Roy Foster: Irish reunification ‘is nearer than I would have thought it a couple of decades ago’

“I’m technically against pantheons,” Roy Foster tells me, citing a distinguished fellow historian. “FSL Lyons was asked where he would place Parnell in the pantheon, and he said he hated the idea of pantheons.”

Parnell was the subject of Foster’s PhD and his first book, Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family, from 1976, of which another eminent historian, Laurence Stone, wrote approvingly: “No heroes, then in brackets (except O’Connell).” Daniel O’Connell “isn’t as revered as I think he should be”, says Foster.

We are talking of pantheons, the great and the good, because next Wednesday, at the Irish Book Awards, Foster, “one of the most distinguished modern heirs of the great tradition of Anglo-Irish liberalism,” according to critic Terry Eagleton, ”which flows through Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell to WB Yeats and on to such latter-day luminaries as the essayist Hubert Butler and the historian FSL Lyons”, will be conferred with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award. He is “surprised and delighted” to join the ranks of “a lot of names I revere”, such as Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, John McGahern and William Trevor.

Foster’s mammoth and magisterial Modern Ireland 1600-1972, published in 1988, rejected “the definition of Irishness against Britishness” and sought “a more relaxed and inclusive definition of Irishness, and a less constricted view of Irish history”. It sold in quantities more normally associated with writers such as Maeve Binchy. Triggering the widely contested “revisionism” debate, it succeeded in demonstrating that Irish history was more than just the story of Irish nationalism.

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His two-volume biography of Yeats, from 1998 and 2003, was no less of a publishing phenomenon. His fellow public intellectual Seamus Deane had taken issue with Foster’s treatment of the Easter Rising in a 1991 essay, Wherever Green Is Read; a little over a decade later the same critic, reviewing Foster’s The Apprentice Mage in The Irish Times in 2003, was unabashed in his admiration. Foster’s Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, published in 2014, seemed to represent a certain rapprochement with the men and women of 1916. Have his sympathies shifted somewhat?

“That’s quite a complex question,” Foster says. “When I wrote Modern Ireland a bit of tearing down idols, or at least shaking them up a bit and dusting them off, was necessary. The function of the historian at that time in the 1980s was to say things that caught people up a bit, that involved looking at the 1916 generation perhaps not as pietistically as they had been, particularly Pearse. Ruth Dudley Edwards had begun it with her very impressive biography of Pearse, but there was more to do. It was a necessary moment, and I don’t take back any of it.

“By the time I came to write Vivid Faces that work of reassessment had been done, much had happened in politics and I had become much older. I was interested in disillusionment, in the way that youth imagines it can change the world and can’t. I was very sympathetic to that. I was thinking of the 1960s, and it struck me in a way that it didn’t when I was writing Modern Ireland that the youth of that period were like the 1960s, full of utopianism, a lack of realism, but well intentioned in many ways. I also thought how young they were, which when I was young myself, writing Modern Ireland, wasn’t as poignant.”

Not for the first time, trends in continental history writing influenced him, and he had become interested in the history of generational shifts. “I began thinking of how the people who made 1916 saw themselves as different from their parents, and in some ways the enemy was their parents’ generation as much as the British state; therefore I suppose there is more obvious sympathy. My wife calls that book my novel. I was trying to re-create characters as well and to write a group biography.”

Revisionism was a major debate in Foster’s early career. How does he feel now about that and the prevailing consensus on our big-picture history, especially after the Decade of Centenaries?

“I think the poles have shifted. I think the way the Decade of Centenaries was approached was infinitely more interrogative than it was in 1998 for 1798. The Government took a very careful, balanced line, showed far more sensitivity to those whose stories didn’t accord with the national narrative. I thought it was a maturing moment, which cheered me. My great friend Catriona Crowe hit on the phrase ‘complicate the narrative’, and I think she was really on to something.

“The whole revisionism thing is over. I would like to say that the historians of my generation who were loosely dubbed revisionists – myself, David Fitzgerald, Marianne Elliott, Vincent Comerford – I think what we were trying to do was look at Irish history not necessarily in an antinationalist way but in a broader social way.” Their critics took “too hibernocentric a view”. “We were part of an international movement,” influenced by the US historian Eugene Genovese, France’s Annales historians, Britain’s EP Thompson.

Cultural diversity and cross-channel borrowings are implicit in Irish history and cannot be denied by piety or suppressed by violence

The return of violence in the North must have had a bearing, too. “It must have had. But the rhetoric got silly. We were accused of being in cahoots with the government, even with the British government. That was absolutely ridiculous, but it can’t be denied that to see violent nationalism revived red in tooth and claw had to have an effect on the way we saw the history of the whole country.”

Mention of FSL Lyons reminds me of his quotation that “to understand the past is to cease to live in it”.

“I think it’s one of the merits of studying history. Bertie Ahern said we don’t live in the past, we live in the future. I tend to think we live in the present myself.

“One of the reasons to study history is to interrogate the assumptions of the past. Isaiah Berlin, when asked why he had given up writing pure philosophy in favour of writing intellectual history, said ‘because I want to die knowing more about something than when I was born.’”

Foster was inspired to study history by Eileen Webster, a Cambridge graduate who taught him history at Newtown, the Quaker school he attended in Waterford, then by Theo Moody at Trinity College Dublin.

