The Irish Revolution occurred just after significant changes in print journalism in the early twentieth century. It was the heyday of mass circulation newspapers owned by fiercely competitive press barons who invested huge sums in recruiting staff and promoting their titles. Then came the First World War when, as Maurice Walsh observes, journalists became the kept men of their respective military commands.

Walsh, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reporter for over two decades, argues convincingly that the way in which visiting correspondents reported the Irish revolution between 1919 and 1923 was crucial both in the way that they affected perceptions of the war and the way in which they connected Ireland to the world. It helped that at the very time when the League of Nations was being established, contemporary debates about self-determination promoted the cause of Irish independence internationally. Of the various nationalist insurgencies that broke out after the First World War, in Ireland, India, Egypt and Mesopotamia, Ireland received the most coverage; this was not surprising as it was nearer to the metropolitan center, and so the tactics of colonial repression normally concealed by distance, ignorance, or indifference were more easily observed.

For Walsh one of the most striking aspects of the war, especially where British correspondents were concerned, was that their traditional affinity with the British army, so evident during the First World War, suddenly dissolved when the paramilitary Black and Tans and Auxiliaries were deployed in Ireland in 1920. Walsh comments on the clear class prejudice that emerged in reports about these irregulars compared to officers and men of the regular army.

Walsh examines four interesting case studies—two British journalists, H. W. Nevinson of the Nation and Hugh Martin of the Daily News, and two Americans, the Irish-born Francis Hackett, editor of the New Republic, and Carl Ackerman of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Nevinson, who had established his reputation during the Second Boer War, was appalled by the reports from Ireland: it was a “terrible thing to feel ashamed of the country one loves. It is like coming home and finding one's mother drunk upon the floor” (188).

Walsh considers that most correspondents were badly informed about the relationship between Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) but that Hugh Martin of the Daily News was one of the few prepared to delve deeper. He immediately saw the significance of the Soloheadbeg murders in January 1919, which began the drift to war, and put forward the view, which gained credence with other reporters, that the movement was now in the hands of the gunmen. Martin's work was influential and was often cited in parliament. He helped to put government reprisals at the heart of the debate about Ireland.

Francis Hackett and Carl Ackerman represented contrasting ideas of what journalism meant and what journalists should do. Hackett was regarded as an anglophobe and disagreed strongly with Walter Lippmann and other New Republic journalists, who swallowed too readily the propaganda coming from the British Embassy in Washington. He was deeply uncomfortable with the new orthodoxy that the role of reporters was to report the facts and opinions of others, not their own. Ackerman represented that new orthodoxy. He had worked in Washington, Berlin, Siberia, and China for Philadelphia's Public Ledger. He moved to London in March 1920 and went to Ireland in April. Ackerman viewed the Anglo-Irish conflict as a disinterested spectator, unlike Hackett who saw the struggle as fundamentally moral. Ackerman also saw himself as a Wilsonian uncorrupted by Old World intrigues. Interestingly, the Ledger's diplomatic consultant was none other than Colonel House, one of Wilson's closest advisers and a great influence on Ackerman who, like Lippmann, believed that good journalism depended on cultivating the great and the good. One of the latter whom he cultivated in London was the murky, sinister Basil Thomson of Scotland Yard, a consummate manipulator of the press. Thomson used Ackerman to carry messages to Sinn Fein and IRA leaders. When Ackerman met Michael Collins, his job was to ascertain if Sinn Fein was ready to compromise. When Ackerman told Collins that the American government would never jeopardize relations with Britain for Ireland, he recalled how irritated Collins was.

In his concluding section Walsh looks at various literary travelers, notably V. S. Pritchett, who came to identify Irish freedom with his own personal freedom, a not uncommon experience at the time. He saw that he was watching the first modern defeat of colonialism and was particularly alert to the precarious position of the Anglo-Irish in the new state. He had less sympathy for the defeated republicans in the civil war when he visited Clare in autumn 1923 just after the arrest of Eamon de Valera there. He concluded that the enthusiasm of the local people for de Valera was feckless and misguided. In his dispatches from Ireland in 1923 he consistently argued that republicanism was a dead end and that Ireland was about to embrace a liberal future. He indulged in familiar Victorian tropes about the “childlike” Irish, but, returning to Ireland in the late 1920s, Pritchett was more pessimistic: “One could smell the coming reaction and the dullness of growing religious obduracy” (176).

Walsh's book is a valuable addition to the work of scholars like Simon Potter, Una Bromell, Gary Peatling, and Chandrika Kaul, who have explored the role of the press in Ireland, Irish-America, India, and the British Empire.