Modern Ireland

The propensity for macro-economic developments to affect the vitality of endangered languages is often alluded to in relevant literature, but rarely explicated in any great detail. Attempting to help rectify this, the case of Irish in the wake of the 2008 economic crash and “Great Recession” which followed is discussed. In addition to examining the effects of austerity on Irish-language institutions and policies, ethnographic data from some of the strongest remaining Irish-speaking communities – collectively known as the “Gaeltacht” – are presented, illustrating some micro-level consequences of macro-level developments. The effects of the recession on the Gaeltacht labour market are discussed, as are issues of migration and community resistance. It is argued that neoliberalism fundamentally conflicts with revitalising minoritised languages.

In the nineteenth century the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis evolved into a lucrative commodity in great demand throughout the western world. In less than a century its trade became big business by any measure, involving tens of millions of animals shipped to every inhabited continent. In this context Ireland is particularly instructive in that it was the first country in Europe to exhaust its supply of native leeches. Concomitantly, it was also the first country to import leeches from abroad, as early as 1750. Being an island with manageable border controls, and a clearly definable medical market, Ireland serves superbly as a microcosm of the leech as a worldwide commodity. Being a relative small country it is possible for the first time to gain a balanced perspective of various economic factors underlying this trade, including supply and demand, exploitation of natural resources, and an evolving network of competitive traders.

Utilizing a new theory for examining critical junctures, we seek to better understand the nature of industrial policy change in Ireland during the 1950s and macroeconomic policy change in Sweden in the 1980s. Did these policy changes constitute critical junctures, or something less, and if so why? The theory consists of three elements—economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change—that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if a policy change constitutes a critical juncture. Herein, we will be examining the roles of a variety of change agents including the media, central banks, and politicians. Our findings will help explain why Irish industrial policy was transformed in the late 1950s, while Swedish macroeconomic policy underwent only minor change in the early 1980s.

On 18 April 2019, by-stander Lyra McKee was killed while a group of teenagers and young men rioted against the PSNI in the Northern Irish city of Derry. During these riots, two masked gunmen of the “New IRA” fired up to ten shots at three PSNI Land Rovers. The recruitment of teenagers into the ranks of dissident Irish republicans has raised concern that a new generation of young adults born after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement is prepared to continue acts of political violence in Ireland. This article will examine the motivations and ideology of teenagers and young adults in dissident Irish republican organisations. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews with members of the dissident republican youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann in the Dublin region. The interview data show four broad motivational factors for teenagers and young adults to join the republican youth organisation, Na Fianna Éireann, in the Republic of Ireland. These four are: First, working-class background, with its related deprivation and social problems (such as criminality and drug addiction); second, the importance of family links and social networks; third, social media as an introduction to republicanism; and, fourth, fascination with Irish history.

This paper sets out to develop an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This a priori framework is a significant improvement over existing critical juncture frameworks that lack any predictive element. It is an advance for historical institutionalism in particular, and political science in general. After the new framework is set out in detail here, it is tested. The framework is used to examine a number of potential critical junctures in macroeconomic policy, drawn from Ireland, Sweden, Britain, and America in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This presentation will elaborate upon what it meant to be Irish to those on both sides of the Treaty-split during the Irish Civil War through its cultural expression as sport, propaganda, and protest. Additionally, a more practical-based hypothesis will also be presented which locates the proliferation of soccer in Free State internments within a situationist context.

This paper improves our understanding of critical junctures, a concept employed in historical institutionalism for exploring change. However, the concept lacks rigour, weakening our ability to define critical junctures. Of late, academics have utilized other mechanisms to identify change in historical institutionalism. Thus, it is within this context that the critical junctures approach is remoulded through the specification of standards, hence reducing uncertainty as to what constitutes a critical juncture. The remoulded approach is employed here in examining change in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ ~ICTU! influence over public policy in 1987

This paper uses cognitive mapping techniques to understand how brand associations, an important aspect of political brand equity are formed, differ, and change, from the perspective of citizens, across the four largest Irish political parties between 2013 and 2016. The paper focuses in particular upon the strength, favourability and uniqueness of these brand associations. The results constitute a first attempt to longitudinally explore changing political brand associations through cognitive mapping techniques, using data generated with the participation of hundreds of citizens. Our findings suggest that this approach can contribute to our understanding of how and why political brand associations change over time.

