HistoryIn 1971, when internment in the North sent a wave of refugees across the Border, I went to Gormanston camp to see them. The officer in charge showed me proudly around the accommodation and facilities the Army had provided, stopping at a Nissan hut labelled, in large white letters, "cinema". Above this, in equally large letters, someone had scrawled the word "some".
The people themselves were taciturn - understandable after what some of them had been through. But they made no secret of their contempt for the backward country they'd been forced to flee to, and of their determination to get back to the streets of Belfast as soon as ever they could.
It was a sobering reminder that Irish unity would indeed have to be about people more than territory, and that Northern nationalists were in many ways as different from us as Northern unionists. That reality, just as much as the fact of a million steadfast unionists, helped to fade the dream. Republican violence finished it off.
For many of us, what remained was a sense of responsibility for those we regard as part of our nation, responsibility for their safety, for their liberty, and yes, for their aspirations. We signed away our claims over the North without a backward glance 10 years ago. Now prosperous, and finding reality a very pleasant alternative to dreams, we happily patronise the North by investing a billion euro in its outdated infrastructure, and by buying up its property. It's a vast improvement on the alleged diversion of funds in 1969/70 to buy arms.
Roy Foster sums it all up in Luck and the Irish - A Brief History of Change 1970-2000 when he says: "A dominant theme of Irish history in the last 30 years of the 20th century has been the cementing of partitionism and the institutionalising of 26-county nationalism."
He makes the point in a powerful chapter on the relationship between the South and the North. He might well have quoted Liam Cosgrave's assertion in the mid-1970s that Northern violence was turning people in the Republic off unity. In any case, he quotes Garret FitzGerald, relating how voters in the mid-1980s were telling him to stop talking about Northern Ireland. They wanted tax down, unemployment cured, not involvement in Northern Ireland.
Austin Currie was astonished at the hostility aroused by his Northern accent on the doorsteps of west Dublin as he canvassed for a Dáil seat. Danny Morrison is quoted as saying that if people in what he called the 26 counties didn't want the six counties then "let us know. If they're telling us to fuck off, telling us they're happy with the state they've got and fuck 1916, then tell us. Because if they don't want us, then I would have to look again at the situation".
The decision to "look again at the situation", says Foster, would lead to the Belfast Agreement 10 years later and "it was initiated by the realisation that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement gave the Republic of Ireland exactly as much of a role in the North as it needed to save face, and no more".
This chapter, entitled "Big Mad Children", is the strength of this book, vivid and beautifully written. Equally striking is an elegant chapter on cultural change entitled "How the Short Stories Became Novels". Foster is very assured in this sort of territory and he explores our image of ourselves in our literature and music, as well as the image refined by Bord Fáilte, sold abroad, and then reflected back on us through the filter of our own diaspora. He rightly questions our readiness to buy ersatz Irishness - Irish pubs, Irish house designs called "Inishfree", and "Inishlacken" - while destroying the real thing. In the same way, we built over the remains of Dublin's Wood Quay, and then ran a Viking theme show around the corner.
That said, however, I have some major reservations about Luck and the Irish, starting with the title. I'm reminded of young Margaret Thatcher's rejoinder when someone told her she was a lucky girl to have won a piano prize: "I wasn't lucky. I deserved it." Is Foster implying somehow that the peace and prosperity of recent years is wholly undeserved and that we did nothing to help bring it about? He says the growth rate that reduced unemployment "appeared like a miraculous beast materialising in a forest clearing, from 1990, and economists are still not entirely sure why". Aren't they?
Most economists agree that the record growth in the 1990s was due to a number of factors: improved credibility of public policy from 1987 in relation to the economy and the public finances; the super-competitiveness of Irish costs and prices due to the deflation of the 1980s and the two currency devaluations of 1986 and 1993; the low rate of Irish corporate tax. As a result of those three factors and the existence of a well-educated, English-speaking workforce, we saw the massive inflow of foreign direct investment led by the US. The industrial peace guaranteed by the partnership process added to the attractions for investors over the period.
