The Medieval Irish Church’s view of war and civilian lives

Adomnán’s Lex Innocentium and the Laws of War

by James W. Houlihan (Four Courts Press, €50.00 /£45.00)

In this book the ordinary reader will find an account of the roots of the views about the treatments of innocent civilians, clergy and other unarmed folk in time of war.

It is a discussion of the Cáin Adomnáin sworn to and promulgated by the community leaders of Ireland and Scotland at Birr in 697, but lawyer turned historian James W. Houlihan ranges well outside the confines of early Christian Ireland to discuss ideas about laws of war and the protection of non-combatants over the centuries.

He quotes a harrowing account of the massacres at My Lai in 1968 during the second Vietnam War, and officer Calley’s account drawing on the example of the Old Testament.

Read in conjunction with Peader King’s book (reviewed elsewhere on these pages) readers will find thoughtful considerations in one matched by the anger in another. Today My Lai, while an instance of concentrated evil, is eclipsed also by the evil being perpetrated even at this moment in the Yemen, a war which is destroying in the name of peace a long isolated people and an ancient culture.

Here in Adomnán is perhaps the basic source and moral justification of Ireland’s long-sustained neutrality, and the country’s well-established services in the cause of peace and development. Readers should not feel themselves daunted by the academic appearance of this book, for it is quite readable; the work of a new historian long used to handling and presenting legal evidence with clarity, and is filled with aperçus that will give everyone who reads the book ‘furiously to think’.