Encountering modern Irish history: historiography, archives and imagination in the twenty-first century

Abstract Ireland’s historical coordinates are shifting, prompting a re-examination of national narratives and of the assumptions and anxieties that have kept them in place. Increasingly, stories that disturb rather than coalesce with grand narratives are the focus of historical study, revealing the structural violence used to maintain societal order. This article argues that tending to bigger questions about power and smaller ones about human experience creates space for new and diverse histories. It explores the dynamics that shaped the grand narratives central to Irish history and proposes the idea of imagined and lived encounters as a way of thinking about differentiation, the relational nature of power and its impact on experience and everyday life. An analysis of the concept of respectability is used to probe how power functions. The article concludes with a consideration of the historical archive broadly defined, highlighting the benefits of embracing the ‘unreliable’ witness, listening and accounting for silences, touching the material, and considering imagination as a force constantly at play in the encounters that shape history. The acceptance of this dynamic instability in historical research creates possibilities for new voices and perspectives to emerge.