Plant MADS‐box genes encode transcriptional regulators that are critical for a number of developmental processes. In the angiosperms (the flowering plants), these include the specification of floral organ identities, flowering time and fruit development. It appears that the MADS box gene family has undergone considerable gene duplication and sequence divergence within the angiosperms. Here I discuss the possibility that these events have allowed the recruitment of these genes to new developmental pathways in particular angiosperm lineages. Recent analyses of sequence changes, (...) expression patterns and, in a few cases, gene function are beginning to provide tantalizing evidence for deciphering when and how such genetic diversification has led to particular morphological innovations. In the future, comparative studies of large numbers of species will be required to assess the extent of such variation as well as to fully understand the mechanisms by which evolution of these developmental regulators has played a role in shaping new morphologies. BioEssays 25:637–646, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing a frame analysis approach this paper examines how The Irish Times and the Irish Independent portrayed public sector workers during Ireland's economic crisis. Using a sample of coverage from 2009 and 2010 it discusses the five media frames identified in this analysis, three of which were hegemonic and two of which were counter hegemonic. In this paper, I argue that coverage of the public sector by each newspaper was imbalanced and inaccurate. This paper also finds that (...) both newspapers were strong advocates of austerity cutbacks in the public service as a solution to Ireland's financial crisis, frequently representing this idea as ‘fact’ while simultaneously delegitimising those opposing this viewpoint. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the images of nursing that were presented in the media during the recent industrial action by nurses and midwives in the Republic of Ireland. Although both nurses and midwives took industrial strike action, the strike was referred to as ‘the nurses’ strike’ and both nurses and midwives were generally referred to by the generic term ‘nurses’. Data were gathered from the printed news media of The Irish Times over a period (...) of one month - 4 October to 4 November 1999 - which included the nine days of the strike. Although we limited the source of our data to just one newspaper, the findings do provide an image of how nurses and nursing care are viewed by both health professionals and the public. This image appeared to give a higher value to masculine cultural codes and the performance of technical skills, whereas acts associated with feminine cultural codes of caring were considered of lower value. (shrink)

Following the deaths of ten Irish republican hunger strikers in 1981, radical Basque nationalists and Irish republicans of the Basque izquierda abertzale and Irish republican movement respectively, began to develop ever closer ties of transnational “solidarity”. In addition to the relationship between Herri Batasuna and Sinn Féin, more ad hoc organisational links in areas such as youth, prisoner, and language advocacy, fostered a shared political culture at the intersection of both movements, which was periodically reflected through the (...) prism of cultural expression. Utilising a wide array of primary sources, this article explores and analyses, for the first time, the emergence and development of this transnational nexus, from the hunger strikes of 1981 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. (shrink)

The word “tragedy,” as Irish critic Shaun Richards points out, “is a term frequently used to describe the contemporary Northern Irish situation. It is applied both by newspaper headline writers trying to express the sense of futility and loss at the brutal extinction of individual lives and by commentators attempting to convey a sense of the country and its history in more general terms.” 1 Since identifying this particular use of the word, it has be- come clear that (...) the Irish are not referring to tragedy in general, but to Greek tragedy in particular. For example, Deaglán de Bréadun writes in The Irish Times: “The whole community knows outright disaster was only narrowly averted at Drumcree last year [1996]. There is also a terrible creeping feeling that Drumcree Three will be upon us soon and that, like a Greek tragedy, this time disaster is inevitable.” 2 Another article the following year, on Sinn Fein’s exclusion from the 1998 Peace Process, reported: “One long-distance peace processor lamented that today’s events were ‘like a Greek tragedy. You can see the end coming but you can’t do any- thing about it.’” This “language of exhausted fatalism” 4 is not unfamiliar to the Irish, and offers an explanation for the more than twenty Irish authors who have translated, produced, or adapted over two dozen Irish versions of Greek tragedies in the last century alone. 5 Irish poets have translated the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, yet all with a distinctly Irish stamp. Moreover, these Irish-Greek adaptations all, in one way or another, comment upon and question the instability of twentieth-century Ireland – the people, the poets, and the divided country. (shrink)

