Cumann na nGaedheal was formed in 1923 from the section of Sinn Féin that supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. It was the party of government from the establishment of the Irish Free State until its defeat in the election of 1932 by its anti-treaty rival, Fianna Fáil. A short while later, in 1933, Cumann na nGaedheal merged with the National Centre Party and the Army Comrades Association, or “Blueshirts,” to form Fine Gael. Despite the centrality of Cumann na nGaedheal in shaping the Irish Free State in those early years and the impact that its successor party, Fine Gael, was to have on Irish politics, Cumann na nGaedheal remains vastly understudied. Jason Knirck's excellent Afterimage of the Revolution goes some way to redressing the imbalance and should be read by all scholars who focus on that postrevolutionary era in Ireland. Indeed, this is a book which will be of great interest not just to scholars of twentieth-century Irish history but also to those concerned with postrevolutionary politics and the politics of state building more generally.

Mindful of the divisiveness of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath for those engaged in and those who study Irish politics (a distinction which is not always clear), Knirck states that his project in Afterimage of the Revolution is “not a defence of Cumann na nGaedheal's personnel or policies” nor an “analysis of the veracity or wisdom of any aspect of this project” (6). His goal in this book was rather on examining “how various Treatyite members of the government and the Dáil [Irish parliament] perceived and enunciated connections between the early years of the Free State and the revolution that had created it” (6). He is ultimately successful in this endeavor. His account is even-handed, with arguments made on the basis of rigorously researched and painstakingly footnoted primary archival material, newspaper sources, and personal papers, and a fair and serious assessment of the existing historiographical debates and secondary literature.

Knirck's assessment of Cumann na nGaedheal challenges John Regan's portrayal of the party as “counter-revolutionary” and recalibrates the clichéd and simplistic view of Cumann na nGaedheal as flatly conservative and wholly uncommitted to the ideals espoused during the revolution. Instead Knirck's study looks at the party “through the lens of the revolution” (21). In doing so, it demonstrates how the party exploited ambiguity in the treaty and the Constitution of the Irish Free State to extend the limited independence to more closely resemble that which had been envisioned during the revolution. Similarly, Knirck's explanation of how the Cumann na nGaedheal governments used the Imperial Conference and League of Nations to cement Ireland's position in the international system and underline their independence is detailed and serves to support his claim that Cumann na nGaedheal cannot simply be dismissed as reactionary and wholly counterrevolutionary.

The image Knirck paints of Cumann na nGaedheal is nuanced. He shows the party as one riven with contradictions, explaining that the heterogeneity of the movement's elite meant it was frequently in conflict with itself as well as with its political opponents. Knirck highlights the contradictions inherent in postrevolution consolidation and state building; he also points to the grating incongruity of reluctant democrats lauding the supremacy of parliamentary democracy as a means to justify often authoritarian emergency legislation as one such contradiction. The party found itself trying to cling to revolutionary heritage even while attempting to cement the treaty in popular opinion as the instrument through which independence was granted and explaining away elements of the revolutionary agenda which had to be abandoned.

Afterimage of the Revolution addresses the lack of attention that Cumann na nGaedheal has received, and Knirck must be lauded for his work. However, the book is not without limitations. The reader reaches the end of the book before Cumann na nGaedheal reached its own; that is, Knirck's analysis stops in 1932 with the election defeat at the hands of Fianna Fáil, so we get no sense of how Cumann na nGaedheal dealt with this defeat or of the moves that led to the formation of Fine Gael. Perhaps it is an unfair criticism, given Knirck's clearly stated aim of assessing how party elites squared the newly created Free State with the revolution that had created it, but we lack much of a sense of the movement's character below the level of Dáil deputies. Knirck does allude to an ever-widening chasm between these elites and the rank and file members (128–29), and he alludes to a failure by the party top brass to understand the electorate and convince them of their vision (252–53), but this topic could have been given more attention, especially since Knirck credits it as one of the main factors in Cumann na nGaedheal's defeat in the 1932 election. Furthermore, although Knirck rightly acknowledges the frequently inward-looking tendency of Irish historians, seldom in this work does he seek to buck this trend. While Afterimage of the Revolution was never intended to be a comparative work, there would have been much merit in a final chapter focused on tying threads from other chapters together and reflecting on how much of Cumann na nGaedheal's experience was shared by other postcolonial movements attempting to cement independence and build new states in a postimperial, postrevolutionary moment.

Knirck's work is not perfect, and it does not answer all remaining questions about Cumann na nGaedheal, but perhaps we are expecting too much from one author whose subject has been all but overlooked by academics for nearly a century. What Afterimage of the Revolution does is serve as a call for further dispassionate and rigorous discussion on Cumann na nGaedheal and that most contentious era of Irish politics. With the emotive centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty approaching in a few years, let us hope that scholars of Irish history heed the invitation.