Since David Fitzpatrick's 1977 analysis of revolutionary life in County Clare, local county studies have been the vehicle for some of the most challenging and provocative insights about the nature of Irish nationalism in the revolutionary period. Historians such as Peter Hart and Marie Coleman have used the local frame to craft textured portraits of the earnest young men who turned to violence in pursuit of their nationalist convictions in the early 1920s, the local networks of conformity to which they belonged, and the identity and experience of their victims, both military and civilian. Tom Doyle's The Civil War in Kerry is the latest contribution to the literature of revolution in the southwestern counties, and it tackles a county in which the civil conflict was waged on particularly bloody and bitter terms. Doyle is not the first to consider the detail of civil war conflict in Kerry. His subject was covered by one of the first ever book-length publications about the period, Dorothy Macardle's 1924 Tragedies of Kerry, a Republican tract that graphically described the sufferings of dozens of Republican fighters, most notably the gruesome killing of prisoners using land mines at Ballyseedy in March 1923. Macardle's righteous account made no pretensions to objectivity: it lingered on the screams of agony emitted by Republican martyrs from prison cells, the mutilated bodies found in ditches, and the tears shed by grieving mothers. Doyle's The Civil War in Kerry is a catalog of suffering too but one with an altogether more sober and balanced tone.

While Macardle's book sanctimoniously portrayed Republicans as the defenders of the true will of the Irish people and Free State soldiers as the deluded dupes of an all-powerful British conqueror, Doyle's account is starkly unideological. Doyle's combatants, to the extent that their motivations are explored, are driven primarily by local alliances and personal loyalties. Neither side is bestowed with the moral authority of “the people.” The people, as Doyle rightly acknowledges, were largely indifferent to the conflict, which they viewed as abstract and largely meaningless, unlike the very real inconveniences that affected their lives as the result of the sabotage of trains and roads and the disruption to public utilities. Civil war wrought unexpected consequences for civil life in Kerry: shops were closed because of the unavailability of basic food supplies, incomes plummeted as a result of lost tourist trade, bread rations were reduced at hospitals, and emigration became more difficult. Doyle evokes these everyday privations well and numbers them appropriately alongside the more dramatic civilian casualties of the war, such as the fate met by the driver and fireman of a train at Liscahane who were pinned beneath the locomotive and scalded to death by the ruptured boiler after a Republican sabotage of the track.

The Civil War in Kerry is primarily a narrative of military conflict, rather than a social history. After a digest of national political developments leading to the civil war, Doyle describes the two-month standoff that took place between locally recruited Free State Soldiers and Republican troops at Listowel in spring 1922 and then chronicles every documented ambush, sabotage, execution, reprisal, and sniping attack that took place in Kerry in exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail. The names and birthplace of combatants, the manner of injuries and deaths, and the damage to property are all conscientiously recorded. Particular attention is paid to the dramatic seaborne landing of Free State troops at Tralee in August and the Irish Republican Army assaults on Free State troops in Kenmare and Killorglin in September 1922, but Doyle does not overlook the more obscure confrontations and accidental deaths caused by dropped grenades and misfired ammunition. The total body count, Doyle estimates, was eighty-five Free State soldiers, over seventy Republicans, and a dozen civilians.

Readers hoping for the kind of thick description showcased by Peter Hart in his study of revolutionary Cork will be disappointed. Doyle's descriptions of ambushes and reprisals are merely that, descriptions of military engagements. They are not windows into the culture of military life for Republican or Free State fighters or the lived experience of the civilians who struggled to endure while the conflict raged over their heads. Knotty questions about the extent to which, beneath the Treaty rhetoric, civil war disputes were in fact animated by sectarian or residual Land War animosities are dealt with superficially. The death of Jeremiah Hannifin, a father of ten who died after being shot in the chest and shoulders, for example, is said to bear “all the hallmarks of a local feud and a conflict devoid of any political context” (178), without any explanation as to what the feud was or what the significance of the number of children he has or the manner of his shooting might be. Doyle is inconsistent on the question of sectarianism, describing an attack using stones on the windows of a Protestant household in April 1922 as a “once off” sectarian incident (87) but later making casual reference to “what approached a pogrom of house burning” inflicted on the Protestant population of South Kerry in the summer months (156). Nor does The Civil War in Kerry probe the issue that made Kerry such an unusual county in the civil war: the fact that it was largely a conflict between locals on the Republican side and “foreign” imports from Dublin, Clare, and Galway on the Free State side. Doyle might have fruitfully contrasted Kerry with the civil war experience of Cork, where “native” Corkmen fought on both sides and where, as Peter Hart has argued, the military chain of command counted for little against communal networks and friendship circles. To a significant extent, the analytic limitations of The Civil War in Kerry are a function of its narrow source base. Doyle's primary research rests heavily on four newspapers, and while he uses these with appropriate cognizance of the impact of Free State censorship, there is no doubt that greater use of unpublished correspondence and government archival material would have enlivened his evocation of the conflict. The Civil War in Kerry is a book that will mainly appeal to those with a particular interest in local Kerry history and readers who prefer a detailed military narrative over social or cultural analysis.