R. F. Foster,
The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (Allen
Lane, Penguin, London, 2001).
Roy Foster towards
the end of this volume cites, with qualified approval, G. M. Young's
dictum that the historian must "read until you hear people talking".
Despite his suspicion of this easy maxim, a great pleasure of The
Irish Story is the generous excerpting from the writings of W. B.
Yeats, Hubert Butler, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Trollope and William
Carleton. Foster’s evident delight in their glittering prose is
easily shared, but his own writing does not suffer unduly from the inevitable
comparison, as he himself is a fine stylist. Even if this volume of
essays, complex, erudite and allusional, is unlikely to be propped on
the clattering looms of autodidact artisans, the proletarian intelligentsia
of the Turtle would be richly rewarded by its study.
I
Foster talks
about Ireland’s thinkers, of necessity individuals impatient of
prevailing orthodoxies, and their paradoxical struggle to relate to
"the Story of Ireland". It is that perennial question, the
intellectual’s duty to society. Foster ranges from the heroic (if
perhaps unpremeditated) defiance of church, state and society by Hubert
Butler [for more on this, see The
Stepinac file here], through Yeats’ sometimes misfiring struggle
for relevance to the mainstream, to Carleton’s slow withdrawal
of sympathy for the Irish.
Intellectuals,
such as those Foster discusses, usually champion pluralism, even if
only because they egotistically value their own individual voice and
thus fear the suffocation of conformity. (Negatively, this often leads
to an authoritarian suspicion of democracy and the banality of the "swinish
multitude"). There is a tension, however: one cannot escape environment.
Foster generalises from Yeats and Carleton: "your background, and
what it has made you, survives repudiation and can return to claim you
in strange ways in the end". (p 116).
One cannot help
but read this as somewhat autobiographical. And indeed, Foster encourages
such a reading with an intimate authorial voice. He speaks of Ireland
since independence as "our own literary and political history"
(p 111). Throughout, there is an undertone of personal engagement, removed
from the abstract tenor of the monograph.
Following his
classic volume, Modern Ireland 1600 – 1972 (1988), Foster
was incongruously labelled the arch-Revisionist, foisting a sarcastic
and anti-national analysis on Ireland’s history. This is odd, as
Foster in fact comes across as rather "patriotic". He sympathetically
delineates (in an essay on the historian F. S. L. Lyons) what he calls
Trinity College Nationalism: "an eighteenth-century cast
of mind, when the idea of "nation" signified not a claim to
territory but an ethos of government and culture." (p 49). Foster
is no "West Brit"; rather he baulks at Ireland’s tendency
to cultural cringe, expressed either in paddywhackery, or, more commonly,
inflated claims for its spuriously parochial heritage.
Foster has been
taken to task for excessive sympathy with the declining Protestant "ascendancy"
in Ireland. But his real attraction is to those voices that seek to
embellish, not caricature or circumscribe, Ireland’s mind. Certainly,
this is the concern of most of the writers discussed in The Irish
Story (Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt serve as the black-hatted antitheses).
II
Things, however,
have changed even since Modern Ireland. Ireland these days celebrates
pluralism with the vigour of the convert. Foster now is at least rhetorically
unexceptional in reminding us that "Irish life, like Irish literature,
is a matter of diverse growths from tangled roots, and that local stocks
can be equally tough and enduring even if they stem from very different
origins". (p 151) But he also sees the shoals and reefs of the
new consensus. In two combatative essays specifically, on "Theme-park
Ireland" and "Remembering 1798", Foster
concentrates on a neo-nationalist appropriation of pluralism. History
itself can be distorted to over-emphasise the intertwining of multiple
voices in the past, all the better to claim lineage for a hoped for
rapprochement in post-ceasefire Ireland. Such a rapprochement implies
heavily that unionism can, and at some period must, find itself absorbed
into a newly reformed and tolerant Irish nation.
