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Welcome to Irish Academic Press Irish Academic Press is a long established Dublin-based publisher of high quality books of Irish interest. Our publishing programme includes Irish History, Contemporary Irish History, Military and Political History, Literature, Arts and the Media, Social History, Women's Studies and Genealogy. We hope that among our past and present titles you will find titles of interest.
Our new and forthcoming publications include several important and eagerly awaited titles. |
|  | Northern Ireland
A Triumph of Politics
Millar, Frank
From stalemate to consensus by way of the Belfast and St Andrews Agreements, this is a 'big picture' treatment of the peace process. In a compelling compilation of landmark interviews and keynote analysis, award-winning journalist Frank Millar charts a unique chapter in Northern Ireland’s history - in the words of the history makers themselves. Here are Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, Dermot Ahern, Tony Blair, Peter Brooke, Cahal Daly, Jeffrey Donaldson, Peter Hain, John Hume, Seamus Mallon, Ian Paisley, Chris Patten, Mitchell Reiss, Peter Robinson, John Taylor and David Trimble - on the record, in a highly accessible volume of original source material indispensible for aficionados, teachers and future students of the process alike. Over 20 years Millar reported the evolution of the process and the slow triumph of constitutional politics, and of Anglo-Irish diplomacy, over a counsel of despair about a Province long perceived as a problem without solution. In face of much hostility and widespread indifference during the years of political impasse, many journalists and broadcasters helped foster necessary understanding of the Northern Ireland conflict and those trapped in it. But few had the space, opportunity, commitment and insight Millar brought to the task - his grasp of the detail, ear for the unspoken opening and enthusiastic embrace of the participants on all sides making him a must read in London, Dublin and Belfast. Insiders attest to the role played by Millar and The Irish Times, not least for insisting on speaking to politicians at times when they refused to speak to each other. As Millar’s reportage and analysis helped make his newspaper the house journal of the talks process, the British and Irish governments and individual politicians availed themselves of the opportunities it provided. At one difficult moment when London and Dublin tried to second-guess David Trimble’s position, Tony Blair expressed relief to Bertie Ahern that at least the unionist leader was still talking to The Irish Times. Blair also gave the paper his most comprehensive print interviews about Northern Ireland policy - the second, in 2003, at the famous ‘fork in the road’ moment for Sinn Féin and the IRA. As early as 1988-89 Millar was talking to John Hume and Cahal Daly about dual referendums, the legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state, and the vexed question of policing. True to form, our chronicler likewise remained ahead of the game at St Andrews in October 2006, the first journalist to divine that Sinn Féin’s endorsement of the PSNI would see the Rev. Ian Paisley make peace with republicans and form a power-sharing government with a co-equal Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.
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|  | IRA: The Bombs and the Bullets
A History of Deadly Ingenuity
Oppenheimer, A.R.
As a leading expert on non-conventional weapons and explosives, the author focuses on the bombs and explosives and shows how the IRA became the most adept and experienced insurgency group the world has ever seen through their bombing expertise and how - after generations of conflict - it all came to an end. The book is a comprehensive account of more than 150 years of Irish republican strategic, tactical, and operational details and analysis covering the IRA's mission, doctrine, targeting, and acquisition of weapons and explosives. Oppenheimer also colourfully presents the story behind the bombs; those who built and deployed them, those who had to deal with and dismantle them, and those who suffered or died from them. He analyses where, how, and why the IRA's bombs were built, targeted and deployed and explores what the IRA was hoping to accomplish in its unrivalled campaign of violence and insurgency through covert acquisition, training, intelligence and counter-intelligence. The book focuses entirely on the IRA's bombing campaign - beginning with the Fenian 'Dynamiters' in the 19th century up to the decommissioning of an arsenal big enough to arm several battalions - which included an entire home-crafted missile system, an unsurpassed range of improvised explosive devices, and enough explosives to blow up several urban centres. The author scrutinises the level of improvisation in what became the hallmark of the Provisional IRA in its pioneering IED timing, delay and disguise technologies. He follows the arms race it carried on with the British Army and security services in a Long War of Mutual Assured Disruption. Oppenheimer fully describes and assesses the impact of the pre-1970s bombing campaigns in Northern Ireland and England to the evolution of strategies and tactics. He also provides an insight into the bombing equipment and guns from the IRA inventory held at Irish Police HQ in Dublin.
