Roy Foster: belief

Transcript context

…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? No. I think certainly by the early 1920s, that’s the case. I think the First World War, which is one of the defining events in Irish history, split a deeper rift than ever between the Northeast and the rest of the country. Mind you, very, very many — more than 100,000 — Irish men volunteered to fight on the side of the Allies in the First World War, but the real commitment came from the Northeast, the Protestant culture of the Northeast, which was determined to use the war effort as a way of showing that they were part of Britain, not part of a putative home-rule Ireland. The Battle of the Somme, which decimated the flower of Ulster’s youth on the western front, put this into stone, just as the 1916 nationalist rising a few weeks before, at Easter 1916, and the executions of all the leaders of that, built into stone the resentment of the nationalist Irish against British rule, leading to the extremely traumatic guerrilla war of independence and then the civil war which followed. So you also think the periodic World War II talk of Ireland giving up its neutrality in return for unification — that was never serious, in your view?…

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