Ireland’s
multiple voices have more often been at daggers’ drawn. Most commentators
accept this ruefully, but it is often assumed that the cause is to be
found in mutual deafness. In fact, the oases of common ground, as with
the United Irishmen of the 1790s, are usually the clearest examples
of mutual misunderstanding. It is hostility between nationalism and
unionism that has been based upon clear-eyed understanding of each other’s
aims and ambitions.
This point is
well made by Foster. It’s a pity, however, that he pays little
attention to the other side of today’s pluralist coin, the iconoclastic
rage of "revisionist" journalists, who practice what Eoghan
Harris calls "acts of good authority". This amounts to vigorously
attacking the assumptions of one’s own tradition, introducing an
often shrill "corrective bias" that produces its own polemical
excesses.
III
Foster seems
here to be taking stock of his craft, after revisionism has more or
less won the field. Revisionists often insist that their project is
apolitical, a simple application of letting the facts speak for themselves
to Ireland’s past. Foster is too subtle to accept such an easy
line. He acknowledges that the Troubles diverted the historical profession.
The vistas of sociological and anthropological approaches, so attractive
to the student of the 1960s, gave way to the more immediate tasks of
refuting or at least complicating nationalist mythologies (see pp 27–8).
Revisionism has not been a simple intellectual counter-insurgency, but
more than one academic in Belfast wrote literally to the crump of bombs:
not to respond to the task of civilising discourse would have been an
abdication.
But this is
no straightforward project. The idea that revolutionary nationalism
was committed to jejune ideas of Irish history, and thus liable to massive
disillusionment if these were demonstrated as wrong, is somewhat exaggerated.
For example, a recent academic commented that "Irish republicans
believed and continue to believe that the famine was a deliberate act
of genocide by the British. This became a central myth of the republican
movement in Ireland in the twentieth century". [Peter Neville,
"The Origins and Growth of Irish Republicanism", History
Today, no. 40, September 2001, pp 35-40.] In fact, the primary twentieth
century purveyor of the "genocide" label was A. J. P. Taylor.
The Provisional IRA publication of 1973, Freedom Struggle, argued
that "The Great Famine was the result of English laissez-faire
economic policies and deliberate neglect, combined with the failure
of the potato crop". This judgement unbalanced and misleadingly
phrased (what is meant by "deliberate"?), but it is not a
complete nonsense, certainly not a central myth of genocide.
Moreover, traditions
can be resistant to the lessons revisionists expect them to draw. Peter
Hart’s The IRA and its Enemies
sought to puncture myths about the "honourable" nature of
the War of Independence. A scholar committed to the republican project
today took this onboard, to a degree, but commented:
"All too often a romanticised and sanitised version of the period
… [has been]… presented to the reader. People look back and
feel that there was a nobility associated with the "old IRA"
which is devoid from the Provisional IRA. Hart's account demonstrates
that the organisation in both eras was remarkably similar in its operational
practices. In fact there is reason to believe that the modern IRA lacked
the ruthlessness of its predecessors". We see that republicanism
and nationalism, with a certain time lag, is actually quite adept at
selectively incorporating new zeitgeists, all the better to repackage
themselves and retain relevance. So too is unionism.
IV
If there is
any "central historical myth" of Irish nationalism it is less
concentrated on British misgovernment than on the historicity of the
Irish nation and the "artificiality" of unionism. Nationalism,
it was held, derived from an ancient Irish nation culturally coherent
and politically cohering. It resisted repression and assimilation, and
emerged tested through trial. Unionism, in nationalists’ opinion,
is artificial and transitory, buttressed by privilege and reliant upon
Britain’s imperial might.
This might seem
at first sight simply ridiculous. Unionists have mobilised impressively
the past, notably in 1912–14 against the Third Home Rule Bill.
Contemporary unionism is hardly weak-willed. However, the nationalist
analysis is an excellent example of a theory that can’t be disproved.
