On the Town: The newly published tome, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, is "about the lives of ordinary people", said its author, Diarmaid Ferriter.
He told of one woman in his book, Elizabeth Bloxham, a Cumann na mBan member who lost six stone cycling around Ireland trying to get women to take part in the War of Independence. His book is not just for academics, Ferriter said.
The book "goes beyond politics and the conventional history and gets into the ordinary story of a lot of people", said Prof Paraic Travers, president of St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, where Ferriter lectures.
"What ordinary readers are longing for is an account of 20th-century Ireland that meets with their experience of having lived through it," said historian Dr Margaret MacCurtain, who taught Ferriter at UCD.
Ferriter's book "doesn't just deal with the doings of the so-called powerful. It attempts to get behind the facade of family, of class divisions and stratification and deals with the miseries caused by exploitation and inequity," said Vincent Browne, the journalist and broadcaster, when he launched the new work. It was a busy week for Browne, who also celebrated the publication of his own weekly current affairs magazine, Village, which went on sale last Saturday.
Ferriter's book "represents ordinary people as opposed to the traditional political nexus", said Catriona Crowe, of the National Archives. Others who attended the launch at the National Museum of Ireland on Dublin's Kildare Street were writer Anne Enright, whose most recent book is Making Babies; Barry Desmond, the former Labour Party deputy leader; Father Bernard McGuckian, of the Pioneers; Michael Kennedy, of the Royal Irish Academy; and Richard Aldous, of UCD's school of history.
• The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, by Diarmaid Ferriter, is published by Profile Books