This article seeks to improve our understanding of the concept of critical junctures. Critical junctures have been used to provide avenues for exploring change in historical institutionalism. However, the critical junctures concept, as it has developed, lacks rigour. We have no means of saying, with certainty, what is a critical juncture. If we cannot define a critical juncture the issue of path dependency becomes nebulous, as we cannot be certain as to path origins. Over the years the critical junctures concept has been used in conjunction with so‐called watersheds in politics, but without any quantification. This has left the approach in a quandary. Consequently, historical institutionalists have been more inclined to look to other approaches to identify change. Improving upon the critical junctures approach involves specifying standards that enable identification of levels of change. The remoulded approach is employed here in examining change in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions' (ICTU) influence over public policy in 1959. It will identify if this change in the unions' influence over public policy constituted a critical juncture. This example will illustrate how the remoulded approach reduces uncertainty surrounding the issue of what level of change is necessary to constitute a critical juncture. What is more, the remoulded framework is applicable to any social science research concerned with change.

This paper examines the role of authenticity as a moral orientation and social evaluation in practices of racism. It will argue that discursive conceptions of authenticity disguises and legitimises racism within micro encounters. Using evidence from a qualitative study of minority children in Ireland, this paper explores how perceptions of 'authenticity' are bound within racist and gendered conceptions of whom can be said to legitimately embody nationally and locally authorised dispositions and identity markers. The specific context of how this played out through the locality of north Dublin and constructed notions of Irishness is examined. The wider implications of a discourse of authenticity are discussed in relation to assumptions of similarity, adaptation and integration. This paper contributes two unique insights, firstly that the passive body (one's appearance) has a central role in perceptions of authenticity and secondly that similarity in one's active body (dispositions and tastes) do not necessarily act as a bridge to bring racialised groups together or facilitate integration. Introduction.

"Is Modernism Really Transnational?" uses the communion between Stephen and Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses as an allegory for the debate surrounding new cosmopolitan theory and the transnational/global turn in modernist studies that relies on this theory. The essay begins by drawing a parallel between the Irish Literary Revival and the Celtic Tiger as cosmopolitan movements that served colonial and neocolonial ends. In Bloom, however, Stephen encounters a new form of cosmopolitanism, one analogous to that offered by new cosmopolitanism. However, the failure of this communion, the essay argues, undermines the distinction between the cosmopolitanism offered by Bloom and new cosmopolitan theorists and that offered by the Irish Literary Revival and the Celtic Tiger. Thus, the essay concludes that transnational encounters mediated through cultural exchange lead to the very exploitation the modernist critic seeks to combat and provoke the defensive localism the critic seeks to transcend.

As the dominant intellectual figure in the early Irish protestant church, James Ussher played a key role in defining its sense of identity in Ireland.  He created an 'origin myth' for the Church of Ireland,, giving it historical legitimacy by tracing its origins back to St Patrick, and his apocalyptic view of the Pope as Antichrist shaped Irish protestant anti-Catholicism for centuries to come.

In the Republic of Ireland the ‘decade of commemorations’ (2013-2023) has witnessed much debate around how to interpret the formative events of Irish independence. Some have conceived of those who achieved independence as a ‘revolutionary generation’. This explanation downplays theories of political disadvantage or abstract nationalism and instead elevates the notion of generational divide. But if a ‘first generation’ of revolutionary thinkers and actors drove change, what about the ‘second generation’? This chapter explores generational division as a phenomenon heavily coloured by conceptions of male potency and the homosocial. Just as the ‘first generation’ of males in independent Ireland scorned their forbears, so they frequently looked down on their own offspring as ‘degenerate’. Exploring ‘degeneracy’ in the fields of sex, crime, leisure and work this chapter delves deeper into the divide between the ‘second generation’ and the boys of the old brigade.

