From the early 1970s the Irish midland town of Portlaoise became famous as the home of the country's maximum security political prison. A childhood on the Main Street of that "once congested, now double by-passed town" afforded award-winning poet Pat Boran a unique insight into its workings, and into small-town life in general.

Here are extraordinary glimpses of bog men and bogey men, of the town's first colour television and the national debate over its first public toilet ... Here too are stories of coming of age, of high jinks and low deeds, of events and characters both wonderful and strange.

And here too is the shadow of the northern 'troubles', seen through the lens of a southern Irish town with claims to being the place where the British Empire began - and where the first shots of the 1916 Rising were fired.

Part memoir, part social history, part meditation on community itself, The Invisible Prison is a funny, moving and by time heart-breaking exploration of Irish life and the energies and passions that animate it.