Irish History

Tom Crean is one of the most iconic figures in Irish history. Born in 1877 in County Kerry, he enlisted in the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen, the start of a career that would bring him to the most extreme environments on Earth.…

The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923 During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These "Big Ho…

This book situates the history of Trinity College Dublin within the great upheavals and changes that were taking place in Ireland and the wider world in the transformative period between 1912 and 1923. The period saw Trinity and i…

"This book is my attempt to get to know my Uncle Dennie, born in the Mealagh Valley, Bantry in 1901, died in Dublin 1967. The child raised by his grandparents. The older brother who was a sort of uncle to his 16 younger siblings. …

In this fascinating sequel to the ground-breaking publication of Broad Church in 2019, A Broad Church 2 reveals the true history of the Provisional Republican movement in the south of Ireland in the cataclysmic decade of the 1980s…

The astonishing story of the English heiress who devoted her life to the IRAShe grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate. She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958. She trained at Oxfor…

Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world. But on a remote island, off the coast of County Mayo, it has a louder voice. The local radio station runs a thrice-daily roll-call of the recently departed.The islanders keep vigil with…

The Civil War in Kerry was more brutal, divisive, violent and protracted than in any other county leaving physical, psychological and emotional scars which have lasted for generations. No Middle Path tells the story of this most t…

The focus of this book is an utterly neglected, important figure from the period leading up to the foundation of the Gaelic League and the early years of that movement, Pádraig Ó Laoghaire (1870–1896) from the Béarra Peninsula in …

From near Bantry to Inchigeelagh, on to Macroom, Dripsey and Coachford, all the way north to Millstreet and almost as far as Mallow. Like anywhere else in Cork and Ireland for that matter it’s dotted with murder. Some murders are …

Serial winners and glorious losers, heroes andvillains, trailblazing women, role models and rogues,all are here; so too are audacious sporting founders,enduring legends and forgotten or overlookedgreats. Through a selection of six…

A fascinating history of Irishmen, woven through the clothes they wear. Taking the clothes they wore as a starting point, Paul Galvin skilfully weaves together a collection of stories of Irish men who defined the culture and mood …

n the early 1970s, Sir Maurice Oldfield of the British Secret Service, MI6, embarked upon a decade-long campaign to derail the political career of Charles Haughey. The English spymaster believed Haughey was a Provisional IRA godfa…

Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion opens in 1970 when the Irish Women's Liberation Movement burst onto the streets and screens of a society bewildered by women demanding equal status in …

ON EVERY TIDE is a wide-ranging and challenging reassessment of the Irish diaspora. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research, and his own career-long engagement with the complexities of Irish identity, Sean Connolly reveals …

This remarkable book provides an account of the history of Ireland like we've never seen before. Told through the prism of the lives of twenty-one extraordinary women, it offers an alternative vision of Irish history, one that put…

We Don't Know Ourselves is a very personal vision of recent Irish history from the year of O'Toole's birth, 1958, down to the present. Ireland has changed almost out of recognition during those decades, and Fintan O'Toole's life c…

From 1918 to 1922 Michael Collins kept working diaries of his busy revolutionary life. They are a collection of hurried notes, necessary lists, names and appointments, things to do, and things not done. They are a record of his lo…

Born in Dublin in 1822, Lieutenant-General John Nicholson was raised and educated in Ireland. He joined the East India Company's Bengal Army as 16-year old boy-soldier and he saw action in Afghanistan, the two Anglo-Sikh wars and …

In this people's history of Ireland, John Creedon introduces a fascinating collection of stories from the Schools' Collection. This treasure trove of old stories, ways and wisdom, which could have been lost for ever, was collected…

In the eleven months between August 1971 and July 1972, Northern Ireland experienced its worst year of violence. No future year of the Troubles experienced such death and destruction. The 'year of chaos' began with the introductio…

First published in 1949, 'Guerilla Days in Ireland' is an extraordinary story of the Irish War of Independence and the fight between two unequal forces, which ended in the withdrawal of the British from twenty-six counties. Seven …

You may know all about the Easter Rising and the Good Friday Agreement, but did you know that the hypodermic needle was invented in Tallaght? Or that Dublin was the first city in the world to have a woman stockbroker, decades befo…

By the sixth week of the Irish Civil War in 1922, all eyes turned to Cork, as the National Army readied its climactic attack on the 'rebel capital'. At 2 a.m. on a Bank Holiday Monday, Emmet Dalton and 450 soldiers of the National…

When Rudyard Kipling, whose only son died fighting with the Irish Guards on the Western Front in 1915, penned the words "For where there are Irish there's bound to be fighting," he wasn't exaggerating Ireland's contribution to the…

On a sunlit evening in l882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried ou…

In June 1922, just seven months after Sinn Fein negotiators signed a compromise treaty with representatives of the British government to create the Irish Free State, Ireland collapsed into civil war. While the body count suggests …

Myles Dungan's family was involved in four violent deaths between 1915 and 1922. Jack Clinton, an immigrant small farmer from County Meath, was murdered in the remote and lawless Arizona territory by a powerful rancher's hired ass…

During the Irish Civil War, events of late 1922 and early 1923 together with waves of 'dishonourable' killings created poisoned relations between Republicans and 'Free Staters' which would last for several generations. The most en…

Guardians of the Peace is a political history of the Irish police force, An Garda Síochana, from its foundation at the birth of the Irish State, through the Irish Civil War, the threat of the fascist ‘Blueshirts’, the continuing c…