ABSTRACT
Commemorations of war dead are an ubiquitous feature of nation-building, memory-making, and statecraft throughout the contemporary world. The case of local war commemorations of IRA soldiers in County Clare communities provides the unique occasion to track empirically multiple and on-going contestations of the meanings and consequences of armed-conflict in Ireland during the formative years of the new state. During the Civil War, the IRA designed a military campaign centered on arson, intimidation, and selective assassination. The Provisional Government responded to the IRA with the full force of the fledging state. In addition to focusing on the subjects of commemoration and war deaths of locals, both anthropological and reportage narratives are careful to identify the specific agentive speaker at the commemoration. Citizens’ and institutions’ memory work entailed in war commemorations that brings past armed conflict actively into the present political moment is amplified by the degree to which narratives about the violence circulate in different voices, contexts, and communities.
