Irish Interest

Leading journalist Matt Cooper examines the key players behind the scenes of Irish property ownership – who really controls the valuable land where we live, work and play and how did they acquire it? Who are the new foreign investors and why are they buying property and land in Ireland? What does it mean for ordinary citizens when the ownership of shopping centres, wind farms, forestry and data centres comes from outside? Comprehensively researched and filled with riveting detail, this compelling account of the Irish property landscape is about our offices, hotels and pubs and the power of those wealthy enough to accumulate these properties. This eye-opening book is a must-read for anyone interested in Ireland and who really owns it. ‘It’s not possible to understand Irish society, politics or the economy without knowing who owns land and property.

November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim.

What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the gardai, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young garda killed as Tidey is freed.

Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode. At its heart are remarkable interviews with Don Tidey, talking about these events in detail for the first time, and with the families of Private Kelly and Garda Sheehan who explain the devastating fall-out for them. The book also raises thought-provoking questions about the legacy of these events for today’s Ireland.

Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle – heartland of the North’s defining industry – and the Murder Triangle – the Badlands devastated by paramilitary violence. He lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took – more than twenty violent deaths in a few square miles – and the long trail of trauma it has left behind.

Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism, both Catholic and Protestant, entrust Doyle with their stories. Writing with a literary sensibility, he skillfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for communal division but also for the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal.