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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 624-625



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Ireland's Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation's Soul, 1500-2000. By Marcus Tanner (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) 498pp. $29.95

Irish history, particularly when written, as it so often is, to explain contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland, has long had the capacity both to attract attention and repel understanding. Tanner, a veteran observer of ethnic/religious conflict, wrestles with that challenge in presenting a well-produced sweeping overview of 500 years of Irish history. Convinced that the crucial religious dimension of the Northern Ireland problem is not commonly understood, Tanner focuses his narrative on the parallel development of the Catholic and Protestant religious structures. In eighteen chronological chapters covering 400 years of history, Tanner explores that development from the beginning of Henry VIII's Reformation to the increasingly secularized present. Tanner's approach is to bring a broad narrative of political and social change to bear on evolving religious identities with well-chosen quotations and extended anecdotes drawn from primary-source accounts. The overall result is engaging history with a first-hand feel to it.

Tanner provides a relatively sophisticated account of relations between Ireland's Christian churches and their place in the social order, particularly in his opening chapters that recreate the fluidity and ambiguity of the religious situation in Ireland for much of the sixteenth century. The dynamic that he describes, however, is essentially oppositional. The Cromwellian Settlement, Tanner insists, replaced a complex and shifting set of identities with a Catholic-Protestant dichotomy that has persisted practically to the present day. Tanner downplays the divisions between Protestant denominations and the complexities of Protestant opinion on national questions because in the second half of his narrative, he devotes his attention increasingly to the renaissance of Catholicism.

The swamping of the Church of Ireland and the unchecked rise of the Catholic clergy, after the penal laws were lifted at the end of the eighteenth century, within the emerging Irish Free State and, eventually, the Republic of Ireland are his primary interests. For Tanner, the Catholic Church was the eminence gris within Irish nationalism, and Ireland for most of the twentieth century was a theocratic construction the illiberal triumphalism of which was as reprehensible as it was debilitating. But not until the last chapters of the book where Tanner's objective, if occasionally breathless, prose breaks down, does his open distaste for the post-independence Irish polity become clear. Decrying the decline of secular influence in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, Tanner describes the Church as "a vast cancerous lump that was steadily sucking the life blood out of the society from which it drew nourishment" (337). All is well that ends well, however. Tanner's description of the shockingly sudden collapse of Catholic hegemony in Ireland after the Second Vatican Council has a whiggish ring of satisfied finality to it, although the Church has "remained part of the furniture of Ireland," less as "a [End Page 624] precious heirloom" and more as "a smelly old armchair no one had the heart to chuck out" (415).

Given Tanner's framing of the book as an inquiry into the roots of the Ulster problem, it is important to note that Tanner does not attribute the last thirty-five years of violence in Northern Ireland to religious tensions. Despite the resurgence of fundamentalism on its margins, Protestantism is also a declining force even in its Ulster heartland, according to Tanner, and the real problem in the North is no longer the religious traditions but the "religious-based nationalism" spawned by earlier centuries (427). The Troubles amount to the death-spasms of creed- informed identities, and hope is to be found, unsurprisingly, in "the riseof a multi-cultural and multi-racial Ireland, which seems irresistible." "It will," Tanner confidently predicts, "render the struggle between Catholic and Protestants for the soul of Ireland redundant once and for all."

If there is a Rosetta stone for understanding Irish history, it can be found in the shifting...

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