John Wilson Foster FRSC is an Irish literary critic and cultural historian. Bio here…
Between 2017 and 2023 I wrote newspaper articles and online essays in response to what I saw unfolding in the UK and Ireland after Brexit. I was shunting between Portaferry and Queen’s until late 2021 when I returned to Canada where I had spent my 28-year career as an English professor at the University of British Columbia. I wrote about what I saw as striking trends in the political flux of chiefly Northern Ireland but also of GB, Canada and the U.S. Eighteen of these articles and essays now make up my new book, Ireland Out of England and Other Inconveniences.
I’ve had several perspectives on the vexing Northern Ireland crisis. Two years after I returned to Belfast in 1970 on completing my doctorate at the University of Oregon, my first wife and I travelled (by coincidence) on Bloody Sunday to live in Dublin. As the violence worsened we were nevertheless happy in Dublin among writers and lecturers who were moderate in politics and generally distant from the Northern Irish. Even a heated monologue by Liam O’Flaherty in McDaid’s pub was somehow exhilarating rather than depressing.
By contrast, I noticed during Brexit an anti-English unanimity among Dublin politicians, newspapers and commentators. My review of Fintan O’Toole’s broadside against Brexit, Heroic Failure, is one of the essays in my book. O’Toole’s view of England ignores the astonishing number of southern Irish performers and professionals living in England and seemingly too busy being successful, prosperous and happy to share the Anglophobia of the politicians and pundits back home. My title essay reminds us of the extraordinary range of Irish talent in England and how it contradicts the official Dublin narrative of the English-Irish relationship.
If there are two Irelands, one on the island, the other in Britain, there are also “Two Solitudes”, the title of another essay. Living in Canada, I’ve been intrigued by the parallels between Irish nationalism and Quebec nationalism. Both reacted against British colonial presence (Quebec nationalism itself, of course, growing out of a French colonial presence in North America) and both partly rooted in a strong Catholicism (inside a larger Protestant nation) but now wholly secular. Canada is in the process of solving the mutual hostility of what was known as the Two Solitudes, Francophone and Anglophone, but is it applicable, I ask, to Northern Ireland where reconciliation seems farther away than ever?
Quebec nationalism, after the failure of revolution and then democratic referenda, has grown more successful through engineering demographics and expanding French culture through French language laws. We know already the role of demographics in unionist and nationalist morale in Northern Ireland. Is there a parallel, too, I wondered in “Beachheads and Wool”, between the determined politicisation of French in Quebec and what has been called the weaponisation of Irish in Northern Ireland with its territorial expansion?
Language can reinforce by exclusion and identity markers what we call tribalism. In “Your Tribe or Mine?” I examine (alongside her former law student J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy) Amy Chua’s profile in Political Tribes of what she calls the new tribalism in the United States. Vance, now the Republicans’ Vice-Presidential nominee, derived from Scots-Irish Appalachia and grew up among blue-collar workers in Ohio. Does the tribalism of Vance’s background shed light on the equally post-industrial, equally despised loyalist working class of Belfast? The observation of Seamus Heaney (a Dublin friend whose letters to me appear in the recent Selected Letters) that the whole world seems to be becoming Ulsterised might suggest that it does.
Another parallel between what is happening in Canada and Ireland is the former’s controversial high immigration rate and current unrest in Ireland north and south on the same phenomenon. And also the new Canadian national project of Decolonisation and Indigenisation to reduce and even “cancel” British features of Canadian society (just as Quebec is engaged informally in widespread de-Anglicisation) and indigenising them instead, including in education, business and environmentalism. In “Pretendians” I profile and try to explain the white Canadians who pretend to be aboriginal and avail themselves of preferential treatment in their professional life, but now being outed as figuratively wearing “redface”.
Vance’s hillbillies, like Ulster loyalists, have been disowned by their prior allies after their usefulness was over with the collapse of heavy industry. In “God’s Away on Business”, I ponder how the unionist gentry, middle and professional classes have gone AWOL, taking my cue from Tom Waits’s morose song, leaving unionism bare of any sophistication or much credibility. And in “Sympathy for the Devil” I mull over the abandonment of unionism by the parties, people and pundits across the water.
I would like my pieces to be read by both unionists and nationalists and hope both would engage by argument. Republicans say there’s a debate on about the future of Northern Ireland and the Republic. There isn’t but if there were, the changes in the Republic that I claim would have to come about or seriously thought about are set out in “A Debate on Irish Unity?” and “The Story”. At present, the notion of the inevitability of a united Ireland and thus the needlessness of any other scenario or of any sympathetic knowledge of unionists is what helps to divide the Northern populace.
Perhaps if ever the dust settles in Northern Ireland there might be a museum dedicated to Northern Ireland’s thirty years of trials and tribulations. But my friend and former QUB office-mate, the economic historian Professor Liam Kennedy, would like to see a Museum now. In “A Museum of the Troubles?” I set out my reasons for discouraging such a thing, but I give my good friend and courageous campaigner the last word on the subject. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war, as the man is supposed to have said.
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John Wilson (Jack) Foster is now a freelance writer. Ireland and Other Inconveniences is available at £10.99 from Amazon, Amazon Kindle (£6.01), Colourpoint Books and bookshops. His recent books include Midnight Again: The Wartime Letters of Helen Ramsey Turtle (ed. 2021), The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland (co-ed. W.B. Smith, 2021) and The Space-Blue Chalcedony: Earth’s Crises and the Tyler Bounty (2020). The Achievement of Seamus Heaney appeared in 1995.
This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.
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