Roy Foster: ‘The Irish argue about history all the time’

Roy Foster looks around his cramped rooms at Hertford College in Oxford at a clutter of mismatched tables and chairs, brightly patterned rugs and books stacked from floor to ceiling. He is retiring as Carroll professor of Irish history, the position created for him in 1991, and he's in the midst of the melancholy task of packing up and moving out.

“I don’t think melancholy is quite right. I think it’s more elegiac. It’s been 25 years of my life, and it’s been a very intense 25 years,” he says. “I’ve sat in this room with generations of students, because that’s the way we teach. Two young people come in, and they’d sit there, and I’d sit here, and we’d talk about things – and sometimes quite heatedly – and that was wonderful. That I’ll miss, because I don’t think you get that kind of teaching anywhere.”

Oxford’s chair of Irish history, still the only one at a British university, is being renamed after Foster as his successor, Ian McBride, takes over. Foster is shy about the compliment, which was made at the insistence of the anonymous donor who is funding the chair, but it is a tribute to the transformative impact he has had on the study of Irish history in Britain over the past quarter of a century.

Seen as part of British history

Before he arrived at Oxford, after teaching for 17 years at Birkbeck college, part of the University of London, Irish history had been taught in an episodic, unconnected way, usually as an occasional adjunct to British history.

“It was seen as an interesting subject but niche, and relevant really only to people who had that particular kind of interest. It wasn’t seen as something that was an inseparable and large and inconvenient part of British history, which is one way that it could be seen. It was seen more as something that came in and out of the story of Britain at certain points,” he says.

Foster introduced undergraduate courses and seminars, bringing guest lecturers from Ireland, and he has supervised no fewer than 34 PhDs, 19 of which became books. Irish history now has a major presence at the university, where it is increasingly seen as another European history rather than part of British history. This is reflected, he says, in the people who study it, who are no longer drawn mainly from those with Irish backgrounds.

“They’re people who think that Ireland is an interesting country with a fascinating history that reflects all sorts of enormous issues about colonialism, postcolonialism, violence – all those issues that we’re now groping with all over the world – and that Ireland and the study of Irish history can illuminate these in a very interesting and sometimes anticipatory way, particularly at the turn of the last century.”

Born in Waterford in 1949, Foster is the son of two teachers at Newtown School, a Quaker institution at the edge of the city, where his father taught Irish. Members of the Church of Ireland, his parents were liberal nationalists, part of a 3.5 per cent minority in the Republic whom Foster says are sometimes misunderstood.

Protestants aren’t unionists

“This stupid assumption is made often by people that Irish Protestants are unionists. Indeed, I think occasionally I’ve been referred to as a unionist, which is so far from the mark that it’s ludicrous,” he says. “The sort of home I grew up in thought that partition was a tragic mistake. Of course it was a tragic mistake for us. We’d have been a 25 per cent minority in a country that wasn’t a fecking theocracy if partition hadn’t happened. Partition was a tragedy for southern Protestants, and that’s not often enough realised.”

A foundation scholar at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied history under TW Moody, Foster moved to England in 1974 and has been based between London and Oxford ever since.

Foster is a prolific and celebrated writer; his works include the popular and influential Modern Ireland 1600-1972, a universally celebrated two-volume life of WB Yeats, countless essays and reviews, and, most recently, Vivid Faces, a group biography of some of the revolutionary generation in Ireland a century ago.

Early on he was identified as the leading figure among “revisionist” historians, whose work was often seen as a challenge to the prevailing Irish nationalist version of history. Working against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, arguments about history became entangled with politics.

“It couldn’t not be, could it? Every now and then some bright spark thinks that he or she has made a really interesting assertion by linking the so-called revisionist moment in Irish history to the agendas of the British and Irish governments vis-a-vis republicanism and the North from that same period. To which the only answer is, yeah, right?” Foster says.

“Certainly, the way people were rereading Irish history had to be galvanised by what was being done in the name of Irish history in the North. But where the thing breaks down is the idea that the historians were some sort of arm of a government project.”

Our enthusiasm for commemorations

Foster has criticised the way history was pressed into the service of the peace process during the 200th anniversary of 1798, but he is pleased by the official commemorations of 1916.

“I’d expected more unequivocal triumphalism. I was surprised at the extent to which it was allowable to say – I’m not saying that I agree with this, but some people do – that 1916 was a mistake. It became allowable to say that, and to debate it, without the kind of emotional denunciations that would have happened certainly 20 years ago and maybe 10 or 15 years ago.”

Foster contrasts Ireland’s enthusiasm for commemorations with the way Britain tends to ignore major anniversaries, even of events such as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which form the basis of the country’s political identity.

“The Irish talk about history all the time; the Irish argue about history all the time. The average knowledge about history and about his or her country’s history, although it would be maybe a very skewed and coloured version of history among people on the street in Ireland, is very high. You just have to look at the sale of history books. Thank God, they sell well in Ireland,” he says.

“But history is a kind of intellectuals’ interest here; it’s not part of the air people breathe. It’s to do also, I suppose, with having been a very secure and entire and confident country for a very long time. The English used to think they didn’t even have nationalism, because they didn’t need it.”

Furious about Brexit

Everyone is talking about English nationalism now, in the wake of the Brexit vote, which prompted Foster to write an angry denunciation of a referendum decided by “the embittered, the alienated and the old”.

“I was furious about it. The only political leader whose voice echoed what I felt that awful morning was Tim Farron, of the Liberal Democrats, who said he was heartbroken. And that was the feeling. I felt the country had taken a step back and a step into a kind of diminishing cul de sac,” Foster says.

“This is considered an elitist view to take, but I think it’s clear that the votes that swung it, whether defined by age or location or education or occupation, were from a very identifiable sector of the excluded and the angry and, I would have to say, unanalytical.”

Foster avoids engaging in what he calls “predictive history”, but he admits that he has been thinking about the potential consequences of Brexit for Ireland, including the possibility of reunification.

“I have been thinking that one outcome of this might possibly be that a reunified Ireland, on the basis that both north and south want to be part of Europe, could be slightly nearer the bounds of possibility than it might have been. But then I suppose I’d always come back to something I’ve also said often, which is that the Border has been reinforced and re-entrenched by the Provisional IRA,” he says.

“It is one of the great ironies of the last tragic half-century of Irish history that what came out of the Provisional IRA’s campaign was the unintended consequence of a reinforced Border and that strange little unit up in the northeast of the island more its own place than it ever was.”

It’s time to go. Foster has a couple of book projects in the pipeline, and he will take up a part-time academic post in London, so life after Oxford will be as busy as ever.

“Twenty-five years is long enough to do anything. I retired because I’m 67, and that’s when they encourage you to go,” he says. “I think it’s better to go when you’re still in control of yourself. Which I marginally am.”