Surveys the politics and administration of the new Irish state, but also focuses on the social history. Explores neglected features of modern Irish history, such as the role of women in Irish society.
A revised and extended study of the long twentieth century, surveying politics, administrative history, social and religious history, culture and censorship, politics, literature and art. It presents an inclusive narrative, including the tragedy of emigration and its effect on the Irish psyche and on the under-performance of the Irish economy, the loss of opportunities for reform in the 1960s and early 70s, and the despair of the 1950s which revisited the country in the 1980s as almost an entire generation felt compelled to emigrate. Keogh also argues that the violence in Northern Ireland had a major impact on the government of the Irish state. He presents the crisis as an Anglo-Irish failure which was turned around only when the British government acknowledged that the Irish government had a vital role to play in the resolution of the problem. Keogh extends his analysis to include a wide-ranging survey of the most contentious events - financial corruption, child sexual abuse, scandals in the Catholic Church - between 1994 and 2005. "Here is a fair-minded political history which also embraces cultural developments. It seeks to write into Irish history those it feels had previously been written out ; migrant workers, emigrants, itinerants, religious minorities and that other half of the Irish race, women."-Sunday Tribune. "Dr Keogh's book stands as a mighty effort by one historian to help us understand our recent past and cut through the shibboleths."-The Irish Times.
