Collecting for the future, irish style ode iss26

COLLECTING FOR THE FUTURE, IRISH STYLE Owen Dudley Edwards The collective mind (such as it is) of the permanent editors of this journal having branded this issue with the slogan, mantra, prayer or capitalist exhortation ‘collect’ requires only simple obedience from me, an humble contributor accustomed to normal collections of blue pencils, brickbats, belches &c from the said mind, collected or (customarily) uncollected. But it may actually be of some use to us. A Professor 6 * *SWXIV SJ 3\JSVH TVSFEFP] XLI ½RIWX stylist among Irish historians now writing, and a hot candidate for the same distinction among historians of all and any kinds, comes before us with Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change

4IRKYMR ,I MW YRHIVWXERHEFP] E XVM¾I defensive about the period he has selected for operations. By way of a start, having been asked by the Wiles Committee to deliver the ensuing series of Wiles lectures at Queen’s University Belfast, he announced his topic (presumably with some hint of its present sub-titular if not titular foam). To which ‘they gently intimated that the series had not usually been given on Irish history and that I would be creating a precedent’.

Professor Foster may indeed be creating a precedent in furnishing his readers with evidence that the body issuing the invitation ultimately resulting in his book now under scrutiny, of half-wits who should promptly be relieved of their (ir)responsibilities, having clearly a mindset of 150 years ago, and one which should never LEZI I\MWXIH MR XLI ½VWX TPEGI ;LS EGXYEPP] EVI the persons constituting this committee, and what may be their names and stations. I neither know nor wish to know: my collection of village idiots is replete, and I’m not even looking for a swop. Consider their imbecility. Roy Foster is an Irish historian, the best in Britain, and a frontrunner against the best in Ireland. His books are a study of Parnell’s family background, a life of Lord Randolph Churchill, the best history of Ireland from 1600 to 1972, a life of the (Irish) poet W. B.Yeats in two volumes, unsurpassed as biography and perhaps unsurpassable, a couple of collections of essays on Irish history, and some editions bringing together works by others and himself again on Irish themes. Apart from Randolph Churchill, (a skeleton key player in locking Ulster Unionism into the Tory party), the golden apples of the sun plucked by Foster have been Hibernian (neatly linked by Agatha Christie in The Labours of Hercules with the apples of the

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Hesperides). And not one Foster book would any reader of intelligence wish unwritten, be the alternative abounding in the wisdom of Atlantis and the lost Lemuria.

In therefore advising the men in white coats to make their way quickly but tactfully to the residences of the Wiles Committee, taking them to large buildings with pleasant grounds surrounded by high walls with broken bottles on the top, and being sure to give them all the rattles and wee drums their hearts may desire, bless them, I do but simple justice. To attempt to work out what they thought Foster should lecture on is to risk the dismemberment of our S[R ¾EKKMRK LSPH SR WERMX] -X QMKLX FI EVKYIH MR palliation that there may be secret instructions to the Wiles Committee under the original will that they should ask great historians to lecture on anything save what they knew about.

Let us ask Livy (whom they probably think is still alive) but insist he shall lecture on the Chou Dynasty in China. Let us ask Churchill (whom they certainly think is still alive) but demand that he speak about the zenith of Hittite civilisation.

Yet the series of Wiles Lectures till now have easily enough bracketed lecturers with topics associated with them, to which was added an audience including specialists in the lecturer’s GLSWIR ½IPH 4IVLETW XLI] [IVI QMWXEOIR MR XLIMV Foster: nobody deserves the invitation more, but like the committee to choose a new President for Columbia University when it sought to appoint President Milton S. Eisenhower of Kansas State University and the secretary accidentally wrote to his military brother (who accepted), maybe the Wiles Committee really wanted the Dr Foster who involuntarily undertook aquatic experiments in Gloucester, Or Sir Thomas Gregory Foster the Vice-Chancellor of London University from 1928 to 1930, or Speaker John Foster who presided over the last session of the Irish House of Commons in 1800 (no doubt vivid in the memories of several of the committee), or possibly (having the recessive ‘r’ of the English gentlemen that many of them may be and more may try to be) E. M. Forster of King’s College Cambridge famous for Howards End (no doubt GVIHMXIH F] XLIQ [MXL E ½RI EGGSYRX SJ XLI later Dukes of Norfolk, a most suitable subject for lectures in Queen’s University Belfast, the

family even being Roman Catholic, how apposite for our changing times (George III may well permit Catholic Emanciapation in the decade after next)).

