The Republic of Ireland has won its status as a leading contributor to international peacekeeping operations, which has been its key 'foreign policy' since the 1960s. But why is Ireland so keen to be involved?

This new book asks and answers this and other key questions about Ireland's close involvement with the EU. It cannot simply be for charitable reasons, so is it because it is a neutral state or because it is a middle power? Overall, is Ireland's peacekeeping policy based on realism and liberalism? The characteristics of peacekeeping operations have changed significantly, especially since the end of the Cold War. Can Ireland survive as a traditional peacekeeping contributor or does it have to change its peacekeeping policy radically? And will it be able to maintain its distance from NATO and the EU in terms of peacekeeping operations? This title attempts to answer all of these questions, drawing on a wide range of resources from literature, Irish and UN documents, to newspapers and interviews.

The Republic of Ireland has won its status as a leading contributor to international peacekeeping operations, which has been its key 'foreign policy' since the 1960s. But why is Ireland so keen to be involved?

This new book asks and answers this and other key questions about Ireland's close involvement with the EU. It cannot simply be for charitable reasons, so is it because it is a neutral state or because it is a middle power? Overall, is Ireland's peacekeeping policy based on realism and liberalism? The characteristics of peacekeeping operations have changed significantly, especially since the end of the Cold War. Can Ireland survive as a traditional peacekeeping contributor or does it have to change its peacekeeping policy radically? And will it be able to maintain its distance from NATO and the EU in terms of peacekeeping operations? This title attempts to answer all of these questions, drawing on a wide range of resources from literature, Irish and UN documents, to newspapers and interviews.

This is the first book to give a unified picture of Ireland's experience of the First World War. Unlike any previous work it identifies the similarities of experience of constitutional nationalists, separatist republicans and unionists, and deals with civilian, social, economic and cultural aspects, as well as the purely military. The book also relates the experience of the war and its subsequent commemoration to the politics of twentieth-century Ireland, North and South, up to and including the recent peace process.

This book explores the impact, both immediate and in its longer historical perspective, of the First World War upon Ireland across the broadest range of experience - nationalist, unionist, Catholic, Protestant - and in civilian social, economic and cultural terms, as well as purely military. Underscoring the work is a belief that the Great War is the single most central experience in twentieth-century Ireland and that the events of the war years, whether at home in Dublin during the Easter Rising or at the European battlefront, constitute a 'seamless robe' of Irish experience. The book also explores cultural responses to the war and its commemoration since 1918, up to the dedication of the Irish 'Peace Tower' in Belgium in November 1998. It argues that identifying and exploring the Irish Great War experience can contribute to the contemporary Irish peace process.

Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irishman who in June 1922 was assassinated on his doorstep in London by Irish republicans, was one of the most controversial British soldiers of the modern age. Before 1914 he did much to secure the Anglo-French alliance and was responsible for the planning which saw the British Expeditionary Force successfully despatched to France after the outbreak of war with Germany. A passionate Irish unionist, he gained a reputation as an intensely 'political' soldier, especially during the 'Curragh crisis' of 1914 when some officers resigned their commisssions rather than coerce Ulster unionists into a Home Rule Ireland. During the war he played a major role in Anglo-French liaison, and ended up as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, professional head of the army, a post he held until February 1922. After Wilson retired from the army, he became an MP and was chief security adviser to the new Northern Ireland government. As such, he became a target for nationalist Irish militants, being identified with the security policies of the Belfast regime, though wrongly with Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics. He is remembered today in unionist Northern Ireland as a kind of founding martyr for the state. Wilson's reputation was ruined in 1927 with the publication of an official biography, which quoted extensively and injudiciously from his entertaining, indiscreet, and wildly opinionated diaries, giving the impression that he was some sort of Machiavellian monster. In this first modern biography, using a wide variety of official and private sources for the first time, Keith Jeffery reassesses Wilson's life and career and places him clearly in his social, national, and political context.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 17, held in Exeter, UK, in July 2000.The 12 revised full papers presented with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The book is divided into topical sections on database performance and optimization, user requirements on large database systems, distributed transactions, and interoperability using XML.

