Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…How do you think that influenced your subsequent views on Irish history? The Waterford background — not from Dublin, right? Not from Dublin. And neither of my parents were from Waterford, either. One came from the border county: my father came from County Cavan. My mother came from County Wicklow, very beautiful county south of Dublin. But the school that they taught in and where I was taught was a Quaker school. We weren’t Quakers — we were nominally Church of Ireland — but the ethos of the education — and very many of our friends were Quakers, and Waterford was a strong center of the small but disproportionately influential Quaker presence in Ireland. The older I get the more I admire what Quakers stood for, what they did, what Quaker values are; and the more I am conscious that those values infused the — I think — very impressive education that I was lucky enough to be exposed to. You ask for Waterford and I give you Quakers. But Quakers were an intrinsic part of the history of Waterford, and I was brought up at the center of that. You think your views on religious toleration and the history of religion in Ireland were shaped by that background?…

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