As editor of the Irish Times between 1934 and 1954, one of R. M. Smyllie's most significant characteristics, available to few of his contemporaries, was an intimate knowledge of Germany and other European countries. This was partly productive of, and allied to, a world view and a breadth of political sensibility, unusual among public figures (let alone fellow journalists) in a small polity on the edge of, and largely insulated from, the tempests that buffeted Europe from the 1930s onward.

It is clear from Caleb Wood Richardson's meticulously researched and superbly focused Smyllie's Ireland: Protestants, Independence, and the Man who Ran the “Irish Times” that this was substantially initiated by Smyllie's internment as an enemy alien in the Ruhleben camp in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. Lengthy incarceration can often be a profound intellectual stimulus. It patently provided Smyllie with not only a more than adequate substitute for the Trinity College, Dublin, education that Herr Hitler had unknowingly abbreviated, but also antennae well attuned to puffery and pretense (whether social or political), a substantial general knowledge of the wider world, and the gregariousness that was another hallmark of his distinctive and significant editorship.

Editing a newspaper is always a balancing act. Decisions must be made on a daily—sometimes even hourly—basis about how to combine giving your readers what you know they want with what you think they ought to have. No formula can encompass it: it is a combination of knowledge, instinct, and luck, and the ability to pick significant collaborators to add intellectual heft to what would otherwise be a mere assembly of facts. Smyllie, as Richardson's impressive research makes clear, scored highly on all these criteria. It is a pity, in this context, that it is no longer possible to identify the editorials he personally wrote, as this would have added a valuable dimension to any analysis of his thought and indeed of his influence.

On the evidence of this book, at least, he deserves to be fully exonerated from the charge that many of his Protestant contemporaries, insulated by social class advantage, were among the most quiescent political minorities in Europe. Quiescence, of course, was not always evidence of uncomplicated loyalty to the new constitutional arrangements, in respect of which some of Richardson's assumptions are perhaps a mite too generous. In the early years of the Republic, the playing of the British national anthem to mark any success of its equestrian team at the Dublin Horse Show was accompanied by such a full-throated vocal accompaniment by spectators that some doubts were privately expressed by government officials about the advisability of the attendance of the then president, Douglas Hyde (a member of the Church of Ireland) on such occasions. In this context, Smyllie's rugged independence and clear-sightedness from the 1940 well into the 1950s marked him out as a man well ahead of his time—and indeed of a sensibility that was to be fatally marginalized for many decades after his death by the events and passions that disfigured the island as a whole.

Richardson is right to challenge the dominant “narrative of disappearance and decline” (7), as he categorizes it, even if the impressive sources he marshals to support his critique of this lazy analysis lean, to some extent, on middle-class analyses and narratives. Recent census figures provide substantial evidence for an even wider thesis that would link the elision of confessional Catholic influence on Irish society to the ongoing decline of religious adherence among Catholics in the Republic, as social and economic changes have weakened the structural rigidity that has characterized Irish society for almost two centuries.

The Irish Times, under Smyllie and his successors, has been, by and large, an important, even vital initiator, accelerant and positive influencer of these processes, and this book provides invaluable evidence for such an assessment. It has escaped from the jaws of history on a number of occasions, not least in the mid-1970s when some combination of blind faith and crossed fingers at the Bank of Ireland (culturally still strongly linked to the minority denominations) saved it from a fate worse than death.

It has never been the sole standard-bearer of twentieth century enlightenment in the press, even if it certainly was its precursor. In later periods, even the much-maligned, erratic conservatism of the Irish Independent and the pioneering literary journalism of the Irish Press have both contributed substantially to the modernization of Irish society. But this is a thoughtful, superbly researched and elegantly written study of one the most important pioneering Irish newspaper editors of the past 150 years, of his influence and his craft. It is also a timely reminder of the continuing importance of its journalism, warts and all, in the creation and maintenance of the kind of society we will, with luck, bequeath to the generations that follow us.