Stars and Stripes for Eireann : American Connections in the Making of Modern Ireland, by Dermot Walsh

Out of the blue they came to Shannon. Extraordinary people who would do extraordinary things in what was an extraordinary era when the combination of American know-how and enterprise, with Irish imagination and will to do well established a hotbed around Shannon Airport in which were planted the seeds of the Irish economic transformation of the 1960s.

Recorded in outline in this book are the largely untold stories of a selection of those extraordinary Americans who collectively formed the key in opening up the deprived West of Ireland to new ideas, new confidence an a new future including Charlie Blair, Bernard P McDonagh, Stan Delaplane, Mark Edwin, Lavone Andrews, Barbara Walters and Chuck Feeney.