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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. 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...