Ireland Memoir

One of Ireland's best current novelists provides a thumbnail sketch of Ireland's greatest writer. A passionate and sensuous portrait, James Joyce is a return to the land of politics, history, saints, and scholars that shaped the creator of the 20th century's groundbreaking novel, Ulysses.

The moving story of an Irish immigrant's life from a poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland to becoming a captain of industry, After the Roof Caved In is a powerful, poignant look at how hard work and education enabled one young man to change his life and circumstances completely.

For decades there has been argument in the media and amongst politicians about the possible existence and extent of a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. MRF Shadow Troop confirms there was such an agenda in the early, chaotic days of British military intervention across the Irish Sea. But amongst the mountain of speculation there is little of any accuracy or authority relating to this period.

It was a cold and foggy February night in 1983 when a group of armed thieves crept onto Ballymany Stud, near The Curragh in County Kildare, Ireland, to steal Shergar, one of the thoroughbred industry's most renowned stallions. The thieves demanded a hefty ransom for the safe return of one of the most valuable Thoroughbreds in the world, but the ransom was never paid and Shergar's remains have never been found.

Lindsay Ireland enjoyed an idyllic childhood. She spent her summers in Vermont with her movie-star relatives where she rode horses, played detective with her cousin, and drank ice-cold lemonade. After the summer months, Lindsay returned to her loving family where her biggest worry was getting good grades in school. Then one day, Lindsay noticed blood in her stool.

The stories of two undercover agents: the man known as Stakeknife, Force Research Unit (FRU) agent and deputy head of the IRA’s infamous ‘Nutting Squad’, the internal security force which tortured and killed suspected informers; and Brian Nelson, who worked for the FRU, aiding loyalist terrorists and murderers in their bloody work. The inside story on: – How the British Secret Service uses informers – The recruitment, briefing and handling of spies – Murders and set-ups in Northern Ireland.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Catherine Corless could not have known where her interest in local history would lead her as she began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway in 2010. Uncovering no less than 796 missing burial records of children born there, the stark truth of their place of rest became clear: a disused sewage tank on the old home site, where two boys had once stumbled upon bones.

Award-winning memoirist and New York Times best-selling author Nuala O'Faolain branches into new territory with her biography of the infamous Irish-American prostitute and thief Chicago May. O'Faolain uses May's autobiography, primary sources from the turn of the 19th century, and her own experience as an Irishwoman to bring May and all her heartache, deception, and violence to life.

It's Belfast, 1975. The city lies under the dark cloud of the Troubles, and hatred fills the air like smoke. But Tony Macaulay has just turned 12 and he's got a new job. He's going to be a paperboy. And come rain or shine - or bombs and mortar - he will deliver. Paperboy lives in Upper Shankill, Belfast, in the heart of the conflict between Loyalists and Republicans. Bombings are on the evening news, rubble lies where buildings once stood, and rumours spread like wildfire about the IRA and the UDA.

One sunlit evening, May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans.

Dublin, November 1856: George Little, the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, is found dead, lying in a pool of blood beneath his desk. He has been savagely beaten, his head almost severed; there is no sign of a murder weapon, and the office door is locked, apparently from the inside. Thousands of pounds in gold and silver are left untouched at the scene of the crime. Augustus Guy, Ireland's most experienced detective, teams up with Dublin's leading lawyer to investigate the murder. But the mystery defies all explanation.

Marie Cassidy was Ireland's state pathologist from 2004 until 2018. During that time, she was involved in many high-profile cases, including the Stardust exhumation and the deaths of Siobhan Kearney, Rachel O'Reilly, Robert Holohan and Tom O'Gorman. In Beyond the Tape, she invites us into the world of forensic pathology and shares her remarkable personal journey, from working-class Glasgow to becoming Ireland's head pathologist.

The Boy They Tried to Hide is the startling true account of how truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.... Shane Dunphy was working as a resource teacher in a rural town when he was approached by the mother of one of his pupils, seeking help. She is worried for her troubled young son, who has been found leaving the house late at night to go deep into the woods near their home. He has spoken of meetings with a friend, Thomas, but no one else has seen him or knows who he is.

Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of Paddy Power, is the largest gambling business in the world. The evidence of that success is visible everywhere, from shop fronts and bus shelters to sporting arenas and smartphone screens. The company’s rise to this point has been rapid, but like any gambler worth their salt, Paddy Power has always succeeded in finding an edge.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright in the late 19th century. His controversial plays were riddled with mockery of social status, cleverly covered by the use of comedy. Wilde may have paved the way for people living a little off the center line. Full of flash and flare, he wrote some of those colorful traits into his literature. Take a journey into the world of Oscar Wilde, and find out just how individualistic he was.

When Richard Hayes, a gifted polymath and cryptographer, was drafted by Irish intelligence services to track the movements of a prolific Nazi spy, Hermann Görtz, it set in motion one of the most remarkable episodes in Irish history. What followed was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse that would wind its way through the capital and its suburbs, reverberate through the corridors of power, test the sympathies of those in high society and even expand to jeopardise the Allied war effort.

Farming has been in John Connell's family for generations, but he never intended to follow in his father's footsteps. Until, one winter, after more than a decade away, he finds himself back on the farm. Connell records the hypnotic rhythm of the farming day - cleaning the barns, caring for the herd, tending to sickly lambs, helping the cows give birth. Alongside the routine events, there are the unforeseen moments when things go wrong: when a calf fails to thrive, when a sheep goes missing, when an argument between father and son erupts and things are said that cannot be unsaid.

Let This Be Our Secret is a remarkable true crime story set on Ireland's north coast where the bodies of a couple were found in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes - the apparent victims of a suicide pact....

'Money is handy for doing messages' was a phrase the young Tommie Gorman heard from his father, growing up in Sligo in the 1960s. Struggle was never far away but their household had a surplus of love and warmth. From modest beginnings as a local reporter at the Western Journal, where his deadlines were dependent on the bus schedule, Tommie landed at RTÉ, taking up the post of North-West correspondent in 1980. Over the next four decades he became a familiar presence in Irish homes, known for his coverage of Europe and Northern Ireland.