ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the definition and uses of material heritage in contemporary Ireland. It is argued that, ultimately, the answer to the question of ‘whose heritage is conserved and why?’ depends upon the ideological issues which determine why certain artefacts become heritage while others are discarded. The discussion is predicated upon certain suppositions. In the first instance, it is assumed that the importance of the heritage icon does not lie in the actual artefact itself but within its interpretation. Inevitably, it follows that heritage, being ideologically defined, is value-laden. Second, heritage is seen as an essential component of the foundation myth of a nation state, a ‘dreamland’, part and parcel of the need to give people a dramatized sense that they belong to that state (Home 1984). Idealized or representative heritage landscapes are an essential component of every social construction, for each ‘culture weaves its world out of image and symbol’ (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: 8). Heritage landscapes are thus part of the very iconography of a region or nation (Williams 1989: 100). But, third, if that symbolism, and the identity and needs which it confers, are time-specific, then so also is the interpretation of heritage artefacts. These often sanitized and romanticized pasts are invented for ourselves (Pearce 1989: 233; Loughlin 1990). Consequently, the definition of heritage will change through time, embodying the ever-shifting balance of continuities and changes characteristic of any society. If a pre-condition for the emergence of a new Europe is a new past, Ireland as part of that Europe also requires a reconstructed myth. This is not necessarily a heritage derived from a post-nationalist past, but one emerging from, while also helping to create, revisionist nationalist interpretations which stress Ireland's cultural location in a European world. Nevertheless, this heritage must also emphasize Ireland's particularity of place, derived from the fusion of diverse, plural and external linkages from which the Irish cosmos is constructed. But patently Ireland is not a unified place. It is but one regional example among many in Europe where we can witness the dissonance between rival cultural assertions and appropriations of heritage. Thus, the present discussion must address the contrasting ideological uses of heritage between the Republic of Ireland (the twenty-six counties) and Northern Ireland (the six), the sociopolitical conflicts within the latter region contrasting with the relative homogeneity of the Irish nation state.
