Until recently the military record of Belfast nationalists inWorld War One was a part of this City’s hidden history. The revised edition of this book seeks to assist the renewed and growing interest in this important part of nationalist history that lay for decades in the shaded margins of contemporary historical events.New political circumstances in our society have made it easier to address the questions of why so many young nationalist men of that time enlisted in regiments of t...

'Never has so much been owed by so many, to so few.' This is the story of those few, in their own words.In the summer of 1940, the British frontlines were the skies above southern England. Spitfires and Hurricanes took on the might of the Luftwaffe, and its feared Messerschmitt fighters, dogfighting high above civilians watching on in awe.Hitler was determined to invade Britain and close down the Western Front for good. But his plan Operation Sea Lion could not begin whil...

?Ireland's War of Independence generated a wealth of published material but very little from a British perspective. Yet many British servicemen left accounts of their time in Ireland from 1918 to 1921. They describe military operations, the IRA, the Irish, the actions of their own forces, morale and relationships with local communities. There is Brigadier Vinden's strange tale of a drinking session with Michael Collins and humour in the sending of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders into a public ...

The name the Romans gave to Ireland was Hibernia, which means 'Land of Winter', and cold feet may have been a factor in their decision to leave the Irish to their own devices. The weather is our main topic of conversation and has done its bit in shaping our character. This lively overview shines a light on incidents when the weather – generally bad – changed the course of Ireland's history. Along the way it takes in those years – and there were quite a few – when the sun really didn't shin...

Frank O'Connor's acclaimed autobiography, now in one volumeWhen Frank O'Connor was born, his parents—Minnie O'Connor, a former maid raised in an orphanage, and Michael O'Donovan, a veteran of the Boer War and the drummer in a local brass-and-reed band—lived above a sweet-and-tobacco shop in Cork, Ireland. The young family soon moved, however, to a two-room cottage at the top of Blarney Street, a lane that originates, as O'Connor so vividly describes it, "near the ri...

On Another Man's Wound, O'Malley's account of his experiences during Ireland's War of Independence, was first published to instant acclaim in 1936 and was followed by his account of his experiences in the Civil War in The Singing Flame. O'Malley had reported directly to Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy during the War of Independence and was appointed OC of the Second Southern Division, the second largest division of the IRA. When the Treaty with Britain was signed on 6 December 1921, di...

Medieval Ireland – The Enduring Tradition, the first instalment in the New Gill History of Ireland series, offers an overview of Irish history from the coming of Christianity in the fifth century to the Reformation in the sixteenth, concentrating on Ireland's cultural and social life and highlighting Irish society's inherent stability in an very unstable period. Such a broad survey reveals features otherwise not easily detected. For all the complexity of political developments, Irish socie...

Why do men abduct women? Are their motives sexual, economic, or social? How crucial is the use of violence? How important is the participation of others? What are the societal consequences of abduction?Answers to these questions can usefully be found in a historical case study of abductions as they occurred in Ireland between 1700 and 1850.Forcibly Without Her Consent describes in detail how abduction was a largely communally-sanctioned exercise in male violence ag...

The struggle between Catholic and Protestant has shaped Irish history since the Reformation, with tragic consequences up to the present day. But how do Catholics and Protestants in Ireland see each other? And how do they view their own communities and what these communities stand for? Tracing the history of religious identities in Ireland over the last three centuries, Marianne Elliott argues that these two questions are inextricably linked and that the identity of both Catholics and Prote...

The interior of the old Ford armoured car stank of sweat, blood and acrid smoke. Pat's eyes desperately struggled to focus in the gloom of the biting cordite fog …On 15 September 1961, Trooper Patrick Mullins was posted missing after the bloody ambush of an Irish UN convoy in a suburb of Elisabethville in the Katanga province of the Congo. The circumstances of that fateful day have remained shrouded in confusion and contradiction for five decades – until now. Missing in Action reveals for ...

Before the 1970s flipped the switch to colour, Irish children ere raised in a world of black, white and an awful lot of grey. But kids, being kids, found endless ways to have fun. Do you remember Dáithí Lacha, Radio Caroline and holidays in Butlin's Mosney? Then this is the book for you! Damian Corless takes us on a tongue-in-cheek trip down memory lane to the age of Let's Draw With Bláithín, instant mashed potato and 'Yellow Submarine'. Set against a backdrop of the space race and the min...

The Modernisation of Irish Society surveys the period from the end of the Famine to the triumph of Sinn Fein in the 1918 election and argues that during that time Ireland became one of the most modern and advanced political cultures in the world. Professor Lee contends that the Famine death-rate, however terrible, was not unprecedented. What was different was the post-Famine response to the catastrophy. The sharply increased rate of emigration left behind a population of tenent farmers eng...