Great Irish Reportage

Alongside its world-famous tradition of great fiction, Ireland has a less well known but thrilling tradition of reportage: journalism, dispatches and eyewitness accounts done with literary style and flair. From Kate O'Brien to Colm Tóibín, from Myles na Gopaleen to Maeve Binchy, some of Ireland's finest writers have produced first-rate journalism. And from R.M. Smyllie, Gertrude Gaffney and John Healy to Eamon Dunphy, Nell McCafferty and Fintan O'Toole, Ireland has also produced a remarkable number of journalists who can really write.

Now, for the first time, the best of Irish reportage - some of it legendary, some of it unjustly forgotten - is gathered into a single volume. Whether it's Emily O'Reilly on the election to Westminster of Gerry Adams, Joseph O'Connor's hilarious dispatch from the 1994 World Cup, or Michael Lewis's encounter with the economist who called the property crash, the pieces in Great Irish Reportage illuminate Irish life in a way that no other form of writing can.

'Such places were clean and comfortable enough, though often equipped with forbidding furniture of the marble-topped and iron-legged variety usually found in morgues and fish-shops.' Myles na gCopaleen on Dublin pubs, 1940

'Ben Bulben was draped in cold rain, and the long quays and drained-out waters of Sligo Harbour recalled us to thoughts of his later work, of its unsparing, iron relentlessness ' Kate O'Brien on the reinterment of W.B. Yeats, 1948

'The Irish are not by nature bullying or ungenerous . . . This essay, therefore, is not about bigotry, but about the ineffectuality of ordinary people with nice intentions and neighbourly instincts.' Hubert Butler on the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, 1958

'Three o'clock in the afternoon is no hour for anybody to be sitting at a window in a public restaurant with a martini in front of her, or half a martini, as it was by the time the nuns passed.' Maeve Brennan, 1962

'Kennedy himself glided past, standing in an open car and looking just like himself but, we were glad to observe, more so.' Louis MacNeice on JFK's visit to Ireland, 1963

'The Queen looked thin and unhappy in a harsh blue outfit.' Maeve Binchy on the wedding of Princess Anne, 1973

'The world still hankers after the Sportsman as Gobshite - preferably Modest Gobshite.' Eamon Dunphy on the L.A. Olympics, 1984

'I interrupted him to ask what he was talking about on the phone. Stocks and shares, he said. He had started, six months before, to play the stock market.' Colm Tóibín on Sean Quinn, 1987

'Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do was to buy Ireland. From each other.' Michael Lewis, 2011