In thirty-two chapters by leading experts in their respective fields, this handbook provides a great resource to scholars and students. The centrality of religion in Irish culture and history means that this book has wide relevance for anyone in the field of Irish studies. The ‘modern’ history of Ireland begins – for the intents and purposes of this handbook – in 1800, with the Act of Union, which of course had profound implications as far as religion was concerned. Not only was the established Church of Ireland merged with that of England, creating a new double-headed entity, but also Catholics saw their aspiration to full political rights frustrated. Nothing more could have been done to ensure the further politicisation of religious animosities, the identification of the ‘Protestants’ with ‘England’ and the association of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland with the demands of national democracy. The editors have misgivings about the primacy of partition and political narratives as the dominant historiographical paradigms among scholars (p. xxi). Yet, they embrace them, to the extent that – though the Churches themselves were not partitioned and might have provided a lens to look beyond the border – the book as a whole is rigidly ‘partitioned’ in the themes and remits of many of its chapters.

The volume comprises three parts, each bookended by major constitutional or political developments, though in the first chapter, S. J. Connolly warns readers against easy generalisations (of which the primacy of high politics is one). Part i goes from the Act of Union until the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, two years after the establishment of Northern Ireland and the de facto partition of the island. Part ii covers the central decades of the twentieth century from 1922 to 1968. The latter date stands out as a milestone, again for political reasons (the outbreak of the Troubles), but in this case also because of cultural ones. It was the year of the publication of Humanae vitae, an encyclical which provoked impatience among the Catholic population with their Church’s reassertion of traditional teaching (Louise Fuller, p. 187).

Part iii does not have the same methodological unity or focus on politics as the previous two parts. Here the contributors have felt freer to explore the complexity of the increasingly pluralist society into which Ireland transformed itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this part, politics is contained within three chapters (inevitably about Northern Ireland), but much attention is paid to demography, changes in the law, new religious movements, the emergence of new syncretistic religions and small Christian sects, paganism and secularisation.

Yet, in each of the three parts some contributors depart from the dominant political focus. For example, in part i are two brilliant essays by Andrew Sneddon (on the supernatural and magic) and Juliana Adelman and Stuart Mathieson (on science and religion). Gender and sexuality are discussed in each of the three parts. Theology – counter-intuitively – is much less prominent, despite admirable essays (for example by John Wolffe, Ian d’Alton and – in a different way – Daithì Ó Corráin). Some themes stand out: Sarah Roddy and others pay tribute to the longevity of Emmet Larkin’s thesis of a ‘devotional revolution’ (pp. 36–8) and Gladys Daniel and Hugh Turpin comment on the inspirational work of Tom Inglis, Moral monopoly (1998), on the development of ‘a totalizing Catholic habitus … before untangling the factors which contributed to its demise’ (p. 332). Tom Inglis’s own contribution to the handbook (‘Being Catholic in Ireland’, pp. 361-77) adopts a long-term historical perspective to analyse change in identity through the prism of ‘ideal types’ of Catholic Irish (such as the legal orthodox, the cultural and the ‘creative’, i.e. those ready to experiment ‘beyond traditional institutional practices’, p. 369). One key concept which emerges from his essay is the role of ‘fear’ (pp. 372–5) – fear of many things, including hell, and, more tangibly of being incarcerated in industrial schools or Magdalene Laundries. This would have deserved a longer discussion and, generally speaking, the history of emotions might have been more central to the volume as a whole, because religion is, among other things, intensely emotional.

By the early twenty-first century the system had collapsed: priests, far from inspiring fear in layfolk, were themselves ‘[living] in fear of what might happen to them’ (p. 375). The turning point was of course the revelation concerning clerical abuses and the subsequent scandals. James Gallen has authored the key chapter on this thorny subject. He has recently produced a major monograph on Transitional justice and the historical abuses of Church and State (Cambridge 2023), and his chapter is authoritative and to the point. He concludes that ‘[a] key limitation for the Catholic Church’s engagement with its abusive past is the theological commitment to the church’s own moral and spiritual perfection – those individuals who may commit moral wrongs may constitute the church, but the institution and the idea itself remain beyond reproach’ (p. 391). Incidentally this was – and to an extent is likely to remain – a major stumbling block in the relations between the Catholic Church and the Protestants, who are epistemologically and historically committed to a more nuanced and pluralistic understanding of both ‘the Church’ and its ecclesiastical and lay leaders. The question of industrial schools – one of the sites of systematic abuse – comes up in other chapters as well, for example in Patricia Kieran’s ‘Religion and education in southern Ireland’, which argues that education in the Twenty-Six Counties was ‘an essentially religious’ process (p. 258).

This book’s structure is both clear and user-friendly, but also revealing of what the editors have decided to exclude from their handbook. The single greatest gap is the worldwide Irish diaspora, which has inspired one of the most significant reappraisals of the history of Irish Christianity and its global influence. Likewise, little attention is paid to the process of European integration; yet, Ireland’s access to the EEC and eventually its membership of the EU had deep repercussions on the way the country (and its religious people) saw themselves and interacted with the outside world. Another major gap is the neglect of both Judaism and antisemitism. Though the 1937 Constitution listed and protected Judaism as an Irish ‘recognised’ religion, the editors of this handbook have decided that Irish Jews do not deserve special treatment (they receive, in all, only a short paragraph at pp. 335–6). Whether this choice is at all justifiable is a question which the present reviewer would not try to assess, but it is – to say the least – difficult to explain in the current global cultural climate.