Irish Political History

Best-selling historian Tim Pat Coogan offers a strongly personal perspective on the Irish century that followed the Rising - charting a flawed history that is marked as much by complacency, corruption and institutional and clerical abuse, as it is by the sacrifices and nation-building achievements of the Republic's founding fathers.

This biography reconciles an acknowledgement of de Valera's catastrophic failure in 1921-22, when his petulant rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty shaped the dimensions of a bloody civil war, with an appreciation of his subsequent greatness as the statesman who single-handedly severed the ties with Britain and defined nationalist Ireland's sense of itself.

A major new biography of a monumental figure in modern Irish history.

In particular, it assesses his role as a state-builder and a key figure in the Irish democratic tradition.

The recollections within this powerful book throw light on Brian Lenihan's political career from its earliest days, through to the dramatic hours leading to the Bank Guarantee and the subsequent bailout, to his untimely death in 2011.

2014 1ST EDITION HARDBACK