This paperback edition of Lindsey Earner-Byrne's Letters of the Catholic poor is a valuable addition to the bookshelf of any social or cultural historian of independent Ireland. Earner-Byrne establishes in her introduction that she wishes to present the experience of poverty in Ireland through the lens and words of the poor themselves, in order to personalise the experience of poverty. The monograph lives up to this aspiration admirably – it is thoroughly researched, well-presented and situates the experience of the Irish Catholic poor in the interwar period in a broader European context. The historiography of independent Ireland has been sorely lacking a study that illuminates the lives of the poor from their own perspective, not least as they exercised agency in such areas as the negotiation of charity. Earner-Byrne's volume begins to fill this gap.

The book's primary source base is the letters from the Catholic poor in Ireland written primarily to the Dublin archbishop, Edward Byrne. Earner-Byrne has effectively used this archive to reveal the inner workings of the daily lives of the poor, and their varied methods of surviving poverty and gaining financial assistance. The segments concerning the intersections between poverty and charity, and the deserving and undeserving poor, are particularly interesting for the author's expositions of the sociological and religious boundaries between the qualifications of charitable enterprises both private and institutional. Earner-Byrne's use of letters written to and from the archdiocese illuminate these boundaries, and how those in pecuniary difficulty could qualify themselves for charitable attention through the leveraging of their Catholic identity or moral virtue. Much of this book will be of interest to scholars who wish to understand which personal qualities were largely seen as positive and public virtues in post-independence Irish Catholic society.

The sources used so liberally and at length throughout the text beg many further research questions. The misspellings in many of the letters, for example, prompt questions over the levels of literacy across Irish society. The role of women in impoverished Irish Catholic society – and indeed in Irish Catholicism itself – is also prominent in these letters. Written primarily by women, they raise questions over the social interactions between men and women, questions concerning gender norms, and about the familial authority of the wife and mother in Irish homes. How does a female narrator relate or reflect on the experiences highlighted in these letters differently than scholars may expect for male or non-familial consumption in this period? An interesting illustration of such questions could be how women related to the archbishop their experiences of loss and bereavement, or of specifically female physical suffering – for example the leveraging of bedrest or other symptoms and by-products of pregnancy (p. 97) – without apparent regard to social taboos.

In all Earner-Byrne certainly allows the poor to speak for themselves in this volume through copious quotations of what appears to be a very complete archive of letters from the Irish Catholic poor. Though this approach results in the volume begging more questions than it perhaps answers, the amount of primary research demonstrated throughout the book is a valuable resource to begin answering questions about poor Irish Catholics in the first twenty years of independence, and to inspire future work on this section of Irish society.