Narrates Irish politics and society since the 18th century, climaxing with a polemical treatment of independence and civil war that scapegoats the British, credits the Americans, and skips past Irish economic development as well as de Valera’s cynical role. In a long prelude, points up Catholic monasteries made Ireland a European center of learning during the Dark Ages, while and Viking raiders established town life in Dublin, Limerick, Wexford, and elsewhere. In 1156 Henry II of England was authorized to invade by Pope Adrian IV, in order to promote Catholicism, beginning 750 years of oppression. Brechen law was replaced and peasants either enserfed or driven to inarable lands in the west. A second phase of colonization commenced with Elizabethan plantations, prompting the risings of Hughs O’Neill and O’Donnell; revealing tripartite division among a Catholic Kilkenny Confederation allied to Charles I, Ulster Scots Presbyterians, and Dublin-based loyalists; and accelerating with Cromwellian confiscations, which surpassed the 3 million acres previously taken in Ulster and Muster, claiming another 8 million – half the arable land – and driving Celts over the Shannon (‘to hell or Connacht’). Subsequent conversion to pasture meant fewer people could be supported.

Some 150 years later, the American revolution prompted the relaxation of penal laws, allowing Catholics to become landowners and Stormont flourished under Grattan; however, Wolfe Tone’s United Irish and the bungled French invasion of 1798 prompted the 1801 Act of Union. In the 19th century, the anti-colonial campaign turned political. To encourage participation, Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association set low dues but efforts to restore parliament neglected the agrarian problem (so too Young Ireland). The famine, which killed 2 million, in combination with 2 rental evictions and 2.5 million lost to emigration, evidences the wretched state of the countryside. From the 1850s, American public opinion and later dollars became a domestic factor, while new political actors continually emerged, such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (founded 1858) and the middle-class Fenians, which spurred the 1867 rebellion. Michael Davitt’s Land League sought to buy back and redistribute farmland, using the tactic of rent boycotts; Gladstone’s second Land Act to undermine its appeal. All along, England’s intellectuals staunchly opposed and savagely oppressed its neighbor, save alone for JS Mill. But the British arrest of Parnell was more representative of British intention, and Phoenix Park ruined prospects of Victorian Home Rule. Still, the 1904 Land Act increased quadrupled eligibility to buy land, to 300,000, and in all nearly 12 million acres were sold after 1885.

In the final turn, Patrick Pearse and WB Yeats, representative of a literary renaissance that fused pagan and Christian Ireland, served to ally culture with the rising dissatisfactions of Dublin’s slums, evidenced by the strike of 1913. The 1911 Act of Parliament having stripped Ulster’s last line of defense, Edward Carson’s Ulster Volunteers shortly turned to mutiny, Bonar Law’s support ironically contrasting with the derided tactics of suffragettes or labor. It was clear from 1913 that Ireland would be partitioned. Redmond’s agreeing to wartime service mainly suborned the implementation of Home Rule. Even the north opposed conscription, and in December 1918 elections, Sinn Fein swept the balloting and resurrected the Dail. Michael Collins’ campaigning, prompting the introduction of Tans and the Auxiliaries, ultimately turned American opinion against Lloyd George’s penurious England and prompted negotiations (the author states de Valera was in secret contact with the prime minister?). Independence was due to Britain’s postwar decline and the rise of America – domestic events played a secondary role. De Valera could have prevented the civil war. However, upon becoming prime minister in 1932, he repudiated Land Act payments and other Edwardian residuals, prompting a trade war in 1932-38 and exiting the Commonwealth

Coda: although two-thirds of Protestants left Ireland after 1922 and emigration continued throughout the century, exodus reflected the repression of the Catholic Church and Britain’s generous welfare state. In Costigan’s telling, Irish’s citizens qua individuals making social and economic choices count for little.