Book Review: Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900–1923 by Conor Morrissey

Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street Conspiracy. By the 1870s, Ribbonism had become less shadowy and mainly found ‘expression in public national identification’ and ‘collective mutuality’ (p. 229). The book brings to light comical images from these years in the magazine Zozimus that poked fun at the constabulary’s exaggeration of the Ribbon threat. By the close of the century, Ribbon societies merged with the more open and respectable Ancient Order of Hibernians, which operated with the support of the Catholic Church. This important book advances our understanding of Ribbonism and how seriously the state considered the threat it presented, as well as Catholic politics and social organisation more widely in nineteenth-century Ireland and the diaspora. It demonstrates considerable levels of politicisation amongst urban and rural workers in nineteenth-century Ireland and emigrant centres during periods when more overtly nationalist movements were at a low ebb. The Ribbonmen may not have been staging rebellions and holding monster meetings, but they were engaged in regular acts of defiance and reformism, and their ‘low’ politics challenges the traditional nationalist narrative of the nineteenth century.