The photo shows Shane MacGowan performing at a benefit gig for Viva Palestina in Nenagh, Tipperary. As Marx or someone pointed out humanity divides into two fundamental types. There are those who accept that MacGowan has written some of the finest songs in the last hundred years and imbeciles.
R.F. Foster, Roy to his friends, is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. We’ll get onto his views about Shane very soon. Foster’s best known book is Modern Ireland 1690-1972 and he is also the author of Luck and the Irish: A brief history of change c. 1970 to 2000.
Published in 2007 this was his attempt to catch the zeitgeist of the Celtic Tiger. It’s available now in all good second hand shops and is a great example of just how fleeting a zeitgeist can be. Even reading at the time alarm bells must have rung for anyone who’s not an imbecile. The professor is serially disrespectful to MacGowan whom he accuses of retailing “ a skewed version of Irish history” and compounds the error by selecting Bob Geldof and Bo fucking No (to give him his full name) as the epitome of outward looking, self-confident Ireland. His candidate for outstanding political figures in the period under review are Conor Cruise O’Brit and Garret Fitzgerald.
The book was part of the tsunami of praise for the fraudulent speculative property bubble which was branded as the Celtic Tiger. It opens with an archetypal quote from an April 2001 issue of Newsweek: “prosperity of a kind has come to the land of Joyce and Yeats, creating a kind of country they could never have imagined: rich and happy".” Zeits do have an infuriating habit of vanishing and by the end of 2008 the Tiger had been castrated and Ireland was back to a neo-colonial future of mass unemployment, poverty and immigration.
Foster’s label for those who had said that a boom based on building housing estates miles from amenities, hotels and shopping centres with the help of bent politicians and facilitating global tax dodging was “the begrudgers”. Advocates of the foregoing were “the boosters”.
The book does have much that is interesting. It deals sympathetically with the Women’s Liberation Movement; developments in cinema and literature and is informative about the one political party that makes Silvio Berlusconi look good, Fianna Fail. It offers some stimulating ideas about contemporary Irish religion, in particular the Church of Ireland. One side effect of the economic collapse is that attendance at Mass has increased so even the Catholic Church might have a bit of a comeback.
When he’s looking at the superstructure of Irish society, especially the rapid changes in social relations, sexuality, personal behaviour and the emerging multi-cultural society he’s on firm ground. His wilful agnosticism on how robust the material base for these changes was is one of three big weaknesses. Any plan that relies on finance ministers of the calibre of Charlie McGreevy canoodling with speculators has a number of built in flaws and Foster didn’t notice any. Everything was good when the book was being written and it looked like the Irish state had pulled itself into the big league.
Foster is an unapologetic fan of partition and he is much more forthright on the issue than most of the politicians about whom he writes. His ideal civil servants are those in the Department of Foreign Affairs who contorted the English language beyond all recognition to secure partition without making it too obvious that they were doing so. This was to humour the “big, mad children” which is his and their sobriquet for northerners. It turns out he was as wrong about the finality of the “peace process” as he was about the country’s economic strength. The various Republican factions might be utterly bereft of ideas or much in the way of politics but it’s a fair assumption that as the north starts seeing big job losses that they will grow and Martin McGuinness’ seat in the pseudo government won’t change anything.
Invoking Fukayama’s end of history as an example of a “speciously unhistorical” idea was a bit of a hostage to fortune. In common with most of the ideologues of his class Foster had his fingers crossed for a new Celtic dawn. It looks like the begrudgers were right after all.
On the subjects of begrudgers here’s the reality three years on.
Liam redux 
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