Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA

Written by Richard English

Narrated by Roger Clark

The IRA has been a much richer, more complexly layered, and more protean organization than is frequently recognized. It is also more open to balanced examination now-at the end of its long war in the north of Ireland-than it was even a few years ago.

Richard English's brilliant book offers a detailed history of the IRA, providing invaluable historical depth to our understanding of the modern-day Provisionals, the more militant wing formed in 1969 dedicated to the removal of the British Government from Northern Ireland and the reunification of Ireland. English examines the dramatic events of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the bitter guerrilla war of 1919-21, the partitioning of Ireland in the 1920s, and the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Here, too, are the IRA campaigns in Northern Ireland and Britain from the 1930s through the 1960s. He shows how the Provisionals were born out of the turbulence generated by the 1960s civil rights movement, and examines the escalating violence that introduced British troops to the streets of Northern Ireland. He also examines the split in the IRA that produced the Provisionals, the introduction of internment in 1971, and the tragedy of Bloody Sunday in 1972.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515942795

Richard English

Richard English was born in 1963 in Belfast, where he is Professor of Politics at Queen's University. He is the author of several books, two of them published by Pan Macmillan: Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, which won the Politics Book of the Year Award for 2003 from the Political Studies Association and was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland, which was longlisted for both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. Professor English is a frequent media commentator on Irish politics, and has written on Ireland for the Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, the Financial Times and the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Reviews for Armed Struggle

[dolly22_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having grown up through the early part of the war in the North of Ireland and studied this period of Irish history at an academic level, I would attest that this is one of the most accurately researched, balanced and comprehensive accounts of the Irish Republican Army which I have read to date. It should be studied by anyone with an interest in Irish politics. I cannot recommend it highly enough.