This 1909 book was written in an effort to direct 'the attention of thoughtful minds in Great Britain and Ireland to Irish history'. It begins with the period leading up to the Anglo-Norman conquest and moves through to the reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book traces Swift's fluctuating reception in Ireland through the centuries, finding in Swift's ambivalence about his homeland - which he could not love even as he defended its cause - echoes and anticipations of the ambiguities that have marked the development of Irish identity at large. Mahony looks at Swift's posthumous reputation in literary culture and examines his unusual place in Irish political rhetoric. He shows that Swift's patriotic reputation suffered in the later eighteenth century through its seeming irrelevance to shifting political circumstances.