There remains the interesting fact that this group of lectures has been given at Queen’s &IPJEWX JSV XLI PEWX ½JX] years and it has never once permitted a lecture on Irish history until Roy Foster had the bad taste to vouchsafe the explanation of his eminence. Unless it be the same committee for all that time (and the signs seem to be that it is), an institution of higher learning has seriously undertaken that whatever may happen its most prestigious history lecture series must never discuss the portion of the globe on which the university is situated. If Roy Foster is recording a history of change, never was any of the changes he discusses of more urgent need than that which he himself embodies. As Bigham J… remarked of the prisoner in Rex versus Goudie (1902), one knows not whether to be QSVI LSVVM½IH F] XLI JSPP] SJ XLI GSQQMXXII´W wickedness, or the wickedness of its folly.

Never was a place on the globe more in need of illumination on the realities of its history than Belfast in the last half-century. Never was a bequest more disgracefully abused than the decision of the Wiles Committee that it should have done. Perhaps they do not even deserve those rattles.

There was nothing new about it. In its preachment of continued historical darkness for Belfast, the Wiles Committee indeed had its precedents. It was considered the supreme evidence of intellect in Victorian Oxford and Cambridge to know nothing at all of these islands other than England (and little enough of that). Hence the Oxbridge missionaries to the benighted inhabitants of Ireland, Scotland and Wales sought to eradicate any interest in the histories of those places. Queen’s was founded in 1845, and no Irish history was taught there until the advent of the Scotsman James Eadie Todd as Professor of History between the World Wars.

The Irish Free State and its successor regimes avenged themselves by forbidding the teaching of English (by which they meant British) history in schools. Roy Foster and many similarly-minded

historians have been much abused by persons who deplore their attempts to teach Irish history realistically, intelligibly and truthfully, but their oldest enemies are those living and dead who opposed teaching it at all. It was the same thing in Scotland. We founded modern history through William Robertson (and in spite of David Hume).

In particular, we founded Scottish history. And over a century later when history departments were set up in the universities we were very fortunate that the teaching of Scottish history was not purged from Scottish university life. The Wiles Committee has its counterparts in every cultural Cave of Spleen from the London Board of Education to the Irish Board of Censorship, but both these latter have the decency to be dead.

A death-rattle, therefore, for the Wiles Committee! Professor Foster endeavoured to console them for his ruthless insistence on lecturing on what he knew about, assuring them that others would dislike the resultant product as much as they did, deeming ‘much of the material in this book ... not, in fact. “history” at all’ (P. xi). Having thus sunk his hosts without further trace (at least in The Drouth Professor *SWXIV WEMPW MR SR LMW WYFNIGX F] ½VQP] KVEWTMRK his leprechaun, in this case An Taoiseach, An tUasal Bertie Ahern, TD, quoting his memorable observation (Foster knows his 1066 And All That): ‘The cynics’ may be able to point to the past. But we live in the future’ (Fianna Fail Ard-Fheis [High Festival of the Soldiers of Destiny, viz. his party Conference] 1998). An t-Uasal Bertie is rather a dangerous man to prize (prise? price?) loose from his crock of gold (see insert P86), but within less than a page of his close, Foster gives the wee man another shakedown, quoting a gem from interview in October 1997: ‘we can’t change the past, but we can try to clean it up’. With guidance such as these wil1s-o’-the-wisp from the little green man, Roy Foster takes us on our contemporary Odyssey. The activity in itself is not unprecedented. Thucydides did it, all the more because of his special knowledge of his own times on both sides of the Pe1oponnesian War he was describing. Justin McCarthy, a much more Londonised Irish intellectual than Foster,

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Professor R. F. Foster’s stylistic graces are beautiful but not infallible, P. 160 notes the transformation of the Dublin slums at north back of middle Dame Street, justly gives credit to an otherwise much-deplored Charles Haughey, and frames the thought in an allusion to his Lord Leprechaun, an t-Uasal Bertie Ahern: [Haughey] as one of Ahern’s best Spoonerisms had it, deserves the credit for turning Temple Bar into Dublin’s West Bank’.

Did Foster really mean this? Does he intend to say that Ahern meant ‘Dublin’s Left Bank’, his allusion being to Paris rather than Jerusalem? (Paul Jennings helpfully pointed out that as you sit in one of the GEJqW SV LSVPSKIVMIW SJ XLI 0IJX &ERO FI WYVI XLI 7IMRI MW ¾S[MRK E[E] JVSQ ]SY SXLIV[MWI ]SY EVI SR the Right Bank, where nobody is ever found.)

But if Foster meant that, then Ahearn was spouting a (best) Malaprop (as in the Sexton Blake stories where Mrs Bardell, the housekeeper, refers to the clients from Scotland Yard as ‘Defective Inspectors’).

