Irish Politics

Sinn Féin is the most popular political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. A movement once synonymous with a paramilitary campaign is on the brink of taking real power through purely democratic means. But if Sinn Féin has mastered the art of electoral politics, it remains strangely opaque. Who really runs the party? How is it funded? And what can we expect of it as a party of government? Aoife Moore, Irish Journalist of the Year in 2021, explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game.

Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto - first published in 1974 - quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war and gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition.

For the past two decades, you could cross the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic half a dozen times without noticing or, indeed, without turning off the road you were travelling. It cuts through fields, winds back and forth across roads and wends from the mouth of the Newry River to the mouth of the Foyle. It's frictionless - a feat sealed by the Good Friday Agreement. Before that, watchtowers loomed over border communities, military checkpoints dotted the roads and bridges had been demolished to prevent crossings.

It's men like Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone who gave Hell's Kitchen its name. In the mid-1970s, these two longtime friends take the reins of New York's Irish mob, using brute force to give it hitherto unthinkable power. Jimmy, a charismatic sociopath, is the leader. Mickey, whose memories of Vietnam torture him daily, is his enforcer. Together they make brutality their trademark, butchering bodies or hurling them out the window.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O’Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh.

This volume celebrates six such languages - Ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Biblical Hebrew - by first introducing listeners to their most distinctive features, then showing how these linguistic traits play out in short excerpts from actual ancient texts. It explores, for instance, how Homer's Greek shows signs of oral composition, how Horace achieves striking poetic effects through interlaced word order in his Latin, and how the poet of Beowulf attains remarkable intensity of expression through the resources of Old English. 

Throughout the century since partition the unification of the two parts of the island seemed impossible. Many still feel that it is, particularly because of the bloody legacy of past conflict. However, by 2030, if not sooner, Ulster unionists' demographic and electoral advantages will be over. And in the light of Brexit, the rising popularity of Sinn Féin, political developments both sides of the border, and within Great Britain, Irish unification referendums will become increasingly likely. Yet even those who want these to happen are not prepared.

Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s List, is universally praised for crafting smooth narratives from authentic historical events. With The Great Shame, he turns his insightful eye toward the Irish struggle through the 19h century. In sharp contrast to much of Europe, Ireland was a terrible place to be during the 1800s. Many of the nation’s finest people set sail for America and Canada.

Self Help was published in 1859 by Samuel Smiles. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism". Self Help sold 20,000 copies within one year of its publication. By the time of Smiles' death in 1904, it had sold over a quarter of a million. Self-Help elevated Smiles to celebrity status; almost overnight, he became a leading pundit and much-consulted guru.

In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal; three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage. With help from prominent Irish and Irish American voices like historian and best-selling author Tim Pat Coogan and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, A New Ireland tells the story of a modern revolution against all odds.

Putting history into a perspective, Irish History for Dummies is an engaging, entertaining and educational trip through time, packing in equal parts fun and facts, providing listeners with a riveting history of this ancient land. The history of Ireland has shaped the world far beyond its borders. And few stories have a greater need for a balanced and light-hearted telling than the complex and often controversial saga of Ireland and her people.

April 20th, 1968: Enoch Powell, MP for Wolverhampton South West, gives a speech that shakes a community and Britain to its very core. Words that provoke, that divide...that profoundly affect the lives of those they touch. Mrs. Georgina Verington-Delaunay is an administrator working in the Conservative riding office of Enoch Powell. Frank and Christine are art students inadvertently caught in an undercurrent of intolerance. Nelson and his aunt Irene are Jamaican immigrants striving to make a life for themselves in a turbulent atmosphere. 

Bertie Ahern, three times Irish Taoiseach, is often described as an enigma. The Old IRA man's son who delivered peace in Northern Ireland. A working class boy responsible for the Celtic Tiger. An ardent nationalist admired by European leaders. Now in this frank and revealing autobiography, Ahern gives his own account of a remarkable political life and the personal story that accompanies it.

A family story of blood and memory and the haunting power of the past. After nearly three decades reporting conflict from all over the world for the BBC, Fergal Keane has gone home to Ireland to tell a story that lies at the root of his fascination with war. It is a family story of war and love, and how the ghosts of the past return to shape the present. Wounds is a powerful memoir about Irish people who found themselves caught up in the revolution that followed the 1916 Rising, and in the pitiless violence of civil war in north Kerry after the British left in 1922.

In the small village of Kilbane, County Cork, Ireland, Natalie's Bistro has always been warm and welcoming. Nowadays 22-year-old Siobhan O'Sullivan runs the family bistro named for her mother, along with her five siblings, after the death of their parents in a car crash almost a year ago. It's been a rough year for the O'Sullivans, but it's about to get rougher. One morning, as they're opening the bistro, they discover a man seated at a table with a pair of hot pink barber scissors protruding from his chest.

Reclaiming will cover a wide breadth of topics from the specific microaggressions Black women encounter on dating apps to navigating a career that may seem impossible. Every step of Yewande's writing affirms that maintaining your sense of self in a world that is not supportive of you is difficult, but not impossible. The audiobook will be a thought provoking, sensitive, challenging and deeply moving collection of essays covering everything from identity to love and career choices, published in May 2022.

The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope. But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain's historiographical record.

The war has come home. For over 40 years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America’s longest conflict: the War on Drugs. His obsession with defeating the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel - Adán Barrera - has cost him people he loves, even taken a piece of his soul. Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created 30 more that are wreaking chaos in his beloved Mexico. But not just there.

Fintan O'Toole was born in 1958. His life covers Ireland's journey out of underdevelopment and domination by the Church, to the country's transformation into the relatively prosperous and tolerant society that it is today. But, along the way, there was a sectarian civil war in the North, which cast a dark shadow over the whole island, and bitter struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms. This is a very personal history by a writer who is considered by many to be the country's leading public intellectual.

In 1972, Morgan Llywelyn tells the story of Ireland from 1950-1972 as seen through the eyes of young Barry Halloran, son and grandson of Irish revolutionaries. Northern Ireland has become a running sore, poisoning life on both sides of the Irish border. Following family tradition, at 18, Barry joins the Irish Republican Army to help complete what he sees as "the unfinished revolution". But things are no longer as clear cut as they once were.