ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one narrative of Irishness that has been marginalised and largely erased from public memory, namely the Irish regiments in the British Army of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It looks at the heritage of the Connaught Rangers and the manner in which their multiple and conflicting stories reveal the broader ambiguities of the Irish experience of British colonialism, and points to ways in which the diversity of Irishness can be celebrated by recognising marginalised voices and simultaneously disrupting prioritised senses of Irish history. The lost voices point to another Irish heritage that disrupts hegemonic metanarratives of Irish history and suggests a means of celebrating multivocal Irishness through multiple memories. The chapter argues that Ireland's heritage of involvement in the British Array and broader associations with Britain can be reimagined so that 'instead of obsessive re-iteration of the past as justification for the present or historical amnesia or wilful forgetting, the past can be remembered differently'.
