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From the inception of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, Irish women and men were actively recruited to train and work as nurses in British hospitals. By the 1960s approximately 30,000 Irish-born nurses were working across the NHS, constituting around 12% of all nursing staff. While many Irish families produced at least one nurse and many of those emigrated, so far there has been little recognition of the enormous contribution of Irish nurses to health care in Britain. Based on 45 interviews, this book tells the stories of Irish nurses in their own words using rich oral history and photographs. From the rigours of training to the fun of dancehalls, the book explores their life experiences as nurses and also as Irish migrants in British society.

Scarcely a parish in Ireland is without one or more dedications to saints, in the form of churches in ruins, holy wells or other ecclesiastical monuments. This book is a guide to the (mainly documentary) sources of information on the saints named in these dedications, for those who have an interest in them, scholarly or otherwise. The need for a summary biographical dictionary of Irish saints, containing information on such matters as feastdays, localizations, chronology and genealogies, although stressed over sixty years ago by the eminent Jesuit and Bollandist scholar Paul Grosjean, has never before been satisfied. Professor Ó Riain has been working in the field of Irish hagiography for upwards of forty years, and the material for the over 1,000 entries in his Dictionary has come from a variety of sources, including Lives of the saints, martyrologies, genealogies of the saints, shorter tracts on the saints (some of them accessible only in manuscripts), annals, annates, collections of folklore, Ordnance Survey letters, and other documents.

At the beginning of the First World War, many Irish men were enticed to enlist by the promise of home rule, while others may have joined up to secure a decent living; however, by 1918 and the end of the war, the political landscape in Ireland had changed radically and those who had served in the British army found themselves relegated to the shadows of a war that was rarely discussed. In 1919, the National University of Ireland compiled a war list of all students, graduates, and staff of University College Cork, University College Dublin, and University College Galway, who had died or served in the Great War. As part of the NUI's Decade of Centenary programme, the original Honour Roll is reprinted here along with a collection of explanatory essays.

When Brian Friel died in 2015, the New York Times described him as ' the Irish Chekhov', and the Guardian called him ' the father of modern Irish drama' . He had long been acclaimed as Ireland's leading contemporary playwright, with 24 plays for Broadway and West End theatres, including the iconic Faith Healer, Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa. But Friel's beginnings are more elusive, as was the playwright in his later years. He stopped giving interviews and cultivated a reclusive mystique that grew in proportion to his theatrical success. Based on newly discovered documents in the BBC and New Yorker archives, Brian Friel: beginnings reveals Friel's youthful personality and his struggles to get noticed as a young writer. Friel's correspondence with his first mentors - Belfast BBC radio producer Ronald Mason, New Yorker editor Roger Angell, and theatre director Tyrone Guthrie - shows how he shaped his early work, how he chose to write for the theatre, and how the patterns that became so memorable in his later plays were set in motion by his beginnings.

St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most powerful and influential centres of the Church in early Ireland. The stories of Brigid's life and deeds survive in several early sources, but the most important are two Latin lives written a century or more after her death. The first was composed by a churchman named Cogitosus and tells of her many miracles of healing and helping the poor. The second source, known as the Vita Prima, continues the tradition with more tales of marvellous deeds and journeys throughout the island. Both Latin sources are a treasure house of information not just about the legends of Brigid but also daily life, the role of women, and the spread of Christianity in Ireland. This book for the first time presents together an English translation of both the Life of Brigid by Cogitosus and the Vita Prima, along with the Latin text of both carefully edited from the best medieval manuscripts. Also included are an introduction, notes, and commentary to help general readers, students, and scholars in reading these fascinating stories of St. Brigid.

In the spring of 1919, UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote: ' The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt, amongst the workmen against prewar conditions ... In some countries, like Germany and Russia, the unrest takes the form of open rebellion; in others ... it takes the shape of strikes and of a general disinclination to settle down to work.' While comparative studies of revolution within the social sciences define revolution, in part, as necessarily involving mass participation, dominant narratives of the Irish revolution have left Lloyd George's ' spirit of revolution' by the wayside. The political content of the revolution is assumed to exclusively be the demand for national independence, while a focus on high-politics and military elites obscures the ways in which tens of thousands of people participated in diverse forms of popular mobilization. This collection of regional and local case studies, by contrast, shows that a ' spirit of revolution' was widespread in Ireland in the period 1917- 23.

From port to commercial centre, and from textile town to centre of shipbuilding, Belfast has adapted, chameleon-like, to changing circumstances. Each of these changes has resulted in a reimagination of the city's past to make it useable for the present. That has taken many forms. As the town grew in the nineteenth century, local historians, most particularly George Benn, provided Belfast with a narrative that charted and explained its past and charted the topographical development from small village to international industrial city. Benn and his fellow antiquarians were not alone. Others joined in the quest for a useable past for this emerging city. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries novelists, artists, travellers, photographers, Irish-language enthusiasts and memoir writers all created their own images of Belfast's past. These essays reveal the works they created in an effort to explain their own worlds to contemporaries through the medium of the past.

The ' long seventeenth century' was a time of enormous religious and political change in Ireland, but there has never been a satisfactory study of the Church of Ireland throughout this turbulent period. This book fills the gap, drawing on rich research undertaken in recent years by a number of eminent scholars. It considers the way in which the church changed over time, focusing on crucial ' hinge' events such as the mid-century rebellion and Cromwellian occupation, and the existential threat posed to the church in the Jacobite period. It looks at many different facets of the Church of Ireland in the period, including education, music, and the acquisition and use of silver; it covers not only important bishops but also ordinary parish clergy, and reveals the lives of clergy and laity in the more distant provinces as well as metropolitan Dublin. Together, the essays present a composite picture of a church in a time of change.

This book assesses trade unionism and labour relations from the foundation of the Irish Free State to the establishment of the Labour Court under the Industrial Relations Act 1946. This is the first comprehensive examination of labour relations, in the context of political, social, and economic developments during the early decades of Irish independence. Based on rigorous and extensive research of varied and vast material in British and Irish archives, this book is constructed around three central themes that influenced the development of labour relations in Ireland: the impact of the Civil War, the extent and impact of unemployment, and the development of trade unions in the formative decades of independent Ireland. It provides a unique, stimulating, and thought-provoking account of how successive governments and the trade union movement engaged with one another and contributed, in various ways, to the development of Ireland's labour relations norms. This evolution was often difficult, divisive, and halting. At times it was violent.

This book brings together an eclectic mix of papers on aspects of Irish legal history from the early modern period to the twentieth century. Contributors to the volume include leading historians, legal historians and legal practitioners. They make use of archival sources, personal papers, reported cases, parliamentary papers, newspapers and other sources to explore themes such as the role of litigants, perceptions of the law, women and the law, and the impact of social and constitutional change on the law.

This is the first in-depth examination of the Irish Revolution in Fermanagh and its political, economic and social context. Dan Purcell reveals how political tensions initially played out on the political trail and at local government level rather than in militant action. Although Fermanagh appeared calm and seemed to have been spared the violence witnessed in other counties after 1916, in reality tensions were running high as both communities strove to avoid direct provocation of the other. The Government of Ireland Act (1920), which divided Ireland into two jurisdictions, placed Fermanagh in the new state of Northern Ireland and ushered in a more militant phase. In the aftermath of the establishment of the border, the key events of the revolutionary period in the county included the sack of Roslea, the IRA's ' invasion' of Belleek and the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary. During 1920- 3 unionists in Fermanagh vigorously defended what they held, while nationalists proved surprisingly willing to accept their situation in the misplaced hope that the Boundary Commission would resolve the border issue.