The Spoonerism requires transposition of initials, as in the alleged original Oxonian: ‘You have tasted the whole world, you have hissed all my mystery lectures, you must leave on the town drain’. If a Spoonerism, would Ahearn really have meant (however to say in public (however accurately) that Haughey had turned Temple Bar into Dublin’s Best Wank?

wrote A History of Our Own Times 130 years ago. The test is of course to write something posterity (say a century hence) can take in without notes. The contemporary historian has to face a future which not even an t-Uasal Bertie can inhabit, and show how s/he has been --thank you, my editors --collecting materials for history with the knowledge that future historians will be inspired to refute much, but that however ungrateful in expression they will secretly or publicly have good cause to thank their ancient colleague.

Does the United Kingdom on the eve of World War shine particularly vividly for modern historians? Then some of the credit is due to Shane Leslie for his dazzling and profound The End of a Chapter (1916).

(SIW XLI ½VWX UYEVXIV SJ XLI USA ‘s twentieth century, or its 1920s on their own, hold an exceptionally vivid place in historians’ creative minds?

Then honour is due to Mark Sullivan’s monumental if not always continuous Our Times, and to Frederick Lewis Allen’s kaleidoscopic Only Yesterday.

There is in this case the additional reinsurance that Roy Foster is tempered steel, to be reckoned as sound in his analyses and reliable in LMW REVVEXMZIW EW LI MW QIPPM¾YSYW MR LMW TVSWI This does put him a little apart: all the rest We have mentioned --Thucydides, McCarthy, Leslie, Sullivan, Allen --were hitherto untried or little tried, and would produce nothing more

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or nothing as good. Luck and the Irish by its title VMKLXP] MRHMGEXIW E [SVO SJ KVIEXIV WYTIV½GMEPMX] than the Foster histories of Yeats or of Modern Ireland.

Our historian 1s ready enough to inspire us but not to engulf us. This will not necessarily prevent his perceptions from still enchanting their users a century hence. In particular, the themes he has estab11shed are likely to determine the contours of subsequent historical thought.

Had he chosen to follow the great Sir Robert Ensor’s England 1879-1914 (1936, yet with WSQI ¾EZSYV SJ GSRXIQTSVEV] history) the book’s chapters would have such titles as; ‘Economic Developments’; ‘Religious Decline’; ‘Political Transformation’; ‘Perceptions of Northern Ireland’; ‘Cultural Vicissitudes’. Ensor sold his own fascinating pages short by this sort of thing. Foster offers the converse, a little reminiscent of the American newspaper in Chesterton’s ‘The Strange Crime of John Boulnois’ where ‘articles of valuable intel1igence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac’, viz. ‘The Miracle of Loaves and Fishes’, ‘How the Catholics Became Protestants’, ‘The Party Fight and Funeral’, ‘Big, Mad Children’, ‘How the Short Stories Became 2SZIPW´ 8LI ½VWX GLETXIV´W IGSRSQMGW EVI given a light rein, if occasionally steered by a slightly light head. They are certainly essential to understanding recent Ireland, virtually

bankrupted by the massively corrupt Charles Haughey in the early l880s, taken in hand by the great economist Garret Fitzgerald whose post,EYKLI] EWWYQTXMSR SJ SJ½GI [EW YRHIVXEOIR in near-despair, and yet within a decade Ireland had moved into unimaginable prosperity. It might seem that Foster had taken the subject into a captivating cul-de-sac by producing theology as a means of economic explanation, and it’s more fun, anyway (theologians conceal this dangerous knowledge). But it is a cul-de-sac nonetheless.

However elegant in narrative. Titles of book and of chapter supply the explanation of the incredible transformation: luck, from the insider’s view, miracle, from the outsider’s.

But will this do? By the end of the book even Foster is doubtful if it will, and admits, a little more heavily than is his enchanting book’s wont ‘it is hard not… to recognise that in several spheres, not just the economic, a certain amount of good luck was maximised by good management’ (p. 188). And it is hard not to recognize that a century hence they will probably ½RH MX LEVH RSX XS EKVII MJ XLI] EVI WXMPP WIRXMIRX But it may not be as simple as its summary. To XLI SFWIVZIV ¾MXXMRK FIX[IIR EGEHIQMG 7GSXPERH and rural Ireland in the1970s it was staggering to see how expert Garret Fitzgerald’s economic journalism in the Irish Times had made the Irish laity on its European future prospects: I have heard an audience of Sligo farmers show far greater cosmopolitanism on the question than a panel of British academics.