The fourth international conference on Extending Data Base Technology was held in Cambridge, UK, in March 1994. The biannual EDBT has established itself as the premier European database conference. It provides an international forum for the presentation of new extensions to database technology through research, development, and application. This volume contains the scientific papers of the conference. Following invited papers by C.M. Stone and A. Herbert, it contains 31 papers grouped into sections on object views, intelligent user interface, distributed information servers, transaction management, information systems design and evolution, semantics of extended data models, accessing new media, join algorithms, query optimization, and multimedia databases.

A groundbreaking book, this unprecedented study is the authoritative account of the best-known intelligence organisation in the world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of espionage, the two world wars, modern British government and the conduct of international relations in the first half of the twentieth century, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 is a uniquely important examination of the role and significance of intelligence in the modern world.

Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irishman who in June 1922 was assassinated on his doorstep in London by Irish republicans, was one of the most controversial British soldiers of the modern age. Before 1914 he did much to secure the Anglo-French alliance and was responsible for the planning which saw the British Expeditionary Force successfully despatched to France after the outbreak of war with Germany. A passionate Irish unionist, he gained a reputation as an intensely 'political' soldier, especially during the 'Curragh crisis' of 1914 when some officers resigned their commisssions rather than coerce Ulster unionists into a Home Rule Ireland. During the war he played a major role in Anglo-French liaison, and ended up as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, professional head of the army, a post he held until February 1922.
After Wilson retired from the army, he became an MP and was chief security adviser to the new Northern Ireland government. As such, he became a target for nationalist Irish militants, being identified with the security policies of the Belfast regime, though wrongly with Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics. He is remembered today in unionist Northern Ireland as a kind of founding martyr for the state.
Wilson's reputation was ruined in 1927 with the publication of an official biography, which quoted extensively and injudiciously from his entertaining, indiscreet, and wildly opinionated diaries, giving the impression that he was some sort of Machiavellian monster. In this first modern biography, using a wide variety of official and private sources for the first time, Keith Jeffery reassesses Wilson's life and career and places him clearly in his social, national, and political context.

This fully-illustrated collaborative volume deals with all aspects of Irish military history, but especially the relationship between armies and soldiers in Ireland with Irish society in general. It covers Irish soldiers, armies and battles in eighteen clearly-organized chronological chapters, ranging from the middle of the first millennium AD to modern times. As a whole it brings a new and exciting dimension to Irish military history, which has concentrated hitherto on battles and tactics. The text is illustrated throughout by over 120 pictures and maps.

A fascinating examination of the First World War beyond the Western Front told through the significant global events of 1916, which dramatically altered the fate of many nations. The mud-filled, blood-soaked trenches of the Low Countries and North-Eastern Europe were essential battlegrounds during the First World War, but the war reached many other corners of the globe, and events elsewhere significantly affected its course. Covering the twelve months of 1916, eminent historian Keith Jeffery uses twelve moments from a range of locations and shows how they reverberated around the world. As well as discussing better-known battles such as Gallipoli, Verdun and the Somme, Jeffery examines Dublin, for the Easter Rising, East Africa, the Italian front, Central Asia and Russia, where the killing of Rasputin exposed the internal political weakness of the country's empire. And, in charting a wide range of wartime experience, he studies the 'intelligence war', naval engagements at Jutland and elsewhere, as well as the political consequences that ensued from the momentous United States presidential election. Using an extraordinary range of military, social and cultural sources, and relating the individual experiences on the ground to wider developments, these are the stories lost to history, the conflicts that spread beyond the sphere of Europe and the moments that transformed the war.

Drawing on the work of specialists in art history, religion, science, sport and leisure, war, and heritage studies, this volume explores aspects of the construction of national identity in Ireland and elsewhere. The book thus transcends some of the limiting, specialism boundaries which bedevil academia and restrict a proper understanding of identity and culture, and their relations with particular places, wherever they may be. The resulting volume of stimulating essays demonstrates, among other things, that cultural history, to which this volume is a contribution, need not necessarily or exclusively be the preserve of 'cultural historians'. This collection is based on papers presented to the 26th biennial Irish Conference of Historians, held at the University of Ulster, May 2003.