Rita – A Memoir, published August 2024

The late Rita O’Hare led an extraordinary life of activism, even in exile. She joined the IRA, was shot and seriously wounded by the British Army, was imprisoned three times, became editor of An Phoblacht, Sinn Féin Director of Publicity, and was the party’s representative in Washington for 20 years. Nelson Mandela, whom she met twice, called her his ‘little warrior’. However, the British were vindictive to the end and refused to lift extradition charges against her dating from 1971. This posthumous memoir is also a loving tribute to her husband Brendan Brownlee, and her children.

Captive Columns by Eoghan Mac Cormaic, published May 2024

‘Plotting was the natural consequence of the isolation we were detained in,’ wrote John Sarsfield Casey, a Fenian prisoner in Pentonville in 1866, facing deportation. The prisoners established lines of communication to keep connected to each other and to the outside world.

Republicans constantly defied and resisted authority. They smuggled; they planned escapes; and they disseminated news and told their stories in a literature which was central to morale and the integrity of the struggle.

In Captive Columns Eoghan Mac Cormaic looks at the literature of the republican press which saw the production of over sixty prison titles—often handwritten or typed. From the pinpricked sheets of toilet paper in Pentonville to Bobby Sands’ poetry, written on toilet paper and smuggled out to be published, this is an astonishing story which has never been examined in such detail before

Longlines by Caoilte Breatnach, published May 2024

JJ Hynes, a veteran IRA activist, has sacrificed everything for the struggle. When an operation goes wrong he finds refuge in Holland before being called back to Ireland to help convince sceptical IRA Volunteers of the merits of the ceasefire and peace process. History, politics, and the possibility of redemption come together in a narrative that reads like a thriller but asks serious and important questions about the interweaving of personal and national trauma.

McCoubrey by Mark B. McCaffery, published April 2024

A hilarious and enthralling coming-of-age of story set in Portadown, beginning in 1971 as the conflict spreads from Derry and Belfast to engulf small and isolated nationalist communities. Told in the sardonic voice of young Barry-Joe McCaffrey on the cusp of his teens, who reflects on his own life, his family, his troubled neighbourhood—and girls! Barry-Joe rebels against the inconsistencies and double-standards of the world: ‘the phonies’, as Holden McCaulfield put it.

The pen behind the wire by Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic, published 2023

Poems written when Gino Mac Cormaic was on the blanket protest in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (he served fifteen years in total); and other poems written after the prisoners won back their political status. They allow us to look with the POWs from their cell windows out into the wider world where hopes and dreams might be realised someday.

Curious Journey by Timothy O’Grady and the late Kenneth Griffith, published 2022

Reissued with an updated introduction, the classic book first published in 1982 features interviews with nine republican veterans who lived into old age and who speak about their struggle and the tortuous complexities of a post-Treaty divided Ireland. Their testimony was recorded at a time when war again raged in Ireland in the north-east, a war hauntingly like the one of their youth.

Rewriting The Troubles – War and Propaganda, Ireland and Algeria by Pat Anderson, published 2022

Dr Patrick Anderson compares and contrasts Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle with the republican campaign to dismantle Britain’s colonial legacy. Comparing the French and British armies, the ALN and IRA, loyalists and OAS ‘counter-terrorists’, Anderson dissects, with devastating effect, the approach of ‘constitutional’ politicians and the respective media portrayals in an analogy that for critics will be too close for comfort.

Free Statism & The Good Old IRA, by Danny Morrison, published 2022

From its inception and through its many incarnations from Free State to Éire to the Republic of Ireland the establishment and mainstream media in the South have promoted a partitionist mind-set – Free Statism. They abandoned the nationalist community in the North to its fate as victims of sectarian rule and British repression. Their demonization of republicans has only intensified with the electoral rise of Sinn Féin.

They condemned the republican struggle while simultaneously commemorating the IRA campaign during the Tan War as the legitimate, justifiable deeds of a nation fighting to end British rule in Ireland. Except, of course, the fighting didn’t end British rule in Ireland but bequeathed a conflict to another generation.

The Good Old IRA examines the nature of the Tan War, bomb and gun attacks, the killings of RIC men, on- and off-duty, the execution of informers, the IRA campaign in England, and other multiple-parallels between two struggles separated only by time.