Insurgent Memory and Narrative
People experience memories in the form of stories. Chapter 3 traces the ‘continuity of vision and action’ around which Irish republicans built their own account of history over two hundred years of militancy––how each new political incarnation and successive generation, each rooted in a different set of problems and contexts, wove their struggles into a cohesive, historical trajectory. And how discontinuity was blended into a closely guarded continuity. Meaningful schema of historical struggle are more persuasive to a population than an ideology served up cold. We chart the path from Wolfe Tone to Young Ireland to the Fenians and onto the IRB in the Easter Uprising and IRA in the Anglo-Irish civil war, and more recently the Provisional IRA.
