Cinema and Touch

ABSTRACT

Ireland has long been identified as the Green Isle. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, this article explores the color green in Ireland in terms of visualization and marketing in relation to dress and tourist design. The focus on different ways of seeing Ireland's green reveals the color as an identity marker, highly charged politically and culturally. Starting out as a political statement of Irish identity, green became a marker to outsiders signaling Irishness. The ban on “the wearing of the green” during British colonialism reinforced the significance of green in Ireland. Green was the color of the Republican revolutionary organization, and was identified as the national color long before Ireland became an independent nation in 1922. Now green remains an indicator in outsiders' visual construction of Irishness. The extensive wearing of green on St Patrick's Day, the national day, is a continued celebration of national independence fueled by the legacy of the ban, not only in Ireland but among Irish diaspora communities across the globe. The color green is the signature color in the branding of Ireland as a tourist destination.     

The Irish macroeconomic response to an external shock with an application to stress testing

The Irish economy has recently endured a period of turbulence as a result of the collapse of the domestic property market bubble and the onset of the global financial crisis. There are two critical vulnerabilities in the Irish economy at present. The first is the potential for sluggish economic growth due to a slowdown in external demand, which impacts on the government's ability to meet budgetary targets. The second concern relates to the financial stability of the banking system given the escalating mortgage crisis. Our results show that Irish economic growth is highly sensitive to the performance of its trading partners and any international slowdown will hinder Ireland's growth prospects. The model used suggests that the appropriate policy response is to pursue further gains in competitiveness. We estimate the impact of an external slowdown on mortgage delinquency using a new dataset on the loan books of the commercial banking sector. The results suggest that a negative one standard deviation shock to US GDP growth leads to an increase of 1600 in the number of mortgages in arrears for at least 90 days. Arrears are driven by unemployment and negative equity in the model. We discuss policies to contain the mortgage crisis by improving these intermediate target variables.     

Children of the Troubles: The Impact of Political Violence in Northern Ireland

This article explores the effects of political violence on children and young people in Northern Ireland. The article begins with a brief historical account of the Northern Irish conflict and the recently negotiated Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This account illustrates, as is the case with many conflicts, its basis is religious, national, economic, and political, despite its frequent construction as a battle between Protestant and Roman Catholic. The article goes on to review young peoples' experience of conflict in Northern Ireland and the impact of conflict experiences on three related areas of young people's lives. These include the effects of the conflict on everyday aspects of life, social identity, and mental health .     

Unsettling the 'social' in social work: responses to asylum seeking children in Ireland

The ‘social’ context in which social work is located is becoming increasingly unsettled by emerging patterns of mobility. Mobility is constrained for many social work service users who are trapped within disadvantaged areas, while for others it has become a forced necessity to cross national boundaries and inhabit uncertain status in their nations of destination. This article explores the responses of the social work profession to children seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland. These children's complex needs, produced by the conditions of mobility they have encountered and by the conditions of arrival/settlement in Ireland, force social work practice to be orientated beyond the boundaries of the national welfare state. In order to explore the varied responses of the social work profession in the Republic of Ireland to asylum seeking children, three different groups of children are considered: children seeking asylum who have been separated from their parents; children who are seeking asylum with their parent(s)/family; and young Irish citizens whose asylum seeking parents are in danger of being deported. It argues that the provision of appropriate services for these children requires the development of post‐national forms of social work practice.     

A Philosophy of Charity and the Debates over the English and Irish Poor Laws in the 1830s

The role of charity as a provider of relief was notably little discussed in the comprehensive English Poor Law Report of 1834. By contrast, however, the debate at the time in Ireland over whether any kind of Poor Law at all was desirable ranged much more broadly, with the respective roles of statutory and voluntary provision hotly contested. In fact, beyond the confines of the English Report itself, the topic of the place of charity in relief was exercising plenty of minds on both shores of the Irish Sea. This article examines aspects of the intellectual importance accorded to the role of individual charity and wider voluntary action in welfare provision across the British Isles by some of the central figures in the English and Irish Poor Law debates in the 1830s. It is a study of how justifications were forged to underpin charitable activity and specific policy proposals as advanced by the main proponents of Christian political economy from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, including William Paley, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Bird Sumner, Edward Copleston, James Ebenezer Bicheno, Thomas Chalmers and Richard Whately. The discussions of Irish circumstances and problems furnish new insights into the substance and reach of a ‘philosophy of charity’ which was firmly in place by the 1830s.     

The Development of Intergroup Forgiveness in Northern Ireland

As societies like Northern Ireland, Israel, and South Africa strive to resolve social conflict, there is growing theoretical and empirical interest in the role of intergroup forgiveness. This study examined intergroup forgiveness among 340 young adults in Northern Ireland. A short form of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory explored possible influences on propensity to forgive. All participants were Catholic and female (mean age 17.36 years), and had experienced verbal or physical injury or bereavement due to the Northern Irish political violence. Overall forgiveness levels were low in comparison with previous studies of interpersonal forgiveness but similar to previous studies of intergroup forgiveness in Northern Ireland. The strongest (negative) predictor of forgiveness was the perceived degree of hurt caused by the injury .     

The impact of government spending on Ireland’s housing and residential market – Targeted vs economy-wide stimulus

The Irish residential property market is currently characterized by a considerable structural deficiency in housing supply compared to the underlying level of demand. The lack of housing has led to several economic and social problems in Ireland. The imbalance between supply and demand has led to both house prices and rents increasing faster than household incomes. Recent policy initiatives by the Irish Government have outlined plans for significant spending aimed at increasing the numbers of housing completions to tackle these issues. This paper examines the impact of government spending on housing supply using a structural econometric model of the Irish economy with a specific construction block. Within our econometric analysis, we compare the results of an economy wide versus a sector specific government stimulus on the property market. Our simulations suggest that, in order to achieve social and economic goals like increasing the number of dwellings and making housing more affordable by containing house price inflation, a targeted policy such as that described in the Irish Government's Housing for All plan may be preferable to an economy-wide stimulus.     

Iranian consecration of Irish nationalist ‘martyrs’: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland

This article focuses on the official and semi-official Iranian coverage and representation of the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland and the related corporeal constructs of the hunger strikers as ‘martyred’ bodies. The particular characterization and utilization of Irish republican hunger strikers by media outlets, officials, and other propagandists of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was an instance of groups outside Northern Ireland appropriating Irish nationalist bodies for their own ends. IRI commentators re-articulated the starving bodies of Irish republican hunger strikers, re-infusing them with symbolic meanings in a cross-cultural and ideologically laden configuration in the service of IRI’s self-projection as the patron of worldwide struggles for justice and liberation against the twin forces of imperialism and domestic opponents. In the process, IRI added its own layers of agency and politically crafted somatic meaning to the hunger strike. Meanwhile, IRI’s extensive advocacy of the republican hunger strike in Northern Ireland was eagerly welcomed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), to which most hunger strikers belonged; with PIRA and its political wing, Provisional Sinn Féin, hoping to secure diplomatic recognition, and possibly material aid, from the Iranian government for bolstering PIRA’s domestic and international standing vis-à-vis the British government.     

Stereotypes as political resistance: the Irish police court columns,c.1820–1845

Police court columns were a popular and flourishing representation of the courtroom in the early nineteenth-century British and Irish press. Despite this, they have been little used by historians, perhaps due to their often humorous and comic depictions of the courtroom. This article re-evaluates the Irish police court columns as a site of debate around Irish national identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It argues that these representations were not only sophisticated, but allowed the Irish to reformulate the stereotype of the stage Irishman. Moreover, as representations that captured behaviours of individuals within the courtroom, they provided an opportunity for a broad swathe of the community to engage in broader debates around the nature of Irishness and Irish political rights.     

Community Development, Partnership Governance and Dilemmas of Professionalization: Profiling and Assessing the Case of Ireland

Over the last two decades, Ireland has emerged as a paradigmaticcase of partnership governance. Underpinned by state-facilitatednational agreements that sought to maximize economic and socialdevelopment, ‘partnership’ was also held to includethe development of progressive social policies. The ‘communityand voluntary sector’ has been both the site and purportedvehicle for these progressive policies. In this context, communitydevelopment emerged as a discourse of social action that wasboth popular with what Donnelly-Cox and Jaffro (1999) have inthe Irish context called ‘second generation communitydevelopment’, i.e. the emergence of self-activated localcommunity groups informed by a social justice ethos, and tothe Irish state as a route to social inclusion for an arrayof marginalized social groups. Since the early 1990s, thesegroups have been the recipients of significantly increased statefunding. This resource has had a dramatic effect on the structureand nature of community development. In this paper, we outlineand assess the model of community development that has emergedin Ireland during this period. Based on empirical data arisingfrom a nationwide survey of community workers, we profile theextent of state funding; the consequent employment profile ofcommunity development workers and the impact on volunteerism;and the nature and consequence of community development’semerging relationship with the Irish state.     

