A biography of the Sinn Fé in leader, and Taoiseach in waiting, Mary Lou McDonald. Mary Lou McDonald is the bookies' favourite to be Ireland's next Taoiseach. She would be the first woman to reach the office, and the first Sinn Fé in leader ever to enter government in the Republic of Ireland. But how did a quintessentially bourgeois woman end up as the leader of a political party with such a recent terrorist past? And was her change of allegiance from Fianna Fá il to Sinn Fé in ideological...

The definitive inside account of the 2016-20 coalition government. Cabinet minister Shane Ross reveals the bitter internal battles fought with the old Blueshirts, the crises when the coalition came close to collapse and the sometimes fraught personal relationships between the fifteen figures who made up the last government. He recounts how a group of Independents risked everything to form a government that was expected to last for only months but which ran for more than four years, under t...

As recently as 2007, the Irish economy was still booming and the state coffers overflowing; by the end of 2008, the state faces an unprecedented crisis. The story of the Irish banking collapse is a tawdry tale of collusion, back-scratching and denial among bankers, developers, regulators and politicians.This is the story Shane Ross - independent Senator, long-time champion of citizens against misbehaving corporations, and Journalist of the Year 2009 - tells in The Bankers,...

During the years when all seemed well with the Irish economy, a scandal bloomed in front of our faces but went mostly unnoticed: the scandal of public waste. Vast overspending on infrastructure (including a number of white elephants), extravagant use of overpriced consultants, the creation of dozens of quangos whose primary purpose seemed to be jobs for the boys, the culture of junketry that took hold in the semi-state sector and the Oireachtas - these and other dubious practices flourishe...

A devastating new exposé from the bestselling authors of The Bankers and Wasters.In March 2011, the Irish people elected a new government. But how much had really changed? In The Untouchables, Shane Ross and Nick Webb shine a light into dark corners of official Ireland to show that the blame for running the country into the ground goes well beyond Fianna Fáil, and that a dismaying number of the people who should share the blame are still ...