This paper concentrates upon particular artworks from Irish women artists. It demonstrates that there are certain themes which recur in their artwork. These include dislocation, particularities about place and contestation around language, all of which are rooted in the lived experience of being Irish, being female and being an artist. At the same time the paper provides readings of this artwork which demonstrate that these experiences are diverse, and that the areas of representation within which the artists are (...) working are socially produced constructs. There is therefore no romantic essentialist category of ‘Irish woman artist’, but rather the richly interplaying histories, readings and contexts of Irish/woman/artwork. (shrink)

This paper aims to perform a multi-level analysis of the Irish public discourse on Covid-19. Despite widespread agreement that Ireland’s response was rapid and effective, the country’s journey through the pandemic has been no easy ride. In order to contain the virus, the Government’s emergency legislation imposed draconian measures including the detention and isolation of people deemed to be even “a potential source of infection” and a significant extension of An Garda Síochána’s power of arrest. In April 2020, journalists (...) John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty initiated judicial review proceedings before the High Court to challenge such legislation, which they defined as unconstitutional, “disproportionate” and based on “fraudulent science”. The proceedings attracted widespread media coverage in what soon became a debate on the legitimacy of emergency legislation and the notion of ‘fake news’ itself. After a brief survey of the legislative background to Ireland’s Covid response, the argumentative strategy is analysed through which the High Court eventually dismissed Mr Waters and Ms O’Doherty’s challenge. Focusing on the process of justification of the judicial decision, the paper provides a descriptive account of the argument structure of the Court’s decision. This sheds light on the pattern of multiple argumentation through which the Court interpreted relevant norms in the Constitution and at once re-established the primacy of “facts” informing political decision-making at a time of national emergency. (shrink)

Hugh Connelly, An authentic Celtic voice : the Irish penitential and contemporary discourse on reconciliation -- Padraig Corkery, Bio-ethics and contemporary Irish moral discourse -- Amelia Fleming, The silent voice of creation and moral discourse. -- Raphael Gallagher, CSsR., A church silence in sexual moral discourse? -- Donal Harrington, Moral discourse and journalism. -- Linda Hogan, Contemporary humanitarianism: neutral or impartial? -- Vincent MacNamara, On having a religious morality. -- Enda McDonagh, A discourse on the centrality of justice (...) in moral theology. -- Suzanne Mulligan, Moral discourse in a time of AIDS. (shrink)

Objective To determine the public's understanding of and views about a range of ethical issues in relation to death and dying. Design Random, digit-dialling, telephone interview Setting Ireland. Participants 667 adult individuals. Results The general public are unfamiliar with terms associated with end-of-life care. Although most want to be informed if they have a terminal illness, they also value family support in this regard. Most of the respondents believe that competent patients have the right to refuse life-saving treatment. Most also (...) (mistakenly) believe that families, either alone or with physicians, have the authority to make decisions about starting or stopping treatment for incompetent patients. Most Irish people are more concerned about the quality of their dying than death itself. Religious commitment is important to most Irish people, and this impacts on their views about medical treatment and care at the end of life. Conclusions The study paints a picture of a general public that is not very comfortable with or informed about the processes of dying and death. Great sensitivity is required of health professionals who must negotiate the timing and the context of breaking of bad news with patients and families. Educational interventions, public and organisational policies and legislation need to address the uncertainty that surrounds the role of professionals and families in making decisions for dying patients. (shrink)

William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux (...) wrote the letter to Locke in which he posed the now famous question about a man born blind made to see, he was an active member of the DPS and was on familiar terms with several other key figures in Irish philosophy at the time. For the most part, Irish thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries answered “no” to Molyneux’s question of whether a blind man made to see could distinguish, by sight alone, between a cube and a sphere. (shrink)

