John O’Brien's academic career began at University College Dublin and subsequently encompassed Manchester, Adelaide, and Melbourne before he finally returned to Ireland to teach at University College Cork, where he was a popular and inspiring teacher. While at Melbourne University he met David Fitzpatrick, then an undergraduate, and encouraged his research on Irish nationalism that Fitzpatrick later continued with such distinction in Cambridge and Oxford. In his introduction to this volume of O’Brien's collected essays, Fitzpatrick has written a warm and affectionate tribute to his former mentor. Of O’Brien's farming background in Munster he writes perceptively that when discussing Irish agriculture, rural banks, or the Catholic middle classes, O’Brien had the advantage over most economic historians of personal experience. He also “had more to teach us than how to learn history” (13). He placed great importance on professionalism, documentation, and analytic rigor, which had become increasingly old-fashioned by the 1990s. His awareness of what Fitzpatrick calls the “concealed realities” (13) in Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism made him constantly urge his students to ask awkward questions and seek out the evidence. This characteristic, Fitzpatrick notes drily, “may have been more warmly welcomed in Melbourne than in Cork” (13). O’Brien was greatly missed after his sudden death in 1999.

It is regrettable that he left comparatively little written work, but until the 1990s in Ireland research and publication were not considered priorities, and there was little support in terms of sabbaticals or financial help. The first four essays in this volume display O’Brien's varied perspectives on Irishness and Catholicism in Australia and the way that they intersected in such controversial figures as Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne and Archbishop John Panico, who was appointed Apostolic Delegate to Australia in 1935. Mannix, as O’Brien observes, had been relatively uncontroversial in Ireland, but once translated to the antipodes, his vehement demand for state aid for Catholic schools, his support for the 1916 Rising, and his opposition to conscription in the two referenda of 1916 and 1917 engendered huge controversy. In another essay on the Australian premier W. M. Hughes, O’Brien concludes that Hughes unwittingly pandered to Mannix's thirst for the limelight by exaggerating the influence of radical Irish republicanism in Australia and by blaming Mannix for the defeat of the two conscription referenda. O’Brien argues that Hughes failed to grasp the importance of Irish home rule to Irish Australia and that his belief in Sinn Fein plots and conspiracies dangerously exacerbated sectarian tensions in Australia.

The most substantial part of the volume deals with Ireland, Australia, and the Commonwealth from the 1930s to the 1960s. Or was it the Commonwealth? As O’Brien notes, the Irish “believed that the Commonwealth was still the British Empire, the Australians wished it was while the British knew it was not” (57). Responsibility for managing Commonwealth relations rested with the Dominions Office (DO) in London, which tended to be looked down upon by its grander colleagues in the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, and India Office. In a chapter on Australia, Ireland, and the decline of the DO, O’Brien makes some interesting points on the way that the DO operated with regard to Ireland and Australia. It was most successful when mounting salvage operations to heal rifts that arose between Whitehall and particular dominions. The DO was also skillful in manipulating its various secretaries of state. Since Anglo-Irish relations were in constant need of salvaging, particularly after de Valera's election in 1932, the almost perpetual crises gave the DO an invigorating raison d’etre. This was absent in relations with the Australian government that expected the DO to act as a sort of complement to its High Commission in London. The loyalty of the DO was conditional on whatever ensured its own survival; “what was remarkable was that the Office could maintain cohesion for so long within so amorphous a body as the British Commonwealth” (82).

The chapter on Ireland's chaotic departure from the Commonwealth in 1948–49, first published in 1986 and based on British and Australian archives, highlights the part played by Dr. Herbert Evatt, the Australian Minister for External Affairs. It complements the research by F. J. McEvoy on Canada's role in what has been charitably called a diplomatic shambles. That the Irish government, led by the new premier John Costello and his foreign minister Sean MacBride, emerged from this fiasco with the privileges for Anglo-Irish trade and Irish citizens in Britain intact was largely due to Evatt and other Commonwealth statesmen, especially Peter Fraser of New Zealand, who mitigated the initial punitive response of the Attlee government. O’Brien's article was published before the release of Irish diplomatic archives in the 1990s, which revealed that de Valera was waiting to see what attitude the British government would take toward India before making a final decision to leave the Commonwealth. If he had not lost the election in February 1948, it is certain that Ireland would have remained in the Commonwealth.

The 1932 Ottawa Economic Conference emerges as a constant theme in the last essays. Ottawa was an oddity because economic issues were rarely a priority at imperial conferences despite the creation of such fig leaves as the Imperial Economic Committee and the Empire Marketing Board in the 1920s. O’Brien was critical of Australian economic policies in the thirty years after Ottawa as foreign markets in the United States and Japan were neglected because of the concentration on the British market. When Britain applied to join the Common Market in 1961, an Australian government memorandum declared that “we will have views, but not yet,” which O’Brien considers “a species of levitating diplomacy that was entirely original” (133). Although the application (made by Britain and Ireland) failed, it had exposed the fragility of Commonwealth cohesion and the dominance of national interests. For Australia, and for Ireland now outside the Commonwealth, Europe was a political and economic watershed.