The Catholics Of Ulster

Marianne Elliott was born a Catholic in Ulster, and this history of her people--The Catholics of Ulster--will change the world's view of the nationalist Catholics in that province of Northern Ireland. Elliott's revisionist claims are many, and they are large. She denies the proposition that there was any such thing as a Gaelic Catholic race. She argues that Catholic gentry disappeared not because they were exiled and dispossessed by their Protestant neighbors, but because they were converted. She claims that the Penal Laws were not intentionally anti-Catholic. She believes that the English were not substantially to blame for the Potato Famine. And she claims that the IRA has never enjoyed much popular support. These arguments are part of a detailed, comprehensive history of Ireland's tangled Troubles that she makes as clear as one could hope for. Elliott's unwillingness to reduce Ulster's story to any simple opposition between good and bad is unwavering. And her gift for self-criticism, suggested in the book's prologue ("I have discovered in myself lingering prejudices and sensitivities which I either believed I had left far behind or never recognized in the first place"), informs every chapter. --Michael Joseph Gross