With all its self-obsessions, Ireland began Foster’s thirty years of change with superior perceptions of America and of Europe than Britain could muster: the country’s history had from time to time led it to think itself European or American as Britain cannot (but Scotland may: one wishes Foster had done more with his instructive ‘newlook Scotland presents some intriguing parallels to Ireland’ (P. 3). Naturally Foster notes signs that the Irish Sea Bubble may burst, possibly even has burst, and that (like the protagonist in Flann O’Brien’s satire on Gaelic Revivalism The Poor Mouth, rightly beloved by Foster} we shall not look upon our like again!

The theology entitling chapter one arises from its somewhat coy opening peep at the theme of chapter two.

In the late 1990s, Colm Toibin has remarked, as Irish people turned away from the Church, they looked to another kind of miraculous intercession: the economy. ‘The word was no longer

QEHI ¾IWL MX [EW QEHI MRXS E WIX SJ astonishing statistics’, It is, as we will see, edifying and charitable in Foster to applaud Toibin, although this somewhat overdoes it, enshrining banalities in the manner of worshippers of royalty. The Irish, Catholic or 4VSXIWXERX LEZI RIZIV LEH XLI WPMKLXIWX HMJ½GYPX] in expecting miraculous intercession from the economy, in or out of Church. In certain unfortunate ways ‘the economy dictated the religion, whether by mercenary clerics or from a laity grimly performing its church attendance to qualify for the ultimate return on investment.

Foster uses Shaw to great effect in the present book, so let us remember that in 1904 Shaw saw real religion in Father Keegan, isolated ERH HVMZIR JVSQ SJ½GI WYTTPERXIH F] XLI EPP XSS IJ½GMIRX EHQMRMWXVEXSV *EXLIV (IQTWI] happily unaware of having no spiritual vocation whatsoever. At least religion in Ireland, however in decline, has the advantage that it is no longer a profession carrying social advancement and economic security. It hardly captures this essential to announce that the Catholics became Protestants, since Irish Protestantism was in its way as brutally enslaved to social and economic TVS½X XLVSYKLSYX LMWXSV] XS WE] RSXLMRK SJ the political pickings for both Catholic and Protestant clerics who cared to muddy those already dark waters).

The joke about Catholics becoming Protestant is in fact fairly old. When Leo XIII condemned the Plan of Campaign, the witticism of the day was an Orangeman telling a Catholic ‘Paddy have you heard the news! The Pope’s turned Protestant’ (probably of English manufacture: a real Orangeman would have said Teague or Taig). As the author of the best essay I have seen on Punch, Roy Foster should beware of wit which may blunder into antiquity. But the real objection is that this sort of thing is unfair to Protestants, conservative and liberal. The Rev. Dr Ian Paisley held most theological,-and social, attitudes in common with the more reactionary Irish Parish Priests before 1970, apart from the Mass, the Pope, clerical celibacy &c, and would rightly regard it as a slur on his Protestantism to equate it with the secularist, liberal, permissive vacuity into which SO many Irish Catholics have now slithered. Equally, the integrity of the proselytising evangelical ancestors of the Wildes, the O’Caseys and so many other leaders of the Irish Renaissance deserves better than being butchered to make an anti-Roman holiday.

8LI KIRYMRIP] KVIEX LIEVXIH ½KYVIW SJ -VMWL Protestantism such as William Bedell, translator of the Bible into Gaelic, Jonathan Swift, George

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Berkeley --- Professor Foster knows them better than I do --- are giants in their own right and should be left immune from comparison to the rats leaving what their materialism had long made a stinking ship. Above all, they should have been spared the end of that chapter: ‘Why did the Reformation not succeed in Ireland?’ ... it did, FYX MX XSSO JSYV LYRHVIH ERH ½JX] ]IEVW ´ 3RP] MJ we conclude that the Reformation was destitute SJ VIPMKMSYW GSRXIRX GER XLMW FI NYWXM½IH ERH [LMPI XLEX WIIQW YRJEMV XS ½KYVIW SJ XLI GSYVEKI of Luther, Zwingli and Knox, it’s accurate enough about Henry VIII’s placemen, George Brown his Archbishop of Dublin, Edward Staples his bishop of Meath. If Professor Foster wants to argue, like Shaw, that Catholics and Protestants alike replaced Jesus with Barabbas for religious purposes, I give him guarded welcome. But as matters stand, those a hundred years hence awaiting his instruction will lack the depth they will need in understanding what was the thing their ancestors called religion.

