by Philip Boucher-Hayes and Suzanne Campbell

The Irish countryside has experienced a seismic shift in the past twenty years. With the decline of farming, country living has become a pass time rather than an occupation.

In the boom years, food became Flash Paddy’s greatest status symbol. We loved to eat out, yet at the same time, the majority of us continued to throw a pre-cooked chicken and bagged salad into the trolley at the supermarket. Why? Why did food and where it came from matter so little?

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.

When Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan met it was love. It has been love through twenty-seven years together. But that love had consequences which brought this couple to the High Court, and beyond.

They met at Boston College. Returning to Ireland, their relationship had to be kept secret. Jobs were at stake, and elevation to positions of authority could be jeopardised.

What would happen if one of them died? Only a married couple received the support of the state in such circumstances.

Ireland rejected their Canadian marriage and they had to make a huge decision: to go public and fight or to stay quiet and suffer the consequences? Here they offer their deeply personal story – out loud for all to read.