Fianna Fáil have long posed an odd paradox in Irish history writing; so central to Irish politics and yet so very much understudied. Only a handful of academic monographs have studied the party, Kieran Allen's Fianna Fáil and Irish labour and Richard Dunphy's The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland being the two dominant texts. Kenneth Shonk's monograph, tightly focused on the party's formative and more radical early years and adeptly plugged into recent currents in Irish gender history, makes a serious addition to this field.

An initial preparatory chapter provides an overview of Fianna Fáil's early history and political innovations and the party's efforts to disprove any accusations that they were ‘irrational, emotional, militant, and thus feminised agents of disorder’. The subsequent chapters focus, in turn, on the party's understandings of femininity and masculinity. Shonk's final chapter then suggests, in a fascinating way of thinking about Irish gender history, that once these properly nationalist Irish feminine and Irish masculine archetypes were realised, they ‘could then engage in the act of symbolic national coitus upon which a new Ireland could be based’. This is fascinating but it also means that the book sometimes remains wedded to a binary understanding of ‘gender’, one that only allows for two options — male or female. However, at other times, Shonk carefully recognises that Fianna Fáil in the 1920s were attacked for being the wrong kind of irrational and violent men, rather than for being feminised. Cumann na nGaedheal presented itself as a law-and-order party, against the disorder and ostensible queerness of militant republicanism, which was pitched as neither male nor female but something uncomfortably in-between.

Early in the book Shonk states that under Fianna Fáil, ‘the people of Ireland were now asked to direct their energies towards the inculcation of republican ideology into all aspects of their daily life’. In statements like this, he verges on an overly totalising understanding of the party and its activities. Were Fianna Fáil really ever successful at so massive a restructuring of Irish life? At a later point, he asserts that ‘The recasting of Irish republicanism under the guise of de Valera's party coalesced around its larger discourse, such that all aspects of the Irish polity came to be viewed in direct relation to the renascent movement enabled by the economic war’ [my emphasis]. Fianna Fáil may have wanted this, but it is hardly the case that they actually achieved it. Nonetheless, the book does trace the shifts from Sinn Féin to Fianna Fáil with an admirable level of patience for the subtleties of party-political ideologies. In his chapter on ‘The Irish feminine’, for example, Shonk shows how the well-known coercion of Irish women in the Free State period co-existed alongside a desire to transform Irish women into nationalist consumers and even, in a very controlled way, to give political agency to women (provided that agency was used in ways deemed correct by Fianna Fáil). Where women were encouraged to be consumers, men were encouraged to be producers. Drawing on the party's visual material, Shonk shows how Fianna Fáil emphasised speed, dynamism and growth, tropes that were familiar from other inter-war European nationalist movements that sought to avoid the trappings of both capitalism and communism. At the same time, Shonk is careful enough to point out that Fianna Fáil's political aesthetics was also the result of the party's ‘Keynesian leanings’ and their ‘monetary alchemy’. The party's vision of manliness served as ‘the pedagogical model of the Irish masculine’ and ‘If Fianna Fáil was pedagogical, then de Valera was the professor’.

Seeking to go beyond the consensus view that Ireland was unaffected by the interwar politics of continental Europe, Ireland's new traditionalists pursues a cautious comparison throughout with continental fascist movements. Shonk remains rightly cautious in his comparisons to interwar Europe; rather than arguing that Fianna Fáil was a variant of fascism, he makes the more apt point that it was a product of the same moment in European politics, when questions of national sovereignty, borders, essentialised understandings of national identity and a desire for an ordered and disciplined mass politics were to the fore. In doing this, the book also tacitly moves past the various historians who, with an incredibly selective memory, have described post-1922 Ireland as a democratic, pragmatic or liberal polity. Shonk ends his narrative firmly in 1938, resisting any temptation to trace Fianna Fáil's trajectory through the Lemass, Lynch or Haughey years. Nevertheless, this book does lay out a serious model for how to understand this party, and in so doing makes a welcome intervention into a sadly understudied topic.