There has been a growth in recent years of work dealing with the shell-shock experiences of British army veterans who incurred their mental scars during the First World War. This has partly come about due to a growing interest in the history of the mind and the development of rigorous concepts with which to tackle the subject. Despite that, shell shock remains a difficult subject with which to engage. Understandings of the condition were rudimentary even for some charged with dealing with it and this is one reason why the records created often lack comparability. Perhaps the best way of understanding that is to realise that during the war men with the same condition could be described as having ‘shell-shock’ (and were more common as the war progressed), but the language of neurasthenia and other terminology still dominates in many records. Of course an added challenge for the Irish historian, compared to historians looking at the issue in England, Scotland and Wales, is the extent to which treatment of soldiers was fragmented due to the establishment of two new jurisdictions on the island in this period. Faced with such source-related problems, Michael Robinson has done an outstanding service both to twentieth-century Irish history and to medical military history more widely in his study of shell-shocked British army veterans in Ireland between 1918 and 1939.

Robinson's book is not solely a medical or disability history, and should be seen in the context of wider literature on veterans in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. In particular it should be read alongside Paul Taylor's 2015 book Heroes or traitors? Experiences of southern Irish soldiers returning from the Great War, 1919–39, although, of course, Taylor only considered the south, and one of the key merits of Robinson's book is that it is able to offer a comparative perspective between the experiences of soldiers in the south and in Northern Ireland. As Robinson points out mentally disabled veterans in Northern Ireland were treated broadly similarly to those in Great Britain, with the Stormont government providing special training and employment for veterans, within the context of a society whose ruling elite privileged service in the First World War in their founding narrative. In contrast, official employment in the Irish Free State was not specially provided for First World War veterans, by a state which had different heroes as part of its founding narrative. Instead such men sought relief from the British Ministry of Pensions.

Dealing with around 25,000 discharges for mental disorders among Irish men in the British army, Robinson locates his argument within a First World War British stereotype of Irish soldiers that they were ‘volatile and susceptible to mental illness’. Despite this, the treatments provided were ‘more progressive and innovative than is often assumed’ (p. 11). However in the south there tended to be longer waiting lists after 1921 and of course those returning to a society which was not celebrating British veterans faced other challenges. Robinson makes the point, rightly, that his extension of the analysis of shell shock up to the outbreak of the Second World War provides a valuable innovation in this book, with some past work not going far beyond the early 1920s by which point the basis of the treatment of shell shock had been established. A particularly valuable part of the book, which will help to broaden its appeal to those working on local studies of the war, is its close and perceptive attention to the institutions which treated shell-shock veterans. Certainly there is no other study which provides as much valuable general information on both the Richmond War Hospital in Dublin and the Belfast War Hospital. Through a focus on the mentally ill the author has therefore offered material of value to those looking at how the war affected specific geographic communities.

Beyond Irish history this study will be important for a wide range of historians of the British military and of medical military history beyond that. Indeed, its conclusion that the treatment of shell-shock veterans owed much to Victorian and Edwardian narratives means that the book is important beyond its immediate chronological period in being able to speak to subject matter from at least half a century before the end of the First World War. As such it is a fine addition not only to the field of disability history but also to the wider social history of the time.