Misery tourism and voluntary amnesia

Towards the end of this brilliant new collection of linked essays, the historian Roy Foster relates how the foundation stone of a proposed Dublin monument to Wolfe Tone, hero of the 1798 rebellion, was re-used as the base for a Boer War commemorative arch some years after the Tone memorialists had run out of money and motivation.

The "Irish story" seems to be characterised by such ironies, from the growth of "misery tourism" in Limerick, following Angela's Ashes, to the adoption of the name "Faminists" by the people it was intended to satirise. Making and remaking the past is nothing new in a country where, as Roy Foster points out, "The importance of structured memory has been recognised by the widespread practice of its obverse: therapeutic voluntary amnesia."

But what about the phenomenon of remembering things you never knew in the first place, such as the survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress which attended Ireland's elaborate Famine commemorations in the mid-1990s. (The new Famine Museum in County Roscommon, the author notes, is next door to a restaurant.)

Foster is surely right to see this as an index of how alien such history seems to the newly prosperous European republic, which perhaps "feels a sneaking nostalgia for the verities of the old victim culture, which was also, in its way, a culture of superiority". Foster is sardonic about the pitfalls of "memory" but never cynical. In a passionately admiring essay he praises Hubert Butler for having "kept pace with history and kept faith with his ' ethical imagination'", acknowledging how hard this is and how important.

William Butler Yeats is on Foster's mind (the second volume of his biography of the poet is in preparation) and crops up everywhere, not only as a figure in the making of history - the Abbey Theatre, the Celtic revival, the Dail - but as a mythographer and manipulator, notably of his own life-story.

In an essay on poetic strategies and political reconstruction, Foster shows how Yeats "wrote himself back" into the Anglo-Irish war via some deft adjustments to a poem about 1914; also how he overrode facts by putting anti-imperialist sentiments into the mouth of Major Robert Gregory, in what was meant, after all, to be a straightforward memorial to a real-life Irish airman. It was a process that turned round and bit back later - one obituary of the Nobel laureate's achievement ended: "Beyond that, he was a little daft."

As a part-time "outlander", Freemason, placeman and Oxford professor, Yeats's Irishness has been called into question, as has that of Joyce, Trollope and Elizabeth Bowen, all discussed here. Qualifications for Irishness seem hard to meet, unless they are worked up shamelessly (as in the best-selling memoirs of Frank McCourt, Gerry Adams, Alice Taylor and Frank's brother Malachy, a bandwagoner whom Foster demolishes with relish).

Elizabeth Bowen was deemed to be an outsider on account of her Anglo-accents and cosmopolitan outlook, although, as she asks in Bowen's Court, "How long does it take to belong somewhere, without apology? Surely 300 years is enough?" Apparently not for the North Cork Anthology, in which Bowen's name appears with a line through it and the following note: "We include her in this anthology in deleted form in order to explain why she does not belong to it."

The historian FS Leland Lyons, to whom Foster devotes a chapter, thought the essence of the Irish situation was "the collision of a variety of cultures whose very smallness makes their juxtaposition potentially, and often actually, lethal". But the force of the collision and nature of the cultures change all the time, as Foster acknowledges in a typically clear and trenchant passage: "The fundamentalist and myopic 'nationalism' of the IRA in Northern Ireland is a different culture than 'nationalism' as redefined in a drastically altered South ... it is the world-view of the Northern republicans that must change - including a change in their recognition of the Unionist community, who themselves know there is no going back to the old conditions of their supremacist statelet."

With the state funerals, just a fortnight ago, of Kevin Barry and nine other republic martyrs of 1920, it seems there is always some new twist awaiting us in the volatile Irish story. But one couldn't ask for a more eloquent or thought-provoking guide to it than this.