Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, again, if I can instance my own work, I wrote a book called Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970–2000, which is a study of how Ireland became rich, successful — a country into which people immigrated rather than exporting its own people for emigration. A country which was producing a large quantity of the world’s supply of Viagra, to take one example of its pharmaceutical revolution. A country in which not only Big Pharma but also silicon technology invaded from the 1990s and made a number of people very, very rich. It all would collapse — no, actually, it wouldn’t all collapse. There would be an extreme check applied in the crash of 2006–2008, but now that we can look back from 2022, the upside is still there. Ireland is a great deal richer, more prosperous, more fully populated, and more, I think, optimistic than it was in the Ireland I grew up in in the 1960s and early ’70s. I think Ireland has got very used to being a world player, or at least an EU player, if I can put it like that, and that can’t be underestimated. I think Ireland began being rich earlier than people think, just as Ireland began being liberal earlier than people think. People think that Ireland cast off the shackles of overwhelming Catholic power and social morality with the scandals that emerged about bishops having children and the mother and baby homes and so forth. Not so. I think — and I said this in the lectures that became that book, Luck and the Irish — I think it began with the Irish women’s movement in the very early 1970s, when what the sociologist Tom Inglis has called the bargain, the implicit bargain between the priest and the mother that kept Ireland going, was broken radically from the mother’s side. When women were not going to be instructed by the church how to live their lives, and how to live not only their reproductive lives but their social and their work and their sexual lives. That was an enormous revolution, and it happened both quickly and irrevocably from the 1970s. Similarly, I think Ireland became rich not just when the Big Pharma and the Silicon Valley began invading in the 1990s. It became much richer from 1972–3 when it entered the Common Market, as it was then called, and became the recipient of very many grants and handouts and also, more creatively, was integrated into the European government, always punching above its weight at Strasbourg and Brussels, and doing very well out of it. Ireland took to Europe in a very committed way. Even during the years of austerity after the crash of 2006–8, when it seemed at the time rather draconian implementations of economic policy were being ordered on Ireland from the so-called troika of European financial authorities, it wasn’t objected to half as much as it was in Greece or in Spain, for instance. The medicine was taken because so much good medicine, or sugar, or whatever you like to use metaphorically, had gone down in the previous 20-odd years. h as it was in Greece or in Spain, for instance. The medicine was taken because so much good medicine, or sugar, or whatever you like to use metaphorically, had gone down in the previous 20-odd years. Ireland has come through a lot of its economic dislocation since then and is more — I think I’m right to say — more passionately and more committedly European than ever, especially in the light of what Brexit is bringing about in the larger island next door. As you know, Ireland has quite a low marriage rate. How do you think about the long-term repopulation of the country? Could you imagine, say 30 years from now, that half the population in the Republic is simply from the EU, and that that’s culturally stable, and everyone’s fine with it?…

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