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The book examines the fortunes of a provincial, entrepreneurial family, the Glynns of Kilrush, County Clare, who came to local prominence in the early years of the nineteenth-century. It explores their networking strategies and acumen, and traces the rapid expansion of their business activity from small-scale corn millers to proprietors of a multifaceted enterprise. It examines the rapid expansion of their various enterprises from milling to shipping and railways.Paul O'Brien places the Glynn family and businesses within the wider context of networks developing between the urban, provincial and metropolitan industrial class. Networks which helped shape Irish society and its economy. It examines the family primarily from a social point of view while also exploring the family's business and trade enterprises. It addresses the issue of middle-class identity, examining the ways in which it was constructed and represented to the wider community. The book also explores the mechanisms that were used by the middle classes to establish and maintain their economic, social and cultural hegemony, and how these were reproduced down the Glynn generations.The book was helped by the availability of a superb, hitherto undiscovered, family and business archive belonging to the Glynn family. The most fascinating aspects discussed in the book are the interactions between class, networking, local administration, associational culture, education, religion, the Glynn women and last, but by no means least, the town of Kilrush itself where the family still remain based.

They were sent over here to break the people and they were a far more dangerous force than the Black and Tans. - Commandant Tom BarryIn 1919, Ireland was plunged into a brutal guerrilla war. Although unconventional warfare made the British government uncomfortable, senior politicians realised a specialist unit was needed to fight the insurgency. In July 1920, a paramilitary corps of former soldiers was deployed in a supportive role to the police. Trained for swift, surgical assaults and sent into a war zone with little or no understanding of the conflict or the locals, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC trailed a wake of death, hatred and destruction in incidents such as the Burning of Cork, the Limerick Curfew Murders and the Battle of Brunswick Street.Inaccurate reporting and IRA propaganda also influenced the impression of these soldiers as bogeymen. As long as operations and personnel records remain unexamined, their legacy will be mired in hearsay.Drawing on archival material from the bloody annals of British imperial policy, Paul O'Brien reconstructs the actions of the Auxiliaries, providing a balanced examination of their origins and operations, without glossing over the brutal details. By capturing key insights from their manoeuvres, he gives a controversial account of a side of the War of Independence rarely studied from an Irish perspective.

On Easter Monday, 24th April 1916, members of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers, under the command of Pádraig Pearse and James Connolly, occupied the General Post Office in Sackville Street, Dublin. From the portico of the iconic building, an independent Irish Republic was declared. For seven days, this newly proclaimed republic fought a week-long bloody engagement with British Crown Forces as part of the 1916 Rising that would see hundreds die and Dublin city reduced to rubble after an intensive military bombardment. Battleground - The Battle for the General Post Office, 1916 is a detailed account of the actions in the area of operations in and around the General Post Office. The building served as the General Headquarters of the Republican Army and witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of Easter Week as the beleaguered garrison fought against overwhelming odds. The Rising was quickly and brutally suppressed, but the memory of the heroism depicted that week and of the executions that followed changed Irish history forever. Military historian Paul O'Brien is the author of Shootout: The Battle for St. Stephen's Green, 1916, Crossfire: The Battle of the Four Courts, 1916, Field of Fire: The Battle of Ashbourne, 1916 and A Question of Duty. He lives in Dublin.

In the Curragh Army Camp in County Kildare, a senior British General and his officers had threatened to resign rather than deploy their forces to Ulster in response to threats from the Protestant populations there refusing to accept Home Rule. This was the so called Curragh Mutiny, which precipitated the most serious crisis of civilmilitary relations in modern British history. In this engaging and enjoyable new history of those events, Paul O'Brien explores the why and the how of those strange days as well as putting the events in a wider context and bringing home to the modern reader just how close to civil war the British Empire stood in 1914.