Roy Foster: prediction

Transcript context

…If we think about the Troubles, they seem to heat up again in the late 1960s. Why does that happen at that time? Well, many books are published about this. The most recent ones, actually, have started emphasizing the examples of global movements, of civil and libertarian unrest, notably in America, on a generation that had been educated to know how discriminated against the Catholic people were. I think there’s a question as to whether the outburst of violence that began in 1968/9 — and then continued, as you know, until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — there’s a question as to whether this was the bursting of a boil, which was always going to happen because of the way the Catholics in the northeastern counties — the statelet set up by the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 — that this was always going to happen. More recently there’s a more nuanced view that sees movements towards reconciliation, movements towards peaceful civil rights demands, movements towards liberalization within a certain wing of the unionist party — that sees this as happening in the early and mid-1960s. And all that followed as a lurch into violence that could have been avoided, had the unionist establishment behaved with more intelligence and foresight. I think I incline rather to that view, and I believe that it was the view of Seamus Heaney as well, about whom my latest book is. Certainly when you read about his life and those of his peers in mid-1960s Northern Ireland, you get a sense of: finally, some new territories of interaction, cultural interaction, social interaction between the two communities opening up. But due to the violence with which civil rights demonstrations were put down in 1969 and due to the rise of the Provisional IRA as a result of that, that was not to be, and we had 30 years and 3,500 deaths instead. Why did the British intervene as much as they did — because that had not been the general pattern, right?…

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