Two features in particular gave nineteenth-century Ireland a distinctive character. The first was the unusually high level of religious devotion, combined with acute sectarian partisanship. The second was exceptionally heavy emigration, such that by 1890 two out of every five persons born in Ireland resided permanently beyond its shores. Although Catholics predominated in absolute numbers, the migrant flow affected all denominations. Their response, as Sarah Roddy demonstrates in this incisive and revealing study, was complex and often contradictory. The clergy of the Church of Ireland were most responsive to the economic argument for the removal of a redundant population. Some Presbyterian ministers, heirs to a radical tradition, were more ready to attack the economic conditions that drove members of their congregations overseas. Catholic priests and bishops, having initially conceded the potential economic benefits of emigration, increasingly wove the mass exodus seen from the 1840s onwards into a broader narrative of British misgovernment and landlord ruthlessness. Yet political rhetoric gave way to real alarm only in the depression of the early 1860s, when tenant farmers began to appear alongside the rural poor in the continuing stream of emigrants. There was, as Roddy says, ‘a hierarchy of regret’ (p. 172). Spokesmen for all three denominations oscillated between fears that the outflow would weaken their Church and hopes that it might tilt the demographic balance in their favour. All recognised the risk that those uprooted from family and neighbourhood would lose contact with religion. Yet their record in providing pastoral care either for those in transit or for the new congregations created abroad remained distinctly patchy. The Catholic Church ostensibly did most, setting up a specialist college in 1841 to train priests for the overseas mission. But in practice All Hallows, Dublin, became notoriously a refuge for would-be priests unable to meet the strict admission criteria of the national seminary at Maynooth. Financial support, in fact, mainly flowed in the other direction, as collections across the expanding diaspora helped to fund the massive church building programme of the second half of the century. Recognition of the role of the migrant Irish in dispersing Catholicism across the non-European world provided some consolation. But grandiose references to Ireland's developing spiritual empire were not as callous or as chauvinistic as they might appear. Instead, Roddy suggests, they should be read as ‘a rational response of the pious to a dispiriting phenomenon’ (p. 192). The balanced assessment is characteristic. Picking her way deftly though a huge volume of contemporary comment, public and private, Roddy provides a clear-sighted and dispassionate account of the dilemma of pastors and religious leaders torn between horror at the brutal means by which their society was being reshaped and an uncomfortable awareness of the benefits both to themselves and to their surviving congregations.