Podcasts Education Self-Improvement Conversations with Tyler Roy Foster on Irelands Many Unmade Futures

Roy Foster on Irelands Many Unmade Futures

Published: April 6, 2022, noon

\u201cThe best history,\u201d says Roy Foster, \u201cis written when we realize that people acted in expectation of a future that was never going to happen.\u201d While this is the case for many countries, it\u2019s especially true of Ireland\u2014the land of The Troubles, of colonization, of revolution and reforms. This sympathy within his scholarship sets Foster\u2019s work apart. Not content to simply document the facts of what did happen, he\u2019s undertaken the role of reconstructing the motivations that animated the Irish people throughout its storied history--without which we cannot truly understand the Ireland of today.

Roy joined Tyler to discuss why the Scots got off easier than the Irish under English rule, the truths and misconceptions about Ireland as a policy laboratory for the British government, why spoken Irish faded more rapidly than Welsh, the single question that drove a great flowering of Irish economic thought, how Foster\u2019s Quaker education shaped his view of Irish history, how the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Rising cemented the rift between the Northeast and the rest of the country, what went wrong with Irish trade policies between the 1920s and 1970s, the power of Irish education, why the re-emergence of The Troubles in the 1960s may not have been as inevitable as many people believe, the cultural effects of Ireland\u2019s pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, how Irish visual art is beginning to be looked at in a similar way to Irish literature, the social and economic changes of the 1970s that began to radically reshape Irish society, the reasons for Ireland\u2019s openness to foreigners, what Irish Americans misunderstand, and more.

Read a\xa0full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the\xa0full video.

Recorded February 22nd, 2022

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