[Book Summary] Emigration seemed the only path to the future in 1962 when Marita O'Connell left Ireland for America with two bulging suitcases and $10 to finance her new life. Based on childhood diaries, Galloping Green: From Dear Distant Damp Dublin tells her engaging and humorous story of growing up with a mother whose family were British Protestants, and an Irish Catholic father with colorful republican ancestry. The second half shows Marita searching for a better life in America and recounts how her invincible spirit helped her to overcome numerous hurdles in her quest. Through example, Galloping Green shows readers that no matter what life presents, there is always another path "where the air will smell fresh and the sun will warm your face."

All across Ireland, thousands of people are living in apartments and houses with serious fire safety and structural defects. Some of these have made the news, many more have not. Defects: Living with the Legacy of the Celtic Tiger tells the horrifying story of these people and how they came to be trapped in dangerous homes. In this follow-up to Home, his hugely popular and acclaimed manifesto for public housing reform, Eoin Ó Broin reveals how decisions made by successive governments from the 1960s to the 1990s led to an alarmingly light touch building control regime. This regime, when combined with the hubris and greed of Celtic Tiger-era property development, allowed defective and unsafe properties to be built and sold in huge numbers to unsuspecting victims. Who was responsible? Why were they allowed to get away with it? And who will foot the bill to fix these potentially fatal defects? All these questions and more are answered in this hard-hitting and shocking investigative work.