Building Communism and Policing Deviance in the Soviet Union: residential childcare, 1958–91

general of Irish working-class life, though this is probably more pronounced in the Republic than in Northern Ireland. More pointedly, however, he underlines the relative absence of factory studies in particular and the fact that this comparative approach to factories is the first (though hopefully not the last) of its kind. What emerges is a story of not one but two towns, Cork and Cobh (pronounced ‘Cove’), the latter of which was on an island in the Cork harbour estuary and was home to an Irish steel plant. In spite of being a nationalized industry with early trade union recognition, somewhat in contradistinction to Cork’s two private car manufacturers, Cobh’s Irish Steel workers evince noticeably less warm nostalgia for their old workplace. Undoubtedly, and as Cullinane demonstrates, this is in part tied to the subsequent fortunes of Cobh as a place haunted by de-industrialization whilst Cork grew and diversified during the Celtic Tiger years. Indeed, the history of the present if not the recent past suffuses much of this study in general, something that is paradoxically oral history’s perennial strength and weakness as a source, method and final product. One of the more interesting aspects of this book is the discussion around protectionism and its generally positive impact on sustaining these three factories. This contrasts with much that has been written about the tariff-driven economics of successive twentieth-century Irish governments up until the 1960s. If, of course, for a time it operated – like the Republic of Ireland’s corporation tax regime does today – to help attract and anchor businesses, it nonetheless did rather less for workers, who continued to emigrate in large numbers to find work, albeit some of it was provided in Ford’s Dagenham plant. It is, though, the workers’ memories that sparkle most in this book, most notably in the central spine looking at life in the three very different factories. They combine humour with pathos and show the ordinariness as well as the drama of the working lives within the plants. Cullinane here has produced a very democratic history in the service of his living sources and allowed them to speak not merely for themselves but for a long-silenced Irish working-class experience.