CECS Research Seminar

'Forgetting 1798: the struggle over 'living memory' in Ulster'

Guy Beiner, Ben-Gurion University

In the aftermath of the suppression of the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the passing of the Act of Union in 1800, an apparent turn amongst Presbyterian communities in Ulster towards loyalism and unionism facilitated conditions conducive for social forgetting of their former involvement in republican insurrection. The paper will examine how private memories of people who had witnessed the traumatic events of 1798 confronted a public culture of silence. It will probe the boundaries of a ‘very-long-eighteenth century’ by considering ways in which members of the generation that had lived through the Age of Revolution later engaged in regenerating some of its controversial legacies. Guy Beiner is a senior lecturer at the Department of General History of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and is currently a Gerda Henkel Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press) and is currently writing a book on social forgetting in Ulster.