From Seán Lemass to mass unemployment: Ireland changed between 1966 and 1987 and, Tim Pat Coogan argues in Disillusioned Decades, not for the betterThe year 1966 was one in which to take stock: fifty years since the Rising, what had the Republic achieved? In Disillusioned Decades, Ireland's most celebrated and controversial historian Tim Pat Coogan looks at a country in bloom – Seán Lemass was at the end of a successful term as Taoiseach, the economy appeared stable and the newly founded Raidío Telifís Éireann was providing homes around Ireland with art and culture through their television screens.Over the next 21 years, every aspect of Irish life was changed dramatically and profoundly. By 1987, Ireland was a country characterised by high levels of urbanisation, chronic unemployment, mass emigration and a heroin problem comparable in percentage terms to New York. What happened in those pivotal 20 years? Tim Pat Coogan, famous for his perceptiveness and sharp observations, was editor of national newspaper The Irish Press for most of this period, reporting on the people and events that Disillusioned Decades analyses. Using his in-depth knowledge of the political, cultural and social changes of the 1960s, 70s and 80s rounded out with his personal reminiscences, in Disillusioned Decades Coogan steps back to view the events in a wider context.Throughout Disillusioned Decades, Coogan paints a grim and no-punches-pulled picture of Ireland's trajectory from 1966 to 1987. Sharply perceptive and enlivened by frequent flashes of personal reminiscence, this book presents a wealth of information and opinion in Coogan's distinctive and authoritative style.

There’s before 1916 and then there’s after. Between them lies the Easter Rising, when Irish republicans took up arms against British rule and changed the course of their country’s history forever. For though the resistance failed, it failed gloriously; the rebels were no longer a group of cranks and troublemakers in the public eye, but martyrs and national heroes, their example set the way for others and their mission lived on through the century to come. But what sort of country did the Rising create? And how does post-1916 Ireland compare with the aspirations of the rebellion’s leaders, the hopes of Thomas MacDonagh and John MacBride, of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse? One hundred years later, Tim Pat Coogan offers a personal perspective on the Irish experience that followed the Rising. He charts a flawed history that is marked as much by complacency, corruption, and institutional abuse as it is by the building of a nation and the sacrifices of the Republic’s founding fathers.

Volume VII covers a period of major significance in Ireland's history: the division of Ireland and the eventual establishment of the Irish Republic.

During the 1960s, the physical landscape of Dublin changed more than at any time since the eighteenth century. In this period, the government began to invest in town planning, new opportunities arose for the country's architects, and the old buildings of the core began to be replaced by modern structures. The early manifestations of this process were well received, understood as the first visible signs of prosperity and broader social and economic modernization. However, this attitude was short lived. By the end of the 1960s, popular support for urban change had evaporated; a disparate movement of preservationists, housing activists, students, and architects emerged to oppose urban change and campaign for the retention of the city's heritage. The new buildings and urban forms had not brought the promised national rejuvenation. Instead, the rapid destruction of the extant city had come to be seen as symbolic of the corruption and failed promise of modernization. Modern Dublin examines this story. Using approaches from urban studies and cultural geography, the author reveals Dublin as a place of complex exchange between a variety of interest groups with different visions for the built environment, and thus for society and the independent nation. In so doing, Erika Hanna adds to growing literatures on civil society, heritage, and cultural politics since independence, and provides a fresh approach to social and cultural change in 1960s Ireland.

Ireland's History provides an introduction to Irish history that blends a scholarly approach to the subject, based on recent research and current historiographical perspectives, with a clear and accessible writing style. All the major themes in Irish history are covered, from prehistoric times right through to present day, from the emergence of Celtic Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire, to Ireland and the European Union, secularism and rapprochement with the United Kingdom. By avoiding adopting a purely nationalistic perspective, Kenneth Campbell offers a balanced approach, covering not only social and economic history, but also political, cultural, and religious history, and exploring the interconnections among these various approaches. This text will encourage students to think critically about the past and to examine how a study of Irish history might inform and influence their understanding of history in general.

Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007 is the authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last 25 years. Meticulously researched, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of Ireland’s most eminent writers. This is the first text-focused critical survey of the Irish novel from 1987 to 2007, providing detailed readings of 11 seminal Irish novels A timely and much needed text in a largely uncharted critical field Provides detailed interpretations of individual novels by some of the country’s most critically celebrated writers, including Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín Investigates the ways in which Irish novels have sought to deal with and reflect a changing Ireland The fruit of many years reading, teaching and research on the subject by a leading and highly respected academic in the field

This major, authoritative reference work embraces the spectrum of organized political activity in the British Isles. It includes over 2,500 organizations in 1,700 separate entries. Arrangement is in 20 main subject sections, covering the three main p

The second edition of this bestselling survey of modern Irish history covers social, religious as well as political history and offers a distinctive combination of chronological and thematic approaches.