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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

The saga of English predominance in Ireland began in the 12th century following the Norman invasion of England, when a band of Norman adventurers, established on the Welsh mainland, set off across the Irish Sea to test their prospects on the shores of England’s western neighbor. Ireland at the time was ruled in provinces by local kings, each with limited power and authority, and often at war with one another.

It's the dawn of the 1930s, and the three privileged Guinness sisters, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh, settle into becoming wives and mothers: Aileen in Luttrellstown Castle outside Dublin, Maureen in Clandeboye in Northern Ireland, and Oonagh in Rutland Place in London. But while Britain becomes increasingly politically polarised, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh discover conflict within their own marriages.

Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Acallam na Senórach) represents the largest literary text surviving from 12th-century Ireland, the most comprehensive early collection of Fenian stories and poetry. Three parallel worlds interact: the contemporary Christian world of Saint Patrick with his scribes, clerics, occasional angels, and souls rescued from Hell; the earlier pagan world of the ancient, giant Fenians and an array of Irish kings; and the timeless Otherworld, peopled by ever-young shape-shifting fairies.

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.

This anthology of popular American history presents the stories of nine incredible Irish immigrants as written by nine contemporary Irish-Americans. More than one in 10 Americans claims Irish ancestry and, with its celebrity contributors, Nine Irish Lives will have strong appeal for those listeners. It is also, though, a timely portrait of shared humanity. These are stories about immigrants - and in the tales of revolutionaries and visionaries, caretakers and unsung heroes, Nine Irish Lives reminds us of the values and the people that have shaped America.

Twenty essays on Irish women, historical and contemporary, who have defied cultural norms around femininity and achieved great things. The subjects include Irish women from Queen Medb to Eileen Gray, from Constance Markievicz to Sonia O’Sullivan, covering stateswomen, artists, writers, activists and rebels of all kinds. Written by multi-award-winning author and first Laureate na nÓg (Irish Children’s Laureate) Siobhán Parkinson. Perfect for use in schools as well as for leisure listening, this collection celebrates the role of women in Ireland’s changing society.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.