By the year 2000 Ireland was in the midst of an economic boom, the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon that appears to show no signs of abating. For those who grew up in the thirties and forties, modern Ireland is such a different place that people of that generation still have difficulty grasping this new Ireland of wealth, prosperity, and immigrants. Along with the economic boom, Ireland, from the 1990s, has been reeling from the findings of various tribunals into political corruption, and even more so from the abuse scandals, both physical and sexual, that have rocked the Catholic Church and changed the relationship that has existed between “Church and people” in the Republic. How did we get from colonial domination and poverty at the beginning of the century, to independence and wealth by 2000? There are few historians who would have tackled the project of trying to clarify and make accessible the social, economic, political, and cultural history of twentieth-century Ireland. Such interdisciplinarity is not a trademark of Irish historians. Ferriter, a young historian already widely published, has produced a history of the century that is diverse, inclusive, creative, and in places provocative. He has synthesized a huge range of secondary and primary sources, including literary and political memoirs, journalism, and Dail debates. He has made extensive use of recently released government files, particularly those from the Bureau of Military history, the accounts of young men and women who were keen to fight for Ireland in the years between 1913 and 1921 (the dates conveniently excluding the controversial civil war period), and who lived to tell their tales to the government-sponsored collectors. The use of that material, gathered with the intention of reflecting the experience of the “ordinary volunteer” marks Ferriter's own attention and interest in the “ordinary people” of Ireland, those rarely written about, the poor, the marginalized, women, and children.

This is a huge book, in terms of its scope and the level of information and detail it provides on life in Ireland in the twentieth century. The book is strong on personalities; Larkin and Connolly, Collins and De Valera, together with more recent luminaries, find their proportionate place within the story. Haughey is marked as the “most polarising, controversial and corrupt politician of his generation” (561). Ferriter shows how little real accountability Irish politicians actually had to the public, something that has perhaps at least changed a little with the advent of a greater level of investigative journalism in the country. Economic stagnation, emigration, and poverty, the problems that beset Ireland for much of the century, are clearly delineated. Irish cultural, social, and sporting life is discussed. Ferriter alerts the reader to recent work, for instance, on 1950's Ireland, which argues that we were more culturally sophisticated than has previously been recognized. Northern Irish history is explored in detail. Attention is given to the important role of women in the civil rights struggle, an aspect rarely referred to in general histories of Northern Ireland.

Ferriter uses the secondary material well, building on the insights of a new generation of historians of Ireland who are opening up vast areas of research previously untackled. He gives attention to recent scandals, and we get horrendous accounts from those who had been confined to the industrial and reformatory school system run by Christian Brothers and various female religious congregations. In 1968, when Brian Lenihan, a Fianna Fail Minister, visited the most famous and now notorious of these schools, Artane Industrial School, and was made aware of conditions and beatings, he responded, “Get me out of this fucking place” (589). Ferriter, while he adds much to our current general knowledge on the more hidden aspects of Irish history, must by necessity rely on an underdeveloped historiography in some subject areas. Women's history, the history of children and childhood, the place of the body as ideal and object in the gender war that certainly surfaced in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s, the issue of sexuality, and the place of institutions in twentieth-century Irish society still await deeper historical study and analysis. There are a number of typographical and factual errors, and while the book is full of quotable material, the tendency to break up the text with quotations later repeated in the narrative became annoying to me. Footnotes do not always correspond with the information given. While it may be provocative to claim, as Ferriter does, that 30,000 Irish women were incarcerated in Magdalen Asylums, no source is given for this “fact.” It may come from the controversial film by Peter Mullan on the Magdalen Sisters, but it is a figure that supports rather than challenges the generally erroneous public perception of the role of these institutions in Ireland.

It is hoped that many of these errors will be corrected in a new edition of the work. Despite the errors this book is a tremendous achievement. It will open up further the research agenda for twentieth-century Irish history. It is already essential reading for anyone who has either a passing or serious interest in twentieth-century Irish history.