Irish history books

[Lee909]

Pretty sure it was on here on some thread the other day about a few good books on Irish history of the last couple of hundred years. Went to amazon to order them today and my bloody baskets been emptied. Anyone remember the thread of list the books for me

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.liverpoolway.co.uk/index.php?/forums/topic/67375-kicking-off-in-northern-ireland-again/&page=8

[Bjornebye]

30 years to the day since Pat Finucane was murdered in his own home by Loyalist Paramilitaries in collusion with British Intelligence. He was a civil rights lawyer. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Finucane

 

 

[Red '84]

Secret History of the IRA (Ed Maloney) is also a good read exploring the Troubles, and the negotiations before the negotiation of the GFA.

 

Vivid Faces by Roy Foster is an excellent read exploring the "revolutionary" generation in the country between 1890 and 1923.

[Bjornebye]

Another very good book

 

[Section_31]

 

Tainted spuds 

[Captain Turdseye]

3 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

30 years to the day since Pat Finucane was murdered in his own home by Loyalist Paramilitaries in collusion with British Intelligence. He was a civil rights lawyer. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Finucane

 

 

 

Celtic fan, was he?

[ZonkoVille77]

if you're into Podcasts then listen to "The Irish History Podcast" on Spotify.

 

Link to his site:

 

https://irishhistorypodcast.ie/

 

 

[Bjornebye]

43 minutes ago, Captain Turdseye said:

 

Celtic fan, was he?

I would imagine so. Not really thought much about that to be fair. For all I know he could have been a season ticket holder at Mordor. 

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, Red '84 said:

Secret History of the IRA (Ed Maloney) is also a good read exploring the Troubles, and the negotiations before the negotiation of the GFA.

 

Vivid Faces by Roy Foster is an excellent read exploring the "revolutionary" generation in the country between 1890 and 1923.

 

It's a very good book, except Moloney really doesn't like Gerry Adams and seems to hint that the leadership was complicit in Loughgall and other deaths of volunteers who were deemed to be in the way of the future peace process and the ongoing "pivot" from the Armalite to the ballot box. Apparently the entire East Tyrone Brigade that was taken out at Loughgall was about to defect to the CIRA.

 

Richard English's History of the IRA is also good.

 

 

[Bjornebye]

24 minutes ago, SasaS said:

 

It's a very good book, except Moloney really doesn't like Gerry Adams and seems to hint that the leadership was complicit in Loughgall and other deaths of volunteers who were deemed to be in the way of the future peace process and the ongoing "pivot" from the Armalite to the ballot box. Apparently the entire East Tyrone Brigade that was taken out at Loughgall was about to defect to the CIRA.

 

Richard English's History of the IRA is also good.

 

 

Thats the problem with most books about the troubles. Too many angles within both sides of the war, infighting, treason etc. Thats why I like Rebel Hearts so much. Its is the most impartial book I've read on Ireland. 

[TheHowieLama]

1 hour ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

if you're into Podcasts then listen to "The Irish History Podcast" on Spotify.

 

 

Whats it about?

[TheHowieLama]

36 minutes ago, SasaS said:

Richard English's History of the IRA is also good.

 

 

 

4 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Thats why I like Rebel Hearts so much. Its is the most impartial book I've read on Ireland. 

I read the Tim Pat Coogan books -- any different?

[Bjornebye]

6 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

 

I read the Tim Pat Coogan books -- any different?

In Rebel Hearts, The writer (Kevin Toolis) spends time and interviews IRA men from those making bombs to those in prison. Loads of different reasons why they took up arms , how they feel about killing etc. More too it than that but its not like a "this is what happened day by day" book. 

[ZonkoVille77]

24 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Whats it about?

 

It's about Conchology.

[TheHowieLama]

Nice, mollusks.

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, TheHowieLama said:

 

I read the Tim Pat Coogan books -- any different?

Haven't read him, he is always described like an old school pro-Republican writer, English is as far as I recall pretty esteemed as a scholar, Moloney's books are interesting and well researched but he frequently writes with a slight agenda. Rebel Hearts reads more like a collection of very good magazine stories, he spends time living with Republicans and then writes about it, almost gonzo style. These are more human interests, portraits, psychology of people involved than history, something like extended New Yorker or Rolling Stone pieces. Belfast Diary and Watching the Door are books in the similar fashion by different authors, although not as good.

 

I also liked a couple of traitor books, Killing Rage by Eamon Collins describes the mindset and organization at a lower level (his narcissistic personality also shines through, another in the hate Gerry Adams camp). The Informer by Sean O'Callaghan is pretty well known and frequently dismissed as full of self-aggrandising bullshit, but someone close to people involved told me once that a lot of it is actually true.  

