In recent years a series of scandals in Ireland—including the clerical sex abuse scandal, allegations of widespread abuse in state-funded institutions, and the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children on the site of a former mother and baby home—has resulted in the growth of scholarly interest in the history of children and childhood. A number of books have been published that examine the way the state formulated and implemented its responsibility to vulnerable children in the postindependence period, the role of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in mediating parental rights and responsibilities, and how the state and the courts arbitrated cases of infanticide. Children, Childhood and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present adds to the growing body of literature in what now broadly constitutes “childhood studies.” Half of the essays that the editors, Maria Luddy and James Smith, included in this volume were published in 2009 in a special issue of Éire-Ireland, while the other half appear for the first time in this volume and focus almost exclusively on representations of children and childhood in film and literature.

The book attempts to cover more than five hundred years of the history and representation of childhood in Irish society. Such an ambitious undertaking requires a strong organizational structure that would weave the twenty-one various essays here together into a coherent whole. A loose structure, however, is one of the book's fundamental flaws. Its five sections present essays grouped according to subject and approach. The first section, “The Child in History,” includes three essays that investigate various aspects of the history of childhood in the early modern, Edwardian, and postindependence periods. Unfortunately nothing else ties these essays together other than the fact that they are historical in nature. The next section, “Charity, Welfare and Childcare,” includes essays that focus specifically on policies and practices related to child welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1980s. Again, though, the only thing these essays have in common is that they address some aspect of child welfare. But the essays themselves do not build on one another in a logical fashion or collectively trace the evolution of child welfare policy and practice from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century. These two sections, taken together, provide some historical context for understanding experiences of childhood in Ireland, but the reader must dig deep to try to find any valuable connections between and among the individual essays.

The bulk of the essays are contained in third through fifth sections (“Shaping Childhood Cultures,” “Literary Imaginings,” and “Cultural Representations”). With one or two exceptions, these essays examine the way childhood was written about or represented in autobiographical works, literature, and film. Although the essays offer fascinating insights into the artistic or intellectual genius that created these representations, the relationship between representation and the lived experiences—or real policies discussed in the first two sections—is unclear. As presented, the book reads like five distinct volumes of essays that bear little relation to one another.

The disproportionate emphasis on cultural representations and treatments of childhood is perhaps this volume's second significant flaw. In their introduction, Luddy and Smith deftly lay out the state of affairs in contemporary Ireland: the accumulation of scandals involving children, the explosion in the media of coverage of issues related to children and the state's responsibility for them, and the growth of scholarly works in the area of childhood studies (which encompasses a wide array of disciplines and approaches). They wonder “what, if anything, is new about how childhood is currently understood in Ireland? How has the understanding of Irish childhood changed over time? And how do earlier conceptions of Irish childhood feed into and/or inform more recent conceptualizations?” (15). And they suggest that in order to offer viable answers to these questions scholars must examine the newfound interest in children and childhood against the backdrop of historical attitudes to, experiences and representations of, childhood. But the emphasis on cultural representations of childhood, some of them so narrow and esoteric as to focus only on a single work of fiction or works by a single author, makes it virtually impossible to say anything of substance about children and childhood in Irish history and society. Nothing links these essays together but the five broad categories into which the book is divided; unfortunately the end result is a series of disparate essays that offer tantalizing pieces to a bigger puzzle, but that ultimately leaves the puzzle missing some critical pieces.

In their introduction, Luddy and Smith make a valiant effort to tie twenty-one disparate essays into a clear and convincing argument about policy and practice related to childhood, and representations of childhood in various cultural artifacts. They suggest that while the sensationalist accounts of institutional and abused childhood have been at the forefront of both the public consciousness and of scholarly studies, their book seeks to demonstrate that there were other experiences of childhood that deserve equal consideration. It is hard to argue with this sentiment. However, Luddy and Smith did not quite succeed in illustrating the diversity of experiences of childhood from the early modern period to the present, nor have they successfully married the historical and literary essays into a strong argument about how and why experience, policy, practice, and representation changed over time. In short, the essays, taken together, never quite answer the questions laid out in the book's introduction.