DIrish construction workers in post-war Britain are celebrated in song and story. Donall MacAmhlaigh kept a diary as he worked the sites, danced in the Irish halls, drank in Irish pubs and lived the life of the roving Irish navvy. Work was hard, dirty and dangerous, followed by pints in the Admiral Rodney, the Shamrock, the Cattle Market Tavern and others. Living conditions were basic at best. This vivid picture of an Irish navvy's life in England in the 1950s mirrors that of an entire generation who left Ireland without education or hope. Days without food or work, the hardships of work camps, lonesome partings after trips home, periods of intense isolation and bitter reflection were all part of the experience. • Also available: Hard Road to Klondike.

This well-crafted novel is one of the few novels in either Irish or English that explores this generation of Irish people, often termed the 'silent' or 'lost generation' when over a half-a-million people emigrated, primarily to Britain to work in the post-war economy there - 'building England up and tearing it down again'.

This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways – the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.

Based on personal memories of his life in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1900s, this was Patrick MacGill's first novel. It tells the story of Dermod Flynn an independent and feisty youth who earns a meagre living as an itinerant farm hand in Donegal and County Tyrone before coming to Scotland with a potato-picking squad. After living on the road, labouring and navvying, Dermod finds work on the hydro-electric scheme at Kinlochleven –an extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving environment where hundreds died on one of the biggest engineering projects of its time. Against this background, Dermod reads voraciously, begins to discover his talent as a writer and is eventually lured to Fleet Street, where he briefly becomes a journalist. Peopled with extraordinary characters, Children of the Dead End is a gritty and uncompromising expose of the near slavery endured by the poor in Scotland and Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

"The contribution of the Irish 'Navvy' to the British construction industry has indeed been 'immeasurable'. For over two centuries, for hundreds of thousands of rural male Irish emigrants to Britain, the best chance of a start was in construction. While the men themselves have been largely forgotten or ignored, the canals, the railways, the roads, tunnels, dams and public utilities of Britain stand as lasting monuments to their sacrifices and achievements." "The Men who Built Britain has been researched by Ultan Cowley over a number of years. In it he quotes extensively from numerous interviews with Irish navvies and subcontractors, senior English management and relatives of those involved. Generously illustrated with striking pictures - many never previously published - this book ensures that the true story of the Irish navvy will not be forgotten."--BOOK JACKET.