Why have the British Never Understood Ireland/Northern Ireland?
Why have the British Never Understood Ireland/Northern Ireland?
221st Lecture Series Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow
Date: Wednesday 31 May 2023
Time: 19:30 - 21:00
Venue: Boyd Orr Lecture Theatre 1
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Lord Paul Bew
Website: www.royalphil.org/
Lord Bew will explore how we might navigate past, present and future relationships between Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland. Has it always been, as the London Spectator suggested in 1897, a problem of ‘a slow-witted prosaic people trying to govern a quick-witted, imaginative one’? Or might it just all be down to ‘Perfidious Albion’? Both explanations would be tempting yet both would be wrong.
Instead, Professor Bew argues, the key problem in Britain’s relations with Ireland lies with ‘British self-image’, ‘Irish self-image’ and the British ‘obsession with preserving the dignity of their self-image, whether reformist or reactionary, rather than face the objective reality of Irish conditions’. For Professor Bew, this self-image allows policymaking based on ‘concepts more illusory than realistic’ and allows for a ‘profound inability to face up to the effective role of Irish political violence within British political culture.