This is a major, collaborative study of organised military activity and its broad impact on Ireland over the last thousand years or so, from the middle of the first millennium AD to modern times. It integrates the best recent scholarship in military history into its social and political context to provide a comprehensive treatment of the Irish military experience. The eighteen chronologically-organised chapters are written by leading scholars each of whom is an authority on the period in question. Drawing the whole work together is a wide-ranging introductory essay on the 'Irish military tradition' which explores the relationship of Irish society and politics with militarism and military affairs. The text is illustrated throughout by over 120 pictures and maps.

The Rebellion of 1798 was one of the most crucial events in modern Irish history, and the bicentenary commemorations throughout Ireland in 1998 provided much new understanding of an issue that has, down the years, been as divisive as it has been formative. Peter Collins provides here an absorbing and sensitively handled account of the changing nature of how the rebellion has been commemorated over the last 200 years. A particularly helpful feature of this book is the detailed almanac it provides of the commemorative bicentary events held throughout the island of Ireland in 1998. They were notable not only for quality of their output but also, encouragingly, for their inclusivity. For the most part, this time commemoration of '98 was an activity in which people found a common purpose rather than the source of divisiveness it had tended to be in years gone by.

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement on April 10, 1998, marked the beginning of a new era of peace and stability in Northern Ireland. As the public overwhelmingly rejected a return to the violence of the Troubles, loyalist and republican groups sought other outlets to continue their struggle. Music, which has long been used to celebrate cultural identity in the North of Ireland, became a key means of facilitating the continuation of pre-Agreement identity narratives in a “post-conflict” era. Sounding Dissent draws on three years of sustained fieldwork within Belfast's rebel music scene, in-depth interviews with republican musicians, contemporary audiences, and former paramilitaries, as well as diverse historical and archival material, including songbooks, prison records, and newspaper articles, to understand the history of political violence in Ireland.The book examines the potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of republican martyrs, and demonstrates how musical performance and political song not only articulate experiences and memories of oppression and violence, but also play a central role in the reproduction of conflict and exclusion in times of peace.