Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 407 - 19 March 2008
Beyond the Wire: Former Prisoners and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland by Peter Shirlow and Kieran McEvoy
Trade Paperback; 25 Euro / 36 USD / 18 UK; 185 pages
This book provides the first detailed examination of the role played by former loyalist and republican prisoners in grass roots conflict transformation work in the Northern Ireland peace process. It challenges the assumed passivity of former prisoners and ex-combatants. Instead, it suggests that such individuals and the groups which they formed have been key agents of conflict transformation. They have provided leadership in challenging cultures of violence, developed practical methods of resolving inter-communal conflict and found ways for communities to explore their troubled past. In analysing this, the authors challenge the sterile demonisation of former prisoners and the processes that maintain their exclusion from normal civic and social life. The book is a constructive reminder of the need for full participation of both former combatants and victims in post-conflict transformation. It also lays out a new agenda for reconciliation which suggests that conflict transformation can and should begin from the extremes. The book will be of interest to students of criminology, peace and conflict studies, law and politics, geography and sociology as well as those with a particular interest in the Northern Ireland conflict.
Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero by Fearghal McGarry
Trade Paperback; 25 Euro / 36 USD / 18 UK; 440 pages [Add To Basket]
Eoin O'Duffy was one of the most controversial figures of modern Irish history. A guerrilla leader and protégé of Michael Collins, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the republican movement. By 1922 he was chief of staff of the IRA, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood's Supreme Council, and a Sinn Féin deputy in Dáil Éireann. As chief of police, O'Duffy was the strongest defender of the Irish Free State only to become, after his emergence as leader of the Blueshirt movement in 1933, the greatest threat to its survival. Increasingly drawn to international fascism, he founded Ireland's first fascist party, and led an Irish Brigade to fight under General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He died in wartime Dublin, a Nazi collaborator, and a broken man.
This study, the first ever biography of Eoin O'Duffy, draws on unpublished archival and personal papers to trace his journey from revolutionary republicanism to fascism. It examines the importance of cultural forces, including the legacy of the Irish-Ireland movement, Catholicism, anti-communism, and O'Duffy's ideas on sports, morality, and masculinity to explain his descent into extremism. McGarry peels away the public persona to reveal a complex picture of the motives which drove this extraordinary career. A crusading moralist and advocate of teetotalism, obsessed with the need to counter public immorality, who was at the same time a closet homosexual and alcoholic, O'Duffy's remarkable life was characterised by self-aggrandisement, fantasy, and contradiction.
This fascinating biography explores themes as diverse as cultural nationalism, violence, sectarianism, militarism, and masculinity to shed new light on Irish republicanism and the politics of interwar European fascist movements. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of culture, politics, and society in interwar Ireland.
Ireland’s Economic Success: Reasons and Lessons by Paul Sweeney
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 230 pages
Why did "a basket case economy" like Ireland suddenly take off? And what next? These are questions not just the Irish but people in the emerging new EU states and further afield ask themselves.Sweeney's book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the issue based on interviews with: Taoiseach Bertie Ahern; Peter Sutherland, BP Chairman of BP and Goldman SachsInternational, and former EU Commissioner; David Begg, Gen. Sec. of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions; Frances Ruane, Director of ESRI and Trinity Professor of Economics; Olivia O'Leary, Broadcaster and political analyst; Garry McGann. CEO Smurfit Kappa; and Joe Macri, CEO Microsoft Ireland. Part Two of the book provides the reader with the most up-to-date hard facts and previously unpublished statistics on the scale of Ireland's economic achievement, together with an overview of the contributors' point within the context of current economists' debate. A must read for anybody trying to emulate this stunning success, or wanting to find out about the chance of a hard or a soft landing of the Republic's economy.
Words We Use by Diarmaid O Muirithe
Paperback; 13 Euro / 20 USD / 8 UK;310 pages [Add To Basket]
Diarmaid O Muirithe's column "Words We Use" has been a feature of "The Irish Times" over many years. Written in the author's typically modest, witty and sympathetic style, it displays prodigious learning lightly worn and is a delight for all who are interested in and fascinated by the meaning of words. Diarmaid O Muirithe is a lexicographer and etymologist. He explains the origins of words, where they come from, and why we use some of the expressions we do. His knowledge and erudition in languages, ancient and modern, is enormous. With sections from Computers and Shakespeare, Political Correctness, Magic and Monsters to Text Messaging, "Words We Use" is simply a joy.
Macnas Joyful Abandonment by Terry Dineen
Large Format Paperback; 35 Euro / 50 USD / 25 UK; 240 pages, with full colour photographs throughout
Macnas has been entertaining and enchanting audiences for the last 21 years with innovative street events, award winning theatre and community performances. Macnas is a company that believes that the creative experience should be open to all; they harness and celebrate creative collective energy and turn it into the joyful abandonment one sees in every Macnas performance. From constructing a 10 metre Gulliver for Dublin's Millennium celebrations in 1986, to touring with U2 in 42 European countries, to scary surprise Halloween street events, Macnas has always pushed the boundaries of what is considered "theatre" in Ireland and is a name that has become synonymous with having fun on a grand scale. This book will document the journey of Macnas from 1986 until the present day; the company's work, changes, and directions. There will be a heavy emphasis on visual material including a timeline, interviews, profiles, anecdotes, and other data relevant to the journey. As one would expect from a company like Macnas, this book won't be the average coffee table tome. The reader can expect a visual feast, a dazzling array of images, anecdotes and stories from over the years, told as only Macnas know how.
