Welsh Journals

comes to consider the language question in Ireland. The treatment is brief, but should be read by all those, such as Professor J. J. Lee of Cork University, who do not see why the Dail should not aim to discuss its business through the medium of Irish. Irish histo- rians are very bad at making these kinds of comparisons, and Hughes should shake them out of their insularity. However, had Hughes drawn upon his deep knowledge of Germany and applied it to Ireland, then his analysis of nationalism might have moved beyond his perfectly sound, but somehow rather orthodox, treatment of the subject. Certain topics might have been more closely considered. We need to know why the admittedly tense predicament of 1910-14 was transformed into the incredibly brutal violence of 1919-23. Hughes gives Michael Collins more than the benefit of the doubt when he considers Collins's attitude to the new state of Northern Ireland. It is one of the gravest reflections on the reputation of the founder of the Free State that he covertly assisted I.R.A. attacks on the North, which not only threatened the state's stability, but worsened the already difficult plight of the Roman Catholic minority there. The distinc- tion between violent and non-violent nationalism is not as marked as Hughes would have it. The least satisfactory part of the book is the last chapter. It has the look of having been bolted on to the story. Hughes's judgement that the British government has failed to persuade Unionists of the distinction between internal reforms and 'creeping unification' is no longer true, and perhaps has not been the case for some time. It is a pity that the otherwise fine choice of documentary texts does not include the vital Anglo-Irish Agree- ment of 1985, which marks the most significant shift in British policy since 1949, or even 1921. This book, then, has its shortcomings, but its calm and even-handed treatment of the issues stands as an example to those Irish historians who want to return Irish history to its mythical nineteenth-century ways. We must be grateful to Michael Hughes for that. GEORGE BOYCE Swansea LEADERS AND TEACHERS. ADULT EDUCATION AND THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR IN SOUTH WALES, 1906-1940. By Richard Lewis. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993. Pp. xxiv, 271. £ 20.00. Richard Lewis has produced a highly interesting and important study of adult and workers' education in south Wales in the early twentieth century. There are several broad surveys of the history of adult education, an extensive literature in specialized journals, and a number of institutional histories of the subject, but we have relatively few works that survey adult education across a region, as this does, and which weave it so convincingly into more mainstream social and political history. Leaders and Teachers is written with clarity, is based on a wide range of sources, including sensitive use of oral testimony, and it maintains an excellent balance between local detail and national developments. Lewis also shows a sure instinct for what is of lasting political and histor- ical importance in his story. The book is essentially an analysis of two rival educational and political traditions,