The period 1913–22 witnessed extraordinary upheaval in Irish society. The Easter Rising of 1916 facilitated the emergence of new revolutionary forces and the eruption of guerrilla warfare. In Galway and elsewhere in the west, the new realities wrought by World War One saw the emergence of a younger generation of impatient revolutionaries. In 1916, Liam Mellows led his Irish Volunteers in a Rising in east Galway and up to 650 rebels took up defensive positions at Moyode Castle. From the western shores of Connemara to market towns such as Athenry, Tuam and Galway, local communities were subject to unprecedented use of terror by the Crown Forces. Meanwhile, conflict over land, an enduring grievance of the poor, threatened to overwhelm parts of Galway with sustained land seizures and cattle drives by the rural population. War and Revolution in the West of Ireland: Galway, 1913–1922 provides fascinating insights into the revolutionary activities of the ordinary men and women who participated in the struggle for independence. In this compelling new account, Galway historian Conor McNamara unravels the complex web of identity and allegiance that characterised the west of Ireland, exploring the enduring legacy of a remarkable and contested era.

In Unhappy the Land Liam Kennedy poses fundamental questions about the social and political history of Ireland and challenges cherished notions of a uniquely painful past. Images of tragedy and victimhood are deeply embedded in the national consciousness, yet when the Irish experience is viewed in the larger European context a different perspective emerges. The author’s dissection of some pivotal episodes in Irish history serves to explode commonplace assumptions about oppression, victimhood and a fate said to be comparable ‘only to that of the Jews’. Was the catastrophe of the Great Famine really an Irish Holocaust? Was the Ulster Covenant anything other than a battle-cry for ethnic conflict? Was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic a means of texting terror? And who fears to speak of an Irish War of Independence, shorn of its heroic pretensions? Kennedy argues that the privileging of ‘the gun, the drum and the flag’ above social concerns and individual liberties gave rise to disastrous consequences for generations of Irish people. Ireland might well be a land of heroes, from Cúchulainn to Michael Collins, but it is also worth pondering Bertolt Brecht’s warning: ‘Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.’

The war was prosecuted ruthlessly by the Irish Republican Army which, paralleling the political efforts of Sinn Féin, hoped to break Britain's will to rule Ireland and create an independent Irish republic. The British retaliated by introducing two new irregular forces into Ireland, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. Fighting took place principally in counties Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Monaghan, Armagh, Clare, Kerry, and Longford. It was sporadic but vicious, with fewer than 2,000 IRA volunteers facing over 50,000 crown forces. The IRA depended upon energetic local leaders -- where there were none, there was little fighting.

This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) was followed by a ‘traumatic silence’. It achieves this by opening an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely produced in the 1920s and 1930s; testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish. Nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making (or even forgetting), demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans – both men and women – self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to ‘heal’ the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptions that sexual violence during the Irish revolution was either ‘rare’ or ‘hidden’.

Donegal was the bastion of Home Rule conservative nationalism during the tumultuous period 1911–25, while County Derry was a stronghold of hard-line unionism. In this time of immense political upheaval between these cultural and social majorities lay the deeply symbolic, religiously and ethnically divided, and potentially combustible, Derry City. What had once been a distinct, unified, socio-economic and cultural area (to nationalists and unionists alike) became an international frontier or borderland, overshadowed by the bitter legacy of Partition. The region was the hardest hit by the implementation of Partition, affecting all levels of society. This completely new interpretation of the history of the Irish north-west provides a fair and balanced portrait of a divided borderland and addresses key arguments in Irish history and the history of revolution, counter-revolution, feuds and state-building. Ambitious and novel in its approach, Forging the Border: Donegal and Derry in Times of Revolution, 1911–1925 fills an important lacuna, and challenges long-held assumptions and beliefs about the road to partition in the north-west.

Ascending to power after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a violent revolution against the United Kingdom, the political party Cumann na nGaedheal governed during the first ten years of the Irish Free State (1922–32). Taking over from the fallen Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, Cumann na nGaedheal leaders such as W. T. Cosgrave and Kevin O'Higgins won a bloody civil war, created the institutions of the new Free State, and attempted to project abroad the independence of a new Ireland. In response to the view that Cumann na nGaedheal was actually a reactionary counterrevolutionary party, Afterimage of the Revolution contends that, in building the new Irish state, the government framed and promoted its policies in terms of ideas inherited from the revolution. In particular, Cumann na nGaedheal emphasized Irish sovereignty, the "Irishness" of the new state, and a strong sense of anticolonialism, all key components of the Sinn Féin party platform during the revolution. Jason Knirck argues that the 1920s must be understood as part of a continuing Irish revolution that led to an eventual independent republic. Drawing on state documents, newspapers, and private papers—including the recently released papers of Kevin O'Higgins—he offers a fresh view of Irish politics in the 1920s and integrates this period more closely with the Irish Revolution.

Jeremy Smith explores relations between Britain and Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with a story that still raises deep passions and bitter disagreements both among historians and within wider public opinion. This examination attempts to chart a more dispassionate course between the various contending positions and has enormous relevance to the unfolding events in both Northern Ireland and Britain as the united Kingdom moves towards a federal constitutional structure. Books in this Seminar Studies in History series bridge the gap between textbook and specialist survey and consists of a brief "Introduction" and/or "Background" to the subject, valuable in bringing the reader up-to-speed on the area being examined, followed by a substantial and authoritative section of "Analysis" focusing on the main themes and issues. There is a succinct "Assessment" of the subject, a generous selection of "Documents" and a detailed bibliography. Incorporates a large amount of research on Irish history during the last two decades and gives particular focus to the dramatic events between the Easter rising of 1916 and the intense negotiations surrounding the Treaty in the autumn of 1921. For those interested in the history between Ireland and Britain.

On 4 August 1914 following the outbreak of European hostilities, large sections of Irish Protestants and Catholics rallied to support the British and Allied war efforts. Yet less than two years later, the Easter Rising of 1916 allegedly put a stop to the Catholic commitment in exchange for a re-emphasis on the national question. In Ireland and the Great War Niamh Gallagher draws upon a formidable array of original research to offer a radical new reading of Irish involvement in the world's first total war. Exploring the 'home front' and Irish diasporic communities in Canada, Australia, and Britain, Gallagher reveals that substantial support for the Allied war effort continued largely unabated not only until November 1918, but afterwards as well. Rich in social texture and with fascinating new case studies of Irish participation in the conflict, this book has the makings of a major rethinking of Ireland's twentieth century.