Despite the subtitle Ó Corráin's work deals only with the Catholic and Anglican Churches in Ireland. Furthermore his approach and conclusions are not perhaps as novel as he suggests in the introduction to his book: the ground for much of his work has been well laid by others. The value of the present work is the access that the author has been given to collections of papers thus far closed to historians, especially the archives of Cardinal William Conway of Armagh and Bishop William Philbin of Down and Connor. Neither the Church of Ireland in the Republic nor the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland ever really felt at home in those respective political arrangements, but they nevertheless functioned on an all-Ireland basis despite the partition of the country in 1921. It has taken the Church of Ireland in the twenty-six counties a long time to identify itself as a truly Irish rather than a British institution. The problem was compounded for the Church when the Irish Free State declared itself a Republic in 1949. Irish Anglicans were bewildered and felt bereft of contact with the British royal family and only after an intense debate was the prayer book amended to take account of the new realities. Given its numerically superior position in the Republic, the Catholic Church has been able, on occasion, to flex its muscles but not in a wholly unrestricted way. Equally it suited both Church and State to insist with the Vatican that the archbishop of Armagh, whose diocese straddles the border, should not only be a cardinal but also chairman of the episcopal conference when the Holy See was beginning to think otherwise in the late 1950s. Political partition continued to overshadow all other considerations, at least at the rhetorical level. The grudging acceptance of the two states by the two main Churches gave way to a more pragmatic acceptance in the 1960s but never to a full-fledged loyalty on the part of the Catholic Church with respect to Northern Ireland. The eruption of sectarian violence in 1969 ironically led to greater, if none the less laboured, ecumenical contact than would have been the case had the Troubles begun in the 1950s. Of course the new atmosphere created by Vatican II also helped in this regard. Inter-Church contact would eventually lead to the setting up in 1973 of a fully-fledged ecumenical process, the Ballymascanlon talks, which involved the entire Irish Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. The talks began despite intense political divergence between the Churches not least concerning internment without trial which was introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971 and which was, at least initially, aimed exclusively at the Catholic population. Ó Corráin also highlights how much the Church of Ireland was held to ransom by the posturing of the Orange Order notwithstanding the saintly leadership given by the likes of Archbishop George Simms of Armagh. This is a welcome addition to a growing interest among historians in the specifically religious aspects of modern Irish history.