Few enduring political reputations have been construed on so slender a historical base as that of James Fintan Lalor, long regarded as perhaps the most important theoretician of the social, economic and political condition of Irish peasantry in the 19th Century. A handful of letters to 'The Nation of Irish Felon' in 1847 - 48, and a wide, but not voluminous private correspondence with assorted Young Irelanders, are the sole sources of his improbable posthumous repute.

Not that his fame is undeserved. By yoking the land to the national question in 1847, Fintan successfully changed the tone and the content of Irish politics for much of the remainder of the century. However, though his contemporaries were impressed by his prose, they were less enamoured by his policies.

The author, Donal Buckley, the first on Lalor in generations, attempts to rescue Lalor from his disciples by returning him more fully to his age.