Unionism by definition binds itself to Britain’s strength –
if it did not it would no longer be unionism. It is little surprise
that nationalists have assumed that the unionist "bluff" would
crumple without British backing. Indeed, British governments have thought
this often enough.
We see this
"central historical myth" already in a nineteenth-century
nationalist history discussed by Foster, A. M. Sullivan’s The
Story of Ireland (pp 7 – 8). Irish kings, Sullivan argued,
actually deserved their conquest by the Normans because of their anti-national
fractiousness. England had moral right to dominion because they recognised
and acted on their nationalism when Ireland didn’t. When the Irish
similarly earn the cohesion of "modern" patriotism, a process
dependent upon sacrificial struggle, so to would their nation state
triumph. (The 1916 Rising for many, in the words of Maud Gonne, provided
the necessary "tragic dignity", [p 63]) The efforts of the
poor Ulster protestants, in Sullivan’s view, could amount to no
more than a "baseless fabric of a vision". They were colons,
vicious in their braggadocio, but dependent upon their British sponsors,
without internal coherence (pp 7 – 8).
V
Historians can
easily discomfit nationalist historical pieties, particularly if one
notes "the Irish propensity to therapeutic forgetting" (p
79). But only one central myth really matters, that Irish nationalism
has emerged from centuries of repression to become a genuine, nation-making
force. As Irish nationalism did indeed make the nation – it must
have done for an Irish nation indubitably exists as a genuine expression
of popular will – historians’ efforts to highlight that it
also emerged, incompletely at that, from confusion, apathy and contradiction,
cannot substantially diminish the nationalist teleology. Revisionism,
thus, might induce some cognitive dissonance in the more purblind nationalist,
but it cannot disprove nationalism.
Historians could
only explode the nationalist myth if it could change the ending of the
story – an Irish nation. Perhaps the future will allow them to
do this, identifying nationalism as transitory (Alvin Jackson tentatively
tries this in his recent survey when he suggests, in our own time, an
"end to history"). But most believe that’s beyond us
now.
Can the historian
demonstrate, perhaps, the objective superiority of unionism over nationalism,
or vice versa? The problem with weighing up the advantages of conflicting
identities of Unionism and Nationalism is that neither, in reality,
is based upon rational cost benefit analysis. Economists may doubt the
efficacy of the protectionist schemes of Arthur Griffith, hardened by
post-Independence politicians into nationalist dogma, but their abandonment
was and is easily accommodated by a redefinition of patriotism. Likewise,
unionism before 1920 argued that its industrial success justified partition;
now it is more likely to argue that Northern Ireland would sink economically
were it not for the British subvention. In reality, unionists are loyal
to the Crown, not the half-crown.
Historical critiques
of the contradiction between nationalist ideology and harsh reality
are possible, valid and frequent. But such debunking cannot give the
killer blow. Indeed, they lose their innocence as they are converted
into ammunition for the conflicts of identity. Recently David Trimble
lambasted "the pathetic, sectarian, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural
state to our south". This indictment is undoubtedly informed by
Trimble’s considerable familiarity with academic history. But the
appeal for the unionist audience was more clear-cut, as the Irish
Times’s columnist, Kevin Myers, pointed out: "at bottom,
politics in Northern Ireland is still all about tribal adversity. The
Irish Republic is the State constructed by the other tribe on this island.
Therefore, of necessity, it has to be pathetic. QED."
Historians can’t
really invalidate nationalism or unionism. Individually, they may dislike
either phenomenon, as perhaps they dislike rain. But in writing the
history of the nationalist era – from which we have yet to emerge
– the historian is forced to a sort of "pragmatic sanction".
It is not for us to declare between rival identities, rather to contribute
to their humanisation. Let us admit irreconcilables, but seek to make
their intercourse fruitful, rather than bitter and wasteful. This is
the lesson of Foster’s excellent The Irish Story. It is
a lesson too for Europe and the world today.
