Northern Ireland At The Crossroads

Centred on the dramatic premiership of Terence O'Neill, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads examines the most hopeful decade for Ulster Unionism this century. O'Neill's bold ambition to reach out to catholics inspired optimism but also massive political instability. Though concerned with the drama and personalities of high politics, this book has much to say on popular attitudes in one of the world's most politicised societies. New light is shed on Paisleyism, discrimination and the civil rights movement.

The Troubles may have developed into a sectarian conflict, but the violence was sparked by a small band of leftists who wanted Derry in October 1968 to be a repeat of Paris in May 1968. Like their French comrades, Northern Ireland's 'sixty-eighters' had assumed that street fighting would lead to political struggle. The struggle that followed, however, was between communities rather than classes. In the divided society of Northern Ireland, the interaction of the global and the local that was the hallmark of 1968 had tragic consequences. Drawing on a wealth of new sources and scholarship, Simon Prince's timely new edition offers a fresh and compelling interpretation of the civil rights movement of 1968 and the origins of the Troubles. The authoritative and enthralling narrative weaves together accounts of high politics and grassroots protests, mass movements and individuals, and international trends and historic divisions, to show how events in Northern Ireland and around the world were interlinked during 1968.

Dancing at the crossroads used to be young people ́s opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland - until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, ́dancing at the crossroads ́ also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity. Helena Wulff is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Publications include Twenty Girls (Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988), Ballet across Borders (Berg, 1998), Youth Cultures (co-edited with Vered Amit-Talai, Routledge, 1995), New Technologies at Work (co-edited with Christina Garsten, Berg, 2003). Her research focusses on dance, visual culture, and Ireland.

This book examines memoir-writing by many of the key political actors in the Northern Irish Troubles (19691998), and argues that memoir has been a neglected dimension of the study of the legacies of the violent conflict. It investigates these sources in the context of ongoing disputes over how to interpret Northern Irelands recent past. A careful reading of these memoirs can provide insights into the lived experience and retrospective judgments of some of the main protagonists of the conflict. The period of relative peace rests upon an uneasy calm in Northern Ireland. Many people continue to inhabit contested ideological territories, and in their strategies for shaping the narrative telling of the conflict, key individuals within the Protestant Unionist and Catholic Irish Nationalist communities can appear locked into exclusive and self-justifying discourses. In such circumstances, while some memoirists have been genuinely self-critical, many others have utilised a post-conflict language of societal

A radical new perspective revealing the truth behind the making of modern Ireland from economic rebirth to entering the EEC.