Ireland Her Own:

This book tells the history of eight hundred years of the Irish people’s struggle for freedom. It takes us from the arrival of English settlers in the Middle ages up to the present –the struggle in the words of James Fintan Lalor, to make ‘Ireland her own, and all therein, from the sod to the sky’. The author describes this book as ‘An Outline History of the Irish struggle for National Freedom and Independence’, but it is much more than that. As an ‘Outline History’ it has no equal, and for several reasons. In the first place this is the only book in which, right from the beginning and throughout its pages, economic factors are placed in context with the political. Whilst many historians have written of this long struggle with pride and emotion, none has produced anything so effective as this memorable account taking in aspects of Irish social, economic and political history. The book describes the conquest and the first steps taken by England towards Empire in the twelfth century and brings the reader up to the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s. C. Desmond Greaves’ concluding chapter on the events from the then to the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and the start of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The book is not only a clearly and vigorously written history, but also a guide to the history of imperialism in general and an invaluable handbook for students of politics