Edward J Byrne became Archbishop of Dublin in 1921 and remained in office till his death in 1940. He therefore ruled during the period of some of the critical events and developments in the new Irish Free State from the Civil War, through the change of government in 1932 and right up to the adoption of De Valera’s Constitution of 1937. On the eccesiastical side, his reign covered the two massive celebrations of the time, the centenary celebrations for Catholic Emancipation in 1929 and then the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, one of the first major international events in the history of the newly founded state.This biography of ‘The Forgotten Archbishop’ is therefore an intriguing look at the ups and downs of the new state as well as an unusual insight into the clerical and ecclesiastical culture of the age just before the advent of John Charles McQuaid.
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