Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…If we think of Ireland in the mid-to-late 19th century, do you think there was a path where British union with Ireland persists, is at least moderately liberal, and is permanent? Does that involve earlier home rule? Or giving Catholics access to the spoils system? How does that look? Was it ever on the table? Was it just fantasy? There are two great missed chances. One is when the Act of Union happened in 1800–1801 and did away with the old Irish Parliament. This was later seen as a great injustice, but it should be remembered that that old Irish Parliament was a very elite Protestant monopoly. Implicitly part of the promise to the Irish for doing away with their Parliament was that Catholics would be, in the phrase of the day, emancipated and be allowed to sit in British Parliament and have access to the great offices of state. Thanks to the opposition of King George III, this was ruled out, and Catholics felt very reasonably that they had been misled and cheated. It took nearly 30 years, till 1829, under Daniel O’Connell, as I’ve mentioned, for that injustice to be rectified. There’s a very good recent book about it by Antonia Fraser. This, I think, was a missed chance for reconciliation. Those 29 years between the union of 1800 and Catholic emancipation of 1829 were suffused with bitterness, which need not have been the case. The other great missed chance is in 1886, when Gladstone converted himself and a large part of his ruling Liberal Party in Britain to the cause of Irish home rule. In the greatest speech of his life, for nearly (I think) two and a half hours, he tried to persuade the House of Commons that if they rejected giving Ireland an autonomous parliament within the empire, indeed within the United Kingdom, they would regret it in the future and it would be a very ominous sign. They did reject it, the House of Commons. They passed it a few years later, but it was rejected by the House of Lords. I think 1886 was probably the last moment when, conceivably, there could have been united Ireland between the increasingly different Northeast and the rest of the island, with an autonomous parliament on the Canadian model within the empire, which I suspect would have disengaged itself over the next 50 years by peaceful steps, as indeed the Irish Free State after the Irish revolution disengaged itself from the Commonwealth by peaceful steps. But by then Ireland was partitioned, which to me is an inevitable tragedy but still a tragedy. And that could just about have been averted had Britain given Ireland home rule in 1886. How contingent was that partition in the 1920s? Is there a scenario where there’s an attempt to make all of Ireland independent that is anything other than just a very bloody civil war?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.