New Titles: Spring 2021

NEW TITLES

SPRING 2021

MERRION PRESS

New Title • History

AGENTS OF INFLUENCE

BRITAIN’S SECRET INTELLIGENCE WAR AGAINST THE IRA

Aaron Edwards Recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate the IRA and Sinn Féin during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they were ‘agents of influence’.

With codenames like INFLICTION, STAKEKNIFE, 3007 and CAROL, these spies played a pivotal role in the fight against Irish republicanism. Now, for the first time, some of these agents have emerged from the shadows to tell their compelling stories. Agents of Influence takes you behind the scenes of the secret intelligence war which helped bring the IRA’s armed struggle to an end.

Historian Aaron Edwards explains how the IRA was penetrated by British agents, with explosive new revelations about the hidden agendas of prominent republicans like Martin McGuinness and Freddie Scappaticci and lesser-known ones like Joe Haughey and John Joe Magee. Bringing to light recently declassified TOP SECRET documents and the firsthand testimonies of agents and their handlers, Edwards reveals how British Intelligence gained extraordinary access to the IRA’s inner circle and manipulated them into engaging with the peace process.

PAPERBACK APRIL 2021 €19.95 / £18.99 9781785373411 320 pages 226 x 153mm

With new insights into the spy masters behind the scenes and Britain’s international intelligence network, Agents of Influence offers a rare and shocking glimpse into the clandestine world of secret agents, British intelligence strategy and the betrayal at the heart of militant Irish republicanism during the vicious decades of the Troubles.

Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

He is the author of several books, including Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (2014) and UVF: Behind the Mask (Merrion Press, 2017).

MERRION PRESS

New Title • Politics

POLITICAL PURGATORY

THE BATTLE TO SAVE STORMONT AND THE PLAY FOR A NEW IRELAND

Brian Rowan This is a book about political stasis; the purgatory that Stormont became, and the sins of that long standoff. The story begins in January 2017, with Martin McGuinness’s dramatic resignation as Deputy First Minister, and chronicles all the behind-thescenes negotiations that ultimately resulted in the restoration of the Executive in January 2020, with the ‘New Decade, New Approach’ agreement. Then, that new fight with a fearsome and unknowable foe: coronavirus.

Political Purgatory charts the three years from the collapse then restoration of the northern Executive to Covid-19 in the wider frame of building peace after conflict, and it turns the next corner into the centenary of Northern Ireland and that louder call for Irish unity since Brexit, like a piece of heavy machinery on fragile ground, has left cracks across the Union.

Spanning several decades, some of the biggest names on the inside of Irish and British politics, including Gerry Adams, Naomi Long, Peter Robinson, Julian Smith and Simon Coveney, help veteran journalist Brian Rowan turn the pages in what President Clinton has called the ‘long war for peace’.

Brian Rowan is a journalist, author and broadcaster. He was the BBC security editor until 2005, and reported on the major developments in the transition from conflict to peace. He was a category winner in the Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year awards four times, including twice as specialist journalist.

PAPERBACK APRIL 2021 €19.95 / £18.99 9781785373817 272 pages 234 x 156mm

MERRION PRESS

New Title • Politics

RECONCILING IRELAND

50 YEARS OF BRITISH–IRISH AGREEMENTS

Edited by Richard Humphreys

‘This book is an indispensable guide to half a century of agreements between Ireland and Britain and the parties of Northern Ireland.’

Tony Blair Reconciling Ireland is a unique guide to the history of the last half-century, compiling as it does all the texts of the key British-Irish agreements relating to Northern Ireland for the first time.

These forty documents, presented alongside expert analysis by author and Irish High Court Judge Richard Humphreys, chart the evolution of the principles of the peace process and political process from its inception right up to the present day, from the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, to the 1985 AngloIrish Agreement, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the New Decade New Approach of 2020 that resolved the Stormont stalemate.

This definitive collection demonstrates the tremendous progress made towards peace, despite huge obstacles, and gives grounds for optimism for the future. Given the huge challenge to British–Irish relationships caused by Brexit and the increased debate on Irish unity, Reconciling Ireland will be an invaluable reference work for legal and political engagement for generations to come.

Richard Humphreys is a Judge of the Irish High Court. He is a graduate of UCD and the King’s Inns and holds a PhD in Law from Trinity College Dublin. As a government adviser in 1996, he attended the launch of All-Party negotiations in Stormont that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement. This is his fourth book.

