Money is power. It shapes our world in ways that can leave the mind reeling. Indeed, the bank crisis and subsequent recession made clear the influence that it has over our lives. Yet despite this, money remains an opaque and abstract space, with its own language and gatekeepers to knowledge. As citizens we are required to support the profit-seeking strategies of banks and other financial institutions but we are not supposed to question those strategies, the logic that underpins them, nor t...

The questions surrounding how the Irish economy was brought to the brink – who was to blame, and who should pay for these mistakes – have been rightly debated at length. But beyond this very legitimate exercise, there are deeper questions that need to be answered.These questions relate to why we made the decisions we did, not just in the last 10 years, but over the last 80. How did certain industries become prominent at the expense of others, banking as opposed to ...

During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that...

The voyage of the 'coffin ship' Ajax, from Dublin to Grosse Île, the Canadian quarantine station as described in the contemporary diary of one of the passengers, Robert Whyte. Whyte was a Protestant gentleman of education and position, as well as being a professional writer who intended to publish his diary. The diary appeared in 1848. It is signed in the author's own handwriting and features vivid descriptions of the spectacular scenery along the way and the striking delineations of the p...

They are some of Ireland's most famous names, for all the wrong reasons. They are Ireland's missing women, many of them murdered and their bodies hidden by evil killers who remain at large. They include Annie McCarrick, who was murdered in the Dublin-Wicklow mountains; Jo Jo Dullard, who was abducted and murdered while hitching a lift in Co. Kildare; and Fiona Pender, who was seven months pregnant when she was murdered and hidden at an unknown place in the midlands. And then there are Irel...

Change is constant in human affairs and Ireland has seen its fair share over the centuries. If we are to understand Ireland's current challenges then we must grasp the complexity of its past. This concise and even-handed account describes the history of Ireland from early times. Based upon up-to-date research, the narrative covers all political, social and cultural issues of importance, right up to the autumn of 1995 with the visit of President Clinton and the end of the first year of peac...

This is not a boring history book. Instead, it takes a sympathetic look at some very ordinary people in a very extraordinary time. Of interest to anyone whose forefathers left Ireland in the late 19th or early 20th century. Contains informative and graphic accounts and photographs of the lives of both rich and poor, in Belfast while the Titanic was being built.

Michael Hopkinson's Green Against Green is the definitive study of the Irish civil war, putting in perspective a bitter and passionate conflict, the legacy of which still divides Irish society today. Widely praised and frequently cited as the most authoritative work on the subject, it continues to hold its place as one of the finest works on modern Irish history. Unlike the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War has been largely overlooked by historians, put off by ...

Ethna Carbery (born Anna Johnston, 3 December 1866 21 April 1902) was an Irish journalist, writer and poet. She is best-known for the ballad Roddy McCorley and the Song of Ciabhán. Along with Alice Milligan she published two Irish nationalist magazines. In 1900 she was a founding member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the revolutionary women's organisation led by Maud Gonne. In 1901, she married poet and folklorist Séamus MacManus (18691960), and then took the pen name Ethna Carbery, to avoid con...

Kilmainham Jail is perhaps the most important building in modern Irish history. A place of incarceration since its construction in the late eighteenth century, it housed a succession of petty criminals, including sheep rustlers and, during the Famine, people who committed crimes with the sole aim of being imprisoned there: even the meager rations offered at the jail were better than what was available in other parts of the country. It was a powerful symbol of British rule on the island of ...

This book draws together essays on modern British history, empire, liberalism and conservatism in honour of Trevor O. Lloyd, Emeritus Professor of Modern British history at the University of Toronto for some thirty years beginning in the 1960s. With Lloyd best known for his two histories of the Empire and of domestic Britain, published in the Short Oxford History of the Modern World series, as well as his pioneering psephological study of the 1880 General Election, the essays include analy...

The political situation in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century was characterised by crisis and change. Armed rebellion against the British Crown, the prosecution of the Anglo-Irish War, the emergence of the Irish Free State, and the eruption of the Civil War over the treaty with Great Britain ensured that the birth of the modern Irish nation was bloody and difficult. This book details the life of an average Volunteer, and includes the experiences of internment, the lack of establi...