History on your Doorstepby Dublin City Council’s Historians in Residence;Maeve Casserly, Donal Fallon, Cormac Moore, MaryMuldowney, Bernard Kelly & Catherine ScuffilEdited by Maeve Casserly & Bernard KellyDublin City Council 2018

In a new book entitled The Irish Soccer Split, Cormac Moore provides the most comprehensives analysis on the reasons why we have division in soccer in Ireland today unlike in sports such as rugby and cricket. Soccer in Ireland was governed for the whole island from 1880 until 1921 under the auspices of the Irish Football Association (IFA). The Leinster Football Association seceded from the parent body in 1921 and formed the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). Although politics played it...

On 13 November 1938, just months after his inauguration, President Douglas Hyde attended a soccer match between Ireland and Poland. In a passionate reaction, the GAA declared that by attending a 'foreign game', he had broken Rule 27 – the Ban – and they removed him as patron. One of the most controversial incidents in recent GAA history, it strained relations between the GAA and Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil government. It also damaged the standing of the Ban and was used extensively by op...

In May 1922, James Craig described the Boundary Commission as the ‘root of all evil’ for Ulster unionists. Conversely, it ultimately bolstered the unionist cause, leaving the border unchanged and abandoning swathes of Northern nationalists who had assumed that large tracts of land would be transferred to the Free State.Offered to Sinn Féin plenipotentiaries during the 1921 Treaty negotiations, the Boundary Commission was viewed as a major concession by David Lloyd George, but the v...

The 1921 partition of Ireland had huge ramifications for almost all aspects of Irish life and was directly responsible for hundreds of deaths and injuries, with thousands displaced from their homes and many more forced from their jobs. Two new justice systems were created; the effects on the major religions were profound, with both jurisdictions adopting wholly different approaches; and major disruptions were caused in crossing the border, with invasive checks and stops becoming the norm.

From the first symptoms of serious unrest - the Divis Street riots of 1964 - to the tortuous political manoeuvrings culminating in the 2003 Assembly elections, the book traces the reality of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.It details the motivation behind the IRA 'armed struggle', the Civil Rights movement, the murder campaigns of various loyalist terror groups, the major incidents of violence and the response of the British security forces and the justice system....

The years of the Irish revolution were the crucible of modern Ireland. Richard Killeen's authoritative survey of the period is an ideal introduction to this tumultuous time. The Irish revolution began with the Ulster crisis of 1912 followed by the Irish Nationalist Party securing the passage of the Home Rule Act in 1914. By then, however, the Great War had broken out: the Act was suspended for the duration of the war, with the violent Ulster opposition to it still unresolved. But the war c...

The Troubles refers to a violent thirty-year conflict, at the heart of which lay the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Over 3,000 people were killed on all sides, and many more damaged by a legacy that continued long past 1998.After looking at the roots of Catholic discrimination of the Northern Irish state, Coogan points to Orange prejudice in housing, education and jobs and the lack of a Catholic outlet for peaceful protest. He argues that the war in the North started as...

Between 1917 and 1981, 22 Irishmen died on hunger strike. Now, for the first time, the stories of the hunger strikers are chronicled in one book, bringing to light previously hidden histories. From the deaths on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe in 1917 and Terence MacSwiney in 1920, while imprisoned by the British government, to the death in 1981 of Michael Devine, the last republican prisoner to die on hunger strike, Pawns in the Game teases out the tangled mesh of the politics and psychology...

A candid and brutal account of murder, abduction, and violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland-from two men on opposite sides of the conflict.After 'the long war' in Ireland came to an end, very few paramilitary leaders on either side spoke openly about their role in that bloody conflict, but in Voices from the Grave, two leading figures from opposing sides reveal their involvement in bombings, shootings and killings on one condition: that their stories wer...

On St Stephen's Day 1960 Dónal Donnelly made his dramatic escape from the prison known as 'Europe's Alcatraz'. Three years earlier, the teenage Dónal had been convicted of membership of the IRA in the first year of 'Operation Harvest'. He was sentenced to ten years. Here he reflects on why he came to be on top of a prison wall risking his life. This is the story of a man who overcame the hurdles of his early years to live a successful, happy life.

In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the Briti...