Michael McCabe’s For God and Ireland attempts to deal with this dynamic as it applied to the Irish bishops and republicans in the first decade of the Irish Free State’s existence. The author’s principal aim is to ‘observe and study trends across both sides of the ideological divide that separated republicans and the bishops’ (p. 10). Underpinning this focus is the argument that both parties (republicans and bishops) competed for moral authority in the emerging Free State; in the case of republicans, rhetoric laden with religious imagery was often utilized to claim moral and political legitimacy. Key to the author’s interpretation of such ‘moral competition’ is his belief that the bishops acted unjustifiably (morally and otherwise) in order to maintain social and political authority, often showing an unseemly level of interest in political and other secular affairs.