John Wilson Foster – författare

Who is speaking for the Union?

It is a question that has been asked for several decades by Northern Ireland citizens anxious about the firmness of their place in the United Kingdom.

It is now a question that will be asked with increasing concern by unionists in England, Scotland and Wales.

In 'The Idea of the Union: Great Britain and Northern Ireland', historians, distinguished politicians, economists, political journalists, cultural historians and versatile scholars on both sides of the water break cover and declare for the Union. The 20 contributors include David Trimble, Mike Nesbitt, Ray Bassett, and Graham Gudgin. The Foreword is by Baroness Hoey.

'The Idea of the Union' is a manifesto in favour of the constitutional link between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and between the nations of the kingdom. It also promotes cultural relations in the British Isles. But primarily, it is a handbook of arguments, rooted in history and the real world, against Northern Ireland's severance from Great Britain.

Irish separatist nationalism has had a fair innings. Now it's time for reason and reality to go to bat.

'Ireland out of England' plays with the ironies and follies of the campaign for a unified independent Ireland that has expressed little insight or care about what’s involved.

The title essay recounts the constant trouping of Southern Irish artists and professionals to Britain where they live, are welcomed and flourish. They are the talented crests of historic waves of Irish for whom England is the land of opportunity, as warmly familiar as the towns and fields of Leinster, Munster and Connaught.  

How do we square the Irish in Britain with the anti-Britishness of the politicians and pundits back home in Ireland, or with the clamour for the removal of Northern Ireland from the very UK in which so many Irish prosper?

The book reveals other inconvenient truths about the push for a united Ireland – that benign-sounding destination that to be reached seems to require a flight from reality and a refusal to let Northern Ireland heal and thrive before broaching down the line the vexed question of constitutional change.  The Good Friday Agreement, Brexit, the peculiar inhibitions of unionism, the Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework, the Irish language, Ireland’s own Belt & Road Initiative, an agenda for the touted debate on unification – these are some of the topics under the lamp. 

We live in a volatile world, and “Pretendians” and other essays show connections between our situation on the island and the turmoil of identity politics, mass immigration, anti-colonialism and indigenisation in Canada and the United States.

In the real world, a united sovereign Ireland is a distracting mirage.

Next Year Will Be a Good One is SHIVAUN O’CASEY’s memoir of childhood and her youthful endeavours as an aspiring actress and stage manager in Devon, Bristol, London and the United States. She and her father, the famous playwright Sean O’Casey, her mother, the former actress Eileen Carey, and her two gifted older brothers, were a close-knit family. Her earliest memories were those of the blackouts, warning sirens, bombings, and all-clears of the Second World War. 

At the suggestion of George Bernard Shaw, she and her brothers attended the famously progressive Dartington Hall school in Totnes. In London and Paris she was befriended by playwrights and directors who had fled McCarthyism in the United States and was especially close to Sam and Charlotte Wanamaker. Samuel Beckett, Harold Macmillan (wearing his publisher’s hat) and David Garnett are among those who enliven an already spirited story. 

Shivaun’s memoir of her early life is rooted in the figure of her father, struggling despite his failing eyesight to create plays different from the great Dublin trilogy that had brought him early fame. She was an eye-witness to his genius and creative resolve and to the wider developments of contemporary drama. Hers is a story of love and loss amidst the extraordinary busyness of a life dedicated to theatre. 

'a momentous book, a truly significant recovered voice from the 1930s and 1940s' Gerald Dawe, Dublin Review of Books

'Professor Foster has done a wonderful job in presenting and annotating the letters and what comes leaping from the page is a portrait, a place, an era and a society rarely seen in such close-up.' Gillian Reynolds CBE

'Midnight Again' is a selection of the alert and animated letters that Helen Ramsey Turtle wrote back to her family in Denver, Colorado from Northern Ireland during the Second World War, edited by John Wilson Foster.

The letters home kept her American family abreast of her domestic life in Belfast and on Mahee Island, Strangford Lough where she lived with her husband, the naturalist and stockbroker, Lancelot Turtle, and young daughters. And abreast, too, of the conduct of the war on the home front as well as the European front: its impact on everyday life through blackout, rationing, travel restrictions and the departure of friends' fathers, sons and siblings to the war.

An American liberal pacifist, she was converted to the cause of the war and hoped her country would join the war against Hitler's Germany. Being unable to travel to her native land, she was overjoyed when the first American troops to arrive in the United Kingdom landed in Northern Ireland and brought with them energy, hope and colour. All the while an avid reader, picture, theatre and concert goer, and convivial hostess, Helen Turtle brings to life in her letters a Northern Irish culture rarely depicted.

Her early death in 1946 deprived family and friends of a spirited presence, but her letters remain to preserve the thoughts, observations and feelings of a remarkable personality.