Portrait of a Christian crusader

Edmund Rice and the First Christian Brothers. By Daire Keogh, Four Courts Press, €45

It would be as unfair to blame Edmund Rice for the excesses committed in his name by some of his successors as it would be to blame Christopher Columbus for the excesses committed in Iraq by those who now run the country he discovered.

Like the founders of many things, however, Rice has rarely been seen in his own ...