Joseph Lee's review of Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600–1972
appeared in the TLS of February 24 1989
J. C. Beckett’s The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923 has held pride of place
since its publication in 1966 not only as the standard narrative history of
the period, but as one of the outstanding studies of the modern history of
any European country. Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600-1972, a very
different type of history, is fully worthy of the standard set by Beckett.
Ambitiously conceived and beautifully designed, it is in the first place a
work of art. It is no coincidence that Foster integrates architectural
history with striking effect into his study. He has a discerning eye, and an
almost tactile feel, for the great houses of Ireland, both in their own
aesthetic right and as custodians of genteel tradition. He quotes Yeats:
to kill a house
Where great men grew up, married, died,
I here declare a capital offence.
In Modern Ireland Foster builds his own Great House, which deserves to defy
the ravages of time.
His prose, at once lyrical and sinewy, is a pleasure to read; and the felicity
of style is matched by organizational skill. Section after section is a
model of concision, yet the text rarely appears hurried or foreshortened.
The book’s finest moments include his topographical survey of early
seventeenth-century Ireland, the delicate probe into “the covert
continuities from the Tudor period” in Stuart Ireland, the description of
the dilemma of the Old English, whose loyalty to the Crown left them
vulnerable to shifting power relations in Stuart England, the delineation of
the contours of the seventeenth-century planter and the eighteenth-century
ascendancy mentalities, the vignettes encapsulating his reflections on the
Cromwellian and Williamite settlements, the account of the spread of
Orangism in nineteenth-century Ulster and of Fenianism in the other
provinces, and the analysis of the post-Parnellite period, where he
trenchantly challenges the familiar assumption of a transfer of emotional
energy from politics to culture.
Foster determined to write an account which would be “above all, an Irish
interpretation of the history of modern Ireland”. Yet while it cannot be
claimed that, after nearly seventy years of self-government of a sort, this
exercise is premature, it continues to pose interpretative problems. It is
not simply that a balance has to be struck between the history of Ireland
and the history of Anglo-Irish relations, difficult though it may be to
establish the correct emphasis. There is a more incestuous and more
dangerous sense in which the history of modern Ireland tends to be written,
often unconsciously, from an anglocentric perspective. So much of the source
material reflects English assumptions that perspectives can easily be
distorted.
The implications of his approach confront Foster from the very first sentence,
“When does modern Irish history begin?” Having canvassed various answers,
including Henry VIII’s assumption of the title “King of Ireland” in 1541,
the collapse of the ambitions of Hugh O’Neill in the chaos of Kinsale in
1601, and O’Neill’s flight to the Continent in 1607, Foster correctly
concludes that “nothing began, or ended, thus neatly”. Nevertheless, the
criterion for all the suggested dates, or for alternative possibilities,
like 1534, where the relevant volume of A New History of Ireland begins – is
the end, or the beginning of the end of Gaelic Ireland.
Irrespective of the date, or spectrum of dates, chosen, the history of modern
Ireland begins somewhere in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. But ambiguity creeps into the use of the term “modern”. Foster
usually employs it in a simple chronological sense. However, he entitles his
final chapter “Modern Ireland?” and the interrogative imposes a conceptual
burden on “modern”, whose meaning seems to slide at times towards
“modernization”. As the beginnings of modern Ireland coincide with the
English conquest, Gaelic Ireland often tends to be conceptualized not simply
as medieval, in the traditional sense, but as anti-modern or as incapable of
modernization, however casually defined.
Foster addresses the potential for adaptation in Gaelic society more
elliptically than directly. If one holds that Gaelic society was capable of
adapting to changing circumstances, then the English conquest no longer
becomes a prerequisite for modernization, but serves simply as a descriptive
term. Foster detects some potential for change in Gaelic Ireland, but value
judgments derived from English assumptions tend to be built into much of his
initial vocabulary. The word “bizarre” frequently serves as a description of
Gaelic society in his first thirty pages, where it is not always clear
whether this refers to the perspectives of English observers, or is intended
as an objective statement, or both. He is of course well aware of the
fragility of the type of evidence in which “the proponents of ’civility’ saw
only what they wanted to see”. But he is nevertheless forced to rely heavily
on “those Elizabethan travellers who made it their business to be appalled”
at a society where “exoticism manifested itself in long hair, curious
jewellery and flowing clothes”.
