It embraces a wide range of social milieux, from the miseries of the tenements to the cultivated, bourgeois Bradshaws. It introduces a memorable cast of characters: the main protagonist, Fitz, a model of the hard-working, loyal and abused trade unionist; the isolated, well-meaning and ineffectual Fr O'Connor; the wretched and destitute Rashers Tierney. In the background hovers the enormous shadow of Jim Larkin, Plunkett's real-life hero.Strumpet City's popularity derives from its realism and its naturalistic presentation of traumatic historical events. There are clear heroes and villians. The book is informed by a sense of moral outrage at the treatment of the locked-out trade unionists, the indifference and evasion of the city's clergy and middle class and the squalor and degradation of the tenement slums.

    If its name was "Saint Somebody", they know you are a Catholic and you don't get taken on...'In vivid detail, she brings to life the situation which has focused world attention on the North of Ireland...the early marches, and then the shootings, the burnings, the barricades...how she went to America to help her people rebuild their homes...and how she feels today...

    It was intended as an 'interim' anthology of poetry for the Leaving Certificate until such time as a more permanent volume could be devised. Twenty six years later it was replaced. In the meantime it had passed through the hands of hundreds of thousands of students in Ireland. Soundings might have been replaced but it was never fully forgotten. Old copies ended up with an individual personality honed out of manual annotations and thoughts, not all of them provided by the teacher. Scrawls in biro or pencil testified to the thoughts and daydreams many users. A surprising number of copies ended up in attics only to be rediscovered with delight many years later and to be given treasured status in new homes. One former student recalled how Soundings was the first school book to treat her as an adult. It made no concessions to the 'teenager'. It didn't patronise. Its imagery was entirely in the poetry. The typography was appalling but the cover design still resonates. A decade after its demise, second hand copies of Soundings were fetching surprising prices. It was widely discussed in chat-rooms on the web. There were increasing demands for a reprint. So here is Soundings, in its original form just as you remember it. The same stony grey soil of Patrick Kavanagh's Monaghan; T.S.Eliot's same women who come and go talking of Michaelangelo. Please enjoy once more!

    He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind that is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life.

    Already his widely celebrated gifts of precision, thoughtfulness, and musicality were everywhere apparent.

    

    

    A History of Modern Ireland by Giovanni Costigan

    Jackson --Irish as a vernacular before the Norman invasion / by David Greene --Changing form of the Irish language / by Brian Ó Cuív --Irish literary tradition / by Proinsias Mac Cana --Irish oral tradition / by Seán Ó Súlleabháin --Twentieth-Century Irish literature / by Gearóid S. Mac Eoin --Language, personality and the nation / by Martin Brennan --Decline of the Irish language / by Maureen Wall --Irish revival movements / by Tomás Ó hAilin --Language and political history / by An tAthair Tomás Ó Fiaich --Gaeltacht / by Caoimhin Ó Danachair --Irish in the modern world / by Brian Ó Cuiv.