We are on very much happier ground in ‘The Party Fight and Funeral’, an amusing title, all the more because it pays tribute to the genius of William Carleton the nineteenth-century Catholic who did turn Protestant and thereafter proved Ireland’s greatest witness to its peasant culture. It is a very remarkable reassessment of the last thirty years of politics, and hence the historical perspective is in full swing.You know you read a great historian when s/he discusses a series of events you also know, and yet you now realise that they add up to much more than you had perceived and having seen him or her add them up, you also realise how right s/he is. It is when Foster sees the greatness ‘of the undervalued Jack Lynch, Haughey’s predecessor as party chief and Taoiseach, that I had such a shock of recognition I would have dismissed the idea out of hand before seeing his summation. I had Some hopes that the use of the Carleton title meant we were to receive feline disembowelling of the apotheosis of Haughey, attempted at his funeral, but this funeral is of a different kind: that of the austere, narrow, selfrighteous political creed with its own modicum SJ WIPJ WEGVM½GI ERH LSRSYV [LMGL HI :EPIVE sought to have his party idealise. It’s not without the occasional error, to keep pedantic reviewers happy. Haughey was more active as an accountant in the 1970s than Foster thinks (p. 76). After his acquittal at the Arms Trial the Dublin police QEHI LMW ½VQ XLI EYHMXSVW SJ XLIMV EGGSYRXW ERH when journalism raised an eyebrow at so rapid a transformation in the status of a former prisoner the Chief Superintendent said sourly ‘isn’t it betther to have him checkin’ our sums than

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helpin’ us with our enquiries?’ And what Conor Cruise O’Brien actually said in the context of Haughey’s apparent political demise was that if he saw Haughey buried at a cross-roads with a stake driven through his heart he, O’Brien, would continue to wear garlic. Dracula was, after all, conceived by a North Dubliner like Haughey, O’Brien and the present writer: South Dubliners are more innocent.

Big Mad Children’ was the saying of a British businessman. and in fact it recoils more on its patronising formulator than he could have predicted. Foster writes such amiable prose that he can be far more effective than most polemicists.

His enemies who imply that his objectivity is a mere cloak for British sympathies will have hard W[EPPS[MRK XS HS [LIR ½RHMRK LMW ZIVHMGX SR XLI British Government’s roles in Northern Ireland as he rightly declares Catholics and Protestants more divided there than ever and points out where it had been avoidable, concluding; There was nothing inevitable about the sorry catalogue of ineptness, bullying, pusillanimity, political gangsterism and inadequate leadership that accompanied Northern Ireland’s thirty-year nightmare...

Foster consciously follows on from Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland (1972), witness to and indictment of Irish nationalism and its cynical manipulation of Catholic grievances in the si~ counties which in practice the 26 counties wanted less and less. And like O’Brien, Foster is a laughing crusader. If he can rise to magisterial condemnation he never exceeds an austere ration of it. He has a genius for evocative cameos such as when Garret Fitzgerald, genuinely seeking to cool combustible Ulster tempers recalled how his blood ran cold when the patrician British foreign secretary Lord Carrington had greeted him cheerfully with ‘Well, Garret, how do we unite Ireland?’

3V [LIR 3´&VMIR VI¾IGXW SR *MX^KIVEPH ‘He is about as nice as you can be and get ahead in politics’, Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked about his old friend and rival at this time, ‘but no nicer...’There is steel under all that pretty wool. (P. 125)

Taking one thing with another, ‘Big, Mad Children’ will be required reading on Northern Ireland for the entire hundred years ahead of us. By contrast, ‘How the Short Stories Became Novels’ HSIW RSX IZIR JYP½P XLI [IEO NSOI MR MXW XMXPI ‘Became’ is a historian’s word, but the narratives over the thirty years of change sustaining us thus far give way to a retrospective of the Arts viewed from here. Rapturous readers of Foster’s Yeats (can there be any other kind?) must wonder how the Master Biographer could come up with (Pl’. 168-69).

[Seamus Heaney’s) authority within Irish culture rested partly on the range and scale of his work; but, unlike Yeats’s, it existed against the background of an extraordinary period of achievement by other Irish writers, most of whose work is neither inhibited by nor imitative of his own formidable authority.

Heaney certainly had impressive Irish fellowpoets, and even more impressive Scottish ones against whose stimulus he must also be assessed: but how after his own sublime work on the subject Foster can seriously expect his readers to accept Irish writing 1890-1939 as not being ‘an extraordinary period of achievement’, ranging as it does from Yeats’s patron Wilde inaugurating his 1890s to the appearance of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds in the year of Yeats’s death? We have to us to extend some of the bewildered charity he invites us to extend to the semantics of an t-Uasal Bertie Ahearn, save that it is beyond this reader to work out what Foster was trying to say it cannot have been what he said.