HARDBACK MAY 2021 €35 / £29.99 9781788551571 430 pages 234 x 156mm

New Title • History

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

THE STORY OF IRISH IMMIGRATION TO THE U.S. AND HOW AMERICA’S DOOR WAS CLOSED TO THE IRISH

Ray O’Hanlon Unintended Consequences reveals how America’s door closed on legal Irish immigration in the 1960s, and how America’s Irish mounted a counterattack when nation-changing political forces were sweeping the country during the era of civil rights, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. This book looks at the full historical background to Irish migration across the Atlantic, how it helped shape the young republic, and how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a near total halt to this westward flow. Nevertheless, the Irish would not be denied and continued to make the journey, no longer into the light of a full and legal American life, but rather into the shadows of an undocumented existence. Successive organisations championed the undocumented Irish, and the fight continues to this day, but this is a new America, where, in recent years, there has been growing hostility to immigrants of every nationality. Ray O’Hanlon has spent over three decades reporting on battles over comprehensive US immigration reform, and Unintended Consequences is the story of the Irish past, its present, and most uncertain future in the ‘land of the free,’ now in the presidency of Joe Biden, a man who fully embraces his Irish immigrant family story. Through Biden, the great Irish of America story continues, and with renewed hope.

Ray O’Hanlon is the editor of New York’s Irish Echo newspaper. A native of Dublin, he is a frequent contributor to US, Irish, and British media outlets reporting on Ireland, Irish American affairs, and Anglo-Irish relations. His book The New Irish Americans (1998) was the recipient of a Washington Irving Book Award.

PAPERBACK APRIL 2021 €19.95 / £18.99 9781785373787 368 pages 226 x 153mm

MERRION PRESS

New Title • History

FROM WHENCE I CAME

THE KENNEDY LEGACY, IRELAND AND AMERICA

Edited by Brian Murphy & Donnacha Ó Beacháin Elected in 1960 as the 35th President of the USA, fortythree-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy remains to this day the office’s youngest incumbent and he was its first Roman Catholic. His term in office was short, but arguably no US President has inspired more people around the globe than JFK. Even today, for generations born decades after his death, President Kennedy’s legacy has an enduring appeal.

This insightful book contains specially commissioned pieces by a range of respected academic and political figures, including former Obama speechwriter Cody Kennan, the President of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organisation, Kerry Kennedy, and senior adviser to Bernie Sanders Tad Devine.

With the presidency of Joe Biden seeing a renewed focus on broader themes within Irish, American and global politics, From Whence I Came is a fascinating and timely collection that offers a fresh perspective on the Kennedy legacy and the politics of Ireland and the United States.

PAPERBACK MARCH 2021 €19.95 / £18.99 9781788551410 288 pages 226 x 153mm

Brian Murphy lectures at the Technological University Dublin. He is the author of Forgotten Patriot: Douglas Hyde and the Foundation of the Irish Presidency and Brian Lenihan: In Calm and Crisis. He was Co-Director of the Kennedy Summer School from 2016-2018.

Donnacha Ó Beacháin is Professor of Politics at Dublin City University. His books include Destiny of the Soldiers: Fianna Fáil, Irish Republicanism and the IRA 1926-1973, Political Communication in Ireland and From Partition to Brexit: The Irish Government and Northern Ireland (2018).

MERRION PRESS

New Title • HISTORY

BALLYMACANDY

THE STORY OF A KERRY AMBUSH

Owen O’Shea

On 1 June 1921, at the height of Ireland’s War of Independence, a cycling patrol of members of the RIC was ambushed by members of the IRA at Ballymacandy, between Milltown and Castlemaine in County Kerry. After an hour of fighting, four police officers lay dead and another died a day later, among them a father of nine children.

The group of IRA assailants included some of the most high-profile figures in Ireland’s ‘Tan War’, men like Dan Keating, Jack Flynn, Dan Mulvihill, Billy Myles and Johnny Connor, but also lesser-known figures, including members of the local Cumann na mBan. Their actions were condemned from the pulpit and an official enquiry tried to discredit the local doctor who tended to the dying men.

This book comes on the centenary of an ambush that continues to resonate in its community and in a county in which the battle with Crown forces was more virulent and violent than most. Drawing on newly published witness statements and previously unpublished official records, Ballymacandy details what happened the five men who died and those who led the attack against them, and sets the incident against the backdrop of the wider revolutionary struggle in the county.

Owen O’Shea is Communications Officer with Kerry County Council. A former Labour Party press officer and election candidate, he is the author of Heirs to the Kingdom: Kerry’s Political Dynasties (2011) and A Century of Politics in the Kingdom: A County Kerry Compendium (Merrion Press, 2018).

