Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why did the British intervene as much as they did — because that had not been the general pattern, right? No, absolutely not. One of the first pieces of crusading journalism that drew attention to the way Northern Ireland was run, and gerrymandering and discrimination and all the rest of it, was in the British Sunday Times, which was then, amazingly, quite a crusading paper, which it no longer is. The article was called “John Bull’s Political Slum.” And it was a political slum. And one reason it was a political slum, Northern Ireland, was that the British threw money at it when demanded by the unionists but kept their faces firmly averted from the kind of culture of discrimination that had been built upon and encouraged ever since the measures like the abolition of proportional representation in voting, right back at the beginning in the 1920s. When they did intervene, it was, I believe, reluctantly. There’s a simple nationalist version, which is that they were determined — the British were determined — to hang onto Northern Ireland for military reasons no matter what, and that’s why they poured the army in. Absolutely unproven, and I think proven to be untrue by the recollections and the evidence that’s come to light since. Northern Ireland was never going to be anything but a running sore for the British, and many of them secretly and covertly would have really done their utmost to wash their hands of it, as indeed they may almost unintentionally be doing now because of the nonsensical position in which the catastrophe of Brexit has put Northern Ireland in relation to the larger island and in relation to the Republic. How much permanent cultural influence do you think it had that the Republic did not fight in World War II?…

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