ABSTRACT

The post-Troubles context since 1998 offers up opportunities to reconsider key moments in Northern Ireland's past and, in some instances, to question accepted ideas surrounding them. This chapter introduces a collaboration with the Ulster Museum with the aim of overhauling the section of the Museum's permanent exhibition dedicated to the 1968 period. It looks at how Northern Ireland's 1968 has been perceived to have fitted with what was happening elsewhere. The chapter also explains enduring insularity. There are several, interrelated reasons that one can offer in order to explain the continued reticence to place Northern Ireland in the international context of the late 1960s. Such insularity is not exclusive to the events of 1968. In the case of Northern Ireland's 1968, the forty-year period following the events has seen a certain narrative of this period emerge, become consolidated and in fact be anchored in the collective memory.