Heaney’ apart, Foster’s case for the ‘extraordinary period of achievement’ 1970-

2000 is inadequate, and partly because he leaves himself out of account. Heaney apart, no more extraordinary achiever in literature is evident in his generation.

Neither Heaney nor Foster would want to rival ‘Yeats’s brass neck in self-salutation as genius at work (among fellowgenii), showing he had learned all too well from Wilde,and Shaw: in fact here is a contrast between the Yeats and the Heaney generations, putting Synge (who conceived his Deirde to offset what he saw as the inadequacies of Yeats’s), O’Casey, Joyce, Beckett and Hugh MacDiarmid among the Yeats contemporaries, none of them wanting in self-trumpet voluntaryism. The Ireland of today has no need to compensate for metropolitan deris1on: in cultural terms English criticism has backache from bowing low and kissing the latest pair of artistic feet sent forth from Cathleen the daughter of Houlihan.

And when it comes to saluting Foster the English have ached their backs in an excellent cause. But Foster, thirty-two years younger than Cruise O’Brien, became his successor not only as supreme historical stylist: he also followed him as upholder of academic objectivity against XLI GYVWIW SJ KIRYMRI ERH EVXM½GMEP ½PMS TMIXMWXW -VMWL TEXVMSXMWQ MW XLI ½VWX VIJYKI SJ QER] a scoundrel, the late Haughey and the living Ahearn among them, and they mobilised many a rancorous character assassin against the courage of O’Brien, Foster, and the other questors for Holy Truth. Foster can give some hint of these things, but has to restrict it to O’Brien, whose commination from Her present Excellency President Mary McAleese is joyfully recorded here (p. 136): [McAlees] had been shocked by Dublin (‘it isn’t the Republic), historical revisionism (‘it isn’t Ireland’) and above all by Conor Cruise O’Brien.(‘If ever anyone was a culture shock, Conor

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Cruise O’Brien was to me. Here was this extraordinarily arrogant man, in the process of revising everything that I had known to be a given and a truth about Irish history.’

But Foster has been as much a target from nostalgic Fascists of this kind in his day as O’Brien in his, and he omits a crucial part of the years of change when he omits himself.

The result makes for some distortion in the depersonalisation. Foster has in fact shown magnanimity in responding to his traducers, if anything overdoing it, as in the case of Colm Toibin. It’s in the Cruise O’Brien tradition: the Cruise O’Briens nominated Tom Paulin for the Ewart-Biggs prize after his unrivalled scurrility against O’Brien in the TLS. Toibln is quoted by the publishers in slightly fatuous praise of Foster, rather foolishly, since mutual acclaim impresses nobody except Private Eve. (For some extraordinary reason Foster’s publishers have limited their acclamatory sound bites for his previous work to journalists rather than historians apart from Cruise O’Brien, at the head of both professions: in some cases the journalists were not the reviewers in the newspapers here associated with them)).

Toibin’s was a schizophrenic response to Foster: he hailed his brilliance, and even his courage, and at the same time accused him of manufacturing historiographical witticisms to curry favour with Oxbridge commonroom audiences. At the moment Toibin has an extraordinary production on the Irish Great Famine in the bookshops, begun some ten years ago as a review of a number of history books in the London Review of Books, then issued as E FSSOPIX MR MXW S[R VMKLX ½REPP] PMROIH [MXL documents from the accomplished historian Diarmaid Ferriter. Toibin assails Foster amid a number of objectivist historians, whose work Toibin alternately denounces and plunders.

At one point he ascribes childhood in transShannon co. Clare to de Valera, to account for de Valera s interest in the Famine: de Valera was actually reared on the good agricultural land of

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the Cork-Limerick border. Ferriter, author of an excellent reassessment of de Valera, would seem not even to have read the Toibin essay his documents buttress. De Valera is described as disappointed with a work of academic history from whose contributors de Valera in fact selected his authorised biographer. At one point Toibin complains that when he was a history student his lecturers had not come from the parts of the country affected by the Famine (the mother of his chief target, my father was in fact from co. Clare).Yet Foster, of Toibin’s imitations of Mary McAleese, singles him out to show the transformation of Irish literature even to extent of letting an essay of Toibin’s imitations of Mary McAleese, singles him out to show the transformation of Irish literature even to the extent of letting an essay of Toibin’s dictate the contours of Foster’s cultural chapter.

(Admittedly he Kelvinsides Toibin’ s ‘the white man came riding down the valley’ into ‘raiding down’.)

