Novedades

How do we approach troubled histories? Should historians attempt to recover the past and tell it as they imagined it really was? Or should they be more creative and write histories better suited to the needs of the present? These vexed questions inform historical writing on twentieth century Ireland. This volume of 'problem-articles' and review-essays explores what historian John M. Regan calls 'historical anomalies'. These are identified where inconsistencies and errors appear in the interpretation of historical information. Why does critical evidence sometimes go unseen? How does a ...

Charles Haughey maintained one of the most controversial and brilliant careers in the history of Irish politics, but for every stage in his mounting success there was one issue that complicated, and almost devastated, his ambitions to lead Irish politics: Northern Ireland. In ‘A Failed Political Entity’ Stephen Kelly uncovers the complex motives that underlie Haughey’s fervent attitude towards the political and sectarian violence that was raging across the border. Early in Haughey’s governmental career he took a hard line against the IRA, leading many to think he was antipathetic ...

Timothy M. Gay writes that four-time major champion Rory McIlroy is "golf's ageless Opie Taylor," a superstar whose charm transcends national boundaries and enlivens the game. His swing is so powerful that Tiger Woods is teaching his own son to mimic Rory's action. But a charismatic persona and a pretty swing don't translate into winning championships. Rory has failed to win another major and fallen short of achieving the career Grand Slam. Rory Land tells the saga of a compassionate superstar living in a world where "money has no conscience."

Almost a century after his untimely death in 1922, this lively and insightful new assessment explores the man Michael Collins described as ‘father of us all’ and reclaims Arthur Griffith as the founder of both Sinn Féin and the Irish Free State. Since his death when President of Dáil Éireann, Griffith’s role has often been misrepresented. Too radical for some, he was not militant enough for others. His legacy belongs to no single political party today. Colum Kenny argues that efforts to ‘other’ Griffith as ‘un-Irish’ raise uncomfortable questions about Irish identity. A ...

In this sequel to his bestselling Easter Rising 1916: The Trials, Seán Enright puts the great legal cases of the period into context with exacting clarity, including the Mac Curtain Inquest, the trials of MacSwiney, Markievicz, Maher and Foley, the Bloody Sunday courts martial and the trials under martial law. Following the executions of the 1916 leaders, a new government policy of conciliation was attempted but quickly faltered. Rebel prisoners were released, the Great War reached its climax, and Ireland was gripped by the conscription crisis and subsequent resentment over exclusion from ...

General Liam Lynch was a key figure in the Irish Revolution and remains one of the most celebrated IRA leaders of his era. His republicanism was shaped both by his upbringing in Limerick and by the aftermath of the Easter Rising. By the time of the War of Independence, Lynch was in command of the IRA’s Cork No. 2 Brigade and masterminded some of the most important actions against British forces, such as the Fermoy arms raid and the daring kidnapping of British General Cuthbert Lucas. Adamantly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, regarding it a betrayal of the Irish Republic, Lynch became ...

In Ireland, the link between place and myth is strong, and there is no more enlightening way to understand the rich tapestry of Irish mythology, and its relationship to our true history, than by reading the landscape. Earthing the Myths is an engaging and exhaustive county-by-county guide to the vast number of fascinating places in Ireland connected to myth, folklore and early history. Covering the period 800 BC to AD 650, this book spans the Late Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the early Christian period, and explores the ways in which the land evolved, and with it our catalogue of myths and ...

This engagingly personal chronicle by poet Gerald Dawe explores the lives and times of leading Irish writers, including W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, James Plunkett, John McGahern, Stewart Parker and Leontia Flynn, alongside lesser-known names from the earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as Ethna Carberry, Alice Milligan, Joseph Campbell and George Reavey. The Wrong Country also portrays the changing cultural backgrounds of the author’s contemporaries, such as Thomas Kilroy, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, Colm Tóibín, ...

This groundbreaking book is the first to detail, with startling new revelations, just how integral the Republic of Ireland was to the Provisional IRA’s campaign at every level. The sheer level of sympathy and support that existed for militant republicanism in Southern Irish society demonstrates that the longevity of the ‘Troubles’ was due in large part to this widespread tolerance and aid. No Irish political party was without members who aided the Provisional IRA in their early years of their campaign, as former IRA volunteers attest to in interviews and previously unpublished ...

Covering the years 1920–1925, Without a Dog’s Chance is the first major study of Northern nationalists’ role in the Boundary Commission that they, and their allies in the Irish Free State, had hoped to use to end partition and destroy the new Northern state. For Northern nationalists, the partition of Ireland was an intensely traumatic event, not only because it consigned almost half a million nationalists to a government that was not of their choosing, but also because they regarded partition as the mutilation of their Irish citizenship and nationhood. Without a Dog’s Chance fills ...

