This collection contains photographs of ad-hoc, local, and/or temporary commemoration of the Covid-19 pandemic in Northern Ireland and Ireland in July 2022. It covers plaques, memorials, religious sites, and murals. The photographs cover republican and unionist communities, in Belfast, Londonderry/Derry, Donaghdee, and Dublin. The data was collected as part of the broader project: “The Challenge of Mass Deaths for Social Order in a Transnational Context: Experiencing COVID-19”, which studied death as, tragically, the central characteristic of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom and abroad. It understood Covid-19 deaths as, in addition to private family tragedies, a political event with important implications for collective memory and social order. In particular, the study examined how ideas of time – of “timeliness” of decisions/deaths, of the meaning of a “lifetime”, of differential experiences of waiting and urgency/emergency – produced different experiences of pandemic death and grief. More precisely, the study did three things. First, it looked at how ideas of time were important to framing mass Covid-19 deaths as inevitable (or not) in three European countries, showing that “inevitability” was a matter of politics, rather than scale of death. Second, it looked at how the “pause” of Covid-19 lockdown interrupted the daily rhythms of life in Northern Ireland/Ireland, with local practices of ad-hoc Covid-19 commemoration demonstrating evidence of important, if brief, cross-community solidarity. (This is the aim to which the data contained here was collected). Third, and finally, the project looked at practices of body repatriation, a tragic but important and often-invisible form of transnational cooperation that upholds international social order and works to provide timely individual dignity in death.“The Challenge of Mass Deaths for Social Order in a Transnational Context: Experiencing COVID-19” studied death as, tragically, the central characteristic of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom and abroad. It understood Covid-19 deaths as, in addition to private family tragedies, a political event with important implications for collective memory and social order. In particular, the study examined how ideas of time – of “timeliness” of decisions/deaths, of the meaning of a “lifetime”, of differential experiences of waiting and urgency/emergency – produced different experiences of pandemic death and grief. More precisely, the study did three things. First, it looked at how ideas of time were important to framing mass Covid-19 deaths as inevitable (or not) in three European countries, showing that “inevitability” was a matter of politics, rather than scale of death. Second, it looked at how the “pause” of Covid-19 lockdown interrupted the daily rhythms of life in Northern Ireland/Ireland, with local practices of ad-hoc Covid-19 commemoration demonstrating evidence of important, if brief, cross-community solidarity. Third, and finally, the project looked at practices of body repatriation, a tragic but important and often-invisible form of transnational cooperation that upholds international social order and works to provide timely individual dignity in death.

Methodology is site-based ethnography and visual analysis. Method is digital photography.