 

There is also a very, very good book on INLA Deadly Divisions, by Henry McDonald & Jack Holland, for those who are interested in other organizations.

 

Ten Men Dead by David Beresford is of course a classic on the hunger strike, and Nothing But an Unfinished Song by Denis O'Hearn is an interesting biography of Bobby Sands, although it tries too hard to portray Sands as same kind of fully formed leftist revolutionary, which many say wasn't exactly true. On this subject Blanketmen by Richard O'Rawe is an interesting insider's account on the hunger strike, but also with an agenda (well known controversy that they had to end the strike after the fourth death and the leadership wouldn't let them, more for those interested in insider politicking).

 

Speaking of Moloney, the memoir Voices From the Grave was as far as I recall a good read. Martin Dillon's books are also not bad, but he tends to get bogged down in too many details and would have benefited from a better editor.

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/30/top-10-books-about-the-troubles-northern-ireland-david-keenan?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

There are plenty more suggestions in the comments under the article on the above link.

 

Top 10 books about the Troubles

 

Novelist David Keenan picks fiction, history and reportage that record the devastating conflict that convulsed Northern Ireland for three decades. 

 

When I was writing my second novel, For the Good Times, it never occurred to me that we might be approaching a kind of Troubles “moment” in literature, but I did wonder. Were we finally far enough away from the events of 1968-98 to start fictionalising them? Is it necessary for there to be a sort of cultural/historical gap before we can interrogate trauma? And then Anna Burns’s superb Milkman won the Booker, Michael Hughes published Country, his inspired Homeric reimagining of the Iliad set during the Troubles, and with exciting new voices such as Wendy Erskine emerging, Belfast suddenly seemed to be ground zero for radical literary fiction, with borders once more in the news.

 

My own interest in the Troubles stems from my family on my father’s side. My father grew up in the Ardoyne, the primarily Catholic area of north Belfast that was the epicentre of the strife. His father had been a member of the IRA, and although my dad left Belfast just as the Troubles were beginning, most of his family stayed, and throughout my youth the war in Ireland, as my father called it, dominated family discussions, especially when one of his brothers came from Belfast to stay with us. 

It was the stories they told, and the way they told them, that first got me interested in writing about those times. My father and his brothers were semi-literate, but they had such faith in language. Tellings of their times in Ireland were entirely questionable, and inevitably self-mythologising, yet there was something true in the way they owned their stories, relayed them in their own language – a polyglot of jokes, songs, random diversions, verbal sleight of hand, straight-up misinformation and pure folk poetry – that made me think of the art of storytelling as performative. 

And I began to think of Belfast, and how often it had been rebuilt, as a wild place, an autonomous zone – like cold war-era Berlin, or 1980s Airdrie, where I set my first book, This Is Memorial Device – and I wrote about it as if events there play out in their own time, which, for me, is the time in which all of the best Irish literature is fixed: eternity. 

 

1. Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee 
The classic – groundbreaking – fictional account of The Troubles (and so much more) based on the reign of terror of Protestant paramilitaries the Shankhill Butchers and written in a high, hallucinatory style that works to transform the being of Belfast itself. Published in 1994 as events were still unravelling, it’s an evisceration of the self-perpetuating nature of violence, and how it can become a performance, almost, in both the communities that foster it and in the way the media reports it. A profoundly important book. 

2. Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H Block Struggle 1976-1981 
An incredible oral history of day-to-day life in the H Block and the definitive account of the hunger strikes, edited by Brian Campbell, Laurence McKeown and Felim O’Hagan. Horror, redemption, bravery, pointlessness, violence, faith, despair; this is high human drama that asks all of the big questions of young boys and men turned witness to extreme horrors. 

3. Milkman by Anna Burns 
The Irish have a faith in language beyond all proof or reason; Anna Burns writes like a working-class kabbalist. This fantastic novel is one of the most original navigations of Belfast’s heart of darkness and light. It generates its own kind of autonomous zone, somewhere between the demands of community paramilitaries and the forces of the state, and it asserts its independence from either in its grammar of how people talk and think, in the delight – and terror – of its telling, as we follow an independent 18-year-old as she is pursued by a married paramilitary known as the milkman. 

4. Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul by Kevin Toolis 
Still one of the most affectingly personal interrogations of armed insurrection, this book is the result of years of deep investigative journalism. Toolis is especially good at exposing the kind of contradictory logic that living in a war zone and running an armed rebellion necessitates, and his insights about the difference between revolution and rebellion, as manifested in Northern Ireland, were key when it came to writing For the Good Times.

 

 

5. Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh by Toby Harnden 
One of my fascinations with Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s is how it became a place where different rules applied, where reality itself seemed up for grabs. Nowhere was this more the case than the “Provisional Republic” of South Armagh, AKA Bandit Country, with its handmade “sniper at work” signs and its community militias all surveyed by the watchtowers and helicopters of the British army. Toby Harnden’s book is a compulsively fascinating tour of this alternative universe.

