This well-produced and generously-illustrated book is designed to commemorate that ‘disaster’, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871, which, despite the original fears of its members, has turned out to be such a surprising success. Edited by Paul Harron, formerly Church of Ireland press officer, and Ken Milne, the wonderfully-titled ‘Church of Ireland Historiographer’, it covers, in a series of relatively short chapters, almost all the workings of the Church: worship, women's ministry, youth work and pastoral care, media and communications, ecumenism, relations with the wider Anglican Church and with other faiths, the Church and law, architecture and the arts, the Irish language, archives and publishing, and education. Its title pays homage to the 1970 commemorative volume, edited by Michael Hurley sj, which dealt with the first century of disestablishment: this book examines the Church during the last fifty years. In contrast to the earlier one, where all the contributors were non-Anglican, here they are, with the exception of a Methodist, all insiders (including over half the episcopal bench) – clearly chosen because of their knowledge of the Church and its workings.

This makes it a rather difficult book to review. The most obvious question is whether it is a primary or a secondary source. The answer is that it is both, encompassing as it does contributors who were, and are, participants in, and witnesses to, the life of the Church in the last half-century. Thus we get Ginnie Kennerley, one of the driving forces behind the ordination of women, on women's ministry. Áine Hyland, a member of the successful 2002 review of that then strife-torn institution, the Church of Ireland Theological College, writes about the education of Church of Ireland clergy. Ray Refaussé, the librarian and archivist who helped to turn the Representative Church Body Library into a modern repository tells us about … the archives of the Church of Ireland. These and other chapters are therefore valuable in that their writers clearly know of what they write, but are open to the obvious criticism that they may shy away from the hard questions that an outsider might ask.

That said, the benefit of having insider knowledge can make for fascinating reading: two historically-trained bishops, Michael Burrows and John McDowell, tackle social change and politics, offering both a shrewd account of the very different trajectories which the Church of Ireland has followed north and south of the Irish border, and also, more inferentially, an insight into the outlook of two of the members of an episcopate who have starkly differing views on some of the very issues about which they are writing. Harold Miller, recently retired as bishop of Down and Dromore, and intimately involved as Chair of the Liturgical Advisory Committee, gives us a valuable factual account of the renewal of worship since the 1960s, as the Church has moved from the uniformity of a single prayer book to the present more complex pluriformity. Robin Bantry White, George Davison, Gillian Wharton, Ken Gibson, Hazel Corrigan and Adrian Clements give an equally helpful summary of the Church's governing structures, and how one of the oldest Anglican democracies has coped with the challenges of modernisation and ‘managed decline’. Ian Ellis returns to his happy hunting ground – ecumenism – placing the often-distinctive Irish take on how to be nice to each other in the context of wider world developments. Ken Kearon, a double insider, in that he is now bishop of Limerick and Killaloe having previously served as secretary-general of the Anglican Communion, deals with the Church of Ireland's greatly enhanced engagement with other Anglican Churches over the past fifty years, in the course of which he gives us a valuable insight into the development of the role of … secretary general. And Michael Jackson, the archbishop of Dublin and chair of the Anglican Communion's Network for Inter-Faith Concerns, offers a thoughtful reflection on how the Church's relationship to other faiths has changed dramatically in recent decades, stimulated most recently by the impact of immigration (there are now more Muslims than Methodists in the Republic).

For the Irish Anglican and, indeed, the general reader, this volume offers a rounded portrait of the Church of Ireland as it is today. For the historian of religion, it points to a number of potential research topics, some old, many new, as the Church of Ireland, having survived the ‘disaster’ of disestablishment, confronts the challenges of the twenty-first century.