I spent part of Christmas re-reading Professor Roy Foster’s history of modern Ireland — or at least the bit from 1850 on. It is not an edifying tale, but all too relevant to current events, not just in Ireland, but in Britain. It is, essentially, three distinct but overlapping stories of failure and lost opportunity: first, of how London, by resisting Home Rule in Ireland for too long, made independence almost inevitable; second, how nationalism, by wrapping itself in a monolithic Catholic-Gaelic culture, made partition almost equally inevitable; and, finally, how Unionism’s sectarian rule led not just to the failure of Northern Ireland as a state, but also to the 30-year civil war we euphemistically call “the Troubles”. At each step that litany of failure

Source: The Times January 06, 2021 00:01 UTC