Remembering The Great War to Foster Reconciliation: A Multimodal Analysis of Three Exhibitions in Today’s Dublin

The article investigates how three exhibitions represent the Irish participation in the Great War, casting light on a long-forgotten aspect of the country’s history. Resorting to the instruments of multimodal analysis, I will explore how the items on display help visitors understand the complexity of the Irish war experience by acknowledging to what extent a variety of commemorative practices of the Easter Rising has shaped and impacted the memory of the conflict up to a very recent time. Visitors are invited to reflect on the obliviated trauma of those who experienced trench life and were accused of treason for having joined the British Army, and of families who could not grieve their dead properly. Moreover, societal divisions of twentieth-century Ireland were not ignored by the curators, and this enables visitors to look backwards to the denominational and political struggles of their past. I will thus show how the experience provided by the exhibitions should be located in a wider landscape of cultural initiatives which, after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, have been contributing to making sense collectively of Ireland’s recent past in relation to the war effort, highlighting the political and social motivations for remembering.