UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 25 April 2016 at 11.30 am
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR TADHG Ó hÁNNRACHÁIN, School of History on 25 April 2016, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa on ROY FOSTER.
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A Uachtáran, a mhuintir na hOllscoile agus a dhaoine uaisle,
Tá muid bailithe anseo chun an t-Ollamh Roy Foster a cheilliúradh, starraí agus scolaire den scoth, agus is mór an onóir domsa bheith in bhur láthair chun cur síos a dhéanamh ar a shaol agus ar a shaothar.
In the course of his remarkable career, Professor Foster has shaped and transformed scholarship on modern Irish history. He is the author of a series of truly seminal publications and his practice of the historian’s craft has won him widespread acclaim. And the use of the word craft is most apt for in the lucidity of his prose, in the sensitivity of his appreciation of nuance, and in his effortless mastery of detail which underpins but never overwhelms the narrative cohesion of his book, he has come to epitomise the best of a rich tradition of Irish historical writing. In this, as in much else, he can be considered a true heir of FSL Lyons, of whom he was a student and the historian to whom his great biography of Yeats is dedicated.
Professor Foster was born in Waterford and attended school in Newtown, Waterford and St Andrew’s Dublin as a scholarship student. He attended Trinity College where he was elected as a scholar in History and Political science in 1969 and subsequently graduated with first a MA and then a PhD. In the course of a glittering academic career he became Professor Modern British History in Birkbeck College London and held visiting fellowships in Oxford and in Princeton. He then became Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College London, the first incumbent of the only endowed chair in Irish History in the United Kingdom and the seminars associated with this chair have become justly famous. He is an elected fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is a supervisor of a whole generation of younger historians and has consistently demonstrated remarkable generosity to others who have not had the benefit of his formal supervision. A former judge of the Booker prize, he is a public intellectual who has successfully negotiated the delicate balancing act between accessibility on the one hand and an unswerving commitment to the maintenance of respect for nuance, complexity and context.
Professor Foster’s published work is remarkable for its depth and range and for its sustained quality, concentrating on late nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland but his magisterial survey Modern Ireland 1600-1972 demonstrated his ability to synthesis material over a much wider period. He is an essayist of the first water and has published several volumes and is an acknowledged master of the genre of historical biography, as exemplified in his brilliant early career studies of Charles Stuart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill and most of all in his acclaimed two volume biography of W.B. Yeats. In this decade of centenaries, it is very fitting that the biographer of such a pivotal figure in the cultural and political ferment of the Irish revolution should be honoured by UCD. In Yeats it can be suggested that Professor Foster found the ideal subject and, as no less a critic than Seamus Deane has acknowledged, Yeats found the ideal biographer. For a historian to do justice to such a colossal literary figure was a formidable challenge, one even greater than that confronting for instance Richard Ellman in his great life of Joyce, for Yeats’s poetry represented a constant meditation on what the poet himself in 1913 expressed as a moment of particular plasticity in the nation’s history when like wax it was ready to hold for generations the shape that was given to it. As Bernard O’Donoghue has noted Foster’s methodology rises triumphantly to this challenge, placing the poems in relief against historical and personal documentation, both in their chronological place but also transcending it, and thus offering an illustration of the mysterious process by which major poems emerge from scattered experience. Nowhere is this more evident than in the masterly analysis of the great cycle Meditations in Time of Civil war, one of whose (perhaps oddly) truncated stanzas was chosen by FSL Lyons as the prelude to Ireland since the Famine.
It is also fitting in the decade of centenaries and above all in this year of 2016 that particular mention should be given to Professor Foster's extraordinary portrait of the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland entitled Vivid Faces, the title drawn from Yeats’s great poetic reflection on the 1916 Rising. Extraordinarily rich, this wonderful book exemplifies Foster’s achievement as a historian, not merely ranging over but doing full justice to the wide and varied range of source material which the cultural maelstrom of the era produced. The book is ground-breaking too in its integration of the thoughts, aspirations and activities of Irish women during this period and in the balanced examination of the coarsening effects of violence upon the protean creativity which had flourished within the island prior to the entry of the gun into Irish politics.
In all the domains of his professional life, therefore, Professor Foster’s career has been marked by outstanding achievement and it is, I believe, our privilege to honour him today.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad Gradum Doctoratus in utroque Jure, tam Civili quam Canonico; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.