After early biographies of Parnell, “a Marxisant attempt to lift him out of politics and back into his social and family background”, and Randolph Churchill – two half-Americans, he now realises – he wrote important, sweeping modern Irish histories before returning to biographies, but this time on poets rather than politicians. Yet in 1993 he told History Ireland that he “hated biographies”. While he insists he meant the notion of the “who’s next” conveyor belt, “If I did say it, I changed my mind, because I think it can be a terrifically incisive and enlightening keyhole on an age as well as a person.”

I mention the successful biographies of John Bew, which prompts Foster to recall Bew’s father, Paul.

“Paul and I are exact contemporaries. We first met in the Colindale newspaper library in London, where the British Museum kept its papers. It had a better collection of local Irish newspapers than the National Library of Ireland. Paul was then a wild-haired Marxist. Now he’s Lord Bew of wherever, like something from an Anthony Powell novel, but life is like that.”

While Bew became an adviser to the late unionist leader David Trimble, Foster has “always been a kind of depressed centrist or possibly slightly left of centre. I’ve never believed in solutions really, just crisis management” – a believer in gradual amelioration, I suggest, and he concurs. “I voted for Irish and British Labour with varying degrees of disillusionment.” He is fascinated by the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition, once impossible, then inevitable. “It is often how history happens. Something is supposed to be a bouleversement, but things go on much as they did before, like Labour coming to power in 1920s Britain.”

[With Brexit] the worst of England seemed to have taken over; the scum had floated to the top of politics

Foster’s latest book was On Seamus Heaney, from 2020. “I was by no means an intimate, but I revered the work. He was such a magnetic, charismatic, generous person. You were held by the force field of that personality. I hope that inflected my view of him.” When I ask him to compare Heaney and Yeats, he tells me he is about to do just that in a lecture in his father’s native Cavan, “the way they wrote about Civil War, Yeats’s Meditations in Time of Civil War and Heaney’s very different but cognate way of writing about violence. Both were critiqued for writing from outside the cockpit, but both use language and poetry to cope with atrocity.”

The lecture may end up in a third volume of essays he is working on. He already has 14 uncollected essays that need manners put on them, he says.

He is also editing a handwritten memoir by a relative of his wife, Aisling, a minor Catholic landlord in the late 19th century. A labour of love? “I don’t think you would love Great-Uncle Dermot – he was a very crusty curmudgeon – but it is a fascinating reflection on life then. He ends up living in the Hotel Terminus Nice, a perfect emblem for a class whose time has come.”

The last time I interviewed Foster was almost 30 years ago to the day; it was in his north London home, about his first essay collection, Paddy and Mr Punch, which addressed the complex relationship between Ireland and England through the prism of complex personalities whose lives, like his own, bridged the Irish Sea: Katherine O’Shea, Parnell, Yeats, Randolph Churchill, Anthony Trollope. “Cultural diversity and cross-channel borrowings are implicit in Irish history and cannot be denied by piety or suppressed by violence.”

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

Today we meet in the offices of The Irish Times, across the road from Trinity College, two former Anglo-Irish bastions now comfortably integrated into a pluralist modern Ireland.

“I think as you get older you get much more interested in your forebears. Now it’s okay to talk about being a Protestant. It was different in the 1950s and 1960s. I’m very interested in and appreciative of the Protestant background I knew as a child, a strong sense of being national but probably not nationalistic.”

When he first went to lecture in London and then Oxford, the Troubles were still raging and the relationship between Westminster and Dublin was often fraught. After five decades of being an Irishman in England, how does he feel about the two countries’ relationship now?

“If you’d asked me that before June 2016 I’d have given a very upbeat answer. The late queen’s Irish visit crystallised that the past had been got over. Brexit has been one of the great shocks and horrors of my life and for many of my generation. What it did to Anglo-Irish relations has been uniformly deleterious. I cannot believe that people as mentally challenged as Theresa Villiers and other secretaries of state could have campaigned for Brexit saying it would make no difference for Northern Ireland. Anyone with a titter of wit could have seen what a disaster it was going to be. The condescension and crudeness and ignorance with which the Boris Johnson raft of politicians, such as the abysmal Lord Frost, treated Ireland over Brexit was a sobering shock. The damage will take a very long time to repair.”

Does he regret having been away for so long or has it been congenial to live in London and visit often?

“I have to bring in the B-word again. I felt very antipathetic; the worst of England seemed to have taken over; the scum had floated to the top of politics. There was a nasty anti-foreigner racism.” But he had skin in the game, children and grandchildren, and he lives in the independent republic of London, a multicultural and cosmopolitan metropolis, and he has a house in France to retreat to. His vocabulary is seasoned with French phrases.

Is Irish reunification inevitable?

“I’m tempted to refuse that altogether; as a historian I don’t predict. As an Irishman with a certain interest in politics I think reunification is nearer than I would have thought it a couple of decades ago. I’ve a terrible fear it would come in the wrong way and with a lot of upheaval. As you know, I’m a great admirer of Hubert Butler. His idea of the Border was it would float off in the bath one day, like a sticking plaster off a wound that has healed. That would have been the logical future until Brexit. It won’t be like that now, I’m afraid. There will be a lot more trauma. I’m not sure it will be in my lifetime, but then I’m 74.”