Co-authors Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride debate the points in their recent book, For and Against a United Ireland, as the annual Robert Fagles Memorial Lecture. Part of the 2025-26 Fund for Irish Studies Series. The Fund for Irish Studies Series is co-chaired by Jane Cox, Director of Princeton’s Program in Theater & Music Theater, and Robert Spoo, Princeton’s Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters.
About the Guests
Photo credit: Nick Bradshaw
Fintan O’Toole, one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, is a columnist for The Irish Times and advising editor of The New York Review of Books. He also writes for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and other international publications. From 2012 to 2024, he was Leonard L. Milberg Visiting Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton. His books on theater include works on William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Thomas Murphy. His books on politics include the bestsellers We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (which was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2022); Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain; and Ship of Fools. He has received the A.T. Cross Award for Supreme Contribution to Irish Journalism, the Millennium Social Inclusion Award, the Orwell Prize, the European Press Prize and the Robert Silvers Prize for Journalism. He has recently been appointed official biographer of Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. In 2023, O’Toole was named an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2024 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Photo credit: Conor Mulhern
Sam McBride is an author and journalist specialising in Northern Irish politics. He is Northern Ireland Editor of the Belfast Telegraph and the Dublin-based Sunday Independent. He also writes on Northern Ireland for the Economist. He is a former political editor of the Belfast News Letter and has made a documentary film for the BBC on the Northern Bank robbery.
Sam’s first book, Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, became a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.
His second book, For and Against a United Ireland, co-written with Fintan O’Toole, was published in October 2025 by the Royal Irish Academy and was shortlisted in the An Post Irish Book of the Year Awards.
Sam is a regular broadcaster, providing analysis for local, national and international audiences on developments in Northern Ireland. He lives in Belfast with his wife and two young children.
Tickets & Details
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Directions
Get directions to the James Stewart Film Theater, located on the first floor at 185 Nassau Street.
Accessibility
The James Stewart Film Theater is an accessible venue. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.