Biographies

Hidden Soldier: An Irish Legionnaire’s Wars from Bosnia to Iraq by Pádraig O’Keeffe with Ralph Riegel

Monday, 28 December 2009 11:48 administrator

Pádraig O’Keeffe joined the elite and secretive French Foreign Legion at the age of twenty, seeking a challenge that would absorb his interests and intensity. He served with the Legion in Cambodia and Bosnia, then returned to civilian life, but military habits would not allow him to settle.

His need for intense excitement and extreme danger drove him back to the lifestyle he knew and loved, and using his Legion training, he became a ‘hidden soldier’ by opting for security missions in Iraq and Haiti.

In Iraq he was the sole survivor of an ambush in no man’s land between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the most dangerous place on earth.

An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events, Hidden Soldier lifts the veil on the dark and shadowy world of security contractors and what the situation is really like in Iraq as well as other trouble spots.

Guerilla Days in Ireland by Tom Barry

Tuesday, 20 October 2009 08:11 Tom Barry

Guerilla Days In Ireland is a fascinating memoir of the Irish struggle for Independence from the commander of the Third West Cork Flying Column.

Guerilla Days in Ireland is the extraordinary story of the fight between two unequal forces, which ended in the withdrawal of the British from twenty-six counties.

Seven weeks before the truce to the Anglo-Irish War of July, 1921, the British presence in County Cork consisted of 8,800 front line infantry troops, 1,150 Black & Tan soldiers, 540 Auxiliaries, 2,080 machine gun corps, artillery and other unites -- a total of over 12,500 men. Against these British forces stood the Irish Republican Army whose Flying Columns never exceeded 310 riflemen in the whole of County Cork.

Ronnie Delany: Staying the Distance

Saturday, 25 July 2009 15:40 administrator

In December 1956 Ronnie Delany sprinted home to win the gold medal in the 1500m Olympic final in Melbourne, setting a new Olympic record in the process. In the depressed Ireland of the fifties, Delany's win — an outsider storming ahead to beat the favourites — caught the imagination of a nation, and made him a sporting icon.

In Staying the Distance, Delany tells the story of his childhood in Arklow and Sandymount, his early triumphs on the Irish athletics circuit and his realisation that he had it in him to become a great runner.

In 1954 Delany won an athletics scholarship to Villanova University in Pennsylvania where he trained under legendary coach Jumbo Elliot. To a naïve Irish boy in the 1950s, American campus life was glamorous and exciting, and as well as athletics training, there were dances and study sessions, girlfriends and theatrical productions, all brought to life in his own words. Delany's speed was increasing all the time; in 1954, he reached the final of the 800m at the European Championships, and in 1956 became only the seventh runner to join the exclusive club of four-minute milers. Then came his phenomenal win in Melbourne, and a new Irish hero was born.