Is nationalism in the Irish context inextricably bound up with Catholicism? Conor Morrissey, in this well-written and meticulously researched work, demonstrates that in one of the most violent periods of modern Irish history Protestants also played their part in freeing Ireland from British rule. This is in keeping with a long tradition in nationalism. As one prominent Irish Protestant, George Irvine, was to point out in the late 1940s, in a row over state funding for that bastion of British and Protestant influence in Ireland, Trinity College Dublin, Irish republicanism was founded by a Protestant, Theobald Wolfe Tone. Protestants were also to the fore in the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion. Morrissey is wrong to suggest that Young Ireland broke with Daniel O'Connell because of the latter's conflation of nationalism with Catholicism (p. 150). The issue was rather the use of violence for political ends. O'Connell after all maintained ‘our religion from Rome our politics from home’. The leading figures of the Home Rule movement in the 1870s, Isaac Butt, William Shaw and Charles Stewart Parnell, were all Protestant. Morrissey sees the further emergence of Protestant nationalism in the 1880s as associated with the Gaelic revival. Cultural nationalism gives way in some instances to militant republicanism. Protestants joined the Irish Volunteers or the Irish Citizen Army and took part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Even before this, it was well-connected Protestants such as Roger Casement, Erskine Childers, Alice Green and Mary Spring Rice who were responsible for the Howth gun-running in July 1914. Protestant ‘conversion’ to nationalism even in its militant form did not make such individuals necessarily more well-disposed to Irish Catholics. Lindsay Crawford, founder of the Irish Protestant, hoped for the establishment of an Irish Republic on the basis of an alliance of Protestant nationalists with anti-clerical Catholics. Not only was he deeply anti-Catholic but also profoundly suspicious of ritualism in his own Church of Ireland. Lady Gregory, a constitutional nationalist, although discreet in public ‘loved to sneer at “papists” in her letters and journals’ (p.102). The author gives excellent accounts of the motivation for Protestant nationalists, the extent of Protestant influence on nationalism and the relationship between religion and national identity. Many Protestant nationalists not only alienated themselves from their own families and backgrounds but they were, at times, not easily assimilated by Catholic nationalists. The spectacle of Protestants advancing nationalism gave rise to some conundrums. Sir John French, 1st earl of Ypres and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1918–21, was embarrassed by the activities of his sister Charlotte Despard who was a prominent Sinn Féin activist (p. 88). I remain unconvinced by Morrissey's assertion that Irish Republicanism became more ‘Catholic’ following the 1916 Rising (p. 131), at least not quite in the way that Morrissey describes it. At times there is an odd note of disdain for those aristocratic Irish Protestants who deserted their backgrounds and threw in their lot with Catholic nationalists, almost a sense of betrayal because they had gone native. Nevertheless, this is an important book in an under-researched field.