Irish Economic And Social History

This is the first textbook on the history of modern Ireland to adopt a social history perspective. Written by an international team of leading scholars, it draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches and consistently sets Irish developments in a wider European and global context.

Papers from a seminar held in Dublin in September 1976.

This book is a companion book to The Real History of Ireland Warts and All. It deals systematically with the social and economic aspects of Ireland from the earliest days until 1921. Many books with regard to the history of Ireland suffer to a greater or lesser degree of political or ideological distortion. It was always the authors aim to get at the actual facts of Irish history and to paint a picture with warts and all. Events are placed in their historical context, and not in the context of later political propaganda.

Ireland appears to be in the throes of a remarkable process of social change. The purpose of this book is to systematically scrutinize the interpretations and prescriptions that inform the deceptively simple metaphor of the "Celtic Tiger." The standpoint of the book is that a more critical approach to the course of development being followed by the Republic is urgently required. The essays collected here set out to expose the fallacies that drive the fashionable rhetoric of Tigerhood. Four of these fallacies--that Ireland has cast off the chains of economic dependency, that everyone is benefiting from the economic recovery, that personal freedom and liberty are at an unprecedented level for all citizens, and that Ireland is also experiencing a period of strong cultural renaissance--are vigorously challenged.

Exiles in a Global City explores how early modern Irish migrants in Rome represented their cultural identities in relation to world-wide Spanish and Roman institutions and focuses on some sources not previously considered by Irish historians.