This work is the study of a family's century long involvement with Irish self rule and political freedom. Joe Johnston (1890-1972), from a Tyrone Presbyterian small-farm background, had 3 elder brothers who made their careers in the Indian Civil Service. The family were 'Home Rule within the Empire' supporters in the Ulster liberal tradition. After studying classics and ancient history in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and then in Oxford, JJ became a Fellow of Trinity in 1913. He then published his anti-Carson book Civil War in Ulster, attacking the process which culminated in the 1914 Larne gun-running. He contributed significantly to the emergent national movement. He wrote critically about 1930s economic policies, and went on the serve in the Irish Senate/Sennad from 1939 to 1954. His son RJ (b.1929) was a pioneer of the student left in TCD in the 1940s, and was associated with the post-war attempt to bring European Marxist thinking into the Irish labour movement, with the foundation of the Irish Workers League in 1948. After a period in London in the early 1960s, he returned to Dublin, this time as a research scientist, and helped Cathal Goulding in his attempt to get the 1960s generation of republicans to go political, in a democratic left-wing mode, decoupling from the Stalinist incubus. He helped set the stage for the emergence of the Civil Rights approach to reform in Northern politics, as a means of opening up an all-Ireland perspective. His opponents in the Republican movement, the Provisionals, opted for violence . In the ensuing decades he participated in various politicising processes which may, in the end, show the counter-productive nature of the role of the gun in politics, in Ireland and elsewhere. Roy Johnston lives in Dublin and continues to be politically active. "An important addition to any library of 20th century Irish Studies" Professor J.Skelly

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The introduction of co-operative societies into the Irish countryside during the late-nineteenth century transformed rural society and created an enduring economic legacy. Civilising rural Ireland challenges predominant narratives of Irish history that explain the emergence of the nation-state through the lens of political conflict and violence. Instead the book takes as its focus the numerous leaders, organisers, and members of the Irish co-operative movement. Together these people captured the spirit of change as they created a modern Ireland through their reorganisation of the countryside, the spread of new economic ideas, and the promotion of mutually-owned businesses. Besides giving a comprehensive account of the co-operative movement’s introduction to Irish society the book offers an analysis of the importance of these radical economic ideas upon political Irish nationalism.

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.

Vols. 277-230, no. 2 include Stuff and nonsense, v. 5-6, no. 8, Jan. 1929-Aug. 1930.