Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…Last question, to close — this is in some ways quite a large one: Throughout your entire life, you’ve taught Irish history to Irish people, to English people, presumably to Europeans, and to Americans. What are the main differences across those groups in terms of how they understand Irish history or how you teach it? One of my favorite Irish novelists, Elizabeth Bowen, said that she wished the English remembered much more Irish history and the Irish forgot more of it. I tend to feel the same way. If you teach Irish history to Irish people, you can expect a certain parti pris, a certain attitude that is already there that you have to challenge. I should say one of the great things about being an Irish historian is the sophisticated, engaged, passionate interest in history among Irish people. We see it at the moment in the Decade of Commemorations, so-called, commemorating that key decade, 1912–22, when so much changed in Ireland. Living in England, I’ve been amazed at how little commemoration there was, let’s say, for instance in 1991 of 1691, of the Glorious Revolution, of the moment when Whig culture created essentially the modern British political system. Nobody gave a damn about it or remembered it. I was in France in 1989, and again, the extraordinary level of commemorativeness about the revolution was something you never see in England, perhaps because England is more secure and perhaps blinkered in its own views of itself and its past. Moving on to teaching Irish history to English people, British people, I think it’s absolutely vital. I’ve done it in London for many years. I inaugurated the first chair of Irish history in Oxford, which is still there, with a very brilliant successor, I’m glad to say. Teaching English people, especially at the heart of the establishment, which you would have to say Oxford represents, is utterly vital, because these are the people who will be the civil servants and possibly politicians of the future. The astonishing ignorance of English people about Irish history, apart from some set pieces, is one of the things that astonished me when I came, back in 1974, to be an academic in this country. That’s the obstacle you have to get over when you’re teaching Irish history to English people. Teaching Irish history to Americans, which I have done a bit, is another question again, because you’re encountering the emigrant memory of Ireland in many cases. Irish Americans or people with some Irish blood in them will say “I’m Irish,” not “I’m Irish American.” It’s a sense of identity which I think societies of emigrants bring very powerfully with them and sustain very powerfully. But it does mean that, all too often, the memory of Ireland is the memory of the grandmother or the grandfather or the generation who emigrated. They’ve kept it in aspic, and it’s necessary to stir that around a bit, to change it, to accentuate the complications, the nuances, the ironies of Irish history, the unexpected futures, and the futures that were expected but never happened, as I mentioned earlier. That’s what you have to try and get across to an audience that thinks they have a kind of historic tapestry, an immobilized tapestry or a mural of great national events, one after the other, leading in the end to liberation. try and get across to an audience that thinks they have a kind of historic tapestry, an immobilized tapestry or a mural of great national events, one after the other, leading in the end to liberation. It was all greatly more complicated and more difficult and more interesting and, I think, more creative than that.…

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