Twentieth-century Ireland produced no shortage of remarkable people who received acclaim at home and abroad – poets, novelists, playwrights, scientists, revolutionary leaders, international statesmen, and more. Tom Garvin has singled out Daniel Binchy (1899–1989) as a man of extraordinary diversity; in Garvin’s words, ‘a medieval scholar, a diplomat, an Irish public intellectual, a Catholic liberal democrat, a polyglot, a historian, an Irish political scientist avant la lettre, an anti-Communist and, possibly most importantly for nationalist Ireland, a fervent anti-Nazi …’ (p. xi) Binchy was born in County Cork, was sent to Clongowes Wood College and on to University College Dublin, where he did B.A. and M.A. degrees in politics and history, as well as legal studies at the King’s Inn. He was awarded a travelling scholarship to the University of Munich where he completed a D.Phil. In 1921 he began publishing a series of five articles called ‘An Irish ambassador at the Spanish court, 1569–1574,’ in the Jesuit journal Studies. By 1924 he was offered a part time appointment as the Chair of Roman Law, Jurisprudence, and Legal History at UCD, where he formed close relations with Osborn Bergin and Eoin MacNeill and was steered into the study of Old Irish and Middle Irish to support his mastery of early Irish law. In Germany he had also worked under Rudolf Thurneysen, so he had a good foundation in language, history, and law.

Within four years of his professorship at U.C.D., however, Binchy was asked to open the Irish legation in Berlin as minister plenipotentiary. Garvin suggests that Joseph Walshe, the undersecretary at External Affairs, who had taught Binchy at Clongowes, appreciated his legal training, his facility in German, his German university connections, and his rising prominence at U.C.D., as well as having been a member of the Irish delegation to the League of Nations in 1926. Thus he was an attractive candidate for the fledgling Irish diplomatic service and took up his new duties in October 1929. Garvin found Binchy’s relations with German President Paul von Hindenburg surprisingly cordial and his admiration for Chancellor Heinrich Brüning understandable. Although Binchy was praised for reports for External Affairs, Garvin concludes that he really did not enjoy the diplomatic life – the formality, the mannerisms, and the social life. Ireland was not very important in Berlin diplomatic circles and was of interest largely as a means of access to the British. The onset of the ‘Great Depression’ in 1929 meant promoting trade would not have been very rewarding and the political climate in Germany was alarming. Binchy resigned in 1932 and returned to U.C.D.. Nonetheless, the experience gave him shrewd insight into the deteriorating international situation. Garvin outlines how, having seen Hitler in Munich in 1921, Binchy had absolutely no illusions about the dangers of Hitler and Nazism ten years later. Back in Dublin he published a devastating critique of Hitler in 1933, and at the request of the British Foreign Office he wrote Church and state in Fascist Italy (1941). Garvin emphasises that this was at a time when both Hitler and Mussolini had admirers within conservative groups in Ireland. Binchy’s European experience made him particularly appreciative of Pope Pius XI and the Catholic church, caught in the impossible situation that both Germany and Italy presented. He also saw that the church recognised that liberalism and democracy were not its enemy but that totalitarianism was. Binchy began to emerge as something of a public figure as he wrote about contemporary Irish affairs, for example the abolition of the old Senate in the 1930s and of the government’s Irish language policy.

In 1945 Binchy became a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, after which he was appointed director of the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Increasingly he focused on the origins of Irish brehon law. Studies of the law began to reveal that early Irish society was not quite what cultural nationalists had claimed it to be. Binchy found little evidence of an early Irish ‘state,’ or the idea of a working ‘high-kingship’. Indeed, the laws revealed that early Gaelic society was not egalitarian, that women held inferior status, and that slavery was widespread. Structure in Irish society began to emerge as the influence of the church from the continent became more pervasive. The Viking and Norman invasions also began to shape an ‘Irish’ identity, at least to the extent of posing an ‘other’ that had to be dealt with. These analyses of early Irish society began to emerge in Binchy’s writings as early as 1934 in Sick-maintenance in Irish law and in 1943 in The linguistic and historical value of Irish law tracts. Binchy’s great life’s work was Corpus juris Hibernici which was published by the D.I.A.S. in 1978 in six volumes. Much of this challenged the historical view of the cultural nationalists of early Irish society as a happy prosperous land of ‘saints and scholars’. Garvin is very good in placing Binchy’s work in the context of the Irish nationalist movement of the past two hundred years and its struggle against forces of British culture, racialist attitudes, and modern politics and economics. The book is a valuable examination of the intellectual history of Ireland in the twentieth century.