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|  | Irish Tourism 1880-1980
Furlong, Irene
This is the first comprehensive work on the history of Irish tourism development over a hundred year period and examines its economic, cultural and social effects upon the country during this time. The majority of commentators see the history of Irish tourism as beginning in the 1960s and this book demonstrates the fact that strenuous efforts were being made to promote the country as a tourist destination from the 1880s onwards. It includes much information entering the public domain for the first time, including oral history interviews and official documents. The main theme is the approach of successive British and Irish administrations to the question of the promotion of Irish tourism. The author highlights the role played by individuals: politicians; public servants and entrepreneurs, who were dedicated to the growth of the industry as far back as the late nineteenth century and who were crucially important to its progress over the period in question. The social and cultural changes wrought by legislation dealing with the sale of alcohol, holidays with pay, protection of national monuments and training for the hotel and catering trades are also examined. The effects of the troubles in Northern Ireland on tourism north and south of the border is discussed, along with measures to combat the negative impression received by foreigners. The difficulties in agreeing a means of promoting tourism on an all-island basis over the decades is examined, as is the decision to make tourism the first of the industries to be marketed in this way.
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|  | John Banville
Kenny, John
John Banville is an accessible yet detailed study that brings to the surface many of the hidden depths of one of the major writers of contemporary Irish and world fiction. It mediates between two existing kinds of critical work on Banville: novel-by-novel introductions, and specialised academic analyses. While it approaches some of Banville's works individually, its discussions are arranged thematically, thus demonstrating the overall patterns in his oeuvre and in his literary thinking. With a close eye on chronology, the book begins by establishing the intellectual and cultural contexts of the oeuvre and its reception, then provides readings of Banville's Irish themes, his crucial theories of the Imagination, his thematic preoccupation with morality and immorality, his idiosyncratic devotion to a self-reflexive art. Work of all Banville's periods is covered, from his first book, Long Lankin (1970) to his Man-Booker winning novel, The Sea (2005), and his recent popular fiction written under a pseudonym. Rather than incorporating the frameworks of the existing Banville criticism, one of this book's major benefits is that it allows the author to speak for himself at all stages by referring to all his principal statements on his art and worldview. The discussions here are all attentive to those who may be in the early stages of familiarity with Banville, so that the general application of ideas and arguments can be understood without firsthand or detailed knowledge of the works under discussion. Those who are well acquainted with the Banville oeuvre will also find new aspects of emphasis and suggestion. A number of important items from Banville's career as a literary essayist and reviewer are used in the chapters, and the book is thus a good starting point for readers wishing to further develop their interest.
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|  | Elizabeth Bowen
Walshe, Eibhear
This edited collection, provides a complete academic account of the fictions of Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973 ) the most important Anglo-Irish novelist of the 20th century. It covers Bowen's life, her family background and her writing career between London and North Cork. Of particular interest is her position as an Anglo-Irish writer and her centrality as a major novelist within the traditions of 20th century writing, within modernist literature and, in particular, within modern Irish writing. This book provides an overall cultural context for her novels and short stories. Each chapter explores Bowen's links with other 20th century novelists and her modernist deployment of the novel form, her representation of Ireland, of the Anglo-Irish and of the Irish War of Independence. Also considered are the wide range of Bowen's short stories from 1929 up to 1967 and her experience of living in London during the Second World War. Other chapters discuss the changes in narrative form used in Bowen's last novels, novels of experimentation and increasing darkness. This book locates her writings within contemporary notions of the construction of gender in relation to fictive representations of sexuality and sexual identity. Bowen has been read as a modernist, a structuralist and also within feminist and post-colonial theories of fiction writing. Since her death in 1973, Bowen's novels have been constantly in print and many critics and biographers, like Victoria Glendinning, Patricia Craig, Neil Corcoran, Hermione Lee, Maud Ellmann, Roy Foster and many others have written on her. This book provides a comprehensive scholarly account of her creative life and that critical afterlife.
