Bryan Fanning
Irish Adventures in nation-building is a collection of essays examining the debates and processes that have shaped the modernisation of Ireland since the beginning of the twentieth century. Vantage points examined include those of prominent revolutionaries, cultural nationalists, clerics, economists, sociologists, political scientists, public intellectuals, journalists, influential civil servants, political leaders and activists who weighted into debates about the condition of Ireland and where it was going. For the most part the focus is on influential arguments and critiques of these set out in seminal periodicals, books and government reports. Collectively these essays chart the main shifts in dominant ideas and shifting cultural, economic and political circumstances during the last hundred years. Topics considered range from why Patrick Pearse’s ideas about education were ignored to why Ireland has been recently so open to large-scale immigration, from the intellectual conflicts of the 1930s to the future of Irish identity. This is a genuinely multi-disciplinary book that draws on sociology, political economy, political science as well as upon debates within Irish historiography and Irish Studies to offer a coherent overview of how Ireland and what it means to be Irish has changed during the last century.
