Book Review: Women of the Country House in Ireland, 1860–1914 by Maeve O’Riordan

Abstract

O’Kane, the Ulster IRA fighter Rory Graham was ‘a sort of white-blackbird’; George Irvine, who had become vice-commandant of 1st Battalion Dublin Brigade of the IRA was to his co-religionists ‘an iconoclast, who sought rupture with the past’ (pp. 184, 185). Finding a valued place for Protestant nationalism within the dominant political narrative of early twentieth-century Ireland was virtually impossible. Promoting the notion, as Irvine later did, that Protestants were the inspiration for Irish republicanism while Catholics were traditionally loyal to the Crown, was as ingenious as it was insulting to all sides. In this balanced and timely book, Morrissey’s first conclusion is, unsurprisingly, that religious denomination is central in early twentieth-century Ireland, and that political culture had to bend to that reality. His second is that ‘individual historical actors...can often be best understood in relation to the formal and informal networks they inhabited’ (p. 223). This is particularly significant when there were so few of these ‘individual historical actors’. Finally, he emphasizes the significance of this nationalist counterculture in a largely monolithic society. If it contributed anything, Protestant nationalism perhaps provided a narrow bridge across which each tribe could travel into the other’s territory – if they wanted to.