The Green Ribbon Books

Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair

Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding
Andre Deutsch
1999

In 1997, MI5 officer David Shayler went public with a series of damning criticisms of the Security Service. With this book, Hollingsworth and Fielding took Shayler's story as the starting point for a survey of the organisation as a whole.

At the time, Shayler's primary grievance was with what he saw as MI5 incompetence, and the two journalists were particularly impressed by his refusal to indulge in wild conspiracy theories, or to reveal details of  ongoing operations' or agents' identities.

His more recent bizarre behaviour is obvious ammunition for his critics, but arguably only enhances the importance of this book as an exposition of his original views.

Choosing the Green? Second Generation Irish and the Cause of Ireland

Brian Dooley
Beyond the Pale
2004

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

As recently as the 1970s, it was argued that the Irish in Britain were unique, because of the fact that their children assimilated totally into the British population within a generation. If nothing else this book is a spectacular refutation of that assumption.

Choosing the Green looks at the second generation Irish (mainly in Britain but also elsewhere), through their relationship to the Republican tradition.

Author Brian Dooley acknowledges there are other ways of looking at those of Irish descent. He says of writers such as Pete McCarthy “What is remarkable… …is how little impact the Troubles in Northern Ireland appear to have had on their definitions of Irishness.”

Dooley also examines others for whom attitudes to the conflict were decisive. Arguably, this range of opinion is not that that different from the spectrum among the Irish-born. Nevertheless, Dooley is right to apply a political perspective.

The second generation dilemma, how far to identify with Ireland, and how far with Britain, surely derives much of its urgency from the political relationship between the two countries.

The Men who Built Britain: A Celebration of the Irish Navvy

Ultan Cowley
Merlin Publishing
2001

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

Originally published in 2001, this definitive history of the Irish labourer in Britain is now out in paperback.

Author Ultan Cowley, who himself ‘took the boat’ at the age of 15, and lived in Britain for many years, spent two years researching the book in Manchester, supporting himself by performing a revue called ‘A Tribute to the Navvies.’

The result is as full an account of the experience of Irish construction workers in Britain as one could wish for, taking their story all the way from the original navigators on the canals and railways which drove the nineteenth century industrial revolution, up to the moment in the 1990s when a booming Ireland actually began to recruit from its own exiled workforce on a large scale.

The result is as full an account of the experience of Irish construction workers in Britain as one could wish for, taking their story all the way from the original navigators on the canals and railways which drove the nineteenth century industrial revolution, up to the moment in the 1990s when a booming Ireland actually began to recruit from its own exiled workforce on a large scale.

An Unconsidered People - The Irish in Sixties London

Catherine Dunne
New Island Books 2003

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

An Unconsidered People is a unique book. For many people it will be a valuable insight into the still underexplored history of Irish emigration to Britain.

For most Irish World readers it will have a different value, the value of reading about one’s own experiences and one’s own heritage through the stories of others.

For this book is an oral history of the Irish in Britain, told in ten chapters by Irish emigrants themselves. Many readers will find that the memories within it resemble their own or those of their parents.