   •     detail how they navigated internal political fights, sought and won recognition from employers, and sparked the suspicions of the anticommunist clergy and politicians. O’Brien’s is the best study available of these organizations and as such will be useful to specialists in the history of journalism. Others may find the detailed accounts of the internal deliberations and disagreements in these organizations less fascinating, but these are primarily con- tained in the early chapters and do not detract from the utility and interest of the book as a whole. The mid-twentieth century is commonly regarded as low point for Ireland, and its journalism was no exception. In the 1940s and 50s Irish journalists were generally poorly paid and educated, held in low esteem by the public, and continued their failure to offer any check to the abuse of political and religious power in Irish society. There were a few green sprigs in this barren landscape, and the iconoclastic commentary and reporting in The Bell and the Irish Times offered a glimpse of what was to come in O’Brien’s second phase (1961-late 1970s), a period of “contested journalism,” as the press began to carve out an expanded space for itself, establishing greater critical distance from the centers of power (227). This occurred in part because it was in these years that the first post-Civil War generation came of age and entered politics. Less invested in the revolutionary era and more likely to have completed second and third-level education than their parents, this generation embodied the changing, more global Ireland. Their attitude was perhaps best first ex- pressed on the new television current-affairs programs, most notably Seven Days, but soon filtered into the print journalism. As O’Brien argues, at the time of its founding few gave much thought to how the new television service would influence journal- ism in Ireland, and even less considered the long-term effects of legislative requirements that RTÉ be “objective and impartial in its treatment of the news and current affairs.” “When the broadcasting legislation was being drafted and debated,” he writes, “there was no appreciation that this require- ment might be the catalyst for the develop- ment of critical journalism that would challenge the certainties of the power blocs that had, for decades, set the parameters of debate within society” (112). Long-accus- tomed to using the press to transmit and affirm their viewpoints uncontested, these authorities, from the government to the bishops to the GAA, became deeply alarmed when the RTÉ took its impartiality mandate seriously. This new critical spirit spread to the print press, which began to disentangle itself from church and state by exploring previously taboo topics and critically analyzing government policy during the onset of the Troubles. Along with rising education levels (including university courses on journalism), this spirit produced a generation of self-confident and pro- fessional journalists determined to think and write for themselves about an ever- widening range of political and social issues. The third phase (1970s to present) examined by O’Brien, “challenging journal- ism,” was the product of both ongoing demographic-educational change and the continuing evolution of journalistic prac- tices in Ireland. As he notes, in the early 1970s nearly half of the Irish population was under 25. Members of the best educated generation in Irish history to that date, the young journalists of the late 1970s began their careers with a much more skeptical and confrontational mindset than their predecessors and began to directly challenge the political classes and the church. They first did so mainly in current- affairs and specialist publications such as Hot Press and In Dublin, but by the 1980s many of these journalists had migrated to the mainstream media, bringing their new journalistic disposition with them. Not coincidentally, this period also witnessed the long-delayed (compared to Britain and the United State) rise of investigative journalism, in part a product of the greater penetration of British media into the Irish market. The resulting newspaper series on scandals such as the Irish Hospital Sweep- stake, Charles Haughey’s finances, and the sexual abuse of children by clergy rocked Irish society and politics. Largely free from public scrutiny for so long, the power cen- ters of Irish society pushed back in variety of ways, including phone-tapping journal- ists and threatening litigation or prose- cution, but they were unable to drive the Irish press back into the deferential role it had assumed for most of the century. By the late 1990s, O’Brien writes, “this gradual but systematic chipping away at the carefully constructed edifice of an island of saints and scholars finally revealed endemic corrup- tion in the political and business worlds and unspeakable horrors within institutions that had been conspicuously ignored or carefully concealed for many decades” (228). O’Brien’s book artfully demonstrates not only how journalism is a product of the various social and political forces of its time, but also the ways in which the press itself can shape those forces. The dramatic changes in the relationship between Irish society and the traditional centers of power over the last century are in many ways the result of the transformation of how the Irish press interacted with these institutions. Simply put, the dramatic decline in public confidence in the church and the political classes in Ireland over the past thirty years is inconceivable without the independent and critical turn in Irish journalism that O’Brien ably investigates. Anyone interested in how this turn came about and in the evolution of twentieth-century Irish public culture more generally will find this book quite useful and stimulating. • —University of West Georgia  % %    +" % +*  % %    +" % +*  % %    +" % +*  % %    +" % +*  H 4 3 I N THE AMERICAN debates about the Constitution and the establishment of the American republic, the Federalists constructed a notion of the American male that they believed was essential for the movement away from Confederation and its parochial factionalism. They believed that the post-revolutionary period dislocations and difficulties could only be overcome by a new kind of American male, a national manhood that was white, unified, dynamic, and committed to the nation. The male ideal was to be embodied by the President, whose personage would express the masculine ideal necessary for the construction and success of the new American nation. &.