After reading Brian Hanley's monograph few will regard conventional claims that the Northern Ireland conflict had little impact on the Republic of Ireland as sustainable. Taking the period up to 1979, the chapters cover popular reactions to events during the escalation of the conflict, violence in the south, governmental responses in the form of expansive security policies and censorship, popular protests against these forms of coercion, the reaction to northern refugees, the impact on southern Protestants, responses to republican and loyalist violence and socio-cultural reactions (including the revisionist controversy). The evidence provided in each case clearly supports the author's central argument that the conflict was a persistent backdrop to southern life for the period covered.

The great strength of the book is the wealth of primary material used, primarily consisting of periodicals, local and national newspapers, private papers of key political figures and government records of both British and Irish origin. The use of the local press is especially impressive, with papers from most of the twenty-six counties included. Dublin is given due weight but often the most insightful details uncovered address provincial, rural Ireland. The breadth of coverage allows for an appreciation of the differing dynamic of border counties and those less geographically proximate to Northern Ireland. Substantial attention to An Phoblacht, meanwhile, shows provisional republicanism's reflections on the difficulty of navigating southern opinion, responding in turn to qualified support, outright opposition and apathy. Here Hanley criticises provisional claims that the early momentum of republicanism was ‘cynically defused’ by censorship and coercion by the mainstream political establishment in the Republic of Ireland. Instead, he argues that emotional responses to loyalist/British violence in the case of August 1969's riots, internment and Bloody Sunday were matched by shock at acts of republican violence (notably the Aldershot bombing, Bloody Friday and the Birmingham bombings). These events punctuated southern life in traumatic episodes, but the attitudes formed in response to them were fluid and contradictory. The republican tradition was strongly influential, but not enough to transform the southern political scene, and attitudes to the I.R.A. were messy and reactive, influenced most of all by who was responsible for the most recent atrocity. Sympathy for northern refugees was qualified and conditional. Some of the Protestant minority experienced personal violence informed by traditional assumptions of their disloyal identity, but others were made to feel more welcome by expressions of support which recognised their fundamental identification with the southern Irish state.

Hanley identifies early on the historiographical challenge of judging the thoughts and feelings of the ordinary person. His solution is a blunt one: use more printed sources. The author's mode of scholarship is thoroughly empirical and while this produces many insights and sustains his arguments, it also at times takes the form of a very dense descriptive narrative. The first half of the book, in particular, illustrates the impact of the Troubles by sheer weight of detail, culled from the primary sources to stack numerous stories on top of one another. While the sources are acknowledged in the introduction to be imperfect, they are not subject to critical analysis in the main body. It is assumed that the reader will figure out the political predilections of journalists and newspapers themselves, rather than the author explicitly disentangling their influences. Were those who wrote personal letters to the taoiseach representative of the ordinary citizen or might oral history have had greater potential?

Events are briskly described where wider questions might have been addressed. It is mentioned that Fianna Fáil T.D.s celebrated their passing of new security legislation aimed at coercing republicans, in the face of opposition from Fine Gael and Labour, by singing rebel songs in the Dáil bar, but what does this moment, steeped in irony, tell us about Irish political culture and how far would it have been comprehensible north of the border? President Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh's resignation is dispatched with two sentences, despite the episode amounting to a constitutional crisis. Detail is given on new legislation passed in 1976, with party lines reversed, but more attention might have been granted to the question of whether it was particularly challenging for Irish politicians to navigate publicly the reversal of their positions. The Irish Press did adopt a more critical line towards the Fine Gael–Labour government, but was this merely a reflection of the paper's links with Fianna Fáil? That many questions remain for this one small aspect of the book is indicative of the size of the project undertaken by the author; the themes covered are weighty enough to justify monographs of their own. Hanley's approach serves his essential purpose of illustrating the importance of the conflict in the republic and the extent of his research here is rare and impressive. He has placed a tremendous amount of detail on the historical record and laid the foundation for the study of a more social history of the Troubles in an all-Ireland context.