During a time of high tension, terror and fear, the Irish Defence Forces faced the very real threat of the Irish State being plunged into a savagely sectarian civil war. The southern state faced a breakdown of law and order, severely challenged by manhunts, prison breaks, shoot-outs, kidnappings, bank robberies, subversive training camps, bomb-making factories, illegal weapons shipments, and border operations. Soldiering Against Subversion is the dramatic and previously untold story of the Irish Defence Forces’ critical role in defending the southern state against paramilitary forces ...

Fighting Irish is a chronological account of the First World War from the perspective of the men of the Irish Regiments of the British Army, revealing the extent of the Irish military commitment from 1914-1918. It tackles the most pressing aspects of the war, from campaign strategy to the soldier’s intimate war experiences, using engaging documentary evidence and poignant eyewitness accounts. It chronicles their humour and trials, their fighting reputation and the mundane drudgery of routine military life, balanced by an insatiable waste of life itself. Every campaign theatre where Irish ...

‘I tell you this early morning I signed my death warrant’ Michael Collins on the day that the Anglo-Irish Treaty was concluded, 6 December 1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was narrowly accepted by the revolutionary Dáil Éireann in January 1922, splitting Sinn Féin irrevocably and leading to the Irish Civil War, a rupture that still defines the Irish political landscape almost one hundred years on. Drawing together the work of a diverse range of scholars, who each re-examine this critical period in Irish political history from a variety of fascinating perspectives, The Treaty ...

A vivid account of the people who lived through the revolutionary period, whether as occupants of the country houses (both large and small), their servants, members of the IRA or the Free State army, or ordinary people living in the countryside caught up in the tides of war. The research is meticulous and is based on an extraordinarily wide range of sources, both published and unpublished, including compensation claims in the National Archives, witness statements given to the Bureau of Military History, and contemporary Irish and UK newspapers. One of the most valuable sources is the family...

This is the first-ever biography of Emmet Dalton, an American-born Dubliner, Home Ruler and later Republican, whose extraordinary military career as a British officer, IRA leader and General in the Free State army brought him from Flanders to Beal na Bláth . A decorated hero of the Battle of the Somme, he returned from the war with the rank of Captain and transferred his military expertise to the now rampant IRA, serving as Director of Training, and greatly impressing Michael Collins with his extraordinary daring and nerve. Soon befriending Collins and becoming his close confidante, he ...

This fully illustrated book explores the history of the fishery piers and harbours of Galway and north Clare. A testament to these structures as feats of engineering, it is also a riveting account of the human aspect that shadowed their construction; a beautiful rendering of the maritime activities that gave life to the Wild Atlantic Way – kelp-making, fishing, turf distribution, and sea-borne trade. 'Humble Works for Humble People' nurtures the retelling of human stories surrounding the piers, giving voice to the unacknowledged legacy of the lives that were their making. The Office of ...

This collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on the impact of the Great Famine in Ireland, with particular focus on the experience in the province of Ulster – much neglected in histories, but which prompted the political geography and sectarian divisions that persisted into the twentieth century. Edited by Patrick Fitzgerald and Anthony Russell, John Mitchel, Ulster and the Great Irish Famine delves into the immeasurable impact of starvation, illness, and emigration on Irish society and the diaspora. The use of relatively neglected sources shines a vital new light on the ...

Sisters of the Revolutionaries focuses on the lives of Margaret and Mary Brigid Pearse, whose brothers, Patrick and Willie, were executed for their role in the Easter Rising and have been commemorated as martyrs ever since. Comparatively little is known about the two sisters, despite their considerable talents and their efforts to uphold the image of their brothers’ legacies. Margaret was an Irish language activist, politician and educator, working with Patrick in founding St Enda’s School in Dublin and taking it into her own hands following his execution. Mary Brigid was a musician and...

Voices from the Easter Rising is a vivid collection of dramatic eyewitness accounts of the events of Easter Week 1916, which detail how the Rising unfolded in Dublin and in a range of other Irish cities, towns and villages. Extraordinary first-hand testimonies from the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, the British Army, members of the public and civil servants reveal how, in the streets of Dublin and around the country, the lives of its citizens were changed forever. Drawn from previously unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, statements from the Bureau ...

This is the extraordinary life story of Ernie O’Malley (1897-1957), one of Ireland’s most complex and influential Republican figures, and later an acclaimed writer. Born in Castlebar in 1897, O’Malley became devoted to Ireland’s fight for freedom at an early age. As a twenty-three-year-old IRA Commandant-General, leading 7,000 volunteers in the brutal War of Independence, and later IRA senior commander during the Civil War, he was captured three times, severely tortured, escaped twice, wounded fourteen times and survived a forty-one-day hunger strike. What distinguishes ...