Both books are valuable and well worth reading. Bryan Fanning’s excellent book of essays on a variety of individuals who imagined what Ireland should or could become, can be picked up and put down again. It is refreshing to see the inclusion of many thinkers not normally given their due by historians. Starting in the seventeenth century, William Petty’s desired Ireland could only be imagined with the extinction through death and transportation of a million Catholics. William Molyneux, not long after, meant the Protestant Ascendancy when he used the term Ireland, but his plea for parliamentary autonomy long outlived him and was eventually taken up by Catholics as well. Edmund Burke’s close family relationship with modern, pro-active Catholics (Nano Nagle was a cousin) probably influenced his support for Catholic relief, which he struggled to reconcile with his political conservatism. Thomas Malthus did not ascribe Irish poverty to ‘over-population’, but to poor living standards which he blamed, in turn, on Catholics’ lack of political rights. Richard Whately, Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin and chair of the Irish Poor Inquiry Commission, 1833–6, also understood the causes and consequences of poverty, and was a key architect of the Irish national school system. Friedrich Engels exempted the Irish from his preferred fate of extinction for other ‘fragments of history’ like Slavs, mainly because he admired the Fenians, but neither of the two Irish working-class sisters (the second after the first’s death) who cooked his food and shared his bed was considered fit to reside at his official address. John Mitchel and James Connolly, like Engels, disdained capitalism, but both proposed very different alternatives to it, and like Engels, neither understood the complexity of the Irish working/labouring class. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington imagined equal women in a free Ireland, and in a way hers was the most successful dream of all – the very significant reverses in their economic and judicial status after 1922 could not undo the fact that Irish women, in that year, were granted fully equal political rights. Sheehy Skeffington’s nephew, Conor Cruise O’Brien, despite gender and class privilege, believed he belonged to a dispossessed elite; Fanning deals fairly and evenly with this brilliant, unhappy man. Another brilliant lone figure, also dealt with sensitively, was Bishop Jeremiah Newman. Newman’s insights in the early 1960s into rural–urban relationships were quite forward-thinking, and some of his other views surprisingly open, but his pronouncements on family and sexual morality were unacceptable even to many mass-going Catholics in the 1970s and 1980s. By the time of Newman’s death in 1995, the moral authority previously enjoyed by bishops had been handed over to journalists. Fanning attempts, in the final chapter, to unpack the prophetic utterances of the most prominent of these, Fintan O’Toole, over four decades. All these characters are nuanced and multi-faceted, even the most grotesque and grandiose, and readers can have fun deciding on their favourites – mine was that abrasive eccentric, Whately. That said, the book’s poor editing is sometimes annoying, as when Parnell’s middle name is spelt Stuart on p. 235 (and correctly elsewhere), and sometimes hilarious, as when Irish beggars’ place of recourse in Oxford is described as the ‘mendacity office’. (p. 78). And while the book’s bravura style makes it a dizzying, break-neck read, missing commas can bring the reader to a skidding stop: ‘For all that Engels disputed Carlyle’s bucolic account of the Middle Ages as skipping over the miseries of serfdom.’ (p. 100; the comma is missing after ‘that’.)

As far as identity was concerned, Irish certainly meant Catholic in the agencies and organisations set up by the Irish Catholic church for emigrants to Britain in the decades after the Second World War. In Patricia Kennedy’s history, commissioned by the Irish Episcopal Commission for Emigrants (though without the word Catholic anywhere in its title), the evolution of the different arms and agencies of the church-founded emigrant service is traced. The most famous priest/activist was Fr Eamonn Casey, whose work for homeless parishioners (English as well as Irish) in his first parish of Slough led to his chairmanship of the Catholic Housing Aid Society in 1963, and later of the multi-denominational Shelter. But there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of other dynamic and energetic priests and nuns, and several lay Catholics working with Irish emigrants – Frs Bobby Gilmore, Joe Taaffe and Bill Cagney, Sr Alice Mooney, laywoman Therese Healy and many, many more. Needs were often quite specific; Irish-speaking priests were in demand for Connemara people in Huddersfield, and priests ministering to London hotel and café workers had to frequent a lot of pubs, clubs and cafés at odd times. Emigrant chaplains and related organisations (too numerous to mention) undoubtedly formed part of the Irish Catholic church’s extended control over its flock; when reading of how young Irish men and women coming off boat-trains into large English cities in the 1960s were met by Legion of Mary workers, the historian immediately wonders how many of those youngsters were going to England precisely to escape such vigilance. But it was as easy for the average Irish emigrant to Britain to dodge priests and nuns in the cities where they settled as it would have been for agile teenagers to give the Legion of Mary the slip at Euston Station. What the historian should be asking is why so many Irish Catholic emigrants to Britain in these decades welcomed, and even sought, the attention of clergy and religious. While poor social life, peer pressure and a yearning for the familiar might account for the standing-room-only missions to building workers’ camps in the 1950s, the enthusiastic reception given to priests who visited the Vauxhall plant in Luton in the late 1970s, and the record attendances at the masses they organised, is harder to explain away. Kennedy’s book fulfils its purpose of recording the many initiatives and personalities involved in making Irish people’s lives in Britain more comfortable and familiar, and from the 1970s to the 1990s, supporting many who were in prison. The structure is thematic rather than chronological, sometimes dates have to be ascertained by leafing back a few pages, and as is often the case in commissioned histories, anxiety not to ‘leave anyone out’ results occasionally in lists of names (e.g. p. 71) There is, however, abundant use of fascinating oral testimony and an engagement with published histories of the subject, in a readable narrative. Future research subjects leap out from almost every page – emigrant hotel workers (or, indeed, hotel workers in Ireland, who still await their historian), the Irish language in Britain and the impact of English on Connemara Irish (mo mhate, for example, is common parlance in Irish-speaking County Galway), changing attitudes of emigrants towards clerical interventions, the relevance (if any) of gender in the various ministries and missions, and so on. The biggest story of all, barely touched upon in a volume of this scope, is a complete social history of those forgotten emigrants, priests and nuns cut adrift from the security of their unassailable position in Ireland, and far away from friends and families.