Roy Foster: evaluation

Transcript context

…After the war, the Republic switches its electoral system to a version of the single transferable vote. Why did they do that, and how has it mattered for Irish politics? It’s mattered because it has encouraged, as STV PR systems do all over the world, a likelihood towards coalition governments, often between unlikely allies. I think this is a good thing. Living in Britain, where they have what I think is an archaic and crude first-past-the-post system, which has given repeatedly sweeping powers of government to parties who have not received anything like a national majority — I think it’s a much less admirable system than what Ireland manipulates. The general line is often taken that it’s too difficult for voters, but actually anyone who’s at all interested in where their vote is going knows very quickly or finds out very quickly the advantages and disadvantages sometimes of tactical voting in a PR system. The Irish are exceptionally good at it. The disadvantage might be that it produces a rather clientelist kind of politics, and there’s a lot of horse trading and pork barrel (as you would say in the States) politics that go on, especially in rural constituencies, as deals are hammered out for who gets what and what votes go to whom. But in the end, I think it’s produced — I think this has to be admitted — it’s produced a remarkably stable political system in a postrevolutionary country. When you look at the numbers of revolutionary regimes that were set up in European countries after the First World War — and I think Ireland should be seen as one of those — when you look at what was happening in Central Europe, when you look at the rise of fascism, especially in Italy but also in Germany and to a certain extent in France — Ireland, though it had a miniature parafascist party in the 1930s, kept a stable democratic system going. And it kept it going through the crises of war and poverty and a number of internal crises within the government itself, right through to the present day. At the moment, we have, again, a coalition government in Ireland between the long-standing enemies, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael parties, that emerged out of the civil war divide. Which is yet another of those, until recently, rather unexplored areas of Irish history: the traumatic civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish War in 1921. I think the PR system that Ireland adopted has stood it in good stead, and I think that Ireland at the moment seems a far more mature and effective polity, in political terms, certainly than Boris Johnson’s England. And I say “England” advisedly, because I think both Wales and Scotland are in a rather questionable position vis-à-vis the unity of the UK at this moment. There’s so much focus on Joyce and Yeats as writers, but how does Irish modernism differ, in your understanding, if you view it through the lens of the Irish visual arts and painting? Stained glass, sculpture?…

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