Since his election as the first Carroll Professor of Irish History in 1991, Roy Foster has helped elevate Oxford into a major international centre for the study of Irish history as well as devising and supporting a number of new undergraduate papers on Ireland . He completed his massive and authoritative biography of W.B. Yeats in 2003. In May 2004 he will deliver the prestigious Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast . Here, Professor Foster outlines his subject.

The title is ‘The Strange Death of Romantic Ireland’ and the theme is change – indeed metamorphosis – in Ireland since c.1970: a kind of coda to my Modern Ireland which ended in 1972. I will be considering the changes in the position of the Catholic Church (and indeed Protestantism) in public life; developments in the issues of sex and gender; Ireland’s dramatically altered position vis-à-vis Europe, and regarding the British-Irish relationship; the country’s heightened profile in global capitalism and the spectacular shift in economic productivity from the agricultural sector to microelectronics and service industries- in general, the breeding, habits and health of the Celtic Tiger. Within this wider mesh of issues will feature the transformation of politics in Northern Ireland , the politics of sleaze, the international phenomenon of the fashionableness of Irishness, futurism and nostalgia.