John Redmond might just be the most divisive historical figure in contemporary Ireland. Dublin City Council was widely ridiculed after draping a banner with the faces of Redmond, Henry Grattan, Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell over College Green shortly before the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016. One Sinn Féin councillor wryly tweeted, ‘Tourists will be torturing the poor guides with “so, where did these guys fight?”’ Redmond's presence on the banner was particularly galling for some. Misneach, an Irish language activist group, claimed responsibility for the ‘35,000’ that was spray painted over Redmond's face, which referenced the supposed number of Irish deaths on the battlefield during the First World War. The enduring image of Redmond as a recruiting sergeant for the British army in 1914 still places him beyond the pale for some within Ireland, who balk at the thought of him as a potential (step-)father of the nation.

It is because of the ongoing complexities in dealing with Redmond's legacy that Martin O'Donoghue's book is particularly welcome. While Redmond's posthumous reputation is ably covered, O'Donoghue takes a more holistic approach, mapping out the wider home rule genealogies and influences within the Irish political dispensation between the Treaty and the creation of the Republic in 1949. The Irish Party was destroyed in the general election of 1918, but that was not the end of the home rulers. The sons of John Redmond and John Dillon were prominent politicians in their own right in independent Ireland, while Joe Devlin, the emerging star of the Edwardian party, became the chief nationalist player in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of partition. Both the Irish National League in the Free State and the Nationalist Party in the north owed clear intellectual and organisational debts to the Irish Party. Other personalities with clear connections to the home rule party popped up in public life from time to time after 1922. The longevity of some was impressive: the most notable in this regard was Henry Harrison, a former Parnellite M.P. who turned his hand to running the Irish News and Information Bureau in London, a quasi-Fianna Fáil organisation, in the 1930s.

Despite the example of Harrison, O'Donoghue confirms the prevailing notion that home rulers found Cumann na nGaedheal and its successor, Fine Gael, a more welcoming political home than Fianna Fáil. While the tale of the neo-Redmondite Irish National League will be familiar to many readers, O'Donoghue provides a thorough account of its brief life, mapping the limits of relying on old networks and political nostalgia in a new dispensation. The discussion of how Cumann na nGaedheal moved in on the league's home rule constituency following its collapse is particularly well documented, with the pro-Treatyites presenting themselves as the heirs of Sinn Féin and the Irish Party, often simultaneously. In this, they were successful in monopolising Irish Party sentiment: O'Donoghue claims that between 30 and 40 per cent of Fine Gael T.D.s ‘had traceable home rule roots’ during the 1930s and 1940s, even if this was not always visible (p. 170).

In the end, (ex-)home rulers were a minority breed in the Free State, but a significant one nonetheless. O'Donoghue's case study offers numerous insights into how home rulers became reconciled to the new state. For some, it was a relatively straightforward process, but for others, it was much more problematic and painful. Enthusiasm for the Irish National League looked like a wishful hope among the faithful that the band would reunite for one last tour, rather than a serious attempt to build a political alternative to Cuman na nGaedheal. O'Donoghue is also attuned to the decline of the Irish Party as a reference point within the political scene from the 1940s, as its memory faded. Despite the residual power of Redmondite sentiment in the south-east and in the Ancient Order of Hibernian strongholds in the border counties, the rest of the country, seemingly, moved on.

The final chapter of the book covers historiographical and commemorative practices in the first few decades of independence. In death as in life, Charles Stewart Parnell cast a long shadow over Redmond's leadership, with the chief co-opted by all sides on the Treaty divide. O'Donoghue notes the rise of a form of historical writing that framed Parnell's party as a proto-revolutionary movement, which created the conditions for the rise of Sinn Féin some twenty-five years later. Patrick Pearse may have started this process when he named Parnell as one of his five separatist ‘ghosts’ haunting his generation. But this was more than a hankering for a glorified past. When in power, Éamon de Valera keenly invoked Parnell, drawing parallels between Fianna Fáil and the Irish Party at its most radical. Curiously, O'Donoghue does not consider Yeats's role in connecting the might of Parnellism with Sinn Féinism during the early stages of the independence movement, and more might have been said on the enduring literary cult of Parnell as an ultimately unfulfilled yearning for political closure. The Free State had powers far beyond what a home rule Ireland would have had, but it was a messy compromise that disappointed many nonetheless.

O'Donoghue has produced a well-researched and informative study on the legacy of one of the most celebrated, feared and despised political movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As well as documenting the enduring appeal of the Irish Parliamentary Party after its collapse, he sheds light on the new order of independence, a dispensation that few home rulers could have imagined in their heyday.