295315_7
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