Ireland's bestselling popular historian tells the story of contemporary Ireland - controversial, authoritative and highly readable. Tim Pat Coogan's biographies of Michael Collins and DeValera and his studies of the IRA, the Troubles and the Irish Diaspora have transformed our understanding of contemporary Ireland, and all have been massive bestsellers. Now he has produced a major history of Ireland in the twentieth century. Covering both South and North and dealing with cultural and social history as well as political, this enthralling work will become the definitive single-volume account of the making of modern Ireland.

History did not have to work out the way it actually did. Ferriter looks at twenty events in twentieth-century Irish life and wonders how they might have been different: What if Joyce and Beckett had stayed in Ireland? What if Britain had blocked Irish immigration in the 1950s? What if there had been no 'Late Late Show'?

This book analyzes the relationship between the Irish State and the Jewish community in the 1930s. The author assesses Ireland's humanitarian record during the Holocaust and finally traces the history of the Irish Jewish community from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Traces the social and political history of Ireland since the partition in the 1920s.

What did the Easter Rising really change? / Peter Hart -- Ending war in a "sportsmanlike manner" : the milestone of revolution, 1919-23 / Anne Dolan -- Women's political rhetoric and the Irish revolution / Jason Knirck -- The problem of equality : women's activist campaigns in Ireland, 1920-40 / Maria Luddy -- Nuanced neutrality and Irish identity : an idiosyncratic legacy / Thomas E. Hachey -- Modernity, the past and politics in post-war Ireland / Enda Delaney -- "Ireland is an unusual place" : President Kennedy's 1963 visit and the complexity of recognition / Mike Cronin -- Sex and the archbishop : John Charles McQuaid and social change in 1960s Ireland / Diarmaid Ferriter -- Turmoil in the sea of faith : the secularization of Irish social culture, 1960-2007 / Tom Garvin -- The Irish Cattholic narrative : reflections on milestones / Louise Fuller -- Some fitting and adequate recognition : a new direction for civic portraiture in nineteenth-century Ireland's industrial capital / Gillian McIntosh -- The origins of the peace process / Thomas Hennessey.

Explores the extraordinary relationship the Irish have with alcohol from the point of view of the group who were intent on reducing alcohol consumption through membership in the Pioneer Total Abstinence of the Sacred Heart. The Pioneers was formed in 1898, by the mid 1950s the association was to claim a membership of nearly half a million, identifiable by the wearing of a pin, the outward expression of an internal and deeply personal piety. It was a startling figure for such a small country but the stereotype of the Irish as a nation of heavy drinkers continued unabated, aided by vast expenditure on alcohol. As the century progressed two diametrically opposed cultures - abstinence and heavy drinking - were lying alongside each other. Ferriter makes use of previously unpublished sources, examines the Irish temperance movement in the context of Irish society as a whole and attempts to tease out some of the intricacies and ambiguities associated with these two cultures. Although the leaders of this temperance crusade insisted that it was primarily a religious movement, given the pervasiveness of the Irish drink culture it was inevitable that in their desire to transform attitudes they would have to involve themselves in the wider, and more material debates about the role of drink in Irish society. The fact that the movement was founded at a time of intense cultural nationalism gave these debates an added potency, particularly as it had often been contended that increased sobriety was essential for any self-respecting self-governing nation. After Independence, the quest for sobriety and an initially robust Catholic crusade ultimately led to confrontation and confusion.

Professor Dermot Keogh's Twentieth-Century Ireland, the sixth and final book in the New Gill History of Ireland series, is a wide-ranging, informative and hugely engaging study of the long twentieth century, surveying politics, administrative history, social and religious history, culture and censorship, politics, literature and art. It focuses on the consolidation of the new Irish state over the course of the twentieth century. Professor Keogh highlights the long tragedy of emigration, its effect on the Irish psyche and on the under-performance of the Irish economy. He emphasises the lost opportunities for reform of the 1960s and early 70s. Membership of the EU had a diminished impact due to short-term and sectionally motivated political thinking and an antiquated government structure. Professor Keogh looks at how the despair of the 1950s revisited the country in the 1980s as almost an entire generation felt compelled to emigrate, very often as undocumented workers in the United States. Professor Keogh also argues that the violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s was an Anglo-Irish failure which was turned around only when Britain acknowledged the role of the Irish government in its resolution. He extends his analysis of the twentieth-century to include a wide-ranging survey of the most contentious events—financial corruption, child sexual abuse, scandals in the Catholic Church—between 1994 and 2005. Twentieth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents - A War without Victors: Cumann na nGaedheal and the Conservative Revolution - De Valera and Fianna Fáil in Power, 1932–1939 - In the Time of War: Neutral Ireland, 1939–1945 - Seán MacBride and the Rise of Clann na Poblachta - The Inter-Party Government, 1948–1951 - The Politics of Drift, 1951&1959 - Seán Lemass and the 'Rising Tide' of the 1960s - The Shifting Balance of Power: Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave, 1966–1977 - Charles Haughey and the Poverty of Populism - Ireland in the New Century