The Irish Story

"Yes, Roy Foster is a remarkable writer. His biography of Yeats is a magisterial masterpiece. Yeats who put Irish mythology firmly in the people’s psyches. And yet bizarrely, as Roy points out, Yeats also produced and directed the Abbey plays by Sean O’Casey, the great myth-destroyer, and Synge. Dubliners hated those plays – there were riots – because we never wanted that heroic mythology destroyed. In The Irish Story Foster examines the ways in which narrative becomes an agent for the making of history. We are old friends who have talked about this endlessly. I was very much the junior partner in these conversations – Roy is a Professor of History at Oxford! I found this book enormously helpful in writing The Truth About Love because I believe that in private human life – as well as in the historic life – we tell ourselves the story of our own lives and the lives of the people we love through that narrative. The Irish Story connected with what I was trying to do with my book – trying to show philosophically the power of the historical narrative. You can do three things with memory: exploit it, live with it, or you can try and destroy it. And, in a sense, it is my philosophy and I think Roy feels the same that we the Irish have exploited it brilliantly. Foreigners will always associate Ireland with a kind of victimhood, and of course we suffered, but we were not the victims in two world wars. So, in a sense, the permanent narrative of victimhood is not quite accurate. Exactly. As I said, yes, you can exploit memory, live with it, or obliterate it. France, for example, after their terrible suffering in the First World, was to find they couldn’t bear the idea of what they did later on in the Second World War. For decades they obliterated it .They are only now in the past few years coming to terms with it. In Germany you can go to prison for five years for denying the Holocaust. Germany must live with its shocking past. So for me the whole idea of the exploitation of historical and personal narrative – often co-mingled – really is fascinating. Are we telling the true story? Ever?"