It is clear, one hundred years after the Irish Revolution (1916–23), that the Irish Civil War is severely under-represented in the historiography. This is despite the immense and recognised impact that the conflict had on Irish society and politics. The studies of the Civil War written to date generally concentrate on the military and political sides of the conflict, although in the last ten years, local studies have added to our understanding of the nuances of the period. Analysis concentrating on violence against civilians, offered by Gemma Clark in 2014, and Bill Kissane’s placing of the conflict in comparative perspective (2007), have also contributed to a shifting of the focus away from the Civil War as a conventional military conflict to something that had a multi-layered impact and legacy.

Labour historians have traced some of the social conflicts of the period, but the resulting studies have tended to concentrate on institutions and formalised structures of organisation. Gavin Foster’s study breaks new ground in its intention to add to our understanding of the period ‘by closely scrutinizing the conflicting social interests, divergent outlooks, roiling undercurrents of animosity, and socially inflected aspects of the 1922–23 conflict and its aftermath’. He takes an innovative approach to this by concentrating on the attitudes and perceptions that each side had of the other, the treatment of those on the losing side of the war, and, most interestingly from a methodological point of view, the differences in clothing styles and changing attitudes to dress. It is in this sartorial analysis that Foster succeeds in fleshing out the nuances of Irish class divisions in a way that far surpasses anything attempted before. He traces the changes in attitudes to dress in the pre-partition period, noting that as workers and trade unionists became more interested and involved in the Irish language revival, Douglas Hyde complained of having to ‘wear old clothes to meetings so as not to raise the ire of the new democracy’ (p. 96). The adoption of the top hat and morning coat by W. T. Cosgrave and his fellow government ministers in the 1920s is linked to post-colonial consciousness traceable elsewhere at the same time, such as in South Africa (p. 109). The Free State government’s desire to promote an air of respectability is compared to the actions of the British Labour Party members in the early 1920s. Under the leadership of Ramsay McDonald, the respectability agenda was doggedly followed in an effort to convince the electorate that the party could be trusted to form a government. Labour’s first crack at power, as a minority government in 1924, gave McDonald the chance to build on his drive to respectability, particularly by encouraging the more passionate members of his parliamentary party to abide by the conventions of parliamentary behaviour. The Irish Labour Party went through a similar process in the 1920s, but as Foster makes clear, the inheritors of the anti-Treaty legacy in Fianna Fáil went in the other direction, eschewing the accepted dress and behaviour of the parliamentary elite.

As might be noted from the discussion above, Foster’s analysis veers into the pre- and post-Civil War periods for large sections of the book. While this perhaps takes away somewhat from the thrust of the narrative, the choices for points of deviation serve to buttress the analytical rigour of the work. For instance, the coverage of how anti-Treaty Civil War veterans were treated in the Free State is a massively under-researched field of study, and the attempt to do so here should be lauded. However, given that Foster freely moves beyond the chronological constraints of the Civil War timeline, it is questionable why he decided to restrict his analysis to the experiences of those in the twenty-six counties. Inhabitants of the new Northern Ireland had a very different experience of 1922–23, and exploration of the social conflicts in the six counties would require another book-length study. Nonetheless, the experiences of northern I.R.A. members in the period, how they reacted to the Civil War and how those who fled south, in May 1922, were treated by both the emerging southern state and their comrades on either side of the Treaty divide is a glaring blind spot in the book. The urban–rural divide, and class and religious divisions, have all been treated to some extent by historians of the period, but intra-nationalist north–south divisions, which have impacted on Irish society so greatly in the twentieth century, have not been given adequate attention, despite the work of Robert Lynch (2006) and those who have produced localised studies of the north. Despite this criticism, The Irish Civil War and society represents a great achievement by Gavin Foster. He has written a highly readable, stimulating history of the Civil War that will surely inspire others to give this period and its aftermath, with all of its subtleties and dark corners, the attention it sorely deserves.