Friday 3 May 2013

Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout: book launch

Want to know more about the living and working conditions of your ancestors 100 years ago, and the social and political issues that concerned them? If so, A Capital and Conflict: Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout will engross you.

This isn't a book to ignore just because your family didn't live in the capital. While it deals primarily with Dublin and its inhabitants, the lives of the ordinary people of the city will not have been very different to those that lived elsewhere in Ireland at the time.

A Capital in Conflict explores aspects of the social, political and cultural life of Dublin at a defining point in Irish history during the 1913 Lockout. Certain personalities loom large such as James Larkin and William Martin Murphy, Delia Larkin and James Connolly, Charles Cameron and Hugh Lane, but it is the ordinary people of the city, the children, women and men, who shine through the pages.

Edited by Francis Devine, an authority on Irish labour history, the essays in this collection range over a wide number of topics relating to the Lockout and contextualizing it, including the role of women and children; the Gaelic revival; the proposal for a Bridge Gallery to house the Lane collection of pictures; housing, public health and medicine; as well as an overview of the Lockout by Francis Devine and the international context supplied by Colin Whitston.

The 438-page illustrated paperback has been published by Dublin City Council to mark the Decade of Commemorations 1913-1923. It is now in bookshops (it's at number 16 in Hodges Figgis's Top 20, already) or can be ordered online via Four Courts Press.