Memorial cards in Irish funerary culture

Throughout the twentieth century memorial cards, small commemorative cards sent
out by the bereaved to mourners after a funeral, were a vital part of Irish funeral
culture. Even in an apparently secular Ireland, the memorial card – albeit in the
modern guise of the commemorative bookmark – persists. Rather than being an old-
fashioned relic of conservative Catholicism, this paper argues that memorial cards,
which occupy a liminal position between commercial and religious realms, can be
seen to embody the tension between tradition and modernity that characterised newly modern Ireland.