PAPERBACK MAY 2021 €14.95 / £12.99 9781785373879 240 pages 215 x 135mm

MERRION PRESS

New Title • HISTORY

KILMICHAEL

THE LIFE AND AFTERLIFE OF AN AMBUSH

Eve Morrison

The Kilmichael Ambush of 28 November 1920 was and remains one of the most famous, successful, and controversial IRA attacks of the Irish War of Independence. Sixteen Auxiliaries and three IRA were killed in a remote part of West Cork when an IRA flying column, led by Tom Barry, attacked a convoy of British troops. This book is the first comprehensive account of both the ambush and the intense debates that followed. It explores the events, memory and historiography of the ambush, from 1920 to the present day, within a wider framework of interwar European events, global ‘memory wars’ and current scholarship relating to Irish, British, oral and military history.

Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush features extensive archival research, including the late Peter Hart’s papers, as well as many other new sources from British and Irish archives, and previously unavailable oral history interviews with Kilmichael veterans.

There has always been more than one version of Kilmichael. Tom Barry’s account certainly became the dominant one after the publication of Guerilla Days in Ireland in 1949, but it was always overshadowed and contested by others, and in this book, Eve Morrison meticulously reconstructs both ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ perspectives on this momentous and much-debated attack.

Eve Morrison is currently the Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford and a visiting Research Fellow in the Centre of Contemporary Irish History, Trinity College Dublin.

PAPERBACK NOVEMBER 2021 €19.95 / £17.99 9781788551458 300 pages 226 x 153mm

New Title • BIOGRAPHY

ERNIE O’MALLEY A LIFE

Harry F. Martin & Cormac O’Malley

This is the extraordinary life story of Ernie O’Malley (1897-1957), one of Ireland’s most complex and influential Republican figures, and later a hugely successful modernist writer.

Despite a conservative upbringing, Ernie O’Malley was a General in the IRA at 23 and commanded 7,000 volunteers in the War of Independence.

Following the Truce and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, he commanded the Anti-Treaty forces during the subsequent Civil War, after his leadership role in the occupation of the Four Courts in 1923.

What distinguishes O’Malley’s story as remarkable is the stark difference between his dramatic life as a soldier and his subsequent bohemian world as a writer and renaissance man. After the establishment of the new State, O’Malley left Ireland and travelled extensively throughout Europe, America and Mexico, mixing with the likes of Jack B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and John Ford, and embarked upon a tumultuous marriage to American heiress-sculptor Helen Hooker.

PAPERBACK JUNE 2021 €18.95 / £17.99 9781785373909 272 pages 226 x 153mm

Enriched with unpublished material from his diaries and letters, and the unique perspective of his son Cormac, Ernie O’Malley: A Life is the fascinating biography of an extraordinary Irishman.

Harry F. Martin was born in Massachusetts and following his education at Harvard and time in the US Army, he began esteemed career encompassing law and finance.

Cormac O’Malley was born in Ireland, moved to the USA in 1957, and worked in law. In retirement, he has pursued research on Irish history and the legacy of his parents, Ernie O’Malley and Helen Hooker O’Malley.

MERRION PRESS

New Title • BIOGRAPHY

PSYCHIATRIST IN THE CHAIR THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF ANTHONY CLARE

Brendan Kelly & Muiris Houston ‘The remarkable story of a remarkable man … A fascinating book.’ Gyles Brandreth ‘Marvellous’ Joanna Lumley ‘This book explores his life in the same depth that Clare himself would have expected as one of our greatest broadcasters’ Irish Independent ‘The insight that this biography provides into this key figure makes for essential reading’ Irish Examiner Born in Dublin in 1942, Anthony Clare was the bestknown psychiatrist of his generation. His BBC Radio 4 show, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, which ran from 1982 to 2001, brought him international fame and changed the nature of broadcast interviews forever.

Famous interviewees included Stephen Fry, Anthony Hopkins, Spike Milligan, Maya Angelou and Jimmy Savile, each of whom yielded to Clare’s inimitable, gentle yet probing style.

Clare made unique contributions to the demystification and practice of psychiatry, most notably through his classic book Psychiatry in Dissent: Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice (1976). This book, the first official biography of this much-loved figure, examines the man behind these achievements: the debater and the doctor, the writer and the broadcaster, the public figure and the family man.

NEW IN PAPERBACK AUGUST 2021 €16.95 / £14.99 9781785373329 304 pages 234 x 156mm

Dr Brendan Kelly is Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College. His books include Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland (IAP, 2016) and Coping with Coronavirus (Merrion Press, 2020).

Muiris Houston is a medical writer and health strategist, a specialist in occupational medicine, and Adjunct Professor of Narrative Medicine at Trinity College. He is a columnist with the Medical Independent and The Irish Times.

