Framing the past: time,space and the politics of heritage tourism in Ireland

Recent work has emphasised that heritage tourism is not just a set of commercial transactions, but the ideological framing of history and identity. While some commentators celebrate heritage as a complementary or alternative way of mediating the past to popular audiences, others regard it as little more than bogus history. Through an examination of a planning strategy devised by Bord Fáilte, the state's tourism board, this paper addresses the relationship between time and space in the development of heritage attractions in Ireland, and emphasises the mechanisms through which space is privileged over time in a manner that loses sight of the complexities of localised historical processes. This argument is illustrated through the example of an open-air museum which focuses on the display of material culture independent of the historical contingencies of its creation. By contrast, an examination of a stately home, opened to the public by an independent trust, demonstrates how the past can be provocatively explored to a mass audience by being anchored in local historical geography and eschewing an approach that reifies local events into national processes.