This is a very welcome book. It helps to redress two prevalent distortions of the current historiography of Ireland in the sixteenth century. First, by drawing our attention to southern Connacht, it helps to counter the predominant geographical bias towards Leinster. Secondly, by exploring the lordship of the O’Kellys, alongside that of the adjoining lordship of the Clanrickard Burkes, it helps to counter the prevailing preference towards the study of powerful men of English descent in Ireland, as against people with Irish surnames. Dr Mannion’s book explores the expansion of English rule into the Clanrickard and Hy Many lordships in the sixteenth century ‘while endeavouring to establish the degree to which the implementation of crown policy in each was influenced by the ethnic origins of the ruling dynasties’ (p. 25). His work reflects the profound influence of Steven Ellis, his supervisor, in its adoption of Ellis’s ‘two nations’ paradigm — ‘the concept of the co-existence of two distinct races or nationalities on the island of Ireland from the late medieval period into early modern times’ (p. 15).

Central to Mannion’s thesis is the assertion that the Burkes were always English despite evidence to the contrary. He quotes an anonymous Englishman’s report from c.1490 that stated that the Burkes ‘all be [in] no better condicyons then Irishmen and weareth their habits and ben so frended and allyed with them that thei take their parte against the kynges subiectes and hateth the kynges lawes and geveth no ayde ne assistance to his deputie’ (p. 31). Nonetheless, Mannion asserts that the Burkes remained English ‘despite the alleged effects of dwelling among the Gaelic Irish for several centuries’ (p. 243). He claims his study shows ‘that their perceived “gaelicization” was extrinsic rather than intrinsic and that their racial memory and identity had diminished but little with the passage of time’. That ‘intrinsic’ Englishness is used to explain why the Burkes ‘succeeded in gravitating towards the English crown and fulfilling its requirements’ while the O’Kellys, like so ‘many other Gaelic Irish population groups throughout the country … were unable to cross the cultural divide’ (p. 243).

However, little explanation is offered as to how an English ‘racial memory and identity’ was transmitted among the Burkes with little diminution from generation onto generation over hundreds of years. Given the frequency of intermarriage with the indigenous Irish over the centuries, one is left to suppose that the Burkes’ racial memories were inherited only from fathers, and never from mothers. It seems that women were of little consequence when it came to determining ‘race’ in Ireland; mothers were simply incubators for their husband’s offspring. Accordingly, Mannion assumes that ‘race’ was indicated by the father’s surname. However, the notion of ‘two distinct races’ denoted by surnames in rural Connacht in the sixteenth century is problematic.

The English state certainly categorised people in Ireland along racial grounds, and regarded the Gaelicised Burkes as ‘degenerate’ English but reformable, while the O’Kellys were considered to be irredeemably Irish. For the earls of Clanrickard, the possession of an ‘English’ surname was an asset when dealing with the English crown and its officials, and they used it as such. It helped them to re-invent themselves as subjects of the English crown when there were clear advantages to doing so as English control was being extended across Connacht over the course of the sixteenth century. Yet, that re-invention only held true for the Burkes who mattered to the English crown, the lordly elites; no claim of Englishness was made for the vast majority of the Burkes who remained indistinguishable from their neighbours with Irish surnames. As for the Gaelic O’Kellys, Mannion is inclined to blame them for their misfortunes at the hands of English colonial regimes. He shows in detail how successive O’Kelly lords tried earnestly to reach an accommodation with the English crown — through surrender, repeated submissions, by co-operating with the provincial presidency, providing military support and paying higher taxes than the Burkes — all ultimately to little avail because the crown was committed to ‘extinguishing’ the Gaelic lordships (pp 215–16). Nonetheless, Mannion blames the O’Kellys for ‘inexorably’ plunging themselves into ‘fruitless confrontation with the crown’ (p. 215), for their ‘ill-fated desire to return to the traditional Gaelic polity’ (p. 200), for their ‘refusal to honour their commitment to abandon the Gaelic polity for English rule’, for being ‘either unable or unwilling to accommodate the crown’s expectations for their lordship’ (p. 242) and for being ‘unable to cross the cultural divide’ (p. 243). In other words, Mannion characterises the victims of English colonialism as the villains of the piece, ‘inexorably’ brought to grief by their ‘race’.