Irish History

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.

A thrilling tale of passion, courage and determination. Michael Collins became a hero: a soldier, a freedom-fighter, a ghost: Ireland's Rebel Son. In life, in death, a legend.Raised on songs and stories of Irish heroes and the str…

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…

Originally from west Kerry, Thomas Ashe was a schoolteacher in north County Dublin and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. During the 1916 Rising he commanded the Fingal Battalion of the Volunteers, who were tasked with des…

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 …

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 …

The story of Catholic Emancipation begins with the violent Anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780, fuelled by the reduction in Penal Laws against the Roman Catholics harking back to the sixteenth century. Some fifty years later, the p…

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 …

One hundred years after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and partition, after 30 years of Troubles, the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit, the debate on Irish unity has intensified. But what could a united Ireland look like, and what would i…

Independence Memories is a fascinating social history, from living and inherited memory, of the period surrounding Irish Independence and the Civil War. It was a time of violence, of death, of emigration, of families divided into …

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…