The magnanimity is both kind and just: Toibin has certainly become one of Ireland’s greatest novelists of all time, his The Master (on Henry James) being that almost unique achievement, a historical novel about a creative artist which is indispensable to anyone wanting to understand the subject. But Foster’s generosity being expressed without any hint of what it forgives, we get the end of a story whose beginning posterity is not told existed. Also, the thesis of short-story only now giving way to novel needs much; too special pleasing when talking of a culture which had already produced Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien. Nor do the chapter’s preoccupations with the past make full sense: Dermot Bolger is here described as victim of critics as waging ‘a war against the past’ where Scotland knows Bolger as an award-winning TPE][VMKLX QEKRM½GIRXP] IRPMWXMRK XLI +EIPMG past (in Lament for Arthur Cleary) to enhance the terror of the present. Foster has of course no patience with Bolger’s critics, but their wrongheaded pseudo-analysis is too trivial for notice in a work such as this. Had Foster considered the revolution in Irish theatre as his cultural pivot instead of attaching it to the novel thesis as a sort of appendix, posterit might be better

served. The Edinburgh Festival has certainly encountered theatre from Ireland in recent years revolutionary enough to make the modern Irish novel seem impressive1y conventional, and none the worse for that. Had Foster looked west o£ the Shannon to Druid Theatre of Galway he could have made more of the new Irish theatre.

Its perfection of production laid the groundwork for the pyrotechnics which followed, and at the same time it invited all Irish theatre to respect the Irish Renaissance as its foundation.

Inevitably, cultural history of the retrospective kind easily becomes lists of names, and hence the reader aches for living portraiture with which the earlier chapters abounded. We may TEVXMGYPEVP] [IPGSQI XLIVIJSVI E ½RI MRWXERGI of new Irish autobiography in Patricia Craig’s Asking for Trouble (B1ackstaff, £8.99), where the author’s sometimesquestionable literary and historical judgments come back to her audience’s knowledge of her as a person. The depersonalisation which Foster risks by his modesty contrasts forcibly with Patricia Craig’s, perpetually confronting us. For one lesson former contemporary historians (however sunk in the ancient mists may be their contemporaneity) teach us .that their work has more hope of holding its remote future audience if that audience can learn something of the LMWXSVMER XLIQWIPZIW ;LEX - EHZSGEXI ¾MIW MR XLI face of all modern principles of writing history, ERH XLIVI EVI JI[ LMWXSVMIW VIEPP] PMOIP] XS FIRI½X from the historian’s self- intrusion. To collect is one thing; to seek to make sense of what has been collected is another; f but neither of these things likely to be improved by the collector’s decision that the collector merits more attention than the collected. A few personal notes are needed, since any historian who expects acceptance on word alone is a fool, charm they ever so wisely. A real collecting crisis, i.e. a problem in source-material where the activity of the historian seems necessary to reveal may enhance the work, e.g. A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo, yet even here the value of the history is complicated by the inevitable inventions of the historian about himself. Contemporary history is another matter; the historian cannot get away from being his/her own most important and most questionable witness. Even Thucydides’s austere text is necessarily dominated by his own fate in the war he describes, and the thought that success would probably have prevented his becoming a historian. So the fascinating world of mid-Twentieth Century bourgeois Catholic Northern Ireland swims almost tangibly into view because Patricia Craig stands at the door (yes of course, worlds have doors, read

Alice in Wonderland, a work --- not to say a contemporary history - holding common air (rather than ground) with Asking for Trouble and its author.

How would Foster have been strengthened in such usage? First of all, his future reader would know he had been a protagonist in the time he seeks to describe, not simply its narrator.

Irish perceptions of Irish history are different because of Foster’s previous books, and their critical reception in Ireland, while often as far from the common reader as the reviewer can make himself sound, tells us something of how Foster changed Ireland. Then for all his praise for the novels of contemporary acquaintances or even antagonists, he lessens the achievement of Irish mastery of Ireland’s past by omitting one of the best Irish novels of my lifetime --- his wife Aisling Foster’s Safe in the Kitchen which may yet be the best depiction of domesticity behind politics, even foreign politics, to emerge from 1970-2000. Naturally Foster’s iconoclasm in giving the Wiles lectures about Ireland or in writing .’contemporary history at all would be considered venial indeed in comparison to the thought of a historian discussing a marvellous book by his own wife; breach the decencies if you will, but this is a breach too far. Nevertheless, Foster’s book is the poorer because of the omission of his wife’s. Equally his analysis of ‘how the Catholics become Protestants’ is weakened by lack of the personal testimony he could give on how the Protestants became Catholics, WTIGM½GEPP] LS[ XLI FEWXMSR SJ -VMWL 9RMSRMWQ Trinity College Dublin, became Hibernicised

