Irish History

There are 358 holywells recorded in the Archaeological Inventory for County Cork and Amanda Clarke has spent 7 years visiting them all at least once. She has found them by roads in City, town and village, seeking them out down bor…

Often imitated but never equalled, John Breslin and Sarah-Anne Buckley are back with the third instalment of their bestselling Old Ireland in Colour series. Beloved by Irish readers at home and abroad, for this new volume the auth…

At the Dublin Matrimonial Court in the blistering summer heat of 1876, mother of three, 43-yeard old Catherine Louisa Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, sits alone in an all-male courtroom of 'gentlemen'. Her husband, Captain Richard Spre…

John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friend…

If the objective of colonisation should be the establishment of economic benefit, in Ireland it was to enforce order. Settlers were required to usurp the traditional lands of its indigenous population. Their attempts to enforce Pr…

It's said that almost everyone in Ireland, particularly in rural communities, will know of someone with a ‘cure'. It might be for the mumps, a stye in the eye, or a sprain. Indeed the author of Cures of Ireland, Cecily Gilligan wa…

The 1930s in Ireland is often remembered as a bleak period of economic stagnation and unemployment. But, 1932, hailed by the Irish Press as a 'new era', was an early glimmer of the modernity that Ireland would later reach, with ke…

"This hour-by-hour account of the Easter Rising as seen by a non-participant writer and poet is absolutely fascinating. Helps one think straighter about 1916 than all the recent revisionist and anti-revisionist scribblings...a mar…

St Patrick is one of the best-known and best-loved saints in the world. His life and legacy is deeply ingrained in Irish history and society, as the annual 17 March celebrations in Ireland and across the globe show. Northern Irela…

A brilliant work of historical true crime charting a pivotal event in the 19th century, the Phoenix Park murders in Dublin, that gripped the world and forever altered the course of Irish history, from renowned journalist, former N…

At last, Celtic civilization receives a worthy tribute: a gallery of full-color paintings representing culture from ancient artifacts (pagan and Christian) to the contemporary artistic renaissance now underway. The beautiful and m…

In the field of landscape painting, Irish painters of the eighteenth century were outstanding and several artists, including William Ashford, George Barrett and the brothers Thomas Roberts and Thomas Sautelle Roberts painted lands…

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…