KEVIN MATTHEWS. Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics, 1920-1925. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 317. Cloth $79.95, paper $39.95

Abstract

In this detailed study of British politics in the early 1920s, Kevin Matthews argues that Ireland did not, as is often thought, disappear from the British political agenda as soon as Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State were established. He is certainly right. Whether the general consensus on this point has been quite as complete as he suggests is, however, perhaps less certain. After all, there has been no doubting the fact that, as H. A. L. Fisher put it in August 1924, “the old feeling” about Ireland remained “very intense” among Conservatives—the backwoodsmen especially. Their bitter sense of betrayal had already caused the decade's (maybe the century's) most famous political assassination, the fall of David Lloyd George, and blighted the careers of his high-flying Conservative allies Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead. The government's embarrassment over the implementation of the boundary provisions of the treaty, and over the Northern Ireland Parliament's unilateral dismantling of key provisions of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, is likewise familiar fare.