by Government decree while he was a student there himself. It had suited de Valera to keep an institution largely staffed by enemies of the new state and still bewailing the old, with a student clientele mostly consisting of failed English aspirants to Oxbridge. Wiser than the pig rulers of Orwell’s Animal Farm, de Valera’s minions not only told the people they did not want ‘Jones’ back, they could point to Jones himself in all his contemptuous arrogance prominently in view in his intellectual ghetto. Lemass, de Valera’s successor as Taosieach in 1959, was, as Foster puts it, ‘ostentatiously impatient with the kneejerk shibboleths of his party regarding not only TEVXMXMSR FYX IGSRSQMGEP WIPJ WYJ½GMIRG] JVYKEP book-balancing and the sacred First National Languzge’ (p. 101) -- and with the notion of maintaining a university from the public purse whose graduates neither came from would stay in the country subventing them. Trinity was told to get itself a student population of 70% Irish (north-born or south-born) --- or else! The very voice of the University altered from latter-day

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English Edwardian to conventional Dublin. It was one of the most visible changes in late twentieth century Ireland, but our historian, supremely [IPP UYEPM½IH to describe it, leaves posterity without a guide.

Patricia Craig takes her reader in convent school and to the Irishlanguage retreatin the Republic where she asked for trouble and [LMPI JVIUYIRXP] KIRIVEPMWMRK YRNYWXM½EFP] MR LIV analyses, can rest content in the hold she grasps of her reader’s imagination.You are there, and while there is ~ “room for debate about her conclusions on the convent school --- President , Mary McAleese. another of its products. could debate it with her but is unlikely so to do -- it will be hard to disabuse you of the notion that you have sat in it yourself.

In some respects Craig’s most useful evidence lies on issues where her voice is more evident than her vehemence.

The picturesque Donegal Gaedhealtachd of 1959 incidentally revealed as choc-a-bloc with the United Irishman, the IRA newspaper, by then a dreary exhumator of patriotic corpses in the eyes of most of the Republic, but a song of the brave and the free to many Catholic teenage second-class citizens in what, as Foster, says, David Trimble forty years later was the very FIPEXIH ½VWX 9RMSRMWX XS EGORS[PIHKI EW E ³GSPH house’ for Catholics’. Learning IRA as well as Irish had little effect on Craig (and how much of it was part of the education of McAleese?), but its effects on many of her fellow-Catholics may be found in the dead and maimed in Northern Ireland throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And yet, behind all the steamy stuff about IRA nurseries and convent attitudes to sex (as 1066 And All That would say, ‘for none write nun’), the greatest strength of Craig, as of so much autobiography, is her version of her own family. I would read another book of the same size about her mother, who comes to life as an utterly delightful person --- an incredibly hard thing for a memoir to convey, and here managed with doubtless deceptive appearance

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of ease. Discussion of genealogy smashes to blazes the superstition so carefully inculcated among Northern Ireland Catholics and Protestants that they never intermarried: no doubt she generalizes too far in my belief that we’re all, in the North, so religiously and culturally intertwined that it’s just Pot luck whether you come out Catholic or Protestant but it’s high time we had the corrective even if, as often with Craig her mirror shows her the universe. And thus, dear reader in 2107 --- for can we believe the future will be so benighted as to have a drouth of the Drouth --- will you recover the past with Foster in hand? You will certainly need him for guidance, and most of his signposts seem likely to endure. But you will also need Craig whom I trust 2107’s critics will handle more sensibly than she handles Patrick MacGill’s The RatPit, a century-old novel on working conditions for working women in Scotland without history would be much the poorer. Both Foster and Craig would have made more sense of the attraction and decline of the Irish language had they given some comparative analysis to Wales snd tried to understand why its linguistic fortunes have ultimately differed so much from Ireland. By 2107 you lot may think primarily of identity as archipelagans rather than islanders, and view what history we wrote in 2107 as beautiful but limited, a se1fmutilated Venus de Milo. Or will you simply demand as so often we do, that the past consists of your own preoccupations, as Craig thinks the riots in Dublin a century ago against The Playboy of the Western World were caused by Irish-language fanatics (Mary Colum’s memoir Life and the Dream QIRXMSRW XLI QER WLI WE[ KMZMRK XLI ½VWX LMWW XLI JIQMRMWX *VERGMW 7LIIL] 7OIJ½RKXSR [EMX for the historian of 2107 who will declare the riots were feminist). Or, thanks to our wreckage of your planet, will you have given up collecting anything, including us?