With the onset of crisis in England in the early 1640s and the subsequent wars of the three kingdoms, standardized periodical news began to emerge in England. English Newsbooks and Irish Rebellion takes as its subject the coverage and attention accorded to Irish affairs in such works throughout the 1640s. In the past fifteen years Irish scholars have devoted considerable attention to the events of this decade, but this work seeks to devote attention to English perceptions of those events, especially as “Ireland clearly became the focus of a propaganda war for both camps in England” (204). While the interlocking history of the Stuart kingdoms in the 1640s has been studied primarily from political and military viewpoints, the importance of those relationships in cultural and social terms, most especially in terms of perceptions, remains potentially fruitful territory. The Royalist cause was continually tarnished by Parliamentarian polemicists by being associated with the atrocious behavior of Irish Catholics and, by implication, a wider Catholic threat. Yet Royalist writers (who were vastly outnumbered by their Parliamentarian counterparts) could seek to damn the Parliamentarian cause by claiming that they were shirking their responsibility to the forces in Ireland tasked with suppressing the rebellion of 1641 and the Confederate Catholics. Interestingly, despite the occasional intervention of Leveler publications that opposed the Cromwellian campaign of 1649, there seemed to be, to put it mildly, an essentially negative consensus across the English political spectrum about the nature of the Catholic Irish. However, it is implicit within O’Hara's work that such attitudes in themselves were, in large part, incidental: Ireland was primarily utilized as a weapon in the paper war that raged alongside (and within) the English Civil Wars.

However, this is a deeply disappointing book. Rather than providing any sustained analysis of the coverage of Ireland in newsbooks, it limits itself to a simple chronological account of this coverage throughout the decade. The scale of O’Hara's research is highly impressive, and he accumulates a good deal of useful material; throughout the book there is skillful interweaving and contrasting of the perception of events as reported and their actuality. But in terms of analysis, this is as far as it goes: nowhere does it approach the sophistication of Joad Raymond's work on English newsbooks of the 1640s. Admittedly, coverage of Ireland was only one aspect of the overall preoccupations of newsbooks. Yet it seems unusual to view them, as O’Hara does, in isolation from other printed media such as pamphlets that also dealt with Ireland. For example, newsbooks did not necessarily provide the lurid accounts of the 1641 rebellion that can be so readily found in contemporaneous pamphlets. But throughout the 1640s newsbooks consistently harked back to, and reiterated, the perceived sectarian atrocities of the Catholic Irish in 1641. Indeed, perhaps more than pamphlets, newsbooks seemed to illustrate a consistent and simmering hostility to the Irish, who eventually came to be used as a “yardstick” (69) for gauging the scale of atrocity throughout the English Civil Wars. This aspect of the book would have been greatly enriched had it involved other source material touching upon this theme.

This illustrates the weakness in the narrative approach to such a study. While it is useful to trace the shifting perceptions of individual events, this eventually becomes repetitive. The text lacks purpose, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this book is little more than a thesis in print. It is fluently written and is often quite perceptive, but, equally, it is too speculative on occasion and perhaps too inclined to accept uncritically the veracity of many of the accounts utilized here. There is a notable lack of substantive analysis: the obligatory name checking of figures such as Edmund Spenser as the originators of the paradigm of Irish barbarity is used to set the stage for accounts that reiterate examples of that barbarity at specific moments and for specific purposes. But while the propaganda purposes of such material were evident, did they exert a broader influence in cultural terms, aside from immediate political purposes? Irish news may have been subordinated to English preoccupations, but this might not be the only level on which to read such printed accounts. What cultural influence, if any, did they have? Virtually no attempt is made to address these questions. A more critical and thematic approach to analyzing and presenting the material would have been far more useful: Parliamentarian and Royalist propaganda throughout the decade are obvious themes, and while this distinction is suggested by the structure of the book, the treatment is essentially subordinated to chronology. Another possible theme could be the significance of the singling out of the Irish in contemporary propaganda; Mark Stoyle's recent work on ethnicity in the Civil Wars suggests that this could be another fruitful avenue, but it is not dwelt upon here. This study would have been far more successful as a thematic account or perhaps even as a sequence of articles. The chronological structure corresponds to the sequential nature of the evidence, but it does not seem to be the best way to address it: a thematic structure, both in terms of the subject matter and in the manner in which it was covered, would have been far more illuminating.

It is difficult to see what purpose this book might serve, except as a sourcebook to be consulted in a piecemeal fashion about the coverage about Ireland contained in such newsbooks. The significance of this material will be for others to decide, for it is not adequately assessed here. This book is both a disappointment and a missed opportunity.