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|  | Patrick Kavanagh
Smith, Stan
This volume offers a comprehensive account by a range of established scholars of the richness and variety of Patrick Kavanagh's work both in prose and verse, and situates his writings in the social and cultural contexts of the workaday Ireland which emerged from the heroics of nationalist insurrection and civil war. The distinguished scholars who contribute to this account bring a diverse range of approaches and perspectives to offer a fuller understanding of his work. Patrick Kavanagh has for long represented an alternative vision of Irish poetry to the high melodrama and attitudinising of W. B. Yeats. Low key and apparently equable in tone, though often revealing a sly acerbic wit, Kavanagh's verse has represented a domestic, though not domesticated, alternative to the high-falutin' rhetoric of the Yeatsian mode, pitching itself to the quotidian world of de Valera's 'Catholic Republic', famously extolling the virtues of the 'parochial' in contrast to the siren call of the cosmopolitan and metropolitan, like Joyce finding its inspiration in the streets and alleys of a middle and lower class Dublin and the stony acres, literal and metaphoric, of a sparse rural economy, and, like Flann O'Brien, preferring the bicycle as a mode of poetic transport to the high horse of the 'last Romantics'. It confirms Seamus Heaney's claim that Kavanagh 'gave single-handed permission for Irish poets to trust and cultivate their native ground and experience.'
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|  | Countdown to Unity
Debating Irish Reunification
Humphreys, Richard
This book explores how the Good Friday Agreement has put in place the broad outline of how a united Ireland might be achieved by consent. The increasing momentum of nationalist politics in Northern Ireland combined with an ever greater sense of self-confidence in nationalist Ireland as a whole creates an environment in which we can begin to think about the practical steps required to bring a united Ireland into being. It examines the legal implications of a united Ireland and sketches out a programme of action to move towards achieving reunification of the island of Ireland in a spirit of reconciliation and peace. The work looks firstly at the historical legal background to achieving a united Ireland, tracing the evolution of the legal steps required for reunification. Secondly, it looks at the legal changes which could be carried out now with a view to strengthening the case for unity and promoting reconciliation. Finally, it examines the sequence of legal steps required to achieve reunification, from the future border poll, to the subsequent international agreement, and its implementation, and examines the legal measures required to be put in place. The work is the first modern, in-depth and practical legal roadmap to bring about the reunification of the island of Ireland.
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|  | Sean Lester, Poland and the Nazi Takeover of Danzig
McNamara, Paul
Sean Lester, a Belfast protestant and Irish nationalist, became one of Ireland's first truly international diplomats when, in 1934, he took up the post of High Commissioner of the League of Nations in the Free City of Danzig, a Baltic port which both Germany and Poland coveted. Finding himself in a cauldron of intrigue, Lester made strenuous and courageous efforts to frustrate the Danzig Nazi Party's attempts to gain complete control of the city and return it to the German Reich. By mid-1936, having become virtually the only obstacle left in the way of Nazi conquest of Danzig, the Irishman soon became the focus of a very aggressive, and eventually successful campaign by Hitler and the Nazi movement to have him forced out of the Free City. As it was the only country to have official rights in Danzig, Poland's position regarding these events is crucial and perhaps was more important than that of the League of Nations itself. Extensively based on material regarding Lester from the Polish state archives never before seen outside Poland, this book examines the circumstances surrounding the Irishman's tenure in the Free City where he became one of the first western European diplomats to see the Nazi mask slip. Other primary sources used in the book are the National Archives, London, the League of Nations Archives in Geneva, Sean Lester's diary and papers and to a lesser extent German foreign ministry archives. The failure of European governments to heed Lester's warnings and to subsequently allow his 'removal' from Danzig turned out to be a missed opportunity to stop Hitler in his tracks three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Of all the parties involved in this tale of intrigue, misjudgments and bad faith, Irishman Sean Lester is the only one to emerge with his honour intact.
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|  | Gender and Power in Irish History
Valiulis, Maryann
This collection of articles poses the question: What can gender history add to the traditional narrative of Irish history? How can it help us to understand the ways in which power operated in and flowed through Irish society? It is premised on the assumption that men and women are actors in the creation of their society, influenced by the ideology of the period, but also challenging and resisting the assumptions and beliefs of their era. The articles included in this collection are far-ranging and thematically diverse, united by the common theme of gender. While women play a dominant role in its pages, it makes visible the power and presence of men. Sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, the history written on these pages is a history of the ways in which women and men constructed, negotiated and made visible the roles, ideas and representations that governed their particular society. In so doing, it provides an alternative reading to the traditional narrative of Irish history. This book focuses mainly on the modern period and includes two articles from outside of Ireland which provides a comparative focus. It also includes a theoretical introductory section on the nature of gender history from three leading Irish historians.
