Only in Ireland could a key part of an alleged mass conspiracy against government involve hospitality that left three English army officers dead from ‘excessive drinking’ (p. 113). This is just one of the tall tales chronicled in John Gibney's account of Ireland's role in the popish plot that traumatised the Stuart kingdoms in the later 1670s and early 1680s. It is not hard to see why Ireland could have played a prominent part in such a febrile atmosphere. Later seventeenth-century Protestants remembered the horrific Irish massacres of 1641 and feared their repetition. They could also recall that a continental Catholic power had already tried to use Ireland as a bridgehead from which to topple Protestant authority in the British Isles and might try to do so again, even if the foreign leviathan was now France rather than Spain. And if Irish Catholics had ‘form’ when it came to plotting, as well as potentially powerful foreign assistance, they also had more than sufficient motivation to rise in revolt. The Acts of Settlement and Explanation had legally consolidated much of the dispossession of Catholic landowners in Ireland achieved by Oliver Cromwell at the point of a sword. Gibney's long essay constitutes a consolidated digest of the various allegations concocted by a range of shady, self-interested ‘witnesses’ culled primarily from their testimonies and the voluminous correspondence of the hard-pressed chief governor of Ireland, James Butler, duke of Ormond. Ireland and the popish plot represents an attempt to do two things: to assess the impact of the popish plot and exclusion crisis on Ireland, and to explore the role that Ireland played within the broader crisis. Ultimately Gibney is more successful in fulfilling the second goal. He shows in greater detail than ever before that the ‘Irish plot’ was primarily an adjunct of political debates in England, and that pamphlets dealing with the various allegations acted as a subset of a wider explosion in printed polemic following the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1679. The fact that superficially explosive rumours of Irish Catholic plotting failed to have a major impact is indicative of Ormond's political skills and the fact that the period since 1660 had seen considerable calm in the island built on significant economic recovery. It was Presbyterian Scotland that troubled the Restoration regime in practice, even if Catholic Ireland could loom in theory. As Gibney candidly admits, those seeking to promote claims of Irish plotting could fall back on ‘perennial fears and concerns’ but were ‘essentially making bricks without straw’ (p. 154).