During the 1960s, the physical landscape of Dublin changed more than at any time since the eighteenth century. In this period, the government began to invest in town planning, new opportunities arose for the country's architects, and the old buildings of the core began to be replaced by modern structures. The early manifestations of this process were well received, understood as the first visible signs of prosperity and broader social and economic modernization. However, this attitude was short lived. By the end of the 1960s, popular support for urban change had evaporated; a disparate movement of preservationists, housing activists, students, and architects emerged to oppose urban change and campaign for the retention of the city's heritage. The new buildings and urban forms had not brought the promised national rejuvenation. Instead, the rapid destruction of the extant city had come to be seen as symbolic of the corruption and failed promise of modernization. Modern Dublin examines this story. Using approaches from urban studies and cultural geography, the author reveals Dublin as a place of complex exchange between a variety of interest groups with different visions for the built environment, and thus for society and the independent nation. In so doing, Erika Hanna adds to growing literatures on civil society, heritage, and cultural politics since independence, and provides a fresh approach to social and cultural change in 1960s Ireland.

Yvonne Whelan takes the reader from the contested iconography of Dublin as it evolved in the years before Independence through to the contemporary plans for the millennium spire on O'Connell Street, showing how a shift has taken place from an intensely political symbolic landscape to one that is increasingly apolitical, in tune with the changing nature of Irish politics, culture and society at the turn of the 21st century. In her comprehensive discussion of how the streetscape has changed, Whelan explores the capacity of the cultural landscape to underpin and reinforce particular narratives of identity and reveals the ways in which issues of street naming, building, designing and memorializing became firmly grounded in space and bound up with the politics of representation. Incorporating many pictures, maps and plans, "Reinventing Modern Dublin" is a work of historical, cultural and urban geography, a valuable addition to the growing body of knowledge about Dublin's historical geography and Irish urbanism.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Dublin took on the characteristics of today's city. Decisions taken about the location of large-scale social housing programmes, a lack of reform of urban governance and mixed messages in relation to urban planning combined to produce the social patterns of the city that are recognizable today. The city began to deal with the motor car as a friend to be accommodated with some interesting and long-term results. These and other issues are explored in this latest volume in the 'Making of Dublin' series. The volume aims to convey a sense of what it was like to live in and to use the city during these two decades. Particular attention is devoted to looking at the impact of the Emergency and on how the city functioned, particularly as a shopping centre and tourism centre.

Looking past the apparent lack of a sustainable Irish display culture, this book demonstrates that there is a very full story to tell of the way Ireland displayed its art from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Ireland on Show analyzes the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland - and in how Ireland was viewed beyond its own shores, in particular in Great Britain and the United States. Fintan Cullen directs much-needed critical attention and analysis to a subject that has been largely overlooked from an Irish perspective. This study moves beyond museums, to address the range of art institutions in Irish cities that displayed art, from the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in the 1820s, to Hugh Lane's Municipal Art Gallery, opened in Dublin in 1908. Throughout, the book explores the battle between the display of a unionist ethos and a nationalist point of view, a constant that resurfaces over the period. By highlighting the tension between unionist and nationalist viewpoints, Cullen uses the display of art to investigate the complexities of Irish cultural life before the founding of the Free State.

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

These eleven essays explore various aspects of Irish republicanism, north and south, from the early twentieth century to today. An awareness of history, and its uses, has long been a notable characteristic of modern Irish republicanism. Some of the topics covered include republicanism and democracy, paramilitarism, IRA veterans, the IRA and its relationship with Nazi Germany, and the mentality of extreme republicanism. -- Publisher description