The complex role of Ireland in the Great War has elicited a number of scholarly works in recent years. Niamh Gallagher's Ireland and the Great War: a social and political history adds to the scholarship on this subject in her assertion that Irish Catholics supported the war effort, both on an individual and community level, longer than historians have previously understood. She points to the significance of the disasters of 1915, the Easter Rising, and the 1918 conscription crisis as impacting Catholic perception of the war but claims that ultimately many Catholics continued their support of the allied cause up to the armistice. This continued support, in large part, was derived from the conviction that the allies occupied the moral high ground in the face of German atrocities like the invasion of neutral Belgium and unrestricted submarine warfare.

Gallagher's work focuses on the Irish home front through an examination of newspapers and memoirs. Her chapters on women's roles on the home front and the war at sea's impact on Irish Catholic views of Germany are, perhaps, the strongest chapters, contributing new and interesting analysis to aspects of the war that have previously received less attention. Chapter three, on ‘Irish women and war-relief on the home front’, argues that Catholic women supported the war, predominantly those from the middle class, and were willing to work with Protestant women in war work such as charities and nursing. This chapter provides a look at how women formed the backbone of the war effort. It would have been more effective had it discussed the complexities of their support; some women engaged in war work, be it nursing, munitions, or charity organisation, from a desire to aid the soldiers or even simply to have gainful employment rather than an overall support of the war itself.

Similarly, chapter four ‘The war at sea: encountering the German enemy’ provides a look into an understudied aspect of the Irish war experience, in this case, through an examination of the impact of German naval operations on the home front. Gallagher asserts that repeated attacks by German submarines increased Irish civilian support for the allied effort and that, while Ireland did not experience destruction on a par with France, devastation by the German navy brought the war home to the Irish. For some Irish civilians this made the war more personal and reinforced the perception that the allies were in the right.

Gallagher argues that her book ‘offers a radical new reading of Irish involvement in the world's first “total war”’ (preface). Though she pays homage to the scholars before her like Paul Taylor, Catriona Pennell, Senia Pašeta, Keith Jeffery, and John Horne, Gallagher has notably missed some important works like Nuala Johnson’s Ireland, the Great War, and the geography of remembrance (Cambridge, 2003) and Jason Myers's The Great War and memory in Irish culture, 1918-2010 (Palo Alto, CA, 2013), in which both authors discuss the varieties and complexities of Irish Catholic support for the war effort. While there was enduring Catholic support, even after the Rising and the 1918 conscription crisis, the motivations for that support were numerous, and these complexities could have been examined more deeply. Reasons for supporting the war ranged from backing general Allied war aims, to championing the British Empire's agenda in the war, to honouring a loved one at the front, to needing gainful employment, to a combination thereof and further examination of this would have added nuance to the analysis.

While analysis of the motivations behind attendance at parades of departing soldiers tends to assume that such attendance directly translates to war support, further evidence from primary sources would help substantiate such claims. Though support of the war is certainly one potential motivation, one cannot help but wonder if attendance also revolved around sending off a loved one, a tradition with a long history around Irish military service on behalf of the British Empire. It seems possible that one could support a soldier without supporting the war, and further evidence here could strengthen Gallagher's case.

Gallagher's work provides insights into the Irish home front experience and the degree to which the Catholic Irish supported the war throughout its duration. Her work offers important contributions to the scholarship on women on the home front and the impact of submarine warfare in Ireland. Though the argument is, perhaps, overstated in some areas, this work remains an important piece in the ongoing dialogue about the relationship between the Irish and the war effort.