The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland

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Looking at the way the Irish government has integrated Irish history into its tourism programs, Foster W.

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The Apprentice Mage, , etc. In this opinionated, entertaining book he examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century. Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been Oxford University Press Bolero Ozon.

Roy Foster is one of the leaders of the iconoclastic generation of Irish historians. Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been turned into story.

He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past--the Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter , the Troubles--have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a shifting "Story of Ireland," complete with plot, drama, suspense, and revelation. Varied, surprising, and funny, the interlinked essays in The Irish Story examine the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why. Foster provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and that Irish poverty and oppression is sentimentalized and packaged.

He offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen; dissects the Irish government's commemoration of the uprising; and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt.

Fittingly, as the acclaimed biographer of Yeats, Foster explores the poet's complex understanding of the Irish story--"the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history"--and warns of the dangers of turning Ireland into a historical theme park. Though The Irish Story is needlingly partisan, its author tends to believe that partisanship, like halitosis, is what the other fellow has.

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Foster never ceases to harp on the complex nature of Irish history, which would make taking sides seem positively crass. One wonders whether he feels the same about sexism and white supremacism. Whenever an outright conflict emerges, he is usually to be found standing dauntlessly in the middle. It is a pity that he feels the need to carry so much anti-ideological baggage, since he does indeed have a robust ideology to promote. It is just that, like all the best brands of the stuff, it fails to recognise itself as such.

The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland

His suavity thus conceals an extraordinary naivety; and this, too, is a feature of the tradition he inherits, which like the rest of us tended to believe that only its own views were nobly disinterested. The book uncritically celebrates posh Irish Protestants, while reserving most of its flak for nationalist Gaels. It is withering, on the whole, about Irish anti-colonialism, but much more reticent about rebuking the unionists.

The only form of colonial exploitation it will admit to is non-Irish writers muscling in on Irish studies - and this from a cosmopolitan spirit supposed to abhor parochialism. Those in the outer darkness who muscle in on Foster's own political side, oddly enough, are rather more welcome to the club.

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By the end of the volume, his liberal inclusiveness has managed to exclude journalists, republicans, post-colonialists, post-structuralists, left-wingers, theorists, polemicists, "born-again newly Irish Eng Lit academics" that's me , anyone who holds the eminently plausible view that Bloody Sunday was probably planned by the British Army, and anyone in Ireland nostalgic for anything apart from the heyday of Anglo-Irish liberalism. Another of Foster's briskly modernising myths, incidentally, is that nostalgia for the past is always morbid - and this in an age of nuclear missiles and the IMF.

Conversely, he seems to think that embracing the new is usually to be commended, and this in a world ruled by Microsoft and Coca-Cola. In these essays, Irish nationalists tend to have "pieties" rather than conviction, while post-colonial thinkers are addicted to their theories rather than simply holding them. There is an absorbing essay on the novelist Anthony Trollope, who lived in Ireland for a while, and who believed that the Great Famine was an act of divine providence sent to lick the feckless Micks into shape.

He also objected to rural agitators partly because they interfered with fox hunting. Yet Trollope, as an upper-middle-class English Protestant, and an honorary Irishman to boot, clearly qualifies for the club, and Foster's treatment of this racist bigot is far more affectionate than his lip-curling comments on the much less noxious sentimentalism of Frank McCourt.

Trollope's romanticising of Ireland is fondly indulged, whereas no such big-hearted concession is extended to the romantic strains in Gerry Adams's autobiography. Foster assumes in a rather jeering tone that any of his compatriots who feel serious hostility to the British state are simply the deluded victims of demonology.

He rightly assails the culture of victimhood in Ireland, even though his own class sometimes did its bit to deepen the general misery. His earlier study, Modern Ireland, overreacted to nationalist bleating and whingeing with some unpleasantly hard-faced apologias for, among other things, the shabby British handling of the Famine relief campaign.

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He is still at this disingenuous game in The Irish Story, aiming a few well-bred sneers at recent Irish commemorations of the Famine. Some of these rituals were indeed pretty grotesque; but one awaits with interest Foster's impeccably even-handed savaging of British Remembrance Sunday.

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