This book explores the psychic, cultural, and political ramifications of memory within the Irish troubles. It investigates the traumatic impact of the violence perpetrated since 1969; the antagonistic cultural narratives of memory fashioned and mobilized in this context within public and private arenas; and the conflicts, paradoxes, and contradictions involved in "coming to terms with the past" both before and during the Irish peace process initiated in 1993-94. It traces the formation from below of competing public narratives--one concerned with the "ethnic cleansing" of Protestants by the Irish Republican Army, the other with British state violence on Bloody Sunday--and analyses their subjective roots in specific experiences of fear and loss, their role in ideological struggle, and their complicated relation to private, familial, and individual remembering.