Armalite, the ballot box and memorialization: Sinn Féin and the state in post-conflict Northern Ireland

Commemoration of the Northern Ireland Troubles has gained increasing currency since the inception of the first paramilitary ceasefires in 1994. Imagined initially as a mechanism through which to express grief and acknowledge loss, remembering the past has an increasingly social and political value. Inscribing narratives of the past into the streetscape is inexorably linked to the present as some of the main actors of the conflict vie for power and territory. A political resource, memorializtion has been employed as a tool to alter the parameters of the Troubles. This paper focuses on the changing fortunes of Sinn Féin (the political wing of the paramilitary organiztion the Irish Republican Army), and the British government in peacetime Northern Ireland, through an examination of the commemoration of their respective dead.