Margaret Scull’s book The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles 1968–1998 transcends the parochial view on the Catholic Church during the Northern Ireland Conflict and instead situates it in a transnational framework. Thereby, she challenges established views and provides fresh insight.

Her publication is the first major English long-term study of the involvement of the Catholic Church in the Northern Ireland Conflict since the publication of Gerard McElroy’s The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Crisis in 1991. In the period between the releases of the two books, only one other historical study on the same topic came out. In 2009, Markus Büchele published his book Autorität und Ohnmacht. Der Nordirlandkonflikt und die katholische Kirche (Power and Impotence. The Northern Ireland Conflict and the Catholic Church). Büchele’s book has yet to be translated into English. Both of the earlier studies suffer from obvious flaws. McElroy wrote his book while the conflict was still ongoing. Therefore, he could neither include nor fathom the Catholic Church’s contribution to bringing the conflict to an end from the late eighties to 1998 and its involvement in the peace process after the Good Friday Agreement. Büchele’s more recent book includes the period of the peace process and adds extensive interviews with its participants, among them the late Cardinal Cahal Daly. Nevertheless, Büchele could only draw on Government sources dating back to 1980 since the 30-year rule was still in place in 2009. Additionally, he made no attempt to access Church records.

Margaret Scull’s book surpasses both of the books in detail as well as scope. The aim of her study is to ‘critically analyse the influence of the Catholic Church in mediating between paramilitary organizations and the British government during the Northern Ireland Troubles from 1968 to 1998’ (p. 3). The book comprises five chapters as well as an introduction and a conclusion. The chapters are organised chronologically, following the political development of the Conflict leading up to the Good Friday Agreement.

Scull rightly contests that the geographical frame of studies on the Northern Ireland Conflict has been too narrow. She writes: ‘It is futile to study the Troubles in terms of national narratives, as the conflict spilled over national borders’ (p. 7). As a result, her study includes and prominently features the interplay of the Irish Catholic Church with its English counterpart as well as with the Vatican. She diligently records the debates taking place within the Church both publicly and privately around such issues as paramilitary funerals and the morality of hunger strikes. Furthermore, she reveals that prominent human rights activists Fr Denis Faul and Fr Raymond Murray received substantial help from Sr Sarah Clarke, a nun based in England, who visited and campaigned for Irish prisoners in British jails. By studying the work of Sr Sarah and other female religious, she demonstrates the need for a gender balanced approach to the conflict in general and the study of Church involvement in particular. In this aspect, her book picks up the efforts made by Dianne Kirby who interviewed a number of nuns for a series of seminars during the 2010s.

Scull is able to present all these valuable insights because she has gained unprecedented access to both government and Church records. Her visit to a number of diocesan and archdiocesan archives in England—including those of Westminster as well as Birmingham—have proven to be fruitful for her work. In Ireland, she had less success. She was able to gain access to the Cardinal Ó Fiaich library, housing some of the private files of Cardinal Ó Fiaich and files of Cardinal Conway, primarily including press releases. Yet, she states: ‘Accessing diocesan archives in Ireland has often proved challenging to historians. Many files from the period are yet to be made available to scholars’ (p. 9). Her pioneering work in the British and Irish archives will allow future researchers to get a more informed opinion on the Catholic Church during the conflict and will produce further research on this topic.

Scull’s work is not only saturated with a wealth of primary sources but also infused with sociological insight and theory. She applies Tom Inglis’ concept of moral monopoly. Inglis stipulates that the Catholic Church in Ireland became influential in Irish politics and society not because of its economic power or its connections with influential politicians, but because of a monopoly on all things relating to morality. By using this concept, Scull is able to offer an explanation as to why the influence of the Irish Catholic Church on the Peace Process declined: the Church became embroiled in a clerical abuse scandal and thus lost all of its moral monopoly—or what was left of it at that stage. Scull dedicates an entire sub-chapter to the scandal.

Despite her in-depth research in the archives and in the libraries, as well as her numerous interviews with clergymen such as Raymond Murray and Desmond Wilson, she misses out on two important collections of sources which could have helped her bypassing the problems she encountered with Irish Church sources. Both Murray and Wilson left behind a large amount of files. Murray’s files are held in the Ó Fiaich library of Armagh and in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. The Dublin portion is only accessible by personal permission of Monsignor Murray. The files of Fr Wilson are stored in Spring Hill House and open only through request to Wilson’s executor Ciaran Cahill. They include correspondence with various priests and bishops, and stand in contrast to her methodological approach to keep the hierarchy separate from the priests. Instead, they reveal that individual priests often cooperated closely with their respective bishops and acted as their primary source of information.

At first glimpse, her book might appear to be yet another conventional book on an aspect of one of the mostly heavily researched areas of Anglo-Irish History. However, Scull is able to present fresh insights into the role of Church in the conflict. In many ways, her book enters unchartered territory and points towards areas of research that have been neglected so far, such as gender and transnational aspects. Due to her difficulties of accessing Irish Diocesan Archives, her research tends to lean towards the perspective of the English Catholic Church which gives the reader a novel perspective. All in all, Sculls book hopefully will rekindle the interest of the Church’s role in the conflict and will do away with the stereotype that the conflict was primarily the concern of the Irish Catholic Church with the English Catholic Church playing the part of a bystander.