Tadhg Barry was the last high-profile victim of the crown forces during the Irish War of Independence. A veteran republican, trade unionist, journalist, poet, GAA official and alderman on Cork Corporation, he was shot dead in Ballykinlar internment camp on 15 November 1921. Barry's tragic death was a huge, but subsequently largely forgotten, event in Ireland. Dublin came to a standstill as a quarter of a million people lined the streets and the IRA had its last full mobilisation before the Treaty split. The funeral in Cork echoed those of Barry's comrades, the martyred lord mayors Tomás MacCurtain and Terence MacSwiney. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed three weeks later, all internees were released and the movement that elevated him to hero/martyr status was ripped asunder in the ensuing civil war. The name of Tadhg Barry became lost in the smoke. This is the first biography of a fascinating activist described by his British enemies as an 'Utter disloyalist' and by a comrade as 'a characteristic product of Rebel Cork – courageous, kindly, generous to a fault, bold and daring, and independent in speech and action'. It offers fascinating new perspectives on the dynamics of Ireland's long revolution, including glimpses of the roads not taken.

First published in 1975. Using estate records, local newspapers and parliamentary papers, this book focuses upon two central and interrelated subjects – the rural economy and the land question – from the perspective of Cork, Ireland’s southernmost country. The author examines the chief responses of Cork landlords, tenant farmers and labourers to the enormous difficulties besetting them after 1815. He shows how the great famine of the late 1840s was in many ways an economic and social watershed because it rapidly accelerated certain previous trends and reversed the direction of others. He also rejects the conventional view of the land war of the 1880s, arguing that in Cork it was essentially a ‘revolution of rising expectations’, in which tenant farmers struggled to preserve their substantial material gains since 1850 by using the weapons of ‘agrarian trade unionism’, civil disobedience and unprecedented violence. This title will be of interest to students of rural history and historical geography.