It may be that Brown was caught between two stools. An account of the Irish Enlightenment without a discussion of works by Goldsmith, Burke, and Swift would be Hamlet, not just without the prince, but also without Horatio, Laertes, Ophelia, Claudius, Gertrude, and even young Fortinbras.  These works and these authors have to be included somehow. Yet they form no organic part of Brown’s argument, which is not so much a ringing defence of the vibrancy and mysteriously overlooked strength of the Enlightenment in Ireland as a subtle and finally melancholy dissection of the conditions which ensured that, insofar as enlightened impulses and aspirations were at work in Ireland, they tended to emerge in compromised, curdled, transient, or thwarted forms.

As Brown makes clear, few other European countries stood in such grievous need of Enlightenment as Ireland; and within Ireland there was no shortage of women and men who understood and yearned for the benefits that Enlightenment could bring.  However, it seems that need and yearning were necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the flourishing of Enlightenment.  What Ireland lacked was a resident central genius — a Vico or a Hume — around whom Enlightenment energies could crystallise. 

Who might have played that commanding role? Burke and Goldsmith were in England, Hutcheson was in Glasgow. Swift, whose relationship with Enlightenment was utterly unstraightforward, and who thought of Ireland as “that slavish hateful shore”, was resident, but estranged, deliberately peripheral, and ultimately insane. Diaspora, disaffection, and dementia were obstacles that, in the end, the well-intentioned and sincere, but insufficiently compelling, Enlightenment impulses of more ordinary Irish men and women were unable to surmount.