This short book is one of the Historical Association of Ireland’s Life and Times New Series lives of leading figures of Irish history. As the editor of the series, Ciaran Brady, explains, the lives are to be considered in the context of the their times and in the light of modern research. The first edition of the study was published in 1999 following the publication of John Horgan’s biography of Lemass and Savage incorporates more recent work by Brian Girvin, Tom Garvin, Gary Murphy and Bryce Evans into his evaluation of Lemass who he claims, largely deserves his reputation as ‘the great Irish moderniser’ (p.122).

The book contains chapters on economic policy, Northern Ireland, Lemass and the British, the Catholic Church and the introduction of Irish television. The author has written a much-praised monograph on television and Irish society and there is much of interest in the chapter, including Lemass’s frustrated efforts to have the new television service run along commercial, not public service lines, and his favouring of a bid from a Paris-based company run by a Romanian exile which he believed would help to promote the economic growth which he was desperate to initiate.

The chapter on the politics of economic policy traces the central role that Lemass played in the development of Fianna Fáil’s economic policies from the 1920s to the great turn from protectionism in the late 1950s. He points to his consistent doubts about the importance that the party’s agrarian policies placed on the Sisyphean labour of saving the small farms of rural Ireland, doubts that were repressed for political reasons until the dire economic conditions of the 1950s made it possible for such shibboleths to be openly challenged. But it is for his industrial development policies that Lemass’s modernising role is most acknowledged. Here Savage emphasises the support Lemass gave to the proposals set forth by the secretary of the Department of Finance, T. K. Whitaker, in his Economic development published in 1957 in response the deep demographic crisis revealed in the figures of the 1956 census. The subsequent First Programme for Economic Expansion launched in 1958 and implemented during Lemass’s period as taoiseach is linked in the conclusion to the Celtic Tiger. While it is true that the break with protectionism, the wooing of foreign capital and the E.E.C. application were all prerequisites for later economic expansion there were other aspects of Lemass’s approach which Whitaker was less happy with. This was particularly the case with Lemass’s emphasis on the role that the state could play in job creation through its fiscal policies. Savage mentions Lemass’s Clery’s Hotel speech in 1955 calling for the creation of 100,000 new jobs which Whitaker would subsequently damn as ‘simple Keynesianism’. A more critical approach to Lemass’s economic legacy would point to the legacy of fiscal profligacy that produced the disastrous budget deficits of the late 1970s.

The two strongest chapters in the book with are those on Northern Ireland and on the Catholic Church. Savage was not able to consult David McCann’s monograph on Unionist governments and North–South relations (David McCann, From protest to pragmatism: The Unionist government and North–South Relations 1959–72, (Basingstoke, 2014)). If he had, his overview might have been more sceptical of those who have claimed that Lemass’s approach to Northern Ireland was a radical shift from de Valera. Although commentators at the time and since were impressed by his emphasis on building relations with Stormont through practical schemes of economic and social cooperation, the fact remains that he continued to periodically sound more traditionalist notes. The Tralee speech in July 1963 in which he admitted that Unionists had legitimate fears that had to be conciliated is given as a key instance of revisionism. However, as Savage points out, this has to be balanced against a subsequent speech in Washington where he raised partition and called on the British government to make a statement ‘that there would be no British interest in maintaining partition when Irishmen wanted to get rid of it’ (p. 55).

In his conclusion Savage claims that such a statement was eventually accepted by the British and endorsed in the Sunningdale Agreement – wrongly dated as 1971 (p. 124). In fact there was a major difference. Lemass was looking for a statement from the British welcoming the ending of partition by agreement between the main political traditions on the island. In the Northern Ireland Act of 1973 and at Sunningdale, the U.K. government’s position was that Northern Ireland would not cease to be part of the U.K. without the vote of a majority of its population. Lemass in the 1960s, like John Hume and Gerry Adams in the 1990s, wanted more than this: for the British to become ‘persuaders’ of the Unionists for a united Ireland. Thus despite his historic summit with Terence O’Neill in 1965, Lemass’s legacy on Northern Ireland was far from uniformly revisionist.

One of strengths of the book, apart from Savage’s sure-footed survey of the academic literature and the main historiographical issues, are the gems from his own archival research which leads him to astringent judgements of the Irish state which was seeking to incorporate the Unionists. In his excellent analysis of how the clerical iron fist was wielded against the Fianna Fáil Health Bill in 1952 , he points out that Ulster Protestants had good reason to fear that their religious liberties would not be respected in a united Ireland. He also reveals that Unionist paranoia about ‘Romanist penetration’ of the border counties of Northern Ireland had some support in the pressure of the papal nuncio on the government in 1959 to support a fund to clandestinely support the Catholic acquisition of land in Northern Ireland and ultimately out-breed Protestants (p. 42).

Overall this is an excellent introduction to a pivotal figure in modern Irish history.