Ireland 1922


Book Description

FIFTY ESSAYS.FIFTY CONTRIBUTORS.ONE EXTRAORDINARY YEAR. From the handover of Dublin Castle, to the dawning of a new border across the island, to the fateful divisions of the civil war, Ireland 1922 provides a snapshot of a year of turmoil, tragedy and, amidst it all, state-building as the Irish revolution drew to a close. Leading international scholars from different disciplines explore a turning point in Irish history; one whose legacy remains controversial a century on.




The Irish Civil War 1922–23


Book Description

In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Anglo-Irish War, Peter Cottrell explores the Irish Civil War, a devastating conflict that tore Ireland apart. This book examines the many factions that played a part in the fighting and the terror and counter-terror operations, focusing on the short bloody battles that witnessed more deaths than the preceding years during the struggle for the Free State. Cottrell particularly focuses on the contrasting styles of leadership and the conduct of combat operations by the IRA and the National Army, providing a fascinating study for all students of Irish history as well as military history.




The Civil War in Dublin


Book Description

While the Irish Civil War first erupted in Dublin, playing out through the seizure and eventual recapture of the Four Courts, it quickly swept over the entire country. In The Civil War in Dublin, John Dorney extends his study of Dublin beyond the Four Courts surrender, delivering shocking revelations of calculated violence and splits within the pro-Treaty armed forces. Dorney's exacting research, using primary sources and newly available eyewitness testimonies from both sides of the conflict, provides insight into how the entire city of Dublin operated under conditions of disorder and bloodshed: how civilians and guerrilla fighters controlled the streets, how female insurgents operated alongside their male counterparts, how the patterns of IRA violence and National Army counter-insurgency alternated, and-for the first time-how the pro-Treaty 'Murder Gang' emerged from Michael Collins' IRA Intelligence Department, 'the Squad', with devastating and ruthless effect. The Civil War in Dublin brings the chaos of life in the city of Dublin to life through meticulous detail, and it reveals unsettling truths about the extreme actions taken by a burgeoning Irish Free State and its Anti-Treaty opponents. [Subject: Irish Studies, History, Military History, Dublin]




A History of Ireland, 1800–1922


Book Description

The years of Ireland’s union with Great Britain are most often regarded as a period of great turbulence and conflict. And so they were. But there are other stories too, and these need to be integrated in any account of the period. Ireland’s progressive primary education system is examined here alongside the Famine; the growth of a happily middle-class Victorian suburbia is taken into account as well as the appalling Dublin slum statistics. In each case, neither story stands without the other. This study synthesises some of the main scholarly developments in Irish and British historiography and seeks to provide an updated and fuller understanding of the debates surrounding nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.




The Irish Labour Party, 1922-73


Book Description

The first fifty years of the state saw Ireland change dramatically, and the Irish Labour Party changed with it. Using a wealth of new material, Niamh Puirseil traces the party's fortunes through its first fifty years in the Dail, from its perceived role as the 'political wing of the St Vincent de Paul' to its promise that the 1970s would be socialist. As well as examining the competing currents in the party itself, she also looks at Labour's relationship with different organisations and movements, including trade unions, republicans, the far left, the Catholic Church, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, as well as with other Social Democratic parties in Britain and Northern Ireland. "The Irish Labour Party, 1922-1973" is an outstanding contribution to the political history of twentieth-century Ireland. Over the course of the book, Niamh Puirseil charts the ever-depressing fortunes of the Labour party. Her exhaustive research provides a penetrating analysis of the myriad personalities and structures of the Labour Party, and shows a new picture of a party that seemed throughout the period to be hell bent on pressing the self-destruct button.This book offers a fresh and insightful look at a party riven by factions throughout its existence, and one that never reached its potential for a variety of reasons all outlined here. This book marks a major contribution to our understanding, not simply of the Labour Party, but of twentieth-century Ireland itself.




