The Green Ribbon Books

The Irish: A Photohistory: 1840-1940

Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy
Thames & Hudson
2002

Sean Sexton has spent a lifetime collecting old Irish photographs, and it shows in this collection of 271 images documenting every aspect of Irish life from 1840 to 1940.

Insightful captions provide the context to each of the pictures, which are presented alongside an extended narrative by historian Christine Kinealy in four chapters.

Land, Landlords and The Big House, looks at the life of the aristocracy, a subject which was heavily represented in early photography.

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.