So, the reasons for the Republic's growth rate are many and complex, but they're not mysterious. Opposition leader Alan Dukes wasn't "lucky" when he decided to act in the national interest in 1987 and support Charles Haughey's attempts to rein in government spending. He paid the price with his whole political career and we were unlucky to lose him.
Neither was it mere luck that a series of Taoisigh from Seán Lemass through to Lynch, FitzGerald, Reynolds, Bruton and Ahern devoted years of effort to trying to defuse the conflict in Northern Ireland, and indeed many of those efforts are described by Foster himself. Mind you, Foster's not too sure that they've improved things. "It was hard to accept, at the turn of the 21st century, that the six north-eastern counties were a better place to live in than 30-odd years before."
He's right in suggesting that the violence which claimed 3,700 lives achieved little more than the deepening of sectarianism. But how many nationalists would you find to say that life was better in 1966 when Catholics were discriminated against in terms of public housing and jobs and voting rights, and when the police and the B Specials behaved in a way which was seen to be openly sectarian?
These pages bristle with Foster's pride in being a "revisionist". It all becomes a little tedious - so much has happened to destroy the old nationalist belief system that one wonders at this stage who is revising whom. The sources he quotes to back up his views, particularly on the Belfast Agreement and the peace process, are quite selective. A broader list would have been reassuring.
Sometimes he betrays a lack of knowledge of the political scene in the Republic. After all, he's Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford, and doesn't live here any more. To assume that Ruairí Quinn, because he doesn't expand on it in his autobiography, had very little interest in Northern Ireland, is far off the mark. Quinn spent almost every summer until he was nine in Warrenpoint with his grandfather, even developing a Northern accent. As treasurer of the Irish Association of Labour Students Organisations in the troubled late 1960s, he attended Belfast meetings organised by People's Democracy demanding reform. He canvassed regularly for the SDLP in Northern elections. He was probably the most faithful political member of the SDLP's Dublin fundraising committee.
ONE IS TAKEN aback, too, by a number of errors of fact. The sacking of the RTÉ authority over Kevin O'Kelly's report of an interview with Seán MacStiofáin was in 1972, not 1973. Charlie Haughey's "roots" were in Swatragh, Co Derry, not Co Tyrone. I can find no trace of a Fine Gael TD called Jack White - perhaps he means the toast of Donegal and Lisdoonvarna, Deputy Jim White. Harold Wilson met the IRA in Dublin in 1971, a year before Willie Whitelaw did, not "a few years before".
This book has its origins in a series of lectures for Queen's University which may account for its sometimes uneven tone and its odd descent into undergraduate humour (ie "south of the Border, down Merrion way"). It is a brave attempt to look at events so recent that one can hardly call them history. Acutely aware of the debate as to whether our recent boom has been A Good Thing, Foster divides us into Boosters and Begrudgers. On the second last page he somewhat reluctantly sides with the Boosters, accepting that good luck was maximised by good management.
However, one gets the constant impression that he can't quite accept how the place has changed. He sees as "visionary" a Dermot Bolger novel describing a country taken over by Dutch and French where there are only a "chosen million Irish left: red-headed girls bringing menus to diners in the converted castles". Wrong. There are now four and a quarter million of us, swelled by the 400,000 non-Irish who serve the dinners that Fáilte Ireland can't persuade the newly prosperous red-haired Irish girls to serve.
Recently, I walked down a bridle path below Mount Leinster to a quiet townsland pretty well abandoned in the emigration flight of the 1950s But it wasn't quiet that day. A couple returned from England were doing a lovely job of restoring a stone cottage. That for me has been the big change in 30 years - not only can people live here, people can come back here. There's room for them all, whether they're from Boston, or Birmingham . . . or Oxford.
Olivia O'Leary presents BBC Radio 4's Between Ourselves and does a weekly political column for RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime. A collection of her columns, Party Animals, was published last year by O'Brien Press. She covered events in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s for both RTÉ and The Irish Times
An extract from Luck and the Irish by RF Foster will appear in next Tuesday's Features pages in the main paper
Roy Foster makes a brave attempt to look at events so recent one can hardly call them history Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970-2000 By RF Foster Penguin/Allen Lane, 228pp. £20
