Review of A History of Ireland’s School Inspectorate, 1831-2008 by John Coolahan and Patrick F. O'Donovan

This book is a veritable tour de force – a history of the Irish school inspectorate (primary, intermediate/secondary and technical/vocational) over a period of 175 years – both before and after Independence. No history of Irish education on this scale has previously been attempted – and only John Coolahan could have carried it off so successfully. While a reader might expect a book of over 300 pages to be dense and impenetrable, this is not at all the case. It is an eminently readable and very well structured book. As is appropriate to the way the education system was administered until relatively recently, and in particular the way the inspectorate was organised, the three branches of the inspectorate are treated in separate chapters throughout most of the book. With a different author, this could have resulted in a sense of fragmentation and discontinuity. But Coolahan’s easy familiarity with the history of Irish education results in a book in which cross-referencing comes naturally and where links are provided where necessary. It is only in the recent two decades that an integrated inspectorate has finally emerged and the transition is well dealt with in Chapter 16. The more recent re-structuring of the inspectorate is documented in Chapter 17.