'A Nation of Beggars'?

Reviews / Votes

Its strengths lie in its solid scholasticism and its author's enviable and incisive grasp of rich primary sources. * Fortnight * a major contribution to the history of Irish Catholicism at a crucial stage. * Times Literary Supplement * a welcome and worthy addition to this growing body of work. His account has much of interest to say about politics and society in general, but it also provides an indispensable discussion of the church's response to those terrible events. A book as thoughtful and scholarly as Donnal Kerr's on the famine is...to be welcomed. * Social History Society Bulletin * This sequel to his well-received study 'Peel, Priests and Politics' deals with the ensuing half dozen years in great detail using extensive archival and printed sources. * Choice * With this book, Dr Kerr, following his earlier and much valued 'Peel, Priests and Politics' confirms his command of the social, political and ecclesiastical complexities of Ireland in the 1840's...a work of consummate scholarship and masterly presentation. * Bullan * well written...Its strengths lie in its solid scholasticism and its author's enviable and incisive grasp of rich primary sources. * Fortnight Magazine * Kerr's examination of Russell's doomed enterprise is based firmly on a thorough consideration of both published and unpublished evidence. The book is marked by intelligence, insight and understanding. It renders a complicated set of episodes comprehensible and reclaims the Famine as the great political (as well as social) watershed of nineteenth-century Irish history. * K. Theodore Hoppen, University of Hull, EHR Feb. 97 * Once more Professor Kerr marshals his formidable grasp of British and Irish archival material to write a detailed yet broad account of what was arguably the last attempt by a British government to make the Irish Union a reality ... his fine book on these momentous years in the history of the Union does seem to bear out, in some degree at least, Sir Robert Peel's earlier verdict that 'an honest despotic government would be by far the fittest government for Ireland.' * D.G. Boyce, The Historical Association 1996 *