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Book Review: Ireland (Inventing the nation series)

'Inventing the nation' sounds like a working programme for would-be nationalist leaders in their search for an iconic image; and also for historians who want to debunk the story of the nation once it has been dressed up as preordained, determined by forces outside the grasp of human agency, given. It is by now clear that there is a large freedom to manoeuvre for the political entrepreneur who wants to bind his following by way of an image of shared nationhood. Yet the elusive question remains: how large? For a convincing nationalism with a credible nation to emerge, does one need to stay close to an ethnic entity well established before modernity (as, for example, Anthony Smith has argued for a long time), or can one use the many known ingredients of nationalism and just arrange them in a new fashion as one deems fit like a do-it-yourself IKEA sleeping room (a metaphor introduced by the sociologist Lofgren, quoted in Thiesse, 1999: 14; this book deals with nation invention at the European scale)? Comerford's book about Irish inventions of the nation does not answer that question but he provides us with an exciting catalogue of proposals, debates and practices in Ireland and elsewhere that deal with Irishness over time and demonstrate the ever-changing nature of that notion. He also engages in stimulating discussions of the conditions of the popularity of certain ideas about the Irish nation and puts his views in a European framework that allows a number of interesting comparative glimpses. The book is useful for geographers because nation invention is a process driven by perceptions of the geographical environment and full of territorial implications. In addition, this book has a far richer grasp of the sources that hold this repertoire of nation inventions than geographers may be expected to gather. In the end, however, these riches could have been used to even greater effect, I would argue. The book is part of a series about nation invention. Volumes on India and Pakistan, Russia, Italy and China have already appeared; books on Germany, France and the USA are in preparation. Apparently the idea is to deal with nation invention in the framework of states that may be considered the realization of nationalist aims (although very often the already existing state has been a powerful engine of the diffusion of the notion, e.g., Russia). What about attempts to create nations that have so far failed to capture a strong political home like the Arab nation, perhaps the European nation or even the Family of Man; or lost it in earlier times like many current regional movements in the nation states of Europe? The Irish nation as the core of the Irish nationalist message has given birth to the smallest state in the series. At the same time, the Irish case is extremely rich in the variation of vehicles used over time to spread the notion of the nation. It is also interesting because of the impact of the large Irish emigrant population in Britain and the USA in particular, and of the overwhelmingly powerful British state that has set a number of conditions for Irish nationalism. In between a short introduction and an exceedingly brief conclusion (two pages), the book has eight chapters. The first one sets the stage claiming there have been four recognizably different polities since the mid-twelfth century on the British Isles. Ireland was one of these (the others being