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'The Age-Old Struggle' analyses the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism between the outbreak of 'the Troubles' in 1969 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Drawing upon the words and writings of more than 250 Irish republicans, this book scrutinises the movement's historical and contemporary complexity. Yet it also examines the centripetal forces which connected republican organisations through decades of struggle.
Learning behind Bars is an oral history of former Irish republican prisoners in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland between 1971, the year internment was introduced, and 2000, when the high-security Long Kesh Detention Centre/HM Prison Maze closed. Dieter Reinisch outlines the role of politically motivated prisoners in ending armed conflicts as well as the personal and political development of these radical activists during their imprisonment. Based on extensive life-story interviews with Irish Republican Army (IRA) ex-prisoners, the book examines how political prisoners developed their intellectual positions through the interplay of political education and resistance. It sheds light on how prisoners used this experience to initiate the debates that eventually led to acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Politically relevant and instructive, Learning behind Bars illuminates the value of education, politics, and resistance in the harshest of social environments.
'Although the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) existed barely two decades, it left a curiously lasting imprint on British politics. Formed as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency in 1978, the RCP represented a distinct and often controversial offshoot of the Trotskyist left. Aspiring to build a vanguard in the British working class, the upstart organization campaigned princiapally around 'unconditional support for Irish freedom' and militant anti-racism. RCP theoreticians expounded an independent revolutionary politics to supercede capitalism. In the 1990s, however, the RCP leadership ruefully declared that the working class had suffered an historic defeat. The party dissolved in 1996, an...
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The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Frida...
In Fighting Deindustrialisation, Andy Clark outlines and examines one of the most significant and under-researched periods in modern Scottish labour history. Over a fourteen month period in 1981 and 1982, as Scotland suffered the effects of the accelerated deindustrialisation of its economy, three workforces refused to accept the loss of their jobs. The predominantly women assembly workers at Lee Jeans (Greenock), Lovable Bra (Cumbernauld), and Plessey Capacitors (Bathgate) were informed that their multinational employers had taken the decisions to close their plants. At each site, a battle was fought against capital movement, corporate greed, and unfair jobloss. The workers occupied their f...
An unforgettable firsthand account of how the hippie movement flowered in the late 1960s, appeared spent by the Thatcher-consumed 1980s, yet became the seedbed for progressive reform we now take for granted—and continues to inspire generations of rebels and visionaries. At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. He established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government’s road building programs of the 1980s and—later—in legis...
As heard on BBC 6 Music with Shaun Keveny, BBC Radio 5 Live and Talk Radio with Eamonn Holmes The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn’t stay the course. In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more. As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn’t just their story. It’s ours as well.
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