Best of
Ireland

1982

Whisper Who Dares


Terence Strong - 1982
    The new monster in the IRA's armoury must be destroyed at birth. A top-secret, top-priority order goes out to 22 Special Air Service Regiment:SEEK AND DESTROY - NO MATTER WHERE.For the four-men Sabre team of the legendary SAS this will be their toughest mission... probing the inner sanctum of the IRA's terror machine, fighting in the bloody carnage and chaos of Ulster - never before has so much been at stake. They encounter both triumph and disaster - and the cruellest twist of fate.

Passing the Time in Ballymenone


Henry Glassie - 1982
    fresh and fascinating." --Come-All-Ye..". an extraordinarily rich and rewarding book.... it is about the effort of one man to find for himself and us the life's breath of the people of Ballymenone.... It is certainly a remarkable tour de force." --Emmet Larkin, New York Times Book ReviewThe life and art, the folklore, history, and common work of a rural community in Northern Ireland--through the eyes and pen of gifted folklorist Henry Glassie. It is a classic in the fullest sense, reaching beyond folklore to all of humanity.

Light a Penny Candle


Maeve Binchy - 1982
    It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship which will endure through twenty turbulent years of change and chaos, joy and sorrow, soaring dreams and searing betrayals...Writing with warmth, wit and great compassion, Maeve Binchy tells a magnificent story of the lives and loves of two women, bound together in a friendship that nothing could tear asunder - not even the man who threatened to come between them forever.

Ireland's Unfinished Revolution: An Oral History


Kenneth Griffith - 1982
    It takes us inside the armed struggle to throw off British rule and create a united Ireland in the early part of this century.

The Christmas Tree


Jennifer Johnston - 1982
    Now she has returned home to die. While that process takes place she replays the fragments of her past. And, as the Christmas tree awaits its day, so she also waits, hoping that the outcome will be on her terms.

Ireland Revisited


Leon Uris - 1982
    

Irish Folk History: Tales from the North


Henry Glassie - 1982
    In story, song, and spontaneous essay, these texts, selected from Passing the Time in Ballymenone, tell of the coming of Christianity, of endless war, of the hardships and delights of rural life.During a time of trouble, Henry Glassie came into a community of active story-tellers in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, and in this book he sets their voices--their chuckles, whispers, and anger--before us. The words of Hugh Nolan, Michael Boyle, of Peter Flanagan, Hugh Patrick Owens, and their neighbors, echo from the page to present a tale that is at once the story of their tiny community and the story of all of Ireland.

Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France


Marianne Elliott - 1982
    

The Farm By Lough Gur: The Story of Mary Fogarty


Mary Carbery - 1982
    First published in London in 1937, it was quickly reprinted. Though very well received in England and a best-seller in Dublin, some questioned its quiet recall of an elysian rural Ireland before the Land War, its image of a contented Victorian world in the rich lands of east Limerick that rather jarred with the rhetoric of De Valera’s Ireland. Its woodcut images seemed English not Irish, and its ambiguous authorship gave ammunition to the doubters – was this really the voice of old Mary Fogarty, née O’Brien, or the heavily edited text produced by an Anglo-Irish friend and littérateur, Mary Lady Carbery? The text was indeed crafted by Mary Carbery, a sharp observer and accomplished essayist, but the strength of the book rests on Mary Fogarty’s contribution: the draft notes and papers that she sent over to Mary Carbery, fleshed out by information supplied by other members of the O’Brien clan. Her memories provide what remains an entirely convincing account of the lost world of the strong-farm family in post-famine Munster, one far more secure in its social status than that of other Catholic writers such as Charles Kickham or Canon Sheehan. Eighty years later, there are still few histories and even fewer fictional accounts of that rural Catholic middle class like the O’Briens, who confidently expected to be the inheritors of the earth in a HomeRule Ireland. Their world has rarely been evoked so sensitively as in this beguiling and most engaging narrative

Raids and Rallies


Ernie O'Malley - 1982
    Most of all,' he wrote, I would have liked to talk about the rank and file where I found solace.' This book is indeed O'Malley's tribute to his fellow soldiers, in which he provides an account of various offensives against the British in 1920-21. O'Malley took part in three offensives and had first-hand knowledge several others, which are detailed in a unique and informed perspective in this book.

A Time to Dance


Bernard MacLaverty - 1982
    Nelson plays truant and sees something he wishes he hadn't in the title story, 'A Time to Dance'. In Phonefun Limited Sadie and Agnes, retired prostitutes hit upon an inventive new way of making someone happy with a phone call, while in ‘My Dear Palestrina' a remarkable music teacher initiates her pupil into the mysteries of art and maturity.