A Century of service is the first comprehensive history of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (I.N.M.O.). Ambitious in scope and meticulously researched, it charts the history of the organisation from its beginnings as the Irish Nurses’ Union in 1919 to the present day in its current guise with a membership of over 40,000 nurses. The introduction of the book sets the history of the I.N.M.O. within the broader history of trade unionism in Ireland. This would have benefited from some discussion of the existing historiography on nursing, such as Gerard Fealy's work on nursing education and professionalisation. The earlier chapters provide a clear overview of the beginnings of the organisation which began as a trade union making demands for better working conditions for nurses, and drew attention to issues such as pensions and standardised wages. Loughrey shows how ordinary members of the union were resistant to strike action in its early years. From 1925 the organisation cultivated a new image for itself as a professional association rather than a trade union, renaming itself the Irish Nurses’ Organisation (I.N.O.) and focusing its attention on nursing education.

By the 1930s, the organisation adopted a de facto no-strike policy as it was felt that a militant approach would have clashed with the vocational and service nature of nursing work and dissuaded nurses from joining. However, the I.N.O. was by no means passive. I was interested to learn about the organisation's response to key societal developments in Ireland. In chapter six, for instance, Loughrey provides detailed discussion of the organisation's response to debates around contraception and abortion in Ireland, maintaining that the Irish Nurses’ Organisation maintained a Catholic and conservative stance in relation to these issues, but showing how their stance has evolved over time. In chapter eight, the organisation's engagement with the women's movement, the marriage bar and equal pay are analysed. The later chapters deal with the later twentieth century and such issues as the 1999 national nurses’ strike.

While Loughrey has succeeded here in providing an extremely detailed account of the history of the organisation, at times the text would have benefited from a comparative approach. The experiences of nurses in the I.N.M.O. are not placed within the wider international context of nursing unions (some comparison with the experiences of nurses in the United Kingdom would have been useful, for instance), while it would also have been profitable to compare the experiences of nurses with other unions or professions, such as teaching, or women in the medical profession. Because the book focuses on providing a detailed chronological account of the history of the I.N.M.O., there is not much attention devoted to tensions within the organisation or room for engagement with the existing historiography on nursing internationally.

A major strength of the text is the author's use of a range of underutilised and previously unused sources, including the archives of the I.N.M.O., in addition to nursing journals which enable the experiences of nurses themselves to be illuminated. Loughrey has also drawn on Labour Court recommendations, European Union directives and a wealth of reports in relation to the I.N.M.O.'s activities. He has also undertaken a number of oral history interviews which shed light on the personal experiences of Irish nurses in the second half of the twentieth century. However, at times these oral history interviews are taken at face value and could have benefited from more detailed analysis or engagement with oral history theory on memory. It would also have been useful if Loughrey provided more information on his methodology in the introduction, outlining how and why these interviewees were selected. The book is illustrated with the inclusion of numerous photographs and primary sources, although at times the placing of these images distracts from the flow of the text.

Institutional and organisational histories are often criticised for being dry accounts but Loughrey has produced an eminently readable and accessible text which is an important contribution to nursing history and labour history in Ireland. While the author acknowledges at the beginning of the book that he is a nurse and member of I.N.M.O. and that this may have impacted on his analysis (and indeed, the conclusion which is a call to arms could be said to reflect these biases), the book nevertheless is a clear and detailed overview of the key moments in the history of the organisation. The book will be of interest to scholars of nursing and labour history as well as members of I.N.M.O. who want to learn more about the history of their organisation.