The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution, Richard Bourke and Niamh Gallagher (eds), Cambridge University Press, 300 pp, £22.99, ISBN: 978-1108799133

Broadly speaking, Irish historiography has been characterised by certain kinds of conservatism – if not always ideological conservatism then certainly procedural, methodological, philosophical and institutional conservatism. Professionalised as a discipline in the 1930s, when revolution, war and the construction of new states or statelets were matters of immediate memory, history-writing had to find ways to legitimate itself in sometimes unstable and even dangerous conditions. As has been pointed out by scholars such as Ciaran Brady, this professionalisation was encoded not only in the adoption, most obviously in the first great in-house journal of modern Irish history, Irish Historical Studies, of rigidly orthodox scholarly procedures, but also in much more overt regulations, such as the HIS’s initial ban on articles on any political matter more recent than 1900. In other words, IHS and the historiography it both expressed and promoted legitimated itself academically but also implicitly politically by an apparent avoidance of contemporary history and politics. The stress was very much on “high politics” and the constitutional status of