Irish History

On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson - the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War - was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significa…

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…

On the morning of Saturday 22nd April 1978, members of an Active Service Unit of the IRA hijacked a car and crossed the countryside to the town of Lisburn. Within an hour, they had killed an off-duty policeman in front of his youn…

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…

A ground-breaking new book that looks back on Ireland's struggle for freedom with a refreshingly new perspective and attitude. This is a journey into a turbulent period in Ireland's past and covers the exploits of charismatic guer…

"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 Turning Tide is a hymn to a sea passage of world-historical importance. Combining social and cultural history, nature-writing, travelogue and politics, Jon Gower charts a sea which has carried both Vikings and saints, invasion…

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…

On Wednesday, 2 August 1922, Free State troops landed at Fenit pier in the first of a series of seaborne landings on the Cork and Kerry coast. This was a risky and ambitious strategy for the Free State government, whose aim was to…

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…

April 1921 saw the arrival of the first internees at the newly opened internment camp in the ‘Military Prison in the Field Bere Island’. The internees comprised a diverse group of men including poets, writers, intellectuals and co…

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 …

This book draws together the work of twelve contributors, each of whom delves into the history of the one of the county's big houses and the families who lived in them.

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…

The Great Lighthouses of Ireland is a collection of striking images and fascinating stories about the lighthouses around Ireland's coast and the extraordinary men and women who lived and worked in them. The book, published to acco…

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 …

This is the history of what is now Cork’s Glen River Park. It traces the area’s progression from a proto-industrial zone in the early eighteenth century to the public amenity space it is today. Six mills once punctuated the valley…

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…

Michael Collins was shot dead in an ambush at Béal na mBláth, Co Cork, on 22 August 1922. The manner of his death and the identity of his killer have been the source of intense speculation and controversy ever since. In this book …