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Lindsey Earner Byrne, Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland, 1920–1940

The cover of Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s brilliant new book, Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland 1920–1940, features a collage of letters. One details a husband’s illness, another is a postcard of the Wellington Monument from Dublin’s Phoenix Park with ‘very urgent’ underlined on its face. A further letter pleads for assistance from Fr. Dunne, an annotation of ‘£4’ in red ink marking that writer’s success in their plea for material aid. These letters are exemplars from the sizeable collection of 4,343 ‘charity cases’ stored in the Dublin Diocesan Archive, produced during the episcopacy of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Edward Byrne (1921–40); documents which now serve as the source base for Earner-Byrne’s persuasive, compelling, and sympathetic examination of poverty in post-Independence Ireland.