num_pages: 316
description: In the tradition of Sampson's THE ANATOMY OF BRITAIN and Barzini's THE ITALIANS--but more ribald than either--Thomas O'Hanlon's THE IRISH is a vivid, loving, despairing, critical, informed, shrewd, sometimes shocking contemporary portrait of Ireland's green and troubled land.His book is vibrant with persons and events that no tourist brochure would dear, dirty Dublin; the thorn hedges shutting out strangers from rural enclaves; the Anglo-Irish aristocrats and the legacy of class; the hidden wound of Ireland--the continuing loss of population to England, America, and points beyond; the baronial few and the wretched many; the omnipresent Church and its vigilant guardianship over faith, sex, and real estate; the cunning, profitable game of the Irish Sweepstakes with its international secret agents; the gradual sale of Ireland to foreign investors; the effect of membership in the Common Market and the tax-protected conglomerates; the reliance on superstition and alcohol; the increase in tranquilizers, gambling, prostitution, and abortion; the tragedy of Northern Ireland; the old and the new and Marxist IRA; the foreign artists who pay no taxes; the durable women who bear the children and the trouble and who have a sexual revolution in mind; the tourists from whom the truths are kept.This is a book that exorcises myths, seeking to bring the light of day to dark corners. It is a book of pain but also of humor and hope, an unsparing examination but also a loving tribute to a land that against the odds gambles on its instinct for the art of survival.
language: English
title: The Irish: Sinners, saints, gamblers, gentry, priests, Maoists, rebels, Tories, Orangemen, dippers, heroes, villains, and other proud natives of the fabled isle
titlecomplete: The Irish: Sinners, saints, gamblers, gentry, priests, Maoists, rebels, Tories, Orangemen, dippers, heroes, villains, and other proud natives of the fabled isle
publisher: Harper & Row