The Shaping of Modern Ireland: A Centenary Assessment

Description

Originally published in 1960 and edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Shaping of Modern Ireland was a seminal work surveying the lives of prominent early twentieth-century figures who influenced Irish affairs in the years between the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 and the Easter Rising of 1916. The chapters were written by leading historians and commentators from the Ireland of the 1950s, some of whom personally knew the subjects of their essays.

This volume draws its inspiration from that seminal work. Written by some of today’s leading figures from the world of Irish history, politics, journalism and the arts, it revisits a crucial phase in the country’s history, one that culminated in the Easter Rising and the Revolution, when everything ‘changed utterly’. With chapters on men and women of the stature of Carson, Connolly and Markievicz, but also industrialists such as Guinness who contributed to ‘shaping modern Ireland’ in the social and economic sphere, this book offers an important contribution to the renewal of the debate on the country’s history.

Table of Contents

Preface – Eugenio Biagini and Daniel Mulhall
Chapter 1 – 1891-1916 ~ Paul Bew
Chapter 2 – Stephens, Devoy and Clarke ~ R.V.Comerford
Chapter 3 – Redmond, Dillon and Healy ~ Frank Callanan
Chapter 4 – Douglas Hyde ~ Patrick Maume
Chapter 5 – Arthur Griffith ~ Michael Laffan
Chapter 6 – Michael Cusack and the rise of the GAA ~ Stephen Collins
Chapter 7 – Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera ~ Martin Mansergh
Chapter 8 – Edward Carson ~ Eugenio Biagini
Chapter 9 – Archbishop William Joseph Walsh ~ Daithí Ó Corráin
Chapter 10 – George Russell, D.P. Moran and Tom Kettle ~ Daniel Mulhall
Chapter 11 – Maud Gonne MacBride, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Dorothy Macardle ~ Elisabeth Kehoe
Chapter 12 – W.B.Yeats ~ Theo Dorgan
Chapter 13 – Pirrie and Plunkett ~ Mary E. Daly
Chapter 14 – Countess Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth ~ Sonja Tiernan
Chapter 15 – Patrick Pearse and James Connolly ~ Diarmaid Ferriter
Chapter 16 – The Guinnesses and beyond ~ J.J. Lee
Chapter 17 – Hanna and Frank Sheehy-Skeffington ~ Margaret Ward

About the Author

Eugenio Biagini is currently Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. His main publications include British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906 (2007).

Daniel Mulhall is the Irish Ambassador in London. He is the author of A New Day Dawning: A Portrait of Ireland in 1900 (1999).