The opening of the Island of Ireland Peace Tower at Messines in Belgium in 1998 marked a turning point in Irish remembrance of the first World War. The impulse behind the memorial was one of reconciliation. That impulse was, as Keith Jeffery observes, "wholly admirable", but the tower's construction was not without its problems: it was built with stone from an illegally demolished listed building in Ireland; it is a symbol of peace located on the site of an Irish victory; it is also a symbol which came too late for most Irish veterans of the Great War, but which used funds originally set aside for a memorial that would have been of some practical use to those veterans.
Jeffery's discussion of the Messines Peace Tower in Ireland and the Great War suggests that it is both a significant break with some of the constraints of the past and, in unexpected ways, a peculiarly appropriate and complex memorial for a country whose memory of the Great War remains deeply ambiguous. It is always easier to forget the details if to remember them unsettles precariously-held myths of origin and identity. Keith Jeffery is one of a handful of historians who have worked tirelessly in recent years against that tendency, who have tried to illuminate a "once shadowy corner of Ireland's modern history". Ireland and the Great War seeks to synthesise that recent historical research and bring it to a wider audience. Jeffery examines recruitment in Ireland, and the experience of the war (which includes a polemical and stimulating discussion of the Easter Rising). He also discusses some of the cultural responses to the war, particularly in art and music, and the problems of commemoration from the post-war years to the present day.
Through these explorations, Jeffery makes an effective case for seeing the war as "the single most central experience in 20th-century Ireland". But this is, quite deliberately, far from being a last word on the subject. Like the Messines tower, Ire- land and the Great War is a politic as well as commemorative gesture. Its publication last year, just before Remembrance Day, and in the context of current developments in the peace process, is not incidental to its aims. If it provides a marker of where we are now, it also carries behind it aspirations about where we might go in the future.
Remembrance can be as much of an over-simplification as forgetfulness; the dead misappropriated to bolster competing versions of history are no better served than the dead ignored. There is a further risk, too, in combating those over-simplifications with another one: collapsing diverse opinion into one seamless collective memory of "the dead". Jeffery uncovers difference and complexity on the grounds that some political readings of the past insult the memory of the dead. But he also argues that in a country which is in another way "fatally obsessed with difference", we need to recognise "the similarities of our predicament" in the experience of war itself. These strategies are not easy to work side by side, and in suggesting the potentially positive effects of re-examining Ireland's Great War history, Jeffery is both cautious and optimistic. Concerned to protect Ireland's dead from a reductive commemoration which serves its own ends, he also suggests that remembrance can be brought to bear in significant ways on the peace process, an argument not without difficult and challenging implications. The question still under negotiation, in this book and in Ireland, is not whether Ireland's Great War dead are remembered, but how.
As Jeffery argues, there are private as well as public narratives in any commemoration, both of importance. This book is, on one level, a public narrative, a fascinating investigation into, and a recovery of, available facts. But there is a private narrative here too, one which gives Ireland and the Great War its emotional appeal: it attempts to "contribute to the process by which we can come to live peaceably with our neighbours"; it is also inspired by a family history and records a personal obsession. Public and private narratives, though, as Jeffery is aware, are not always complementary. Ireland and the Great War asks crucial questions; in doing so it also becomes part of the difficult process of memory it explores.
Fran Brearton is lecturer in English at Queen's University, Belfast, and author of The Great War in Irish Poetry