With online access to records making it easy for most people of Irish origin to trace their family background, there has never been a better time to research your Irish family history. This guide contains everything you need to know to speed up the process, making sense of the deluge of online material and guiding you towards records and methods you may not have known existed. This 5th edition of John Grenham's bestselling and seminal text is expanded, updated and indexed to make it easier to use than ever before. As well as guides to new developments online and in DNA testing, find out where to start if you're a beginner and to how to access and understand registry office records, census records, church and property records, and county-by-county source lists. It is an essential part of any Irish family history project. 'John Grenham has written a multi-purpose book which can be used by the absolute beginner, the keen amateur and the more experienced genealogist.' The Irish Times

Nigel Yates provides a major reassessment of the religious state of Ireland between 1770 and 1850. He argues that this was both a period of intense reform across all the major religious groups in Ireland and also one in which the seeds of religious tension, which were to dominate Irish politics and society for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were sown. He examines in detail, from a wide range of primary sources, the mechanics of this reform programme and the growing tensions between religious groups in this period, showing how political and religious issues became inextricably mixed and how various measures that might have been taken to improve the situation were not politically or religiously possible.

Independent scholar Fagan presents a history of the Irish Catholic diocese of Meath in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The focus is on the lives of four bishops: Luke Fagan, Stephen MacEgan, Augustine Cheevers, and Patrick Plunket. Coverage extends to the contributions of the regular clergy