Daithí Ó Corráin's study of the Anglican Church of Ireland and the Irish Catholic Church between 1945 and 1973 is a welcome contribution to a surprisingly under-researched area of modern Irish history. Despite the oft-stated importance of the relationship between religion and political identity in Ireland, little has been written about Irish religion in the twentieth century. In addition, the partition of Ireland into two states in 1920—Northern Ireland with a majority Protestant population and the Irish Free State, later the Republic of Ireland, dominated by Catholics—has led to a partitioned historiography that has not generally produced integrated studies of the two states or the institutions that crossed the border. Both the Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church were two such institutions, and the author seeks to address how well the leadership of each negotiated the problems associated with operating in two jurisdictions and the competing political and religious loyalties this implied. Ó Corráin's study effectively summarizes the existing literature and adds much new material gleaned from a variety of archives, particularly diocesan, which makes the book particularly important. It is divided into five chapters: the first two examine how the border affected the organization and concerns of the churches; the next two consider the nature of church-state relations in this period; and the final chapter looks at inter-church relations and the difficult gestation of ecumenism that became more important as Northern Ireland descended into terrible civil strife. Ó Corráin reaches a positive conclusion about the ability of church leaders to manage dual-jurisdictional churches, referring to them as both “pragmatic” and “dexterous.”

The author is particularly good on the Catholic Church. The response of the hierarchy under the leadership of Cardinal John D'Alton and Cardinal William Conway, successive archbishops of Armagh, to the Irish Republican Army's Border Campaign between 1956 and 1962 contributed “in a very significant way to a re-evaluation of the national question” (43). Church leaders did so by adopting a two-nation rather than a one-nation model of the Irish question and utterly condemning physical-force republicanism. They also moved the debate from the injustice of partition to dealing with problems within the northern state. The author's re-evaluation of the leadership of D'Alton, and his courageous federal solution to the Irish question proposed in 1957, is particularly welcome as it offers an important corrective to a historiography that has been dominated by the larger-than-life character of Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin. Ó Corráin also underlines the point that the Catholic leadership overwhelmingly distrusted the local authorities in Northern Ireland, which they believed were gerrymandered and influenced by the Orange Order, and eventually sought to construct pragmatic links with the central government at Stormont.

The discussion of the Church of Ireland is helpful but less rich. The author recognizes the asymmetry of the church in which the overwhelming majority of Anglicans lived in Northern Ireland, and recognizes also that the ecclesiastical structures allowed for the disproportionate representation of the southern church. As a consequence, the focus is on the Church of Ireland in the south, which, owing to its size and the social background of many of its members, is described as moderate and accommodating. By comparison, northern Anglicans, it seems, were heavily influenced by the Orange Order and are portrayed as a disruptive force waiting in the sidelines to upset the delicate balance achieved by the church leadership between religious and political loyalty. This hardly does justice to a complex community on both sides of the border that was divided along theological, cultural, political, and social lines. In addition, the attitude of the leadership toward the Northern Ireland state is not adequately described. The bishops may have been successful in terms of asserting a united church at an institutional level, but did this come at the price of silent complicity in the inequalities of the northern state? The question of why the Church of Ireland began to seriously question these is not adequately outlined, and the impression is given that the bishops suddenly discovered there might be a problem in the late 1960s.

These comments should not detract from a welcome addition to the literature on religion in twentieth-century Ireland. This book is a forceful reminder to scholars of the wealth of untapped material that exists and which could be exploited to answer questions about the nature and structures of church-state relations on both sides of the border. It is to the author's credit that he has raised issues of such importance.