ABSTRACT
The war memorial in Donaghadee, a small seaside town on the northern edge of County Down in Northern Ireland, was only one of a large number of public memorials erected in the years following the Great War of 1914-18 to commemorate those who had not returned from that conflict. The period following the Armistice in 1918 marked the beginning of widespread public conflict commemoration in Northern Ireland, as the erection of war memorials was combined with the invention of new commemorative rituals. Yet despite the service of Ulstermen of all political and religious persuasions in the British Army in that conflict, the dominant memory of the war as it developed in the North of Ireland emphasized a particularly Protestant and unionist version of events. As historian Keith Jeffery has observed:
In the North the commemoration of the war became overwhelmingly an opportunity to confirm loyalty to the British link and affirm Ulster's Protestant heritage (Jeffery 2000, p. 131, emphasis in original).
