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The Catholic Historical Review 88.3 (2002) 559-561



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Book Review

Ireland's Holy Wars:
The Struggle for a Nation's Soul, 1500-2000


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

This is a lengthy, meticulously researched, occasionally inaccurate, vividly written account of the role of religion in Irish political identity over the past half-millennium. The author, the former foreign editor of the London Independent, has a mission which is to show that political conflict in Ireland has religious roots dating back to the intersection between religion and politics in the Tudor conquest of Ireland. The accompanying publicity document for the book actually proclaims, "Renowned Journalist Uncovers the Religious Roots of Centuries of Violence." Perhaps Yale University Press will now commission a book from someone to prove that the earth is not flat. Pace such assertions, though, in the latter part of the book Tanner seems much more interested in the southern Irish state than, as might be expected from the book's title, in Northern Ireland and devotes very little attention to the experience of the two communities there between partition in the 1920's and the outbreak of the 'Troubles' in the 1960's.

Within the constraints of its rather directly political reading of religion Ireland's Holy Wars will undoubtedly be an interesting and informative read to those otherwise unversed in the course of Irish history. Huge labor has gone into it, and it is written with energy and a sense of the dramatic. As might be expected, it is not an especially original account and is reliant on Tanner's eighteen months of reading in Irish history. This does not stop him from blithely dismissing Irish history as "a great shrine" guarded by "shamans" who are suspicious of "a foreign historian" who tramples through "with his muddy boots." These shamans were obviously kept well away from the book; otherwise they might have pointed out that Tanner's map of Catholic dioceses in fact shows Church of Ireland dioceses while his map of Church of Ireland dioceses in fact [End Page 559] shows Catholic dioceses. On the "muddy boots" question one of the disappointments of the book is that they seem to have been left drying in the foyer of the National Library of Ireland. A more direct reporting of his experience of Ireland might have earned Ireland's Holy Wars a place in the long tradition of travel writing about Ireland that goes back to de Tocqueville and beyond.

The really troubling feature of this work is its meta-narrative. In fairness, this important dimension of the book accounts for only a tiny part of an otherwise often impressive text that effectively belies its author's gloss. The book is presented as a "research-odyssey." Tanner sees himself as a journalist-hero, both street-wise and compassionate as he moves from one international conflict to the next. This is a role that of course implicitly flatters his liberal, educated, Anglo-American audience. He is a journalist who has been drawn to Northern Ireland through having to report the summer sectarian tensions at Drumcree, near Portadown, which developed in the mid 1990's, though of course he eschews the "media carnival" in which his fellow journalists indulge. His book answers theneed for a deeper analysis of the situation, but it is clear from the start that the situation is characterized by "madness." Northern Ireland's commonalities are with other mad places such as Yugoslavia, and tellingly Tanner's previous book is entitled Croatia: A Nation Forged in War.

Both Ireland and Yugoslavia have failed to embrace the western liberal ideals of tolerance and the pursuit of material progress over a fixation with the grievances of the past. The author himself being "half Welsh-speaking and very Celt, half English and very Anglo-Saxon" has a special insight. The book attests to the sagacity of the liberal reader's position...

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