The question of how to ‘deal’ with the past in post‐conflict Northern Ireland preoccupies public conversation precisely because it separates a violent history from a fragile peace and an uncertain future. After a brief examination of contemporary Northern Ireland's culture of remembrance, this article provides some analysis of the potentials and dangers of efforts to confront the legacies of the Troubles. I argue here that the challenge for post‐conflict heritage work in Northern Ireland lies in forging practices that permit and facilitate different ways of encountering complex and contradictory histories. These new efforts to remember encourage citizens to incorporate disparate, often conflicting memories into a patchwork of collected memory. Through a presentation of two case studies, this article offers an analysis of this memory work in an effort to show that it is as difficult as it is necessary. By forging a new tradition in memory work that transcends the long history of dual narratives and begins to make space for broader, more complicated engagements with the past, citizens are building their capacity to acknowledge, understand and respect difference. This opens up new conceptions of heritage that accommodate the incalculable complexity that accompanies reckoning with social and cultural inheritances. In settings in which the past is negotiated by ordinary citizens, heritage simultaneously demands and creates new spaces for public discourse.