By Dr Colum Kenny, chair of the MA in Journalism, DCU Four Courts Press Reviewed by Paul Keenan

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

In 1972, King's Inns, the institution responsible for the training of Ireland's barristers, found itself facing severe financial difficulties and unable to secure assistance from the government of Jack Lynch or private benefactors. In order to meet its debts, the society took the radical and drastic decision to sell a large number of its library catalogue, setting in motion a cultural controversy known as "the battle of the books."

In his latest work dealing with the Irish legal profession, Dr Colum Kenny, charts this "battle" and the subsequent loss to Irish bibliophile heritage.In spite of the proviso set down by the King's Inns society that books sold must not be law books and only those "not of Irish interest", Dr Kenny asserts that the works eventually put under the hammer at Sotheby's amounted to a catastrophe for Irish cultural history. Fields of study that have grown only since 1972 have been undermined by the sale of so many books deemed not of Irish interest in that year.

The lost works, described as being of "literary, scientific, religious and ethnographic interest", amounted to 7,000 volumes, consisting of between 2,700 and 2,800 individual titles. King's Inns' acquisition of these works had begun as early as 1788, even before the library itself was constructed. Benefiting from the Copyright Act of 1801, entitling it to one free copy of every new book and reprint published in the United Kingdom, the library grew to the point of being "overloaded with books of all sorts."

While the seeming indifference displayed by the government of the day to the sale may seem implausible in today's climate of cultural renovation and protection, Dr Kenny reminds the reader that 1972 was not 2002, and, as the haemorrhage of books was taking place, events in Northern Ireland dominated political attention, and the wider destruction of the Republic's Georgian and Victorian heritage in the name of progress relegated King's Inns to the "back page" of topical debate.

With this lack of intervention - and Irish libraries too poorly funded to bid for the books - the quest to secure the catalogue fell to a tiny band of protestors against the sale who worked to raise enough funds to pre-empt the crash of the auctioneer's gavel. Notable amongst them were future President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, her husband Nicholas, then of An Taisce, and Charles J Haughey.

While Dr Kenny is clear in naming these "heroes of the hour" and just as critical of the parties involved in the sale of a great slice of Irish heritage, he does not seek villains here to create some mock sense of drama. Instead, giving primacy to learning the lessons of history he devotes space at the end of the book to a prevention plan against such a massive loss of Ireland's literature in the future.

But this is not 1972, and such lessons have been learned have they not? At the end of a supposedly more enlightened 2002, with leaner times once again just around the corner, and bulldozers assailing our history at the walls of Carrickmore, one sees sense in prevention plans such as that contained in The Battle of the Books.