$ $//. !      (* %   ### Just over a century later, during the Dreyfus Affair, French society descended into a maelstrom where the question of the nature of France divided the nation. Was France the France of the Revolution? Was it the imperial France of pre-revolutionary France, or better yet, that of Napoleon? Liberals took on irredentist nationalists, monarchists, and the army, and those on the “new” right took on the left, democrats, and Jews, all in the name of saving France. But in the raging debates, in the newspapers and pamphlets, and in no doubt many a cafe, the subject was also marked by hints of a crisis in French masculinity. On the right, attacks leveled against the effeminacy of Dreyfus and the Dreyfusards became common currency, and were used against French Jews through the Second World War. Even many of those on the left wondered what the scandal said about the state of French manhood and the future of the nation. Depending upon one’s point of view, French setbacks, from the ignominy of Sedan and the humiliation of the army, to the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, to the Commune, and onto the farce that was to become the Third Republic, French masculinité was at issue, and with the Dreyfus case, so too was the very survival of the nation. From nationalism’s beginnings, or even in those pre modern glimpses of national identity where we can see, as when Shake- speare’s Henry V predicts that on future St. Crispin’s Day’s those who did not fight at Agincourt would hold their “manhood cheap,” manhood and the nation have been intertwined. Thus it might seem almost inevitable that in modern Irish society, Irish nationalists, nationalists would address the issue of Irish masculinity. Should we be surprised that Irish nationalists cast their vision of the Irish nation in masculine terms? The depths of this issue are the subject of Aidan Beatty’s brilliant book Masculinity and Power in Irish National- ism, 1884-1938, and he clearly demon- strates that the issue of masculinity was central in the conceptualization and reali- zation of the Irish state. The author opens this work with Eamonn de Valera’s famous 1943 St. Patrick’s Day speech. That speech was mindful of potential invasion at the same time it presented his vision of what Ireland was meant to be. The Irish people were to live lives in the way that “God desires that men should live.” His Ireland was agrarian, full of submissive females, and invigorated by masculine power, yet these were not ideas original to de Valera, and in particular, the nexus of masculinity and power was embedded in Irish nationalist ideology from the 1880s right through the establishment of the Free State and beyond. Beatty favors the “long view” when it comes to nationalism and the supposed Irish revolution. He finds that the term “revolu- tionary” fails to do justice to an ideology that evolved over decades, and continued to be important over two decades after 1916. Furthermore, in order to understand nationalist culture he maintains that one can only do so within “a British imperial con- text,” and essential to that understanding is understanding how the Irish nation came to be expressed in terms of Irish masculinity. This book takes a comparative approach lying side by side how Irish nationalists and Zionists both had to confront the legacy of colonial rule and its creation of anti-Irish and anti-Jewish stereotypes. In both cases, and in the same period, Irish nationalists and Zionists addressed those racial stereo- types by asserting their own racialist ideali- zations of themselves. They both recurred to a romantic past in order to establish a noble history with a superior culture in order to counter British colonial versions of them- selves as inferior and feminized peoples. In both cases it meant addressing the issue of masculinity and with the construction of a male stereotype to counter the enervating effects of colonial rule. In both cases the critical element in establishing the nation was the idealized, muscular, virtuous, dynamic, and agrarian male. The Irish “Strong farmer” and the Zionist Sabra were required for these nations to overcome the feminizing legacies of colonialism. Born as liberating ideals, once nationhood was achieved, the values attached to these ideals served to establish a political, cultural, and social order that proved resistant to change. Beatty notes how this dovetails with George Mosse’s observation in Nationalism and Sexuality that nationalism not only coerced the status quo of political power but established codes of respectability and discipline that required the subordination of women in the establishment of the nation: a true nation was one dominated by men who exemplified the nation and required the submission of the feminine in all its forms. Using modern Jewish notions of masculinity in order to understand Irish identity and masculinity makes as complete a case as is possible for viewing Ireland in a colonial and postcolonial context. In this light the issue of land, essential in both the Zionist and the Irish cases, takes on new dimensions, and thus Irish men, emascu- lated as tenant rent payers, were drawn to the Land War out of deep personal psychological anxieties about their mascu- linity. Thus de Valera’s Economic War with Britain can be understood in terms of the mass humiliation suffered for decades by Irish farmers and continued in the Free State’s role as a subservient economy. Fianna Fail made economic humiliation a centerpiece of its appeal to the nation of strong newly independent male farmers. Fianna Fail had overseen a vast transfer of land to those farmers and ran its 1932 election campaign by appealing not only to those men who had benefitted from this, but it also appealed to male voters on the basis of what was sure to be their ongoing personal mortification under the policies of Cosgrave and Cumann na nGaedheal. The