Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change (review)

Roy Foster's new book is a timely, erudite, and extremely witty personal essay on the condition of Irish political and social life in the contemporary era. It is a benign and patrician attempt, in the manner of Hubert Butler, Arland Ussher, or Sean O'Faolain, to come to terms with the almost constantly contradictory facts of recent life in Ireland. Just at that point where civil rancor might have certainly torn the land apart, another set of forces was at work that delivered success and prosperity. "When did the future present itself to be grabbed? Looking back, we can see that certain statistics suggest where change was likely to begin . . ." writes Foster on page three, but by page 181 he has widened his forensic investigation:

Options of Irishness at the end of the twentieth century reflect a great dislocation. Looking at the new motorway encircling Dublin, the cultural commentator Ann Marie Hourihane caustically pronounced 'History is finished here. Now we are going to live like everybody else.' But it is not that simple.

Indeed. Ireland was never that simple. What country is? As Foster observes, "a certain amount of good luck was maximised by good management." His book is a commentary on that management; a multilayered commentary that had its origins in Foster's Wiles Lectures at Queen's University, Belfast, in 2004 and the simultaneous duty of adding a catch-up section to his definitive 1988 volume, Modern Ireland 1600–1972. He is aware of the limitations and anxieties created by such commentaries, and recognizes that a work on such recent happenings will surely be interspersed with opinion and speculation. But Foster is convinced that what he is writing is "history none the less."That "none the less" is a warning to the reader—a warning that historians who engage in material that might be the stuff of journalism and opinion are acting as agents of history. An historian so close to material like this is also a political agent, effecting the direction of things with an ability to report upon vast quantities of current information and to create a pattern for contemporary action. Ireland has always generated this kind of historical writing: such writing reflects the yearning of our country to find a workable pattern, a paradigm by which it might engage all the contradictory forces at work in Irish life.

Foster captures one of those emerging forces brilliantly in the chapter "How the Catholics Became Protestants."Here, he traces the decline of Catholic influence in Irish education, the decline in Mass-going, the rise of confidence in the Church of Ireland, and the empowering presence of Archbishop Empey in Dublin, culminating in that famous gesture of the devoutly Catholic President Mc Aleese taking communion at the Protestant cathedral. These developments have led to a position in Ireland where, as Foster observes, "The recognition that Northern Unionism had a voice worth listening to has come slowly, but it is one of the striking reversals of approach over the last thirty years."All of this is part of what might be seen, broadly, as a coming to terms with the entire cultural memory of Ireland.

After 9/11, Foster observes, any notion of a benign world order is speciously unhistorical. While he praises the management of Ireland, the seven National Wage Agreements between 1970 and 1978, the sunny expectations of a liberal future, and the differentiation of "politics" from"policy," he shrewdly notes the persistent negative feeling toward the European Union—a national feeling that has led to the recent postponement of the future with the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. This differentiation of "politics" from "policy" is particularly striking; here, Foster continues a forensic scrutiny that was usefully initiated by the historian and broadcaster, John Bowman, who identified de Valéra's continual use of the "Ulster Issue" to advance a Fianna Fáil electoral advantage. By emphasizing the "politics" of the matter rather than addressing the more complex...