The financial stress of poverty, which, as David Chart put it in 1914, “turns the laughing girls of the poorer Dublin streets into the weary-eyed women of the tenement houses” (196), is the subject of Lindsey Earner-Byrne's Letters of the Catholic Poor. This is not the poverty portrayed in censuses, government reports, commissions of investigation, or the minute books of charitable organizations: this is poverty owned, experienced, articulated, and described by poor people themselves, in more than four thousand letters written to the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Edward Byrne, or his secretaries, between 1922 and 1940. Earner-Byrne has researched this material, now contained in the Dublin Diocesan Archive, to produce a compelling account of the experiences of ordinary people both in Dublin and in other areas of Ireland in the first two decades of the post-independence period. The sheer size of this collection of letters makes any discussion of them a challenging task, while their relevance to many different areas of Irish history presents a bewildering choice of analytical perspectives. Earner-Byrne has drawn on the history of poverty—ranging from Olwen Hufton's The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (1974) to Mark Peel's Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain (2012)—to provide international perspectives on state provision, social work, and charitable activity, along with comparative material on the strategies employed by poor people to negotiate the various agencies who were involved with. The history of literacy is also relevant to this study, and Earner-Byrne makes full use of the works of David Vincent on literacy in England (among them The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe [2000]) and, for comparative purposes, those of historians who have studied the same kind of material—most especially Thomas Sokoll's Essex Pauper Letters 1731–1837 (2006) and Christa Hämmerle's “Requests, Complaints, Demands: Preliminary Thoughts in the Petitioning Letters of Lower-Class Austrian Women, 1865–1918” in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross's Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing (2004).

Earner-Byrne organizes the book into chapters that present the material more or less thematically, though inevitably these themes tend to overlap as well. They include the levels of literacy and styles of letter writing in the collection; the strategies used by letter-writers to plead their case; the letters written by middle-class people who had “fallen on hard times”; the toll that poverty took on health, well-being, and family life; and the system whereby local priests vetted the letter-writers and vouched for them, if they thought it appropriate. Earner-Byrne also draws on other important sources such as autobiographical writings, most notably Máirín Johnston's Around the Banks of Pimlico (1986), Elaine Crowley's Cowslips and Chainies: A Memoir of Dublin in the 1930s (1996), and Peter Tyrrell's 1964, “Early Days in Letterfrack: Memories of an Industrial School Boy” (Hibernia 28). These help to give more background and context to the letters. It is in the letters themselves, however, that we find the vividness and immediacy of lived experience. Mrs. Maureen Q., for instance, writing from Dorset Street in Dublin in 1926, describes her situation like this:

Many of the letters coming from the urban poor in the various areas of Dublin read very like the one above. Others show the vulnerability of all kinds of people to distress, due to illness or the death of the main breadwinner, or even the instability of the country during these decades. The two elderly ladies whose millinery shop in Dublin city center had been burned down during the Troubles are one such example of this. The case of a professional pianist recovering from muscular rheumatism and trying to support her eight children and clear her rent arrears is one of many examples of poverty brought about by illness, while farmers’ various troubles—the loss of a mare, a long-running and costly dispute regarding a will, the fall in agricultural prices caused by the economic war—are also in evidence. The sidelight cast on the material details of ordinary people's lives, even if the discourse is one of loss, is a fascinating aspect of the book, as is the connection between the material and the social. The situation of children unable to attend school because their clothes were “in pawn,” and indeed the centrality of the pawnshop in people's lives in general, highlights the extreme distress that people found themselves in, and the evidence indicates that this was not unusual. A letter written by a man who believed he had been denied help from the St. Vincent de Paul because the visitors found him in bed on a Sunday—partly due to illness, but also because he had given his wife his underwear to pawn—illustrates many of the factors at play in the relief of poverty in Ireland at the time. The notion of a “deserving” case, in the eyes of religious, state, and charitable bodies; the connections between being given help and being religious (something the letter writers were acutely aware of); the crucial role played by health or lack of it in the changes in people's fortunes; the interconnectedness of poverty with education, employment, emigration, and state intervention in families: all of these relevant topics are drawn upon in Lindsey Earner-Byrne's rich and nuanced discussion of the letters in their historical, but also social and cultural context.

This is a disquieting book. It tells of the history of poverty through the eyes of the people who experienced it in the early decades of Saorstát Éireann. The struggles of the fledgeling state in the 1920s and 1930s and the effects of this struggle on the most vulnerable people in the country need to be appreciated, especially as we approach the centenary of Irish independence. Letters of the Catholic Poor illuminates an important period in Irish history, but also stimulates deep reflection on our past and its meaning.