One of my favorite poems ever is John Hewitt's "Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto: For the people of my province or the rest of Ireland."
"Bear in mind these dead:
I can find no plainer words.
I dare not risk using that
loaded word, Remember,
for your memory is a cruel web
threaded from thorn to thorn across
a hedge of dead bramble, heavy
with pathetic atomies.

I cannot urge or beg you
to pray for anyone or anything,
for prayer in this green island
is tarnished with stale breath,
worn smooth and characterless
as an old flagstone, trafficked
with journeys no longer credible
to lost destinations."

I don't think I really understand the problem of memory in Ireland. Too me, the past was a collection of stories of "our Fenian dead," not the crippling unemployment and discrimination that my grandparents lived through. I can still tell the stories: the young medical student Kevin Barry bravely facing torture rather than reveal his comrades, Roddy McCorley walking to his death in Toome, all the "heroes of '16" who were shot in Kilmainham gaol and buried in quicklime. But all they are to me is stories. To my grandmother, I think they meant more. They were the reminders of the people who died to prevent the discrimination that she had experienced. Eoghan Ruadh O'Niall was not just a folk hero, he was my grandmother's partisan. The past blended with the present in a way I couldn't understand, and I wish I could ask my grandmother about it now, now that I am beginning to understand.

But ultimately the problem isn't necessarily with how what is remembered is remembered. The problem is how it is applied to life in the Six Counties. Whether it's the Protestant parades to remember the victories against Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Catholic boy who joins the IRA because of the stories of Irish heroes of the last 200 years, the past has a negative impact on the living. And that's why Hewitt calls the word "remember" loaded.