Power, Politics and Pharmaceuticals: Drug Regulation in Ireland in a Global Context Edited by Orla O’Donovan and Kathy Glavanis-Grantham
Hardback; 50 Euro / 75 USD / 37 UK; 262 pages
Central questions that are explored include: What are the implications for health of existing systems of pharmaceutical drug regulation? And, what do existing systems of drug regulation reveal the power of transnational pharmaceutical corporations to shape regulatory and other policies? The importance attached to considering the Irish regulatory system in its international context is reflected in the inclusion of chapters that address the implications of World Trade Organisation and EU regulatory policies and regulatory trends in Canada, Britain and Australia. By demonstrating how the analysis of pharmaceutical drug regulation can provide rich insights into the operation of power in contemporary society, this book challenges the prevailing construction of drug regulation as a sphere of 'policy without politics' and aims to contribute to the imagination of better ways of regulating medicines.
Columbia Jail Journal by James Monaghan
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 278 pages [Add To Basket]
Three Irish Republicans – James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connolly – were arrested at Bogotá airport by the Colombian army, who alleged that they had been training FARC rebels, and were members of the IRA. Almost three years were to pass in which the three men were held in appalling conditions in several different Colombian jails, all the time in daily danger of assassination by fellow prisoners acting for right-wing paramilitaries, who had placed a price on their heads.
Now, for the first time, James Monaghan tells the inside story of the Colombia Three: why they were in the demilitarised zone; what they discussed with the FARC rebels; how they survived the daily dangers of their time in prison. It is an extraordinary, unique account.
To the world media, this was a story of major importance in terms of global issues of terrorism, intimately involving British and US intelligence, the Colombian government, the massive Colombian drugs industry, the US State Department, and the peace process in Ireland. To the men themselves it was a struggle for survival as they were moved from jail to jail, knowing all the time that there was a price on their head that any of their fellow prisoners might be only too keen to collect.
There are lighter moments, too, in this fascinating account, as James Monaghan struggles with his lack of Spanish and tries to avoid the attentions of a homicidal fellow inmate, while Martin McCauley bargains all around him for cigarettes and matches.
Although found not guilty on the charges of training FARC rebels, and released, an appeal by the prosecution saw them sentenced in December 2004 to 17 years in jail. Meanwhile, however, they had gone into hiding, and by August 2005 they had made their way back to Ireland.
Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815-1922 by Malcolm Campbell
Trade Paperback; 20 Euro / 30 USD / 15 UK; 250 pages [Add To Basket]
In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another “New World,” Australia. Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds.
Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland Since 1945 by Henry Patterson and Eric Kaufmann
Trade Paperback; 30 Euro / 40 USD / 20 UK; 276 pages [Add To Basket]
The Ulster Unionist Party and the Orange Order dominated the political landscape of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland for most of the twentieth century, but up until now scholars of Irish history and politics have lacked access to the internal documents of both organizations. This is the first book which is based on unprecedented access to the archives of both the Party and the Order. The history depicted in this book is of two organisations which even at the apogee of their powers in the 1950s were riven with major stresses and conflicts. It shows just how precarious the position of the Unionist and Orange elites was as they struggled to deal with conflicting demands: of working class Protestants for British standards of welfare and wages, of industrialists who opposed the 'socialistic' government at Stormont, of rank and file Orangemen who denounced the Government for restrictions on their right to march and of Border Unionists who opposed new factories that might employ 'disloyalists' i.e. Catholics. From the mid-1960s, the Unionist government faced unprecedented pressure for reform from the civil rights movement and the successive British governments. The book provides for the first time a comprehensive analysis of how the Unionist Party's grassroots mobilized against the reforms and for tough action against the developing IRA campaign. It reveals the complex role played by the leadership of the Orange Order in both opposing change and at the same time stemming the rise of Paisleyism and Protestant paramilitarism. It reveals the key role played by the UUP leader James Molyneaux and his Orange allies in stabilizing the party's position and the subsequent dissolution of the alliance under David Trimble's leadership with his support for the Belfast Agreement.
Tourism, Landscape and the Irish Character: British Travel Writers in Pre-Famine Ireland by William H.A. Williams
Hardback; 50 Euro / 75 USD / 38 UK; 264 pages [Add To Basket]
British tourists in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were both charmed and repulsed. Picturesque but poor, abject yet sublime in its Gothic melancholy, the Ireland they experienced did not fit their British sense of progress, propriety, and Protestantism. "Tourism, Landscape, and the Irish Character" draws from more than one hundred accounts by English, Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish tourists written between 1750 and 1850 to probe the moral judgments British observers made about the Irish countryside and its native inhabitants. Whether consciously or not, these travel writers defined their own British identity in opposition to a perceived Irish strangeness: the rituals of Catholicism, the seemingly histrionic lamentations of the funeral wake, cemeteries with displays of human bones, the archaic Irish language or the Celtic-infused English that they heard spoken. Overlooking the acute despair in England's own industrial cities, they opined that the poverty, bog lands, and ill-thatched houses of rural Ireland indicated failures of the Irish character. By the eve of the Famine of the 1840s, travel writers were employing stereotypes of Celtic, Catholic carelessness in the south of Ireland and Saxon neatness and enterprise in predominantly Protestant Ulster, even calling for "Saxon" colonization of the west of Ireland. The Famine cleared the land of many of the peasants, but the western landscape, magnificent in its scenery but poor in its soil, eventually defeated most of the British "colonists," leaving the region to an ever-increasing number of tourists who could enjoy the picturesque mountainscapes without the distracting contradiction of an impoverished populace.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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