Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Rising by Valerie Jones (review)

Abstract

in paperback at a more reasonable price. It offers a more nuanced reading of the history of modern economic development, showing the links between inventors and innovators and those willing to support innovation with their seed money. The ‘industrial revolution’ didn’t just happen. Kingston offers a realistic appraisal of the role of financial and commercial interests in democratic politics and shows the vulnerability of politics to manipulation by those pursuing sectional interests instead of common goods. The book is frightening for this very reason. It does not seem to offer any solutions. The final chapter asks if anything could have saved capitalism, and suggestions are made about what might have been done. There is little, however, by way of suggestion as to what might be done now. Capitalism seems to have destroyed itself, or to be well on the way to doing so. Do we just wait to see what replaces it? Will it be a new hegemony from China? Or perhaps a wave of protectionism reversing all the developments of globalised markets in capital leading to new forms of mercantilism? Or perhaps the ingenuity and imaginative creativity which has led the various stages of capitalism’s development will come to the rescue once more and offer a new opportunity. This is the whisper of hope at the end of the book, but Kingston finds the hope in the writings of Deirdre McCloskey, an advocate for a kind of capitalism which she calls ‘market-tested betterment’, and not through his own analysis. Perhaps Kingston’s call for greater attention to the public good, renewed emphasis on the moral and cultural conditions for economic success and greater advocacy for the liberation of the imagination and the generation of ideas might swing the balance away from demise and towards the recovery of capitalism from its self-inflicted injuries. Dr Patrick Riordan SJ is Fellow in Political Philosophy and Catholic Social Thought at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is a member of the Heythrop Institute of Religion and Society. Rebel Prods: The Forgotten Story of Protestant Radical Nationalists and the 1916 Rising, Valerie Jones (Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2016), 387 pages. The late Dr Valerie Jones (1943–2014) served as lecturer at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines and also as the Communications 386 Studies • volume 106 • number 423 Autumn 2017: Book Reviews Officer for the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough. Her book, the product of more than a decade of research, was nearly complete at the time of her death and was ‘brought to fruition’ by her daughter, Dr Heather Jones, an Associate Professor of History at the London School of Economics, and her son, Mark. Its publication was supported by the Church of Ireland’s Historical Centenaries Working Group as one of its several contributions commemorating the events of 1916. Irish Protestants, like British Catholics in the period since the Reformation, have a convoluted history. Both groups have often been perceived as possessing mixed loyalties, dedicated to their native land but with an additional connection to a ‘foreign’power. This complex identity makes their respective histories fascinating. Among Irish Protestants different members of the community have worked out their Irish identities in quite different ways. At no time was this more apparent than during the turbulent decade of the modern struggle for Irish autonomy, 1912–22. While most Irish Protestants during this period were unionists, particularly in the North, a few remained loyal to the democratic nationalism of the Irish Parliamentary Party tradition, for example, Stephen Gwynn (1864–1950), Captain Henry Harrison (1867–1954) and John Gordon Swift MacNeill (1849–1926). A small but noticeable minority sided with the republican movement and Sinn Féin. While the relatively few ‘big name’ Protestant radicals of this era, like Erskine Childers (1870–1922), Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) and Constance Gore-Booth (‘Countess’) Markievicz (1868–1927) have been much celebrated by republicans and discussed at length by scholars, it was Dr Jones’s goal to dig deeper into nationalist history and highlight the lives of a diverse group of about ninety less-known revolutionary Protestant nationalists who also were active during the later years of the home rule movement, the period...