First Book Prize

The IHS First Book Prize Committee are delighted to be able to offer the 2024 prize to Dr Seán Ó Hoireabhárd (Maynooth University), for The Medieval Irish kings and the English invasion (Liverpool University Press, 2024). The committee were impressed by the scholarly range and sophistication of this monograph and saw it as a major re-interpretation of the period of the 12th-century English invasion, placing it in a longer-term context of the political and military strategies and cultures of the Gaelic Irish kingdoms and their complex relations with each other and their sub-kingdoms over several centuries. The engagement with the historiography on the subject, dating back to the early 20th century, is robust and thorough, and the comparatively neglected Irish sources have been exhaustively mined and re-evaluated, and utilised to challenge previously dominant Anglocentric and deterministic readings of the conquest. The framing of the study and its consideration of interdisciplinary and transtemporal frameworks – especially postcolonial theory – really highlights the importance of reading across disciplines. This book raises interesting and important questions and approaches for scholars of later time periods, especially when thinking about grand national narratives, as well as for historians of Medieval Ireland itself.

We were impressed by Ruth Duffy’s (QUB) pioneering work on Healthcare and the Troubles: the conflict experience of the Northern Ireland Health Service, 1968-1998 (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which addresses a neglected but crucial aspect of experience in a period of sustained civil conflict. This is the first overview of how the health service in the north was structured and prepared (or rather unprepared) for the storm that would break in the late 1960s; how it responded to the sudden and extreme upsurge of violence in the following years; how the concepts of medical ‘neutrality’ and ‘impartiality’ and medical ethics more generally were challenged by the upheaval; and how both practitioners and the general public were impacted at the time and retrospectively by the stresses and traumas of violence and its legacies. Complementary historical methods have been utilised to investigate the subject, combining patient analysis of ministerial records and reports, press coverage over an extended period, and a series of structured oral history interviews with medical staff from hospitals and community practices across the province.