Maternal Religiosity,Family Resources and Stressors,and Parent–Child Attachment Security in Northern Ireland

This study explores the associations between mothers' religiosity, and families' and children's functioning in a stratified random sample of 695 Catholic and Protestant mother–child dyads in socially deprived areas in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a region which has experienced centuries of sectarian conflict between Protestant Unionists and Catholics Nationalists. Findings based on mother and child surveys indicated that even in this context of historical political violence associated with religious affiliation, mothers' religiosity played a consistently positive role, including associations with multiple indicators of better family functioning (i.e., more cohesion and behavioral control and less conflict, psychological distress, and adjustment problems) and greater parent–child attachment security. Mothers' religiosity also moderated the association between parent–child attachment security and family resources and family stressors, enhancing positive effects of cohesion and mother behavioral control on mother–child attachment security, and providing protection against risks associated with mothers' psychological distress. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding the role of religiosity in serving as a protective or risk factor for children and families.     

Conceptualizing and responding to poverty in the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s: a case study of Dublin

The 1960s saw reformulations and rediscoveries of poverty in the West. This article examines the experience of the Republic of Ireland, a state with a large network of religious charitable agencies and a predilection for voluntary over statutory services. While sociologists have identified an Irish rediscovery of poverty as occurring in the early 1970s, it is argued here that a reframing of understandings of poverty, and the services required to address it, was apparent throughout the 1960s, in the media, in the actions of voluntary, civic and political groups, and in attempts to gather data on social problems. This article investigates the extent to which external ideas influenced a rediscovery or reformulation of poverty in Ireland, placing developments in local, national and transnational contexts. It focuses in particular on the changes within Catholicism that were key to the Irish rediscovery. Dublin is used as a case study in order to examine experiences of poverty on the ground. The correspondence associated with a charitable agency and a maternity hospital reveal the nature of the welfare mix that existed in the capital city and the way in which poverty was managed at a local level. In examining poverty from these different vantage points, this article identifies how ideas of and responses to poverty evolved in this period. It argues that while calls for the further development of collective responses to poverty were key to its reformulation, the historical dominance of voluntary agencies and the complex realities of welfare provision on the ground limited the potential for transformative change.     

Voting for Catholic Candidates: The Evolution of a Stereotype*

Objectives. This article looks at the effects of candidate Catholicism on individual voters, turning the traditional inquiry into voters' religion on its head. Specifically, it hypothesizes that individuals stereotype Catholic candidates based on the voting behavior of Catholics in general, and that these stereotypes help voters make a decision in elections with Catholic candidates. Methods. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), this article argues that citizens hold stereotypes of Catholics based on actual Catholic political behavior—solidly Democratic from the 1950s to the 1970s, but trending Republican starting in the 1980s. It also tests these stereotypes with Gallup data on hypothetical Catholic candidates and analyzes, through election‐day exit polls, the impact on voters of the Catholic conversion of a sitting U.S. Senator. Results. The data analyses strongly support the article's hypothesis, demonstrating that partisan attitudes toward hypothetical Catholic candidates shifted direction as the Catholic electorate shifted. In addition, Senator Sam Brownback's (R‐KS) conversion to Catholicism increased partisan polarization in his support—indicating a conservative shift in perceptions. Conclusions. Candidate religion plays a role in elections. Specifically, voters stereotype candidates based on candidate religion and use this stereotyped information to help them make an electoral decision. This article demonstrates this effect for Catholicism, but other religions should evidence similar impacts.     

Children in immediate danger: Emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond differently to a task that appears to be similar. The Irish team‐based practice rests on the social workers' shared assessment of the child's needs, and the formal decision is made by the courts (or police officers at night‐time); and the Finnish practice involves only one single social worker who makes both the assessment and the removal decision. The Irish system is tightly time regulated, whereas the Finnish system provides a more flexible time frame. Both approaches put a lot of stress on social workers' practice, which also includes creative workarounds (e.g., “planned emergency removals” in Finland). Future research will need to explore these features from the point of view of a child's right to protection.     

