Twenty years on from her controversial and acclaimed book, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, Susan McKay takes a fresh look at the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. Based on brand-new interviews, the story is told with McKay's trademark passion and conviction.
"Northern Protestants is based on over sixty in-depth interviews with a wide range of northern Protestants, Susan McKay presents an uncompromising and clear-eyed examination of her own people - the Protestants of Northern Ireland." "For this updated edition Susan McKay has written a new introduction covering events since 2000. Her analysis of the continuing upheavals within the Protestant community and unionist politics is a timely contribution to current debates about the future of Northern Island."--BOOK JACKET.
Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.
'A moving and timely work, which captures the lasting pain and grief of those who lost loved ones during the Troubles.' Eoin McHugh, Sunday Independent Nearly 4,000 people were killed during the Troubles. Susan McKay's book explores the difficult aftermath of the violence for families, friends and communities. By interviewing those who loved the missing and the dead, as well as some who narrowly survived, McKay gives a voice to those who are too often overlooked in the political histories. She has found grief and rage, as well as forgiveness. This book is a powerful and important contribution to the Northern Ireland power-sharing process. Only by confronting the brutality of the past can there be any hope that the dead may finally be laid to rest. 'An exemplary undertaking . . . a necessary book, which restores humanity to those among the dead who tend to be remembered in terms of statistics alone. Susan McKay has gone about her difficult task with bravery and finesse.' Patricia Craig, Independent 'Peace can only endure if the dead can finally be laid to rest. Bear in Mind These Dead is a moving and important contribution to that process.' Derry Journal 'Tremendously moving . . . Anyone who wants to understand the sectarian conflict of Northern Ireland must examine the individual tragedies that go to make up the broader narrative. This is the grim task to which McKay so admirably applies herself.' Andrew Anthony, Observer
THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2021 'A great achievement . . . brilliant, engaging and essential' Colm Tóibín 'At once intimate and epic, this is a landmark book' Fintan O'Toole When Dubliner Derek Scally goes to Christmas Eve Mass on a visit home from Berlin, he finds more memories than congregants in the church where he was once an altar boy. Not for the first time, the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland brings to mind the fall of another powerful ideology - East German communism. While Germans are engaging earnestly with their past, Scally sees nothing comparable going on in his native land. So he embarks on a quest to unravel the tight hold the Church had on the Irish. He travels the length and breadth of Ireland and across Europe, going to Masses, novenas, shrines and seminaries, talking to those who have abandoned the Church and those who have held on, to survivors and campaigners, to writers, historians, psychologists and many more. And he has probing and revealing encounters with Vatican officials, priests and religious along the way. The Best Catholics in the World is the remarkable result of his three-year journey. With wit, wisdom and compassion Scally gives voice and definition to the murky and difficult questions that face a society coming to terms with its troubling past. It is both a lively personal odyssey and a resonant and gripping work of reporting that is a major contribution to the story of Ireland. 'Reflective, textured, insightful and original ... rich with history, interrogation and emotional intelligence' Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Times 'An unblinking look at the collapse of the Church and Catholic deference in Ireland. Excellent and timely' John Banville, The Sunday Times 'Engaging and incisive' Caelainn Hogan, author of Republic of Shame 'Remarkable . . . Essential reading for anyone concerned about history and forgetting' Michael Harding 'Fair-minded . . . thoughtful' Melanie McDonagh, The Times 'Very pacey and entertaining . . . and it changed how I regard Ireland and our history for good. Fantastic' Oliver Callan 'Original, thought-provoking and very engaging' Marie Collins 'A provocative insight into a time that many would rather forget' John Boyne 'Challenging' Mary McAleese 'Explores this subject in a way that I've never seen before' Hugh Linehan, Irish Times
A brutally honest and deeply affecting memoir about growing up in the countryside in rebel country in Northern Ireland. Colin Broderick was born in 1968 and spent his childhood in Tyrone county, in Northern Ireland. It was the beginning of the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles, and Colin's Catholic family lived in the heart of rebel country. The community was filled with Provisional IRA members whose lives depended on the silence and complicity of their neighbors. At times, that made for a confusing childhood. We watch as he and his brothers play ball with the neighbor children over a fence for years, but are never allowed to play together because it is forbidden. We see him struggle to understand why young men from his community often just disappear. And we feel his confusion when he is held at gunpoint at various military checkpoints in the North. But even when Colin does ask his parents about these events, he never receives a clear explanation. Desperate to protect her children, Colin's mother tries to prevent exposure to or knowledge of the harm that surrounds them. Spoken with stern finality, "That's that" became the refrain of Colin's childhood. The first book to paint a detailed depiction of Northern Ireland's Troubles is presented against a personal backdrop and is told in the wry, memorable voice of a man who's finally come to terms with his past.
In 1995, Sophia McColgan's father was sentenced to prison for the serial rape and abuse of his children over many years. He had first raped Sophia when she was only six. It had taken immense courage on the part of Sophia and her family to bring the murky, hidden world of family child abuse to the public gaze. Then, in 1998, Susan McKay published Sophia's Story, one of the most acclaimed Irish books of modern times. Now re-issued with a new introduction by Susan McKay, it records a triumph of the human spirit in the face of the most degrading and destructive betrayal of trust. Sophia McColgan, who now lives abroad, was Irish Person of the Year in 1998.
We are saved by faith when we trust that Jesus died for our sins. This is the gospel, or so we are taught. But what is faith? And does this accurately summarize the gospel? Because faith is frequently misunderstood and the climax of the gospel misidentified, the gospel's full power remains untapped. While offering a fresh proposal for what faith means within a biblical theology of salvation, Matthew Bates presses the church toward a new precision: we are saved solely by allegiance to Jesus the king. Instead of faith alone, Christians must speak about salvation by allegiance alone. The book includes discussion questions for students, pastors, and church groups and a foreword by Scot McKnight.
How a German city became Polish after World War II With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants—almost all of them ethnic Germans—were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's "amputated memory." Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. Uprooted traces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.
What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.