Fatal Path


Book Description

This is a magisterial narrative of the most turbulent decade in Anglo-Irish history: a decade of unleashed passions that came close to destroying the parliamentary system and to causing civil war in the United Kingdom. It was also the decade of the cataclysmic Great War, of an officers' mutiny in an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army and of Irish armed rebellion. It was a time, argues Ronan Fanning, when violence and the threat of violence trumped democratic politics. This is a contentious view. Historians have wished to see the events of that decade as an aberration, as an eruption of irrational bloodletting. And they have have been reluctant to write about the triumph of physical force. Fanning argues that in fact violence worked, however much this offends our contemporary moral instincts. Without resistance from the Ulster Unionists and its very real threat of violence the state of Northern Ireland would never have come into being. The Home Rule party of constitutionalist nationalists failed, and were pushed aside by the revolutionary nationalists Sinn Fein. Bleakly realistic, ruthlessly analytical of the vacillation and indecision displayed by democratic politicians at Westminster faced with such revolutionary intransigence, Fatal Path is history as it was, not as we would wish it to be.




Ireland and the Land Question 1800-1922


Book Description

This pamphlet makes use of the most recent revisionist literature to reassess the view, much propagated by nationalist sources, that Ireland was a land of impoverished peasants oppressed by English laws and absentee English landlords. The land question has always been closely linked to the development of Irish national consciousness, and greatly exercised the minds of English politicians in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The author examines the nature of English understanding of Irish problems, which was often limited or ignorant, and attributes to it much of the unsound and ineffective ligislation passed. The book is concerned less with questions of English party politics than with the situation in Ireland itself and with the nature of the English response to it.




Defending Ireland


Book Description

This fascinating and original book is the first to analyse the evolution of internal security policy and external defence policy in Ireland from independence to the present day. Professor O'Halpin examines the very limited concept of external defence understood by the first generation of Irish leaders, going on to chart the state's repeated struggles with the IRA and with other perceived internal and external threats to stability. He explores the state's defence and security relations with Britain and the United States and, drawing extensively on newly released records, he deals authoritatively with problems of subversion, espionage, counterintelligence and codebreaking during the Second World War. In conclusion, the book analyses significant post-Second World War developments, including anti-communist co-operation with Western powers, the emergence of UN service as a key element of Irish foreign and defence policy, the state's response to the Northern Ireland crisis since 1969, and Ireland's difficulties in addressing the collective security dilemmas facing the European Union in the post-Cold War era. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the development of independent Ireland since 1922.




Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World


Book Description

An Irish Times Best Book of the Year Longlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing "Sets Ireland's post-1916 history in its global and human context, to brilliant effect." —Neil Hegarty, Irish Times Books of the Year 2015 The Irish Revolution has long been mythologized in American culture but seldom understood. Too often, the story of Irish independence and its grinding aftermath in the early part of the twentieth century has been told only within a parochial Anglo-Irish context. Now, in the critically acclaimed Bitter Freedom, Maurice Walsh, with "a novelist's eye for detailing lives in extremis" (Feargal Keane, Prospect), places revolutionary Ireland within the panorama of nationalist movements born out of World War I. Beginning with the Easter Rising of 1916, Bitter Freedom follows through from the War of Independence to the end of the post-partition civil war in 1924. Walsh renders a history of insurrection, treaty, partition, and civil war in a way that is both compelling and original. Breaking out this history from reductionist, uplifting narratives shrouded in misguided sentiment and romantic falsification, the author provides a gritty, blow-by-blow account of the conflict, from ambushes of soldiers and the swaggering brutality of the Black and Tan militias to city streets raked by sniper fire, police assassinations, and their terrible reprisals; Bitter Freedom provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human face of the conflict. Walsh also weaves surprising threads into the story of Irish independence such as jazz, American movies, and psychoanalysis, examining the broader cultural environment of emerging modernity in the early twentieth century, and he shows how Irish nationalism was shaped by a world brimming with revolutionary potential defined by the twin poles of Woodrow Wilson in America and Vladimir Lenin in Russia. In this “invigorating account” (Spectator), Walsh demonstrates how this national revolution, which captured worldwide attention from India to Argentina, was itself profoundly shaped by international events. Bitter Freedom is "the most vivid and dramatic account of this epoch to date" (Literary Review).




Police Casualties in Ireland 1919-1922


Book Description

The RIC are often portrayed as the villains of the War of Independence, Irishmen who betrayed their country. Police Casualties in Ireland 1919 - 1922 records in detail the deaths of over 500 police casualties during the war including the RIC, Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and Ulster Special Constabulary.