john dorney

Today in Irish History, 6 December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty is Signed

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 1 Comment

Great piece on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 by John Dorney over at my newer (and better treated website) The Irish Story:

By the time of the Treaty negotiations, the partition of Ireland was therefore an established fact and no longer up for negotiation. Thus the Unionists, under James Craig, did not even take part in the Treaty talks. The Sinn Fein delegation insisted that they could not accept a settlement that made partition permanent, but the only element of the northern situation to be seriously discussed was the future of counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, both of which had Catholic majorities. The Irish wanted a county by county referendum on inclusion into the northern or southern states.

What they got in the end was that Northern Ireland as a whole was given the option of uniting with the southern state after a year. There would also be a Border Commission set up to arbitrate on how the border could be changed to reflect the wishes of the local population. It was the hope of Irish delegation that Northern Ireland’s viability would eventually be undermined by the defection of much of its Catholic-populated western and southern territory to the southern state. Nevertheless, the Treaty confirmed the partition of Ireland in the short term.

Today in Irish History, 6 December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty is Signed.

Commissioning For The Irish Story

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Last year I launched a niche Irish History site, The Irish Story. The idea was to create a vibrant site where people could discuss Irish history in an intelligent and interesting way.

I also commissioned five titles and have published each of these as Kindle ebooks and iOS Apps. It seems to have worked pretty well. The titles are each between 10 and 15,000 words each with a detailed timeline of events surrounding the particular focus.

The central focus of the website is the free material that gets posted weekly by a variety of contributors.

There are now over 100 posts on the site of varying length from a few lines to full-length essays, all free. Many of them feature exclusive audio interviews with scholars too, brought to you by the excellent John Dorney who also penned three of the first five books, and who is, in my view one of the most interesting young writers of Irish History.

Based on the success of the site (which is slow but steady) and of the first group of titles I’ve decided to commission a fresh batch of books and this series is to focus more on individuals (though if anyone has ideas for an event based title, I would welcome it too). I created an initial list of targets for 2011 commissioning, it’s here. Have a look at it and if any of them appeal to you, drop me a line and we can discuss the project.

I’ve already added two biographies with this batch, Kaye Jones will be writing two titles from the list in 2011.

So please, get in touch if you are interested, I would love to hear from you.
Eoin (Eoin AT eoinpurcell.com)

Some Notes
1) There are no advances for writing these books, however royalties for the digital editions start at 35% of Net Receipts and go up from there.

2) While many of the titles will be made available through Print On Demand avenues, I cannot guarantee this for ALL titles.