Political failures and globalization have eroded Ireland’s sovereignty—a decline portended in Irish literature. Surveying the bleak themes in thirty works by modern writers, Declan Kiberd finds audacious experimentation that embodies the defiance and resourcefulness of Ireland’s founding spirit—and a strange kind of hope for a more open nation.

The 1998 Belfast Agreement promised to release citizens of Northern Ireland from the grip of paramilitarism. However, almost a decade later, Loyalist paramilitaries were still on the battlefield. After the Peace examines the delayed business of Loyalist demilitarization and explains why it included more fits than starts in the decade since formal peace and how Loyalist paramilitary recalcitrance has affected everyday Loyalists. Drawing on interviews with current and former Loyalist paramilitary men, community workers, and government officials, Carolyn Gallaher charts the trenchant divisions that emerged during the run-up to peace and thwart demilitarization today. After the Peace demonstrates that some Loyalist paramilitary men want to rebuild their communities and join the political process. They pledge a break with violence and the criminality that sustained their struggle. Others vow not to surrender and refuse to set aside their guns. These units operate under a Loyalist banner but increasingly resemble criminal fiefdoms. In the wake of this internecine power struggle, demilitarization has all but stalled. Gallaher documents the battle for the heart of Loyalism in varied settings, from the attempt to define Ulster Scots as a language to deadly feuds between UVF, UDA, and LVF contingents. After the Peace brings the story of Loyalist paramilitaries up to date and sheds light on the residual violence that persists in the post-accord era.

This edition of Cormac O'Grada's study expands upon his central arguments about the agricultural and demographic developments surrounding the Great Irish Famine. It provides new statistical information, new appendices and integrated responses to the new research and writing on the subject that has appeared since the publication of the first edition in 1987.

The Good Friday Agreement is widely celebrated as a political success story, one that has brought peace to a region that was once synonymous around the globe with political violence. The truth, as ever, is rather more complicated than that. In many respects, the era of the peace process has seen Northern Irish society change almost beyond recognition. Those incidents of politically motivated violence that were once commonplace have become thankfully rare and a new generation has emerged whose identities and interests are rather more fluid and cosmopolitan than those of their predecessors. However, Northern Ireland continues to operate in the long shadow of its own turbulent past. Those who were victims of violence, as well as those who were its agents, have often been consigned to the margins of a society still struggling to cope with the traumas of the Troubles. Furthermore, the transition to ‘peace’ has revealed the existence of new, and not so new, forms of violence in Northern Irish society, directed towards women, ethnic minorities and the poor. Northern Ireland a generation after Good Friday sets out to capture the complex, and often contradictory, realities that have emerged more than two decades on from the region’s vaunted peace deal. Across nine original essays, the authors offer a critical and comprehensive reading of a society that often appears to have left its violent past behind but at the same time remains subject to its gravitational pull.

This volume explores Irish rock's relationship to the wider world of international popular music through detailed analysis of the island's most prominent artists and bands such as U2, Van Morrison, Sinéad O'Connor, The Boomtown Rats, and Horslips - and key musical movements including the beat scene and the folk revival.