We are very pleased to announce the release of A State of Emergency, the latest publication from author, journalist and public speaker, Mary Kenny.

Mary all-women play revises a personal dilemma in neutral Ireland, seen in retrospect, and drawing on family memory and social research. And almost forty years after Mary Kenny pioneered the famous “condom train” between Belfast and Dublin, a rather more complex picture of birth control emerges in this partly autobiographical tale…..

About Mary Kenny

Mary Kenny has been a journalist for over four decades, working in London and Dublin. She has contributed to more than 25 newspapers and journals, including the Sunday and Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Guardian, Times, Irish Independent, Irish Times, Catholic Herald, The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement and The Tablet.
In the 1990s she developed an interest in social and biographical history, and published an acclaimed study of Irish values in the 20th century, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland. She subsequently published a biography of William Joyce, Germany Calling, which was made into a television documentary for the History Channel, and her play about Winston Churchill and Michael Collins, Allegiance, was performed to full houses in Edinburgh in 2006 with Mel Smith and Michael Fassbender. Her book on Ireland’s relationship with the monarchy Crown and Shamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy is published in August 2009. She has also done a short book about heroin addiction: Death by Heroin, Recovery by Hope. She is married to the writer Richard West and both their sons are writers and journalists. She lives “between England and Ireland”, in Kent and Dublin.