This collection of essays covers the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, from the debates on the Union of 1800 until the 1869 Church of Ireland Act, which Rafferty sees as the culmination of a long-term strategy by successive British governments to consolidate the Union by dealing with its ‘weakest link’, the Protestant Establishment. Although Gladstone's decision to rescind the links between Church and State had the desired impact upon Irish Catholic attitudes – insofar as it ‘enabled Ireland … to have a renewed confidence in Parliament’ (p. 195) as the institutional arbitrator of social and ecclesiastical justice – on the whole the strategy proved counterproductive. Reiterating Oliver MacDonagh's 1977 view, Rafferty argues that the overall effect of nineteenth-century ecclesiastical reforms in Ireland was that ‘slowly, imperceptibly, but surely … [it] identified Catholicism with nationality’ (p. 30). One drawback to this otherwise admirable and generally persuasive book is Rafferty's Whiggish assumption about the ‘irresistible’ rise of Catholic power, which – we are told – was bound to overcome all obstacles. Not only were Union policies misguided, but Protestant evangelism was largely ineffective, although irritating. The problem is that this does not match the evidence about Protestant numbers and the steady increase in the Protestant proportion of the Irish population during the period between the end of the Famine and Partition: this happened at such a rate that Ireland would have become a country with a Protestant majority by the end of the twentieth century had the trend continued after 1923. Indeed, Rafferty admits that the hierarchy ‘harboured an abiding fear of the functioning of Protestantism in Ireland’ (p. 34). This ought to be borne in mind when assessing the insecurity of the Catholic hierarchy about their hold on their flock. Such insecurity was compounded by Fenian anticlericalism, which suggested that Irish nationalism might go the way it had in other essentially Catholic countries, including Italy, Spain and Mexico. But London's obsession with the Fenians and its hopes of controlling them with the help of the pope and his bishops kept projecting the Church back into the forefront of national life, as the ‘mediator’ between the state and the people. By the same token, the Church's qualified espousal of constitutional nationalism, and the relentless Unionism of most Protestants, both contributed to creating MacDonagh's scenario. But the rot set in with the half-baked and inconsistent appeasement strategy pursued by the state:

This sounds plausible, although in the pre-1916 context ‘Catholic-nationalist’ and ‘anti-union’ merely meant Home Rule, as Senia Pašeta has shown. Had such ‘aspirations’ been fulfilled, Ireland might have remained under the British crown to this day. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the key factor in the making of the separatist alternative was the input of the predominantly secular and sometimes Protestant revolutionary tradition of Young Ireland and the IRB.