Belmore: The Lowry-Corry Families of Castle Coole, 1646-1913 tells the fascinating story of two families who left Dumfries in the mid 17th century to settle in Fermanagh and Tyrone. The marriage of Galbraith Lowry to Sarah Corry united their considerable fortunes and political clout. Their only surviving son, Armar Lowry Corry, inherited some 70,000 acres and an income of £12,000 and moved up in the heady world of Irish society and politics as Baron Belmore with a marriage arranged to a be...

"Though the story of the potato famine has been told before, it's never been as thoroughly reported or as hauntingly told." — New York PostIt started in 1845 and before it was over more than one million men, women, and children would die and another two million would flee the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was the worst disaster in the nineteenth century—it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perf...

In this vivid account, the author punctures some generally held assumptions: despite slaughter and famine, the province on the eve of the Plantation was not completely depopulated as was often asserted at the time; the native Irish were not deliberately given the most infertile land; some of the most energetic planters were Catholic; and the Catholic Church there emerged stronger than before. Above all, natives and newcomers fused to a greater degree than is widely believed: apart from rec...

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...

Now that Northern Ireland’s “troubles” appear to be over, with old enemies the DUP and Sinn Féin sharing power, what will happen to the hard men of loyalism?The Ulster Volunteer Force emerged during the first sparks of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the mid-1960s. Their campaign of violence quickly marked them out as one of the most extreme loyalist groups.Henry MacDonald and Jim Cusack provide a fascinating insight into the UVF’s origins, growth and decline. They follow th...

In Belfast Taxi the city’s taxi drivers – of all ages and from all backgrounds – tell their stories in their own words, covering everything from the beginnings of the public-hire and private-hire industries, to the dark days of the Troubles and the vital role taxis currently play in Belfast’s burgeoning tourist economy.Join Lee Henry as he tours the city in the company of the city’s drivers, including Charlie, who drove members of the press throughout the Troubles; Majella, one of ...

Micheal MacGowan was born in 1865 in the parish of Cloghaneely in the Donegal gaeltacht. He was the eldest of twelve children in a poverty-stricken family, living in a thatched cottage and speaking no English. He ended his days in a large slate-roofed house in the same place. First published in Irish as Rotha Mór an tSaol, this is his account of the fate dealt to him by 'the Wheel of Life'. From the age of nine he was hired out for six consecutive summers at a hiring fee of 30 shillings. A...

In Seventeenth-Century Ireland, Professor Raymond Gillespie, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, tries to understand Ireland in the seventeenth century in a new way. Most surveys of seventeenth-century Ireland approach the period using war, conquest, plantation and colonisation as their organising themes. It does not see Ireland as a passive receptor of colonial ideas imposed from above. In fact, Professor Gillespie argues that the seventeenth century was a uniquely creative moment i...

A hundred years ago sevants underpinned middle- and upper-class life in Ireland, and domestic service was the major source of employment for women before social conditions changed utterly after the First World War and labour-saving appliances took their place. Two generations on, the domestic servant is an almost extinct species. This book examines an area of life which has never been adequately reflected in Irish literature, labour or social history. The author of this pioneering study ba...

The English navy inflicted a narrow defeat on the Armada, but it was the Irish coast that encompassed its downfall. 'Heed that coast!' The Duke of Medina Sidonia wanted only to guide La Felissima Armada home safely. In the North Sea he issued sailing instructions, which, if they had been followed, would have given the Armada a safety margin of at least 300 miles. He particularly ordered them to '...take great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that may happe...

The Pursuit of the Heiress is a new, greatly enlarged and more widely focused version of what the late Lawrence Stone described as ‘a brilliant long essay or short book on the subject of the role of heiresses among the Irish aristocracy’, which was published by the Ulster Historical Foundation under the same title in 1982 and has long been out of print.The new book comes to the same broad conclusions about heiresses -- namely that their importance as a means of enlarging the estate...

The present-day Republic of Ireland was created by a revolutionary elite which developed between 1858 and 1914. Here, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, Professor Tom Garvin, considers the social origins of the revolutionary politicians who became the rulers of Ireland after the 1916 Rising and examines their political preconceptions, ideologies and prejudices. In many cases they were not only influenced by old agrarian grievances and memories of the Great Irish Famine, but also, an...