In his latest monograph, Brian Griffin seeks to contextualise crime in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making a convincing case for the ‘unexceptional nature’ (3) of Irish crime when compared to international standards of the period. Drawing from an array of parliamentary papers, newspapers and a selection of criminal case files, he deftly navigates the source base of Irish criminal history to analyse the nature of lawbreaking and developments in colonial policing across Ireland in a three-chapter volume.

Each of Griffin’s three chapters focus on a different form of lawbreaking, with his first chapter exploring agrarian crime in Ireland. Griffin persuasively argues that while rural crime was indeed a notable form of lawbreaking in Ireland, especially in the context of the Land War of the late nineteenth century and the Ranch War of the early twentieth century, the nature of and motivations behind agrarian crimes have often been misunderstood. The author highlights a tendency to ascribe the weight of rural crime during this period to secret societies whose crimes were prompted by their ‘hunger for land’ (49). Griffin delves into various crimes such as threatening letters sent to landlords, the mutilation of cattle and livestock, and agrarian murders, concluding that while magistrates and police officials tended to attribute most rural crimes in this period to the work of conspiratorial secret societies working towards the goals of the Land League, the nature of most crime in the Irish country is better described as ‘organised crime’, as most perpetrators organised on an ‘ad hoc’ basis and focused on ‘local dimensions’ (37).

In his second chapter, Griffin highlights the ‘ordinary’ nature of most crime in Ireland and localises it to the Irish city rather than the countryside. Griffin’s repeated use of the term ‘ordinary crime’ invites elaboration, as he conflates the term with ‘non-agrarian crime’. What, then, makes rural crime in Ireland exceptional or extraordinary? Griffin shows in this chapter that indictable crime rates in urban Ireland were consistently and significantly higher than rural indictable crime rates, but it is unclear if a statistical disproportion is enough to render a specific type of crime ‘ordinary’ or mundane compared to similar crimes committed in rural areas. Where Griffin shines in this chapter is in his ability to track how policing methods developed through his examinations of how the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) worked to detect and prevent various forms of crime. Griffin’s exploration of constables’ efforts to dismantle the Inistrahull poteen industry is particularly engaging. Griffin also observes that developments in forensic science and policing technology played a relatively minor role in Irish constables’ crime fighting compared to their ‘intimate knowledge of local communities’ (91). Here, Griffin effectively balances the idiosyncrasies of Irish colonial policing against his assertion that Irish crime was relatively unexceptional compared to British and other European countries in the same period.

Griffin’s final chapter analyses the experiences and social position of frequent offenders. Griffin focuses on groups thought to be part of a ‘putative “criminal class”’ in Ireland, including sex workers, vagrants and ‘suspicious characters’ (95). Here, Griffin poses interesting arguments regarding gender and crime, emphasising how Irish women were overpoliced for being drunk and disorderly in public because women’s public transgressions were deemed to be more shocking and abrasive to Irish conceptions of appropriate female behaviour. Griffin’s brevity in this chapter misconstrues some of the remarkable case files with which he is working. For example, when commenting on the crimes of James Ellis French, a leading Dublin police official and a central figure in the Dublin Castle Scandal (1883–4), Griffin claims that French was arrested for ‘illegal sexual activity with Dublin Castle officials and others’ (108). There is no evidence in the Dublin Castle Scandal’s criminal case files to indicate that French had sex with any other Dublin Castle official, but rather that he was well-connected in a cross-class network of rent boys in Dublin. A more thorough analysis of these case files may have provided Griffin with an even more complex and dynamic picture of the lives of prostitutes, vagrants and other individuals in the supposed ‘criminal classes’ of Ireland.

Griffin’s latest volume is engaging, accessible and proves the remarkable potential of Irish criminal history to reshape and texture our image of the Irish past. Griffin is at his strongest when examining the role of the colonial police force and individual police constables in their attempts to detect and prevent crime in Ireland. It is somewhat inevitable that in a volume as brief as Crime and the criminal classes in Ireland some concepts and fascinating case studies remain under- or unexplored. Overall, Griffin’s monograph is a useful resource for scholars of crime and lawbreaking in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland.