In this study Colin Barr provides a historical precedent for contemporary controversies over human rights and Catholicism in the United Kingdom. Much might militate against recognition of the value of this work: the title is slightly ponderous; the chapter titles are catchy, but hardly illuminating; it seems greatly over-footnoted; and its concerns with educational and ecclesial conflicts in mid-Victorian Ireland all might suggest dullness and marginal interest. Further investigation shows that these initial responses are entirely misleading.

Very well served by his publisher, with an excellent index, Barr has produced a meticulously well documented, invaluable and absorbing work of outstanding scholarship. Fluently written, with an iron grip on its extensive source-material, Barr explores the tragedy of a litigious priest, Robert O'Keefe, who defied canon law by suing for libel his bishop, Cullen, the cardinal archbishop of Ireland, and others, so splitting his parish, causing civil unrest and generating a unique crisis in the relationships between the Catholic Church and the British state in Ireland. The controversy centred on the rights of a Catholic priest to sue his ecclesiastical superiors, thus generating a conflict with civil law which affirmed his entitlement.

O'Keefe's defiance of ecclesial authority generated unprecedented difficulties for the government in Ireland, given that he was the manager of the local primary schools and was also chaplain to the workhouse, and therefore a state employee. Westminster and Dublin Castle both found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to sack O'Keefe, thus leaving them open to the charge of overly deferring to the power of Rome to control state appointments. This conflict seemed to replicate issues arising from the Kulturkampf in Germany at the time. Barr covers well the reluctance of Westminster to get involved in a similar process.

The dramatic implications of this odd saga were explored earlier in Thomas Kilroy's novel, The big chapel. In his study, Barr captures the theatrical dimensions of this enthralling scandal which forced the cardinal archbishop into the witness box to defend his reputation against charges of libel by O'Keefe. An authority on Cullen, Barr is in a unique position, which he has well exploited, to explore all facets of this scandal and has really supplied the last word on it. Working over ten years on the project, and using twenty-eight sets of archives in six countries, no aspect of this drama is left unexplored. Its ramifications in the USA, Germany, Australia and, of course, in Ireland and England are relentlessly explored. Barr chronicles well, and with subtlety, the perplexed responses of all the parties drawn reluctantly into this bizarre scandal. The cast ranges from Cullen, Patrick Moran (O'Keefe's unfortunate bishop) and various Irish canon lawyers to Gladstone, Harcourt, Playfair and Disraeli. The legal aspects of O'Keefe's seemingly endless forays into libel actions are well covered, so that what emerges is an immensely satisfying work that throws much light on how all the parties from judges and barristers to canon lawyers coped with the question of the primacy of law, where ecclesial and civil forms were in conflict.

Whilst Barr makes valiant efforts to trace the cause of the conflict, which emerged over the failure of the local bishop to authorise a French order of nuns to teach in a school for ladies which O'Keefe tried to found, the reasons for his fixation on litigation elude in this study. Barr suggests that thwarted ambitions, financial issues and pride of character played their part, but, at times, he is a bit too beholden to the evidence available and might have given freer rein to speculation as to what drove O'Keefe into his tragedy. More contextual material could have been provided on Cullen, but also on Patrick Moran, the local bishop who inherited the legal mess left by his predecessor. He went on to become archbishop of Sydney. Some material on the place of the scandal in his later career would have been interesting.

These caveats aside, Barr is extremely good at drawing out the dilemmas facing the Board of National Education and the Poor Law Commission. Unlike in England, bureaucracy in Ireland was highly centralised in the ambit of Dublin Castle. The need for representative government involved balancing denominations, and in the O'Keefe case these efforts ran into numerous difficulties over conflicting loyalties. Barr chronicles these well, especially in relation to the judiciary and juries, whose ecclesiastical membership seemed to have shaped the deliverance of verdicts in ways peculiar to Ireland. Valuable material emerges in regard to Patrick Keenan, a Catholic and the resident Commissioner on the Board of National Education. His conflicting loyalties over the case and its significance for the state of primary education in Ireland are well drawn, revealing a British state in Irish habiliment being extraordinarily obsequious in its dealings with the Catholic Church. In his appraisals of Cullen, Barr is cutting, noting at one stage that he committed perjury in the dock (p. 180). Indeed, the Catholic authorities, whilst they might have had a case (one hard to discern) for supporting the original decision of the bishop of Ossory to refuse O'Keefe authority to have the nuns in his parish-run school, emerge as vacillating, devious and overly concerned to preserve the façade of their authority in Ireland, invoking Rome to shore them up. Barr documents these machinations with acumen.

This, rich, complex and complete work, with a tale to tell, deserves the widest circulation. A vast range of disciplinary interests are covered in a detail that never clogs. Barr captures well the ebb and flow of this episode, seemingly so peripheral in Irish history, yet, in his account, so telling in what it reveals.