Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

One of the nicest presents Santa brought me this year was The Irish Story: Telling Tales And Making It Up In Ireland by Roy Foster. The Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford writes elegantly and wittily about a country that continues to stimulate and exasperate, to entertain and to alarm. In a dozen essays with titles such as "Selling Irish Childhoods: Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams" and "The Salamander and the Slap: Hubert Butler and His Century", Foster tackles the "national narrative" and the country's "wished-for history" with a sympathy that shows a deep understanding of the idiosyncratic Irish approach to storytelling: "A powerful oral culture, a half-lost language, the necessary stratagems of irony, collusion and misdirection which accompany a colonized culture, maybe even the long wet winter nights — all give a distinctive twist to the way Irish account for themselves."

In this volume, Foster's greatest admiration is reserved for the Kilkenny-born essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991), whose compassionate and brilliant writing owed so much to his enlightened Protestant heritage. This was the same patrimony that inspired Yeats's historic statement during his Senate speech on divorce in 1925: "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their places in discussions requiring legislation."

Unfortunately for the Irish people, it took the nation's spineless legislators almost another 70 years to reach the point where Church and State could be uncoupled, with the result that both institutions are now so tarnished that neither can enkindle affection or admiration. In 1952, Hubert Butler became one more victim of this Gaelic theocracy when he dared to raise his voice, in the presence of a papal nuncio in Dublin, against the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs by Catholic Croats. "Government to Discuss Insult to Nuncio" ran one of the headlines the following day. Butler was denounced for having had the temerity to oppose the Catholic Church and was forced to stand down from bodies such as the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, which he had helped to re-establish. Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, True.

Today, Hubert Butler's reputation is ascending, while that of his small-minded detractors is disgraced.