Irish history is often seen as a mere catalogue of colonial repression. Yet Hawes shows that Ireland, its unique culture rooted in millennia of continuity, has always been able to assimilate would-be invaders. He reveals how the Irish, ever since the roaming saints and scholars of the early Middle Ages, helped shape Europe, then America. And he argues that, with its natural wealth, its extraordinary magnetism and its exiled children across the globe, the island only needs to sidestep the last, toxic wreckage of the British Empire for its turbulent past to flow into a bright future.