The 1800 Act of Union made Ireland the decidedly junior member in a United Kingdom. Now, British policy makers found it more difficult to push their Irish Question to the periphery. In his excellent book, The Eternal Paddy, Michael de Nie argues that the British infused their answers to the Irish Question with their racial, religious, and class stereotypes of the Irish people. In essence, the British viewed the Irish as “Paddy”—barbaric Celts, subservient Catholics, and lazy peasants who needed a healthy dose of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, middle-class values in order to become full-fledged members of the United Kingdom. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, de Nie traces a deepening sense of pessimism about the viability of this assimilation project. Rather, the British increasingly realized that the Irish were “the eternal Paddy” whom they could not improve because the Irish were fundamentally incapable of becoming truly British.

De Nie gauges the sensibilities of the British public through the British press, which he sees as a cultural product of the British public, particularly of the middle class. Although the press previously had served as a partisan mouthpiece, de Nie argues that during the nineteenth century the press became more sensitive to public opinion as it relied increasingly upon advertising revenue instead of government subsidies. By studying editorials, letters to the editor, and cartoons from over ninety London and local newspapers between 1798 and 1882, the author documents the conversations between the British public, the press that spoke for them about the Irish Question, and the policy makers who both the public and the press hoped to influence. De Nie does not examine newspapers from every year of this period. Rather, he focuses upon four major events during this era—the 1798 rebellion and the subsequent Union, the Famine, the Fenian uprisings, and the Land War—when the British public was particularly attuned to Ireland.

For de Nie, several enduring characteristics of the British public's attitude toward the Irish become apparent in studying newspapers in the wake of the 1798 rebellion. First and foremost, the British viewed the Irish as particularly susceptible to incendiary behavior due to their inferior ethnic, religious, and class characteristics. Second, the British press placed the blame squarely upon the rebel leadership, particularly outside agitators such as the French, for taking advantage of the natural weaknesses of the ordinary Irish man or woman. In turn, the press largely exonerated the actions of the majority of the Irish people. Third, the press displayed great ambivalence over how to solve the Irish quandary. Should the British government first wield the carrot of coercion or the stick of reform? Finally, though there existed tremendous ambivalence over how to proceed with the Irish, the public consensus was that for the Irish people to improve their situation, they needed to become less Irish and more British. As a result, despite a good deal of skepticism over whether the Irish would know what was best for them, Dr. John Bull prescribed his remedy: Union.

The Union, however, failed to improve Paddy markedly because, according to the British public, he suffered from a moral plague that was the result of his racial, religious, and class makeup. Nevertheless, during the Famine and the Fenian eras, although they remained ambivalent about how to proceed, the British press refused to lose faith in the Irish people in general. Rather, they continued to blame a minority for preventing the Irish from embracing the prescriptions designed by the British government; thus they attributed the Famine's devastation primarily upon greedy Irish landlords and Fenian violence upon Irish-American filibusters. Meanwhile, the British largely absolved themselves from any wrongdoing. De Nie believes that the British press deserves much more blame for its role in recommending and advocating misguided government policies, particularly during the Famine, when the press rallied behind the disastrous 1847 Poor Law Amendment Act.

De Nie sees the Land War as a turning point in the British public's approach to the Irish Question. The British press no longer could deny the facts: Irish disobedience against British law was a strategy implemented by the Irish masses, not merely by a deviant minority. There developed a sense that no amount of reform or coercion could bring Ireland into the British fold and that the Irish Question had become a debilitating drain upon British resources. According to de Nie, Gladstone converted to Home Rule in 1885 because large segments of the Liberal and Radical public had written off Britain's anglicization strategy of the Irish—a primary purpose of the Union for them—back in the early 1880s.

But was the Land War the first Irish political movement that would have bred overwhelming skepticism and concern in Britain about the merits of the Union? De Nie skips over Daniel O’Connell's Emancipation and Repeal movements, the first mass nationalist movements in Irish history. In fact, he leaves nearly a half-century (1801–45) untouched. One wonders, for instance, whether the British public responded to Repeal with a similar type of pessimism that they responded to the Land League. What kind of threat did the British see in O’Connell's monster meetings of 1843?

Furthermore, a more comprehensive discussion of race is in order. De Nie attempts to expand upon L. P. Curtis's work by viewing race as a “metalanguage” in nineteenth-century British discourse (5). To do so, he would have been well served to compare the British public's views of the Irish race to other colonized races in a more extensive fashion. De Nie makes passing references to India and to Jamaica, but he never develops these themes. Overall, it was apparent that although de Nie views race as one entity in the race-religion-class trinity, that he sees race as somehow more pivotal. A chapter on Ireland, empire, and race would have been useful in this regard. These omissions, however, do not detract significantly from an otherwise well-researched and superbly written book.