Understanding and negotiating identity: Children from cross-community families in public care in Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, most research on the impact upon children of living through the ‘troubles’ and in a divided society has assumed that children are from either the Catholic or Protestant community. There has been very little research with children from cross‐community families who have one parent from a Catholic background and one from a Protestant background. It is known, however, that these children are over‐represented in the public care system in Northern Ireland. The study reported in this paper addresses this gap in knowledge by exploring the experiences and views of children from cross‐community families who are in public care in Northern Ireland. The study has key messages for the development of services for looked after children from cross‐community families, if these are to be delivered in accordance with legislative duties in Northern Ireland and in an anti‐sectarian manner.     

The topography of medieval popular protest

ABSTRACT

Assumptions about the topography of popular revolt have been essential in constructing sociological and historical models that demarcate a ‘pre-modern’ from the ‘modern’ period. In Charles Tilly’s words, the ‘repertoires of collective action’ before the mid-nineteenth century were ‘parochial, particular, and bifurcated’, while afterwards, they became ‘cosmopolitan, autonomous, and modular’ (2008). By relying on primary sources across the Italian peninsula, France, Flanders and Britain and for the early modern period across German-speaking regions into Russia, this article shows that the plethora of late medieval revolts were rarely, if ever, confined to a neighbourhood or bounded by local religious congregations or family ties. Instead, they were citywide and north of the Alps fused alliances with the peasantry and other cities. With popular protest pushing eastward in the early modern period, these long-distant dimensions became more extensive, crossing linguistic boundaries and thousands of kilometres. In addition, this article raises new questions, such as why peasants and urban rebels in Italy, in contrast to northern Europe, resisted cross-mural alliances, and to what extent late medieval popular insurrection differed from those of the early modern period. The article ends with a call for new models to understand these differences.     

Knowledge,power and the city since 1700

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the trend of recorded violence in New Zealand broadly paralleled that of Britain. This review appraises critically two local interpretations of social attitudes and behaviour seen to be reflected in the colonial trend. Both provide 'frontier-type' theses in viewing disorder as a by-product of either colonial masculinity or the social atomization of migrants. Accordingly the decline in recorded violence is viewed as the outcome of either a local civilizing process or the emergence of social networks. However, the parallelism of the colonial and British trends suggest that there could be common processes at work. In this context, the nature of colonial violence, patterns of colonial litigiousness and the applicability of V. A. C. Gatrell's interpretation of the development of a disciplinary 'policeman-state' are considered. The need for further comparative research in both the colonial and British context is suggested, so as to test the extent to which the colonial experience of violence may be explained by 'frontier' and/or 'cultural fragment' explanations.     

‘Poor prison flowers’: convict mothers and their children in Ireland, 1853–1900

Pregnant women and mothers were among the thousands of individuals who were sentenced to at least three years’ penal servitude and admitted to the nineteenth-century Irish female convict prison. While some babies were born behind bars, others were permitted to accompany their convicted mothers into the prison after the penal practice of transportation had ceased. Other dependent children were separated from their convicted mothers for years, cared for by family members or friends, or accommodated in Ireland’s growing web of institutions. Using individual case studies, this article focuses on convict mothers and their young offspring. It draws attention to the increasing restrictions on the admission of infants that were imposed as the nineteenth century progressed, the problems that children of various ages in the penal system seemed to pose for officials, and the difficulties faced by incarcerated mothers who wished to maintain communication with their offspring. This article argues that while there were benefits to parenting within the confines of the prison, sentences of penal servitude had a significant impact on the lives of dependent offspring by dislocating families, separating siblings, or initiating institutional or other care that broke familial bonds permanently. In so doing, the article reveals attitudes towards motherhood as well as female criminality and institutionalization generally during this period and sheds light on an aspect of convict life unique to the women’s prison.     

The Peasant World in the Discourse of Generational Sorrow

This article spells out the methodological considerations and various procedural and methodological subtleties developed over the author's quarter century of sociological field studies of Russia's peasant worlds. Particular attention is paid to “voices from below”—peasant discursive formats that capture, in natural and undiluted form, the evolution of peasant practices constituting the core of everyday life. In particular, the phenomenon of generational sorrow and a special chronological nostalgia that functions as a “social gyroscope” is identified and discursively captured. This phenomenon is noteworthy and useful for its ability to retain a record of the productively longed for past in a rural community's collective memory and thereby influence new peasant worlds taking shape today.