Despite his long stewardship of the Roman Catholic diocese of Derry, Edward Daly remains best-known for his presence during the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972. The events of 30 January 1972, and their aftermath, are covered in Daly's earlier memoir, Mister, are you a priest?; this instalment resumes the narrative in 1974, when the forty-year-old was ordained bishop, then the youngest in Ireland. A troubled see charts the twenty years of Daly's occupation of the see of Derry, when the conflict in Northern Ireland moved from teetering on the brink of outright sectarian civil war to a low-level, sustained civil insurgency, the violence no less devastating in its impact. The attitude of the Catholic hierarchy towards the violence in Northern Ireland, and the activities of the Provisional IRA, is a major theme of the book. Daly, although vocal in his condemnation of IRA violence, was criticised from all sides, perceived as ‘soft’ on republicanism by Unionists and Protestants while simultaneously considered less than balanced by many within the nationalist community in his condemnation of British Army and RUC methods. Daly emerges as an articulate observer of and participant in key moments within the narrative of the conflict: the prison protests and hunger strikes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the campaign to free the Birmingham Six, the controversy over paramilitary funerals within church grounds, and numerous heinous murders; helpfully, Daly reproduces several of his contemporaneous sermons and statements, now housed in Derry Diocesan Archive whose collections, in his retirement, he has helped to catalogue. The difficulty and loneliness of high ecclesiastical office during a period of intense civil conflict clearly emerges: a reluctant though effective bishop, Daly is open about the frustrations that he experienced through administrative burdens, hierarchical opacity (especially from Rome), and makes clear the extent of his burn-out by the early 1990s, when illness prompted his resignation from episcopal office and a welcome return to parish work. The collapse of the moral authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland is another theme of the book, stemming from the revelations of child sexual abuse and institutional cover-ups, although this has largely been confined to the southern part of the all-island Church. The partitionist mentality of southern institutions also comes through: Daly records the failure of the Irish Episcopal Conference actively to engage with the conflict in Northern Ireland, finally resulting in northern Catholic bishops convening their own talks in 1990, while the southern civil service and prison service are contrasted unfavourably with the efficiency and courtesy of their northern counterparts. The latter chapters of the book are a cri de coeur for change in the Church: against episcopal elitism, for a policy of younger episcopal appointments, ending with a plea for rethinking clerical celibacy. Daly's return to the parish work he so desperately missed, in the hospice in Derry, is presented as the pinnacle of his vocation, the calling for which his previous forty years in the priesthood had prepared him. Ministry, not administration, remained his touchstone. His observations in this volume, as in his previous memoir, will remain an essential source for historians seeking to understand the history of the Church in twentieth-century Ireland.