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The Fenian ideal and Irish nationalism, 1882–1916. By M. J. Kelly. Pp x, 282. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2006. £55. (Irish Historical Monograph Series, 4.)

as it does to 1867. The government's decision to close down the Irish People in 1865 and the mass arrests that followed the suspension of habeas corpus in 1866 have yet to be properly explained, but everything here suggests these actions were more assertions of authority most of the internees were quickly released than the suppression of an immediate revolutionary threat. There is much of historiographical interest here. In parts, the book comprises a dialogue with R. V. Comerford, Fenianism's leading modern interpreter and Ramon's mentor at N.U.I. Maynooth. Rather than the neo-Fenianism that sometimes marks Comerford's critics, Ramon challenges Comerford's scepticism, highlighting what is characterised as a failure of sympathy with, and recognition of, the sincerity of Fenian political conviction. Fenians were anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical in certain limited respects, and brought a radical attitude though not a precise agenda to the land question. Ramon sees in Fenianism a class challenge: a refusal of deference and the social hierarchies that determined the complexion of political leadership in Ireland. To a great extent, these are Comerfordian points, but Ramon grants Fenianism greater ideological coherence and significance, cautiously aligning the argument with less cautiously expressed hypotheses by John Newsinger (1994) and Owen McGee (2005). Ramon's analysis of the Irish People is a little too cursory to fully flesh out the complexities of 'Fenian ideology', but the strangely neglected 1867 declaration, reproduced here, leaves the reader in little doubt that leading Fenians were radical democrats. This, it is demonstrated, represented Stephens's views, though he had no input in its writing.