MERRION PRESS

New Title • NATURE

LIFE IN IRELAND

A SHORT HISTORY OF A LONG TIME

Conor W. O’Brien

This is the story of life in Ireland – a story half a billion years in the making.

With its castle, crannogs and passage tombs, Ireland is a land where history looms large. But the saga of life on this island dates back much further – millions of years before the first people set foot here.

In Life in Ireland, we’ll travel the country to explore the history of life here, from the Jurassic Coast of Antrim to the great Ice Age bone-beds of Cork.

Along the way, we’ll meet some of the astonishing creatures to have called Ireland home through the ages: shelled monsters; huge marine lizards; armoured dinosaurs; giant deer; mighty mammoths.

Vital strands in the story of life on Earth have left their mark here, including some of the first creatures to crawl onto land or take to the wing.

This epic journey will take us from the first fossils to the present day, to see how our wildlife has adapted to the human age and explore what the future might hold for life in Ireland.

Conor W. O’Brien has been interested in wildlife and nature from a very early age, and it is a passion that has since taken him around the world. His first book, Ireland through Birds: Journeys in Search of a Wild Nation (Merrion Press, 2019), was shortlisted for Best-Irish Published Book at the An Post Irish Book Awards.

PAPERBACK APRIL 2021 €16.95 / £14.99 9781785373848 272 pages 215 x 135mm

MERRION PRESS

New Title • ART

VICEREINES OF IRELAND PORTRAITS OF FORGOTTEN WOMEN

Edited by Myles Campell This book tells the untold story of the women who were the faces of the British administration in Ireland.

As the wives of the country’s viceroys, the vicereines were once the fashionable figureheads of social, cultural and charitable life at Dublin Castle, in the days before Irish independence. Exploring the portraits, papers and personal objects they left behind, this book sets out to recapture their lost legacies.

Fabrics shimmer, flowers blossom and pearls glint in the painted world of the vicereines. But behind these genteel images were activists and advocates who, as the studies in this book reveal, touched almost every facet of Irish life. Campaigns to develop hospitals, relieve poverty, promote Irish fashions, and, remarkably, mitigate what several perceived as the injustices of British rule in Ireland, are just some of their overlooked initiatives. The experiences and papers of the vicereines have much to tell us, not only about official Ireland but also about those whose identities are largely lost to history, such as orphans, artisans and the working poor. Often sympathetic but sometimes apathetic, the contrasting attitudes of the vicereines suggest a fresh, more inclusive reading of the British administration in Ireland, as viewed not only through its men but also its women.

Featuring essays by leading scholars and based on original sources, including diaries and letters, this beautifully illustrated book brings together text and image to create new and illuminating portraits of forgotten women.

Dr Myles Campbell is Research and Interpretation Officer for the Office of Public Works at Dublin Castle. In 2017 he was co-editor of Making Majesty: The Throne Room at Dublin Castle, A Cultural History (Irish Academic Press), research for which earned him the inaugural George B. Clarke Prize.

HARDBACK MAY 2021 €35 / £29.99 9781788551335 320 pages 245 x 210mm

New Title • ART

GAZETTEER OF IRISH STAINED GLASS REVISED NEW EDITION

Nicola Gordon Bowe, David Caron (Ed.), Michael Wynne Some thirty years since its first publication, David Caron returns with an updated and greatly expanded edition of the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, the definitive guide to Irish stained glass from 1900 to the present day.

This is a practical and comprehensive guide, for glass aficionados and those new to the art form, that lists all of Ireland’s significant stained-glass works, county by county, and the most noteworthy pieces abroad

by Irish artists.

Beautifully illustrated with vibrant new photography, the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass is bursting with colour and brimming with information about our most famous stained-glass artists, those who deserve to be better known, and the best contemporary artists working in the medium today.

With over 2,500 entries, two essays, and biographical notes on major artists, this is the key reference book for both academics and all who wish to learn more about Ireland’s celebrated stained-glass heritage and where it can be found.

David Caron studied Visual Communication at NCAD, Dublin, to which he returned as lecturer and later as Head of Department. He undertook a Masters at Pratt Institute, New York, and his PhD at Trinity College Dublin.

Since availing of early retirement, he has focused on cataloguing Ireland’s stained-glass heritage.

HARDBACK JUNE 2021 €35 / £29.99 9781788551298 320 pages 225 x 170mm

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Tuckmill House, 10 George’s Street Newbridge, Co. Kildare, Ireland T: +353 45 432 497 E: info@iap.ie | info@merrionpress.ie This catalogue contains a selection of our most recent titles across a range of subjects. Please visit our website for a full listing of all our books in print. Ebooks – ePub & kindle editions are available for many of our titles. Our online ordering service is secure and easy to use.

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