'Volume I' of the 'Documents on Irish Foreign Policy' series is a documentary history of the forging of Irish foreign policy and the Irish diplomatic service amid the backdrop of a bloody civil war. It begins on 21 January 1919 with the opening of the First Dail (parliament) in Dublin and the publication of the Irish Declaration of Independence. It closes on 6 December 1922, the date of the founding of the Irish Free State, one year after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed. The intervening years covered in this volume were turbulent: a bitter political and military clash in Ireland, the...

The Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series is the history of Irish foreign policy reproduced from the text of selected original documents from the files of the Department of Foreign Affairs now held in the National Archives of Ireland. Much of this material has never before been seen by historians. The series also includes important documents from papers of significant individuals, in particular from the private papers of Eamon de Valera. Volume V chronicles Irish foreign policy in the last years of peace leading up to the outbreak of World War Two. It shows how Ireland moved from...

Nazi gold, fugitive war criminals, the threat of nuclear war, and the growing global dominance of Communism - issues dealt with by Irish diplomats in the years immediately after the end of World War II - are central themes in this latest volume of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, a series which continues to open up the secret archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Volume VIII runs from 1945 to 1948 and shows that during the immediate post-war years, Ireland redefined its global position as a result of wartime neutrality and the developing Cold War. Previously thought to be years of...

This is a magisterial narrative of the most turbulent decade in Anglo-Irish history: a decade of unleashed passions that came close to destroying the parliamentary system and to causing civil war in the United Kingdom. It was also the decade of the cataclysmic Great War, of an officers' mutiny in an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army and of Irish armed rebellion. It was a time, argues Ronan Fanning, when violence and the threat of violence trumped democratic politics. This is a contentious view. Historians have wished to see the events of that decade as an aberration, as an eruption...

This volume of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy brings together for the first time the entire spectrum of Ireland's foreign relations between 1948 and 1951. It includes Ireland's role as a founding member of the Council of Europe in 1949, as well as the state's response to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950 - the origins of today's EU. Additionally, the book details Ireland's refusal to join NATO. The Korean War (1950-53) also forms a large component of the book, which sees Ireland's foreign relations take a wider perspective and its network of overseas missions...