JOHN WILSON FOSTER
Belcouver Press
£10.99
ISBN 9780993560743
REVIEWED BY Ian d’Alton
Ian d’Alton is a member of the Church of Ireland Historical Centenaries Working Group.
Having learning and intelligence, it isn’t easy to accept in your heart of hearts that history may not be on your side. It seems to me that that’s Jack Foster’s problem in this book that rails against the dying of the (unionist) light and in the face of a perniciously manipulative republic. He writes of ‘the Story’—the narrative being Liam Kennedy’s ‘Most Oppressed People Ever’—which even the recent modernisation of Ireland has barely dented. But Foster maintains that ‘mine is the British story’, and here is an elegant, heartfelt and extended cry of trying to justify and explain why that is. I am in tune with this; as a southern Protestant with a definite sense of Otherness, ‘the Story’ isn’t necessarily mine, either.
The book consists of eighteen short essays and articles published between 2017 and 2023. Foster had no problem with the republic per se—‘socially, I preferred, on the whole, Dublin to Belfast, Southerners to Northerners’. He claims to have written more empathetically about Catholic writers than about Protestant ones. But the Troubles and ‘an invigorated and emboldened Irish nationalism’ post-Brexit have made him less sympathetic. Foster interprets the ‘united Ireland’ debate in the context of the much wider global forces of multiculturism and mass immigration that he sees as threatening the social cohesion of English-speaking countries, and several of the essays discuss these trends in relation to Canada and the USA. Ultimately, he sees a ‘united Ireland’ as dangerously distracting in the face of these broader forces and that it is time ‘to step back and take rational stock’.
Foster is instinctively a unionist because a united Ireland ‘would return me from the larger to the smaller’. And in one sense he’s right. There’s a steady stream of every sort—artists, musicians, businesspeople, tech workers, sportspersons—from the smaller island to the larger, many of the more prominent detailed in the eponymous essay matching the title of this book. He claims that London (not Dublin, Paris or Berlin) is the true metropolis of Ireland. That’s pushing it, but there is an undeniable, perfectly natural, gravitational pull—there for centuries, as much due to a search for opportunity, economic prosperity and linguistic compatibility as anything else. Foster’s chronicling of the intertwined connectedness of the two islands may be articulating a commonplace, but it is a corrective to the über-nationalist trope that exhorts us to burn everything English except their coal.
To be welcomed is Foster’s excavation of the ties that bind us as a counterpoint to the sort of Irish republicanism that wants no truck with Britishness. If voters north and south ever approve a process of ‘unity’, those ties will have to be accepted and, yes, maybe even celebrated. To succeed, that unity will have to be characterised as one of diversity and plurality—a generous à la carte menu of identities and allegiances rather than a narrow table d’hôte of a prescriptive Irishness devoid of acknowledgement of its British component. A proper polity cannot be built upon what Foster sees as zero-sum triumphalism—‘the Micks have it, the Prods done for’.
The author has harsh words for those southern Protestants who are not prepared to accept the position of their community as irretrievably downtrodden, the victims of perpetual discrimination—the Most Oppressed Protestants Ever. No one denies that during the revolutionary period the Protestant population decreased by one third and kept on declining until 1991. Protestants, like Catholics, emigrated from an independent Ireland ill-run from the 1920s to the 1980s. But as R.B. McDowell concluded, ‘hardships sustained by the southern loyalists were on the whole not excessively severe nor long-lasting’, especially when compared to the fate of other erstwhile dominant minorities in post-Great War Europe. By 1995 Church of Ireland Archbishop Caird of Dublin could proclaim that the Protestant community in the Republic was ‘a confident minority well understood and well accepted’. Relatively prosperous in the aggregate and largely left to their own devices, Protestants retreated into self-constructed stockades, circled the wagons and got on with a comfortable interior existence in their social, cultural and economic redoubts. Mixed marriages governed by the proscriptions of Ne Temere posed an existential threat, of course, and were responsible for the ‘loss’ of Protestants to the Other Side. But this was neither war nor pogrom; no one died, even if people saw it in terms of ‘loss’.
Foster poses an uncomfortable challenge for advocates of simple unity—what are Irish nationalists prepared to concede to disarm unionists? Depressingly, he cannot find much evidence to indicate that any serious concessions would or could be made. One consideration, though, is that ‘unity’ may itself change the terms of engagement, as the very concept of ‘unionist’ becomes a political nullity. Broadly, northern ex-unionists will have to do what their southern brethren had to do after 1922—redefine themselves as something else, in their case as ‘Protestants’, a socio-cultural tribe in a reimagined Ireland. By eschewing an orgy of cultural colonisation, in victory nationalists may be magnanimous, allowing the minority to maintain some elements of its mingled ‘Britishness’. Or not.