Ireland Politics

Jonathan Swift's world-famous books - from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal - are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. Half-orphaned, a Dubliner by birth, but a man who would always insist he was English, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a figure of great contradictions.

Rebecca and Brian Unsworth appear to have it all. A nice house in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Two well-behaved, healthy teenage children. Important government jobs - Rebecca working in counterterrorism for the FBI, Brian serving as a coder for the NSA. Seeking to revive their strained relationship, they decide for their 20th wedding anniversary to take their two kids, Kira and Tony, on a European getaway. They have a blast…until one night in Barcelona when Kira doesn’t come home from a dance club. She’s gone. Abducted.

When a series of devastating cyber attacks rock the United States, Hayley Chill is tasked by the “deeper state” to track down their source. NSA analysts insist that Moscow is the culprit, but that accusation brings plenty of complications with Hayley directing the president as a double agent against the Russians. With increasing pressure on the president to steer him towards a devastating war, it’s up to Hayley to stop the mysterious computer hacker and prevent World War III - while also uncovering some shocking truths about her own life.

Recently elected President Richard Monroe - populist, controversial, and divisive - is at the center of an increasingly polarized Washington, DC. Never has the partisan drama been so tense or the paranoia so rampant. In the midst of contentious political turf wars, the White House chief of staff is found dead in his house. A tenacious intern discovers a single, ominous clue that suggests he died from something other than natural causes.

Bertie Ahern, three times Irish Taoiseach, is often described as an enigma. The Old IRA man's son who delivered peace in Northern Ireland. A working class boy responsible for the Celtic Tiger. An ardent nationalist admired by European leaders. Now in this frank and revealing autobiography, Ahern gives his own account of a remarkable political life and the personal story that accompanies it.

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.

Warriors, poets, scholars, and visionaries—from the depths of time the ancient Celts have fascinated us. Their rich heritage lives on today. But who were they? From the Druids and fairies to King Arthur and Celtic Christianity, there is much to be learned about these natives of the British and Irish islands. Their stories are fantastic and stirring, and through them, you'll gain a glimpse into what life was like during the Iron Age.

When Manny McDonnell was 12, he awoke to discover British troops surrounding his home in the toughest area of trouble-torn Belfast. Encouraged by a fiercely Republican mother, he took to the streets with other school kids, throwing bricks, bottles and petrol bombs at soldiers. Jailed at 15 for having IRA links, he became a unit commander leading deadly missions for the INLA before joining the IPLO, a group so vicious even the IRA ordered it to disband. But his decades of commitment to a free united Ireland turned to disillusion when bombs killed two little boys in mainland Britain.

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.

In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the '70s and '80s. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood.

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.

Discover the Spirit of Ireland through an Epic Exploration of Irish History and Myths.

We think we know Winston Churchill: the bulldog grimace, the ever-present cigar, the wit and wisdom that led Great Britain through the Second World War. Yet away from the House of Commons and the Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill was a loving family man who doted on his children, none more so than Randolph, his only boy and Winston's anointed heir to the Churchill legacy.

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

Ireland’s lockdowns were among the harshest and longest in Europe. As the state was battered by waves of disease time and again, unparalleled pressures and untold tensions emerged as the country went to war with Covid, and policymakers and politicians did battle with each other. How were the key decisions made? Who held all the power? Pandemonium reveals the moves, the power-plays and the—at times jaw-dropping—tactics of a government with the health of a nation in its hands.

Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the notorious public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris.

Staying on in Northern Ireland as a civilian after years of working on undercover missions against terrorists, Rob eventually gains employment in Bristol, undertaking security work, but things don’t work out and Rob ends up living in a squat. After a job offer from an old colleague, Rob heads to London to work in close-protection security for some of Hollywood’s royalty and later becomes involved in the rescue of some very well-connected people from a dangerous religious cult. Rob’s life seems to be getting back on track. But Rob’s work soon becomes more covert.

In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal; three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage. With help from prominent Irish and Irish American voices like historian and best-selling author Tim Pat Coogan and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, A New Ireland tells the story of a modern revolution against all odds.

A warm, illuminating memoir full of wit and wisdom that doubles up as a life guide for millennials - by Irish YouTuber Melanie Murphy. Growing up in an online age, becoming an Internet sensation with half a million followers on her YouTube channel, Irish girl Melanie Murphy's journey has been far from ordinary. Here, in her first audiobook, she shares the ups and downs of her life.

In this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism, and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland’s history, literature, and landscape.