Abstract
Reviewed by: Sarah Roddy, University of Manchester, UK
The Church of Ireland minister James Hannay, in his novelist alter-ego guise of George A. Birmingham, presciently noted in the 1914 book Connaught to Chicago that ‘Historians will need to write the history of the Irish people, rather than the history of Ireland, as Irish people succeed, but never in Ireland’. Time has surely proved him wrong on the latter point – emigration was not always and is certainly no longer the only route to ‘success’ for the Irish – but historians are unwittingly cleaving to his advice. Increasingly, Irish history is conceived of in global and transnational terms, not out of a misplaced grandiosity, but based on a recognition that the scale of Irish migration going back centuries and, even more crucially, the endurance and depth of diaspora-homeland connections, particularly in the modern era, demand that we look beyond the island if we are to understand it and the people(s) it produced.
As this book of essays demonstrates, it was fitting that a clergyman made such a prediction, since religion is a facet of Irishness that, perhaps more than any other, benefits from what the editors here term a ‘Greater Ireland’ approach. In their well-judged introduction, Barr and Carey assign an intriguing meaning to what could seem an empty phrase. It is, they note, not a synonym for the Irish diaspora, nor for the set of places to which the Irish migrated. ‘Rather, Greater Ireland was a shared cultural space in which a sense of home and shared identity jostled with the varying challenges of the host societies and the inherited divisions of the Irish themselves’, and it was, as they want the essays they have gathered to show, ‘real to the people who would have recognised their residence in it’ (21).
Individually, the essays contained in the collection each speak to that ambition to varying degrees; as a whole, they reinforce the editors’ point that a decentred view of Irish religion and identity is both possible and fruitful. Organized into four parts, the book deals with ‘Irish Global Networks’, the ‘Atlantic World’, ‘Asia and Africa’, and the ‘Southern World’ in turn, with understandable biases (five chapters apiece) towards work on the Irish in North America and Australasia. Among these essays, Mark McGowan’s and Carolyn Lambert’s respective pieces on Hiberno-French competition in the Canadian Catholic Church and the Catholic Church in Newfoundland together build a strong picture of the complicated and fluctuating religious, national and imperial identities of Irish-Canadian Catholics. Meanwhile, Michael Gladwin’s essay on Irish Anglican clergy in the Australian colonies, although dealing with a relatively narrow sliver of Irish migrants, has important things to say about the extent to which, contrary to some previous assumptions, their Irishness very much mattered to them.
The two smaller sections are by no means without interest, however. Barry Crosbie’s and Colin Barr’s essays on Catholicism in India and South Africa respectively are welcome additions to regrettably small literatures on the Irish in these places. Crosbie, as he did in his earlier monograph, advocates for use of network theory in the examination of religion in the empire, a position the editors partly endorse in their introduction but which few of the other essays adopt. Meanwhile Barr sheds light on Catholicism in the Cape Colony, partly via the papers of Vicar-Apostolic Patrick Moran, a man who was, as John Stenhouse’s chapter notes, later bishop of Dunedin in New Zealand and therefore, to some extent, personifies the value of a ‘Greater Ireland’ approach to religion.
The first section, meanwhile, offers three individually interesting essays: Vincent Comerford’s reflections on Irish confessional relations, Leigh-Ann Coffey’s mining of a Church of Ireland journal for relatively sedate content on migration at a time when Southern Irish Protestant emigration was supposedly controversial, and Kevin Molloy’s comprehensive account of the Irish-Australian book trade. Together, these constitute ‘Irish Global Networks’, a title which does not quite capture their commonalities and which one might expect, in any case, to be a larger section given the book’s ambitions.
Yet this may be a churlish criticism, since the editors are refreshingly frank about their book’s gaps and shortcomings: no Britain, no South America, and not ‘close to a full treatment of the Irish religious experience abroad’ (386). This reviewer would also add that as attractive and useful as a decentred history of Irish religion undoubtedly is, the impact of ‘Greater Ireland’ on the island itself could bear more attention. All this being said, Barr and Carey have produced a volume that surely will contribute to a renewed scholarship of Irish religion that acknowledges its inherently transnational and globally-networked significances.