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|  | The Radicalization of Irish Drama, 1600-1900
The Rise and Fall of Ascendancy Theatre
Slowey, Desmond
Placed within a rich social, historical, and cultural context, this study illuminates the Irish theatre over three hundred years, and uses it as a lens that focuses the dialectic of Irish society as the theatre mutated from aristocratic control to radical dissent and subversion. English colonists created the Irish theatre, reflecting the preoccupations and prejudices of the aristocrats and courtiers clustered around Dublin Castle. This was a political theatre, involved in outlining and defining its own society. The playwrights were engaged in leading opinion, presenting alternative realities, and forging the national conscience. Early Irish theatre was the Anglo-Irish talking to themselves, as the playwrights engaged the ruling class in a dialogue as to how the country should be ordered. As the Ascendancy lost or relinquished control over the theatre, the image presented by the playwrights became more unflattering and dismissive. This work studies how this portrait of Irish society and its rulers was encoded and evolved in the plays of the three centuries from 1600 to the foundation of the Abbey Theatre. It shows how the plays traced the continually mutating Ascendancy, the growing self-consciousness and national self-awareness, and a developing class-consciousness among Irish playwrights.
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|  | The Glory of Being Britons
Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast
Bew, John
At a moment when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has excluded Ireland from his version of modern Britishness, John Bew's book could not be more timely. Covering a period of almost ninety years, Bew demonstrates how a strongly held British national identity took hold in nineteenth-century Belfast, a town which was once regarded as the centre of republicanism and rebellion in Ireland. Starting with the impact of the French Revolution ó a cause of huge celebration in Belfast ó this book describes how political and civic culture in the town became deeply immersed in the imagined community of the British nation after the Act of Union of 1801, allowing the author to provide a new perspective on the roots of Ulster's opposition to Home Rule. What caused this shift from 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity' to 'God save the Queen'? While entirely aware of the sectarian division in Ulster, Bew places these developments in the wider context of the Westminster political system and debates about the United Kingdom's 'place in the world', thus providing a more balanced and sophisticated view of the politics of nineteenth-century Belfast, arguing that it was not simply dominated by the struggle between Orange and Green. The book breaks new ground in examining how the formative 'nation-building' episodes in Britain ó such as war, parliamentary reform, and social, economic and scientific advancement ó played out in the unique context of Belfast and the surrounding area. Ultimately, however, it also explains how the exponents of this civic unionism struggled to make their voices heard as Britain and Ireland entered the age of mass democracy and traditional modes of identification began to reassert themselves, even before the Home Rule crisis began.
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|  | Sean MacEntee
Feeney, Tom
This is the first biographical work of one of the chief policymakers to have served the independent Irish state. It is also the only scholarly biography of a senior Fianna F·il minister other than Sean Lemass. Sean MacEntee was in many ways a unique political personality. He was the most senior politician in the independent Irish state to have been born in what became Northern Ireland. Moreover, he was a fiercely independent thinker who left a voluminous collection of private papers. This capacious collection reflects MacEntee's insatiable interest in all aspects of government policy, not merely those for which he bore ultimate responsibility. The collection complements the official government files in the National Archives which, when viewed in toto, convey the full force of ministerial and departmental thinking and provide a comprehensive record of public policymaking from the 1930s to the 1960s.
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|  | Early Irish Cinema 1895-1921
Condon, Denis
This book examines early and silent cinema and its contexts in Ireland, 1895-1921. It explores the extent to which cinema fostered a new way of looking in and at Ireland and the extent to which the new technology inherited forms of looking from the image-producing cultural practices of the theatre, tourism, and such public events as state occasions, political protests, and sports meetings. It argues that before cinema emerged as an independent institution in the late 1910s, it was comprehensively intermedial, not only adapting to the presentational strategies of such forms as the fairground attraction, the melodrama, and the magic lantern lecture, but actually constituting these forms and altering them in the process. In locating cinema in relation to popular and elite culture during a key period of Irish history, it draws in particular on surviving films and photographs; articles and illustrations in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals; contemporary accounts; and official documents. Working against approaches that see early cinema as a precursor to the so-called 'classical' cinema of the 1920s onwards, it provide its readers with a wealth of contemporary material that allows them to see early cinema in its own terms as an evolving (audio-) visual form.
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| | We welcome manuscript proposals and ideas in all the subject areas outlined above and these can be directed to our Editor, Lisa Hyde: Lisa.hyde@vmbooks.com |
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