As was no doubt to be expected – history being what it is these days – Fergal Keane’s three-part series (11-25 January) immediately declared itself an exercise in reconfiguration.

How the Irish Shaped Britain
BBC Radio 4

As was no doubt to be expected – history being what it is these days – Fergal Keane’s three-part series (11-25 January) immediately declared itself an exercise in reconfiguration. Custom might insist that Anglo-Hibernian relations were a matter of conquest, rebellion and an indomitable native spirit. Keane, on the other hand, was here to “overthrow your preconceptions”. What really ought to concern us, one of his many scholarly interviewees maintained, was the long process of “successful integration” – so successful, in the end, that many of the things we might think innately British were, in fact, innately Irish.

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