 

6. Stone Cold by Martin Dillon 
The sequence of events that ran from the killing of IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar through the attack on Milltown cemetery by “freelance paramilitary” Michael Stone, to the murder of two plainclothes British corporals, David Howes and Derek Wood, by a Republican mob at a funeral a few days later, remains one of the most horrifying unravellings of state and community-engendered violence ever relayed on live TV, and one of the nightmare visions of my youth. This book, too; an incredible insight into the mind of Stone, by one of the most consistently challenging Troubles commentators. Stone talks about violence as a simple fact, as a power that possesses and that is inscrutable in its possession. “I didn’t choose killing as a career,” he wrote in his autobiography None Shall Divide Us. “Killing chose me.”

7. Country by Michael Hughes
Narratives in Northern Ireland are all about who is telling the story and what historical precedents they can muster in its defence: the Irish are born myth-makers. Country, then, is an inspired retelling of Homer’s Iliad set during the Troubles, and it fully engages with the performative tradition of Irish storytelling. This is Ireland as the eternal country. 

8. Where They Were Missed by Lucy Caldwell
The Troubles, here, are a form of distant illumination that makes heartbreakingly sad the lives played out in their shadow. In her story of a tragic childhood and the ending of a Catholic/Protestant marriage, Caldwell is brilliant at imagining the interior voice of a young girl. The novel is an untangling of the fictions we live with, the stories we inherit from our parents, and the possibilities of reinventing our own. A powerful and original work.

 

9. Killing Rage by Eamon Collins 
This is an eye-wateringly visceral – almost Dostoevskian – confession/interrogation of sectarian violence by an ex-IRA man. “I had become addicted to the struggle: operations became my fix. But I often asked myself: when will my final fix arrive? The one that will kill me, put me in prison or break me.” Collins left the IRA and turned his back on violence but he could not bear to leave Newry, where he was brutally killed in 1999.

10. Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine 
Technically a “post-Troubles” book, Erskine’s arrestingly original debut short-story collection bears the ghost of 68-98, as she writes about the magic, ferocity and surrealism of contemporary Protestant Belfast.

 

 

[SasaS]

I spent years trying to lay my hands on Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh before I gave up. Easier to find Shergar.

[TheHowieLama]

13 minutes ago, SasaS said:

I spent years trying to lay my hands on Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh before I gave up. Easier to find Shergar.

I'll get ya one fella:

 

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/bandit-country_toby-harnden/278646/?mkwid=shul2aPmy|dc&pcrid=70112871912&pkw=&pmt=&plc=&pgrid=21323662872&ptaid=pla-292433309456&gclid=Cj0KCQiA-onjBRDSARIsAEZXcKYNy8UsAQPSTjRzcCAcguD2b5HVMXzJ9RuJWT8eLVCdLkWXZ_E1DzsaAv69EALw_wcB#isbn=0340717378&idiq=4439242

[A Red]

I'm not knocking any of those books, i've read a few of them as well as the likes of 50 dead men walking, but if you're interested in irish history there is another side to it. 

[SasaS]

7 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

I'll get ya one fella:

 

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/bandit-country_toby-harnden/278646/?mkwid=shul2aPmy|dc&pcrid=70112871912&pkw=&pmt=&plc=&pgrid=21323662872&ptaid=pla-292433309456&gclid=Cj0KCQiA-onjBRDSARIsAEZXcKYNy8UsAQPSTjRzcCAcguD2b5HVMXzJ9RuJWT8eLVCdLkWXZ_E1DzsaAv69EALw_wcB#isbn=0340717378&idiq=4439242

 

Thanks. " Temporarily Unavailable". It used to be almost always like this. Almost as if Slab Murphy buys every copy as soon as it crops up. 

[TheHowieLama]

Heh -- just bought that copy -- 19 notes plus free shipping. I will give it a read then you can have it.

[SasaS]

13 minutes ago, A Red said:

I'm not knocking any of those books, i've read a few of them as well as the likes of 50 dead men walking, but if you're interested in irish history there is another side to it. 

Feel free to recommend some titles. I'm mostly into NI Troubles though.

 

8 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Heh -- just bought that copy -- 19 notes plus free shipping. I will give it a read then you can have it.

 

Deal.

 

[ZonkoVille77]

12 minutes ago, A Red said:

I'm not knocking any of those books, i've read a few of them as well as the likes of 50 dead men walking, but if you're interested in irish history there is another side to it. 

 

There is 2 sides. The side of the Irish struggle against oppression. And the British side which mainly consists of murdering for hundreds of years, assisting with creating famines, cover ups, falsehoods etc etc.