Irish Resistance Books will publish the books that most publishers won’t. We intend to publish books on Irish history, primarily from a Republican and Socialist standpoint. In addition we hope to publish books on local history, prison memoirs, new Irish fiction, subversive texts, rants, the Irish Diaspora, and whatever is progressive and can’t find a ‘commercial’ publisher. Immodestly we see ourselves as one of the very few groups out there who are attempting to write and assemble a true people’s history of ‘the troubles.’ We won’t publish any politicians ghost written memoirs. We will record the working class’ history, warts and all.
We also want to produce and sell CDs of ‘alternative’ music – songs which have been censored for years, artists who aren’t ‘acceptable’ to the main stream. Additionally, we hope to publish art work, murals, cartoons, video documentaries and posters. We unashamedly (and shamelessly) nail our colours to the mast.
That shameless old lexicographer Dr. Johnson castigated ‘patrons’ as ‘wretches who support with insolence and are paid with flattery’ (that didn’t stop the old hypocrite from accepting a healthy pension from mad old King George III for 20 years). We however are not recipients of monarchical, governmental or indeed any largesse and welcome esteemed patrons such as your good selves. And if you have a book which you think we might be interested in and no one else will publish, contact us.
We take our philosophy from the ‘Father of All Historians’ the great Herodotus. In the 5th century BC he succinctly laid down the historian’s function:
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all; the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
And, it must be said – ‘amnesia is the handmaiden of hypocrisy’ – which is basically what George Santayana meant when he wrote: ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to fulfil it.’
Irish Resistance Books concurs and attempts to encapsulate these views.
The Skibbereen Eagle is Alive and Well and Nests in Derry.
The Staff of IRB