I haven’t been able to shake Patricia Byrne’s The Preacher and the Prelate (Merrion Press, 258pp, £13.99/$24.99) from my mind since reading it back in the summer. It recounts events on Achill Island before, during and after the Great Famine of the mid 19th century, when Edward Nangle, a Protestant clergyman, inflamed by his own rectitude and utterly convinced that the destitution of the rural Irish was a consequence of their Catholic faith, established a mission colony that would eventually face charges of “souperism”: buying the souls of the poor with food. Some brief flashes of sensationalism aside, Byrne leads us with skill and thoroughness through these events. In doing so, she opens a window on one suffering corner of a whole society that had become, to quote John MacHale, the Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, “unhinged”. Moments of kindness are rare but precious. The mission doctor, Neason Adams, is compassionate and of service to all. A priest tells islanders that if they took their needs wherever they found help, “it would be no sin”. Children tell visitors that they will go back to their own chapel “when the potatoes come again”. I am not sure Ireland has yet come to terms with, or even properly faced up to, the full effect of the Famine on the country and the Church. Works like this will be important sources if such a reckoning ever comes to pass.