An Irish surrogacy case from 2013 illustrates how negotiations of the mother’s identity in a given national and legal context are drawing on novel scientific perspectives, at a time when the use of new biotechnological possibilities is becoming more widespread and commonplace. The Roman dictum, ‘Mater Semper Certa Est’ is contested by the finding of this Irish court, in which the judge made a declaration of parentage stating that the genetic parents of twins born using a surrogate were (...) the parents. This article critically examines the normative background assumptions involved in this ruling. It will argue that the particular deployment of arguments from genetics and epigenetics in this court case produces a naturalization of the mother’s identity that is inherently reductive. A second surrogacy case is also examined, this time regarding the rights of a woman of Irish nationality to receive paid maternity leave or paid leave similar to adoptive leave after the birth of her daughter to a surrogate mother in the US state of California. This case, which was brought to the Equality Tribunal in Ireland and decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union, is used to illustrate the possible ramifications of conflicting definitions of motherhood in the legal system. In concluding, this article argues for the development and deployment of a more complex understanding of the evolving state of motherhood within the courts, in keeping with developments in the IVF industry and the various new mother-relations it makes possible. (shrink)

Republicanism has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times among political theorists. This article examines the way in which republican strains of democratic political philosophy impacted political thinkers and leaders in the case of modern Ireland. Although the Republic of Ireland was officially established in 1949, the question of its origins was a source of contention throughout the first part of the twentieth century. I argue that the intellectual origins of Irish republicanism lay in the impact of (...) French revolutionary thought on Irish nationalist leaders in the 1790s, and then trace these republican ideas through the public debates and tracts that marked the major stages in the development of the Irish Republic. In particular, I focus on the principles informing the 1916 Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, as well as the central arguments employed in the debates surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948. My aim is to.. (shrink)

Gaining ethical clearance to conduct a study is an important aspect of all research involving humans but can be time-consuming and daunting for novice researchers. This article stems from a larger ethnographic study that examined research capacity building in Irish nursing and midwifery. Data were collected over a 28-month time frame from a purposive sample of 16 nurse or midwife research fellows who were funded to undertake full-time PhDs. Gaining ethical clearance for their studies was reported as an early (...) ‘rite of passage’ in the category of ‘labouring the doctorate’. This article penetrates the complexities in Irish clinical research ethics by describing the practices these nurse and midwife researchers encountered and the experiences they had. The key issue of representation that occurred in the context of ‘medicalized’ research ethics is further explored including its meaning for nursing or midwifery research. (shrink)

Like all fields of inquiry, Irish studies has its own traditions, its own ways of organizing information. even the most adventurous of the native practitioners tend carefully to maintain disciplinary boundaries when presenting evidence to sustain a thesis, and American scholars have used Irish practice as their frame of reference. This essay, which engages with the time-honored and increasingly vexed enterprise of defining “Irishness,” introduces play into these traditions both in spirit and in methodology. An alternative approach to (...) analyzing Ireland might foreground the underlying assumptions about social relations and historical patterns that link Irish art and writing across diverse fields of inquiry. Exploring the many rhetorics of Ireland might make it impossible, for example, for those involved in the essential task of historical and scientific inquiry—to overlook the submessages of popular Irish representations.I begin, obliquely, with a contrast between American and Irish censorship of music videos. My inquiry targets some fundamental differences between American and Irish appropriations of the body, from which the essay suggests symmetries between the psychological development of individuals in Ireland and one stage in what might be termed the psychohistory of Irish culture. As an experimental, semidisruptive piece that challenges disciplinary lines in the field and introduces fresh theoretical categories, this essay reaches toward a new Irish studies. Cheryl Herr, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture and For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 . Two of her current projects involve spatial organization in Ireland and the syntax of English modernism. (shrink)

Rylands Irish MS 22 is a copy of Geoffrey Keatings Trí Biorghaoithe an Bháis, made by the well-known scribe Risteard Tuibear in 1710, a professionally made vernacular book, making available for circulation a widely read devotional text. In the last two pages the scribe permitted an apprentice to copy, and as a result he had to write the ending a second time more correctly. Like several other books made by Tuibear, it belonged to Muiris Ó Gormáin in Dublin in (...) the later eighteenth century and is found in his book lists from 1761 and 1772. Inside the front is the book-plate of the Duke of Sussex, and the catalogue of his library from 1827 shows that this is a book given to him by Sir William Betham a year earlier. When the Duke‘s library was auctioned, this was sold to a London dealer, reappearing in sales between 1866 and 1869. It was bought by the Earl of Crawford and came with all his manuscripts into the Rylands Library, where for its origin and history it stands out from a collection of books largely made for or by Denis Kelly, of Castle Kelly, in the mid-nineteenth century. (shrink)

