"Mother Ireland" includes seven essays seamlessly woven into an autobiographical tapestry. In her lyrical, sensuous voice, O'Brien describes growing up in rural County Clare, from her days in a convent school to her first kiss to her eventual migration to England. Weaving her own personal history with the history of Ireland, she effortlessly melds local customs and ancient lore with the fascinating people and events that shaped he young life. The result is a colorful and timeless narrative that perfectly captures the heart and soul of this harshly beautiful country.
MAY 2014. The Irish public woke to the horrific discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of most 800 babies in the ‘Angels’ Plot’ of Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home. What followed would rock the last vestiges of Catholic Ireland, enrage an increasingly secularised nation, and lead to a Commission of Inquiry. In The Adoption Machine, Paul Jude Redmond, Chairperson of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors, who himself was born in the Castlepollard Home, candidly reveals the shocking history of one of the worst abuses of Church power since the foundation of the Irish State. From Bessboro, Castlepollard, and Sean Ross Abbey to St. Patrick’s and Tuam, a dark shadow was cast by the collusion between Church and State in the systematic repression of women and the wilful neglect of illegitimate babies, resulting in the deaths of thousands. It was Paul’s exhaustive research that widened the global media’s attention to all the homes and revealed Tuam as just the tip of the iceberg of the horrors that lay beneath. He further reveals the vast profits generated by selling babies to wealthy adoptive parents, and details how infants were volunteered to a pharmaceutical company for drug trials without the consent of their natural mothers. Interwoven throughout is Paul’s poignant and deeply personal journey of discovery as he attempts to find his own natural mother. The Adoption Machine exposes this dark history of Ireland’s shameful and secret past, and the efforts to bring it into the light. It is a history from which there is no turning away.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review "Reads like a novel ... Keefe is ... a master of narrative nonfiction. . .An incredible story."—Rolling Stone A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.
L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors. (124,000 words)
Ireland Is Changing Mother is the latest collection from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the lives of the Irish dispossessed, before as well as since the demise of the Celtic tiger.
This book explores 50 years of Irish women’s prison writing, 1960s–2010s, connecting the work of women leaders and writers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This volume analyzes political communiqués, petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs, highlighting the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey (formerly Marian Price), Áine and Eibhlín Nic Giolla Easpaig (Ann and Eileen Gillespie), Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. This text builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. Centering Irish women’s prison writings, in order to challenge canonization in history and literature, this volume argues that women’s lives and words offer a different view of gender and nation as well as offer a fuller and more inclusive archive of Irish history and literature. Additionally, this book will point to the ways in which their politics of everyday life and their cultural work is a form of anti-colonial civil rights feminism, for it speaks truth to power in a world in which compliance and silence are valued. Overall, this text focuses on rethinking and recasting women’s voices and words in order to document and promote the ongoing Irish freedom struggle from an abolitionist feminist perspective.
In 1946, twenty-six-year-old Bridget Dolan walked up the path to the front door of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Alone and pregnant, she was following in the footsteps of more than a century's worth of lost souls. Shunned by society for her sins and offered no comfort for her pain, Bridget gave birth to a boy, John, who died at the home in a horrendous state of neglect less than two years later. Her second child was once again delivered into the care of the nuns and was taken from her, never to be seen or heard from again. She would go on to marry a wonderful man and have a daughter, Anna Corrigan, but it was only after Bridget's death that Anna discovered she had two brothers her mother had never spoken about. In the aftermath of the explosive revelations that the remains of 796 babies had been found in a septic tank on the site of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, she became compelled to try and find out if her baby brothers' remains were among them. Here, Anna and Alison O'Reilly piece together the erased chapter of the life of Bridget Dolan and her forgotten sons, reminding us that we must never forget what was done to the women and children of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.
In the latest body of work by author and photographer Claiborne Swanson Frank, the artist set out to explore what modern motherhood means in the 21st century. Turning her lens on 70 iconic families of mothers and children from such celebrated names as Delfina Figueras, Carolina Herrera, Lauren Santo Domingo, Anne Vyalitsyna, Aerin Lauder, and Patti Hansen, Swanson Frank’s stunning portraits capture the emotional bonds and beauty that frame the primal relationship of a mother and her child. Complementing her work is a series of questions-and-answers, in which Swanson Frank delicately tasks each mother to look within themselves and express what being a mother truly means to them. Their answers, while exceedingly thoughtful and introspective, are also amusing, fascinating, and moving. Each one of these deeply intimate and stunning portraits will captivate and inspire readers as they embark on this profound journey that reminds us all of the power of motherhood and the great gift of love.
Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds searches for the missing links between a recent murder case and a series of decades-old crimes in this Irish closed-room mystery In 1975, a baby just minutes old is taken from its devastated mother. In 2010, the gruesome corpse of a nun is found in a Dublin public park. Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds and his team are on the scene and he’s convinced the murder is linked to historical events that took place in the infamous former Magdalene Laundries, institutions for “fallen women.” As Reynolds and his team follow the trail to an isolated convent, everything seems perfectly normal and it seems perhaps they’ve followed the wrong lead. But it soon becomes disturbingly clear that the killer is amongst them and determined to exact further vengeance for the sins of the past. The walls in this closed-room mystery narrow in on Reynolds and his team as they race to stop another murder in With Our Blessing, bestselling author Jo Spain’s U.S. debut.
Kenneth and Patrick Doyle grew up in a family of nine children in Tullamore, Co. Offaly. Though the home was dysfunctional and all the children suffered at the hands of their parents, Kenneth and Patrick were singled out for horrific abuse at the hands of their mother. Starved, beaten and sent out to steal, their story is a catalogue of abuse. It also implicates the authorities, who had pages upon pages of reports on their situation, and yet never stepped in.