There is, of course, much incidental narrative in Modern Ireland, but it is in
large measure that of the retrospective glance, more a commentary on, than
an account of, events. It contains little on the process of decision-making,
whether in government, in business, or in institutions, even in political
parties or Churches. Foster’s approach is more that of a literary critic
than of a political analyst; and this accounts for the main weakness in the
work, the treatment of independent Ireland and of Northern Ireland. Part of
his difficulty here doubtless derives from the relative dearth of secondary
literature. But the weakness seems to be as much the consequence of
perspective as of material. Foster’s preference for the history of opinion
and his detachment from policy-making processes may to some extent be
justified in an Irish history of Ireland as long as these processes could be
seen to be primarily external to the society itself. But it cannot be
justified in the history of independent Ireland, or even in that of Northern
Ireland. It is symptomatic that many of the most influential policy makers
in the history of independent Ireland are simply missing from this account.
One searches in vain for Sean MacEntee, the longest serving Minister for
Finance in the history of the state, or Gerald Boland, the Minister for
Justice who stiffened de Valera’s resolve against the IRA during the Second
World War. Nor is there mention of J. J. McElligott, who served for
twenty-six years as a formidable Secretary of the Department of Finance, or
of Joe Walshe, Secretary of External Affairs for twenty-four years, or John
Leydon, Secretary of Industry and Commerce for twenty-three years, or
Maurice Moynihan, Secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach, also for
twenty-three years. The Ireland of 1972 was in many respects their creation,
however trapped they may have been in the legacy of the seventeenth century,
or in their perception of that legacy. There are, too, some factual slips in
this final section. Arthur Griffith, for example, was not President of the
government of the Free State; the Border Commission was not set up in 1925;
de Valera’s successor as prime minister, Sean Lemass, was not first elected
to the Dail in 1925, nor did he die in 1969; T. K. Whitaker, one outstanding
public servant who is mentioned, is invested with the governorship of the
Bank of Ireland rather than the Central Bank, and then for what would have
been the wrong dates even for the right bank.
Foster’s project of an “Irish” history faces a particular problem. He aspires
to write the history of Irish “mentality”. But there are, he notes, many
Irish mentalities. That in itself is not the problem. Many mentalities can
be found in most countries. But most of Foster’s express themselves in
conflicting political loyalties. One wonders where his own loyalty lies.
“We are all revisionists now”, he has written elsewhere. But this tells us
little, as he immediately finds himself obliged to wrestle with rival
definitions of revisionism, ranging from merely the presentation of new
evidence to anti-nationalism, or rather anti-Irish nationalism. Foster would
seem to be a rather mild revisionist, retaining a broadly benign attitude
towards a moderate brand of Irish nationalism, suitably shorn of its more
exotic excrescences, to reflect a decently anglicized and secularized
culture. He is, however, for all his restraint, very conscious of the
superiority of revisionist history to work based on the effusions of
“romantic observers who have laid so many false trails for interpreters of
Irish history”. Revisionists in this sense like to portray themselves as
representatives of reason, valiantly challenging the forces of unreason in
their passionate pursuit of disinterested truth. It is a gratifying
self-image. But revisionism can have its own rigidities, its own blind
spots, as un-historical in their own way as the less discreet prejudices of
its disparaged predecessors. Though Foster is far more subtle than more
strident revisionists, he is still distinctly stronger on mind than on soul.
But these reservations are quibbles when set against the quality of Foster’s
overall performance. He has brilliantly achieved his declared goals of
moving the account forward on a broad front, illuminating the social,
cultural and intellectual dimensions, no less than the political, of life in
Ireland - and in Irish America, the subject of a welcome chapter - in an
impressively balanced study of sustained intellectual power. His work is not
interested in “an exhaustive catalogue of events or record of
administration; these sequences are more easily accessible in volumes
specifically devoted to such things”. Foster cannot therefore be used as an
introductory text, nor does he supersede Beckett, for the simple reason that
he does not seek to compete with “straightforward modern narratives”.