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts that have been the subject of much contention. For a start, how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in English by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, (...) defended, and challenged; a period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. Corcoran focuses his chapters on various themes such as "the Big House," and the rural and the provincial and offers discussions of authors ranging from Kinsella and Beckett to William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, to provide a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing. (shrink)

This volume addresses how spatialized identities, belongingness and hospitality are interrogated in British and Irish contemporary art (painting, installation, video, photography, new public art) at a time when economic and political crises tend to encourage individual or exclusive usages of space. It sketches a cartography of encounters encompassing the home, the neighbourhood, the village or city, and the nation. Artists interrogate how intimacy is both facilitated and threatened by spatial devices, how space fashions our perception of gender, social or (...) ethnic identity and activates power relations. They explore the need for a home or a homeland and the various forms exile or placelessness can take. They may also take part in the restoration of the Commons and the constitution of alternative communities. Whether the analyses focus on the private sphere (in urban, suburban or rural contexts), or on shared communal spaces, they ponder the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at work in human encounters and shed light on how artistic apparatuses make the tensions between openness to the other and rejection or withdrawal perceptible. The approach, borrowing from art history as well as anthropology lays emphasis on context, situationality and field work; it proposes to repoliticize relational art and concludes on the dialogical positionality which lies at the core of art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PEACE EDUCATION AND THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT André Lascaris Dominican Theological Center, Nijmegen The Northern Irish conflict can be interpreted as an anachronism. This is true in many aspects. However, in the last ten years we were confronted with many "anachronistic" conflicts: in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, Algeria, Colombia, and Afghanistan, to mention only some. In our postmodern times the division of the world into two (...) rather neat halves with two centers of power has gone, the nation state is weakening and in many societies the social glue seems to be losing its cohesive force. We have to live together in pluralistic societies in which we are all a minority at times. Wars between states become less likely, butcivil wars are on the increase. Terrorism becomes a power against which the traditional armies and their weapons are quite useless in spite of many technological developments. The ancient laws concerningthe protection of women and children in wartime are becoming obsolete. Women are invited to get involved in the armed forces. The child soldier is a well-known phenomenon. In our western society a child's world, which exists in isolation from the adult world, is no longer a possibility. Some lessons learned in dealing with theNorthern Irish conflict might turn out to be worthwhile taking up in other situations. In this essay, I reflect with the help ofthe mimetic theory on peace work done by some Dutch people on behalfofNorthern Ireland between 1973 and 1992. The Northern Irish conflict as such is not the subject ofthis paper; the mimetic interpretation of this conflict was admirably covered by people such as Duncan Morrow and the late Frank Wright to which I refer the reader in my bibliography. I will concentrate on the educational aspects ofDutch peace work done in the Northern Irish context. Here it suffices to say that the 136André Lascaris Northern Irish conflict is not a religious one, though religious labels are being used. It is aconflict between two cultures, an Irish one and an AngloSaxon or British one. I. Dutch peace work on behalf ofNorthern Ireland A. A short history In 1973 I was invited to become a member of staff of a conference for influential Northern Irishmen in the Netherlands. Glenn Williams, then secretary general of the KEK (Conference of European Churches) had asked the Dutch Council ofChurches whether it could do something on behalf of Northern Ireland. After some consultation Williams asked the Dutch adult education center 'De Haaf to accommodate "mixed Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish groups in a quiet and spiritual atmosphere." The director of this center, Aat van Rhijn, a Presbyterian minister, asked me to participate in the conference because he wanted a Catholic priest to make the Roman Catholic Northern Irishmen feel represented on the staff. A laywoman, Hermine Keuning, was the third member of the staff. The Dutch Reformed Church provided money. In April 1973 a visit was made to Belfast and contact was