Paul Bew
North and South
Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s
By Diarmaid Ferriter
Profile Books 704pp £30 order from our bookshop
Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, is a distinctive historian. Whereas old-style UCD history was dominated by a political narrative, the central theme of which was the achievement of a stable democratic Irish state, Ferriter prefers a form of social history that emphasises the oppressions and backwardness of post-independence Irish society as seen from a progressive Dublin working-class perspective.
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