Ireland joined the European Communities – as they then were – in 1973, alongside the United Kingdom and Denmark. In many ways that membership was defined by the bilateral British-Irish relationship. Ireland was, to all an intents and purposes, an underdeveloped appendage of the British economy and membership alongside the UK was deemed by most of the Irish political and economic establishment as virtually axiomatic. Irish policy makers, however, took full advantage of the opportunities offered by membership; in particular the Common Agricultural Policy, the direct transfers that ultimately derived from cohesion, regional and structural funding and the opportunity of presenting the country as a successful location for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) with access to the European market. Irish decision makers also developed a policy style within the EU which has been described as ‘consensual, collegial and pragmatic’ (Laffan 2000:13) while at the same time positioning themselves rhetorically close to the heart of European construction. This had the added value of creating an Irish antithesis to Britain's ongoing European discontents.
There are perhaps four key themes which have occupied scholarship with respect to Ireland and its membership of the European Union. The first is the question of a small state and its sovereignty. It is a point of ongoing interest to understand and to explain why a small state – which secured its formal independence only in 1921 and which continues to grapple with issues of sovereignty and nationality – should be so willing to enter into a complex shared sovereignty arrangement with other European states, including its former coloniser? A second question of evident scholarly interest has been the economic development of the state within the EU. What was the impact of EU membership on a fragile, largely agricultural, peripheral European economy? How did European engagement contribute to Ireland's stunning economic successes in the 1990s, and what was its role in Ireland's economic crisis of 2008-2013 and subsequent (partial) recovery? A third series of questions relate to the EU and democracy.  To what extent has Ireland's engagement with European integration strengthened or weakened its own democracy and how engaged are citizens with the European project? Finally there's the issue of Irish foreign policy. How and why has Ireland's tradition of military neutrality, which was an outlier within the EU throughout the Cold War, continued to impinge on both domestic debates on Europe and how has it shaped Ireland's contribution to EU foreign, security and defence policy?

This article examines Irish taoiseach (prime minister) Charles J. Haughey's involvement with the Falklands War of 1982; a hitherto neglected subject related to a defining episode in the history of Great Britain in the postwar era. Specifically, it focuses on Haughey's relationship with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher during the depths of this crisis and the immediate diplomatic and political fallout between the British and Irish governments in the aftermath of the Falklands War.

Politics in the Republic of Irelandis newly available in a fully revised fourth edition. Building on the success of the first three editions, it continues to provide an authoritative introduction to all aspects of politics in the Republic of Ireland. Written by some of the foremost experts on Irish politics, it explains, analyzes and interprets the background and processes of Irish government. Crucially, it provides the student with the very latest developments. Ireland enters the twenty-first century as a country of cultural vitality, economic dynamism, and rapid social change, and its politics reflect this new air of liveliness. New patterns of government formation, challenges to the established political parties, ever-deepening, if sometimes ambivalent, involvement in the process of European integration, and sustained

Previous research on credibility-enhancing displays (CREDs) suggests that long-term exposure to religious role models “practicing what they preach” aids the acceptance of religious representations by cultural learners. Likewise, a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence implicates its opposite, perceived “religious hypocrisy” (forthwith credibility undermining displays or CRUDs), as a factor in the rejection of religion. However, there is currently little causal evidence on whether behaviors of either kind displayed by religious authorities directly affect preexisting religious belief. The current study investigated this question by priming Irish self-identified “Catholic Christian” participants with either a clerical CRED or CRUD and subsequently measuring levels of explicit and implicit belief. Our results revealed no effects of immediate CRED or CRUD exposure on either implicit religious belief or three different measures of explicit religiosity. Instead, explicit (but not implicit) religiosity was predicted by past CRED exposure. Prospects and limitations of experimental approaches to CREDs and CRUDs are discussed.

The paper is analysis of one of post-war crises.  It argues that the crisis was largely the result of the authorities' failure to understand the constraints placed on them by a fixed exchange rate.  But the crisis led to  a comprehensive and epochal reassessment of economic policy that would have far-reaching implications for economic development in the longer run.

Data were extracted from the 1911 Irish manuscript census to study the regional variation in the extent and character of family limitation strategies in Ireland a century ago. Regression analysis of the data shows evidence of 'spacing' in both urban and rural Ireland. Further analysis of the so-called 'child replacement' problem also produces evidence consistent with 'spacing'.

The catalytic effect of the OECD-linked study that produced Investment in Education is a much celebrated episode of Ireland's modernisation. A remarkably broad cross-departmental consensus supported the initiative. Bureaucratic caution and ministerial self-preservation were set aside to allow a "warts and all" portrait of Irish education to be painted by the study team. Special efforts were made to focus public attention on the findings of a damning report that legitimated a quickening pace of government action to increase access to an expanded, rationalised and reoriented education system. But, as well as developmentalist triumph over conservatism in the education field, there was also significant division between state and civil society developmentalists. This is examined through an analysis of the relationship between the Federation of Lay Catholic Secondary Schools and the Department of Education.

The author analyses intangible aspects of the maritime heritage, in particular, stories of the sea, collected in Ireland and Scotland, in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The author draws from the experience of Ulster University research project ‘Stories of the Sea: A Typological Study of Maritime Memorates in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Folklore Traditions’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and aims to add to previous published studies on this subject.

An unwillingness to publicly commemorate certain episodes in our history, such as the 1798 rebellion, can be mistaken for collective amnesia, but there is more to forgetting than meets the eye, argues Guy Beiner (Belfast Telegraph, 2.11.2018 ):
The 1798 Rebellion in Ulster (popularly known as the "Turn-Out") was recalled through a dynamic which can be labelled “social forgetting”, which is a form of forgetful remembrance sustained by tensions between perceived public oblivion and muted remembrance in more private spheres.

The Betting Act 1926 legalised cash betting in Ireland and led to the appearance, for the first time, of the legally regulated and licenced betting office. The introduction of this legislation was a pragmatic step, designed to eradicate the undesirable

Martyrdom - political and religious - plays a powerful role in Irish history and identity.  This article explores the period from 1570 to 1630 when the Catholic church recorded a dramatic increase in the number of martyrs amongst its clergy and laity.  It shows how these martyrs were a product of the violent relations between the English authorities and the Irish Catholic population, and examines the informal process by which their sufferings and deaths were recorded and circulated in Ireland and abroad.  It also looks at the ways in which memory and history were shaped and even invented, as a discourse of Catholic martyrdom was created which resonated down the centuries of Irish history.

This article will argue that there has been a shift in the identity of Irish foreign policy and will pursue the implications of this for the study of European Union (EU) member states' foreign policy. Membership of the EU and Ireland's consequent participation in a system of foreign and security policy cooperation in the EC/EU
have had an impact upon the content and conduct of Irish foreign policy.' The nature of this impact, however, is contested: while foreign policy managers conclude that Irish policy has been empoweredb y its participationin this system,2s ome foreign policy activists complain that this very system has constrained Irish policy options and that a principled, independent foreign policy voice is being lost.

This article examines the impact of economic crises on macroeconomic policies in the United States (US), Mexico, Ireland, and Sweden at the start of the 1980s, framed within the context of the policy change literature. These countries are selected for examination as they encompass presidential, parliamentary, republican, constitutional monarchical, federal and unitary systems of governance. Two are European states and two are from the Americas: two are large economies while two are small. Each country’s response to the crisis affecting it, tempered by historical and political factors, provides an insight into that political economy. These findings enable us compare and contrast the nature of each crisis and the policy responses adopted. The value of such comparison is the perspective it offers, contributing to the goal of building a body of increasingly complete explanatory theory (Mahler 1995).

Webpage (in advance of book publication): 
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/forgetful-remembrance-9780198749356 

Forgetful Remembrance examines what happens when communities endeavour to forget embarrassing events in their past. The question of how a society attempts to obscure problematic historical episodes is addressed through a detailed case study grounded in the north-eastern counties of the Irish province of Ulster, where loyalist and unionist Protestants — in particular Presbyterians — tried to repress for more than two centuries discomforting recollections of participation, alongside Catholics, in a republican rebellion in 1798.
By exploring a rich variety of sources, Beiner makes it possible to closely follow the dynamics of social forgetting. His particular focus on vernacular historiography, examining local traditions which are rarely noted in official histories, reveals the tensions between professed oblivion in public and the more subtle rituals of remembrance that facilitated muted expressions of forgetful remembrance, which were masked by a local culture of reticence and silencing.
Throughout Forgetful Remembrance, comparative examples demonstrate the wider relevance of the study of social forgetting in Northern Ireland to numerous other cases where troublesome memories were secreted.

The voluminous scholarship on history and memory has generated a profusion of terms. For the purpose of navigating through the terminological labyrinth, this essay discusses examples that relate to the memorialisation of 1916 in Ireland in order to offer a critical re-evaluation of some of the key terms that have been used to conceptualise communal remembrance, including: myth, collective memory, public memory, popular memory, cultural memory, social memory and postmemory. These concepts of remembrance are counter-balanced with consideration of social forgetting. Moreover, a new concept of prememory, which can be paired with postmemory, is introduced in order to suggest new directions for advancing explorations of historical remembering.

The Church of Ireland, was in many ways a clone of the Church of England. The Irish reformation legislation which established the Church of Ireland was largely a copy of Henry VIII's acts establishing the Church of England.  And many English politicians and clergy thought of the Church of Ireland as wholly dependent on the Church of England.  But for those clergy who were born in Ireland, or who made their careers there, there was an alternative view which saw the Irish church as a separate, sister church to the Church of England.  Here Archbishop James Ussher, the dominant protestant intellectual force in early-modern Ireland, provided an important sense of independent identity for the Church of Ireland. He traced its origins back to Patrick, and insisted that it was separate from the Church of England, as in 1634 when he refused to adopt the English Canons verbatim, but insisted on drafting separate Irish canons.
The result is that the Church of Ireland was Janus-like, looking both to England and to Ireland, relying on the protection of the English monarch and state in times of difficulty, but proclaiming its sturdy independence in better times.

The city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, has experienced a major political transformation and urban revitalization since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. Though the incidence of sectarian violence has declined dramatically since the end of the “Troubles” (i.e., Northern Ireland’s decades-long political conflict), most residential neighborhoods in Belfast remain heavily segregated between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Moreover, sporadic episodes of rioting and property destruction by sectarian youths continue to plague the city, particularly during the annual summer “marching season.” As a relatively new phenomenon in Belfast, skateboarding is especially prevalent in the mostly non-sectarian spaces of the city center. Protestant and Catholic young people often skate together in the same vicinity, thus interacting with the urban “other.” The influence of skateboarding on the collective identities and ethno-religious perceptions of Belfast youth are investigated in this paper, with an emphasis on the role of subcultural spaces in bridging the sectarian divide. Everyday acts of resistance to traditional sectarian norms and values, occurring within the spaces of skateboarding, are described and analyzed. The paper is based primarily on ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with skateboarding teens and young adults, conducted by the author in Belfast during July/August 2010.

The result of the 2008 Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty came as a considerable shock to the Irish body politic. The Irish electorate had, yet again, broken with the established political consensus on Europe. The vote on 13 June 2008 was based on a strong turnout (at over 53 percent) and a comparatively decisive result (53. 4 percent ‘no’ as against 46.6 percent ‘yes’). However, as the only EU member state ratifying the treaty by way of referendum, the electorate’s decision placed the Government in an immediate quandary.

Gaelic games have repeatedly provided filmmakers with a resonant motif to represent perceived aspects of Irish identity, perceived as these representations have been neither straightforward nor unproblematic. In international productions in particular, Gaelic games have been employed on occasion as a short hand for regressive stereotypes associated with Irish people, including their alleged propensity for violence. For indigenous producers, on the other hand, Gaelic games afforded distinctive Irish cultural practices and as such were employed to promote and affirm the Irish nation, particularly as an indigenous film culture began to develop in the aftermath of World War II. From the late 1960s onwards, a critical turn became evident in these indigenous productions though contemporary depictions of Gaelic games still occasionally reveal the more problematic stereotypes associated with Ireland and Irish identity.

This study provides the first major monograph examination of filmic representations of Gaelic games, charting these representations from the earliest years of the twentieth century, including silent films such as Knocknagow (1918) to more recent productions Michael Collins (1996) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). Among the areas examined are newsreel depictions of Gaelic games; Hollywood’s fascination with hurling in the mid-20th century (including in the work of Oscar-winning director John Ford), which led to a range of productions featuring the sport culminating with the Oscar-nominated short Three Kisses (Paramount, 1955); the importance of the depictions of Gaelic games to the emergence of a distinctive Irish film culture post WWII; and the role of Gaelic games in contemporary cinema.

A survey of changing obsessions in Ireland with remembrance of various episodes in the past, identifies moments of heightened commemoration and charts the development of modern memorial practices over the twentieth century. Growing awareness to the multifaceted and multilayered expressions of memory in Irish culture ultimately reveals the necessity to rewrite the history of the twentieth century.

This essay more or less continues a historical survey of Irish memory from the mid-eighteenth century:
Guy Beiner, ‘The Formation of Modern Irish Memory, c.1740–1914’ in The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland, edited by Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 586-93.