The place of memory: Alice Milligan, Ardrigh, and the 1898 centenary.(Critical essay)

Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.

(Maurice Halbwachs)

I have turned to the landscape because men disappoint me.

(John Hewitt, 'The Ram's Horn')

In a time of increasing tension relating to the politics of space in the Home Rule debate, the 1898 centenary of the United Irishmen's rebellion provided a welcome opportunity for Belfast's nationalist community to re-assert the importance of Ulster in the lineage of Irish resistance to British power. Throughout the build-up to the centenary activities we find an insistence on the North as a key place in the foundation and subsequent history of the United Irishmen. This insistence has to be read, I want to argue, in terms of a growing unease within Northern nationalism; this disquiet was generated not simply by an increasingly organized Ulster-centric Unionism, but by a growing feeling that the North was being treated as a locus of difference by some nationalists in the rest of the island. 1898 was a moment to counter these twinned pressures and perceptions; the tensions also helped shape the kind of commemorative practices that were possible in the North of Ireland during this time. This essay explores the commemorative strategies deployed by Belfast's 'Ardrigh group'. This was a loose affiliation of cultural nationalists who gathered at 'Ardrigh' on Belfast's Antrim Road, the home of F. J. Bigger, one of the city's most energetic recorders and promoters of Irish cultural history. My main interest is the emphasis on place in the discourse of remembrance articulated by a Northern nationalism determined to draw on 1798 as a way of countering the problematical geo-politics emerging in relation to Ulster at this moment. More specifically, this essay examines the ways in which a Northern nationalism largely locked out of authorized modes of commemorative practice sought in the more abstract mapping of place and space a counter-discourse to 'remembering '98'.

The central figure in much of these activities was Alice Milligan (1866-1953); the tireless endeavours of Milligan, indeed, were key to much of the Ardrigh group's success during this time. Like much connected with the Northern revival, the contribution of Alice Milligan has often been lost in recent histories of this period. Contemporary assessments, however, reveal the widespread impact of this indefatigable Belfast woman; an article published by Susan Mitchell in 1919, for example, recalls Milligan as an active shaper of revivalist culture:

 
   In almost every one of the national and intellectual activities in 
   Ireland now known to everybody--the Gaelic Revival, the dramatic 
   movement, the literary renaissance--this indefatigable Irish girl 
   was at the start of them. She was lecturing for the Gaelic League 
   all over Ireland, she was writing plays and staging them [...] and 
   she was the most successful producer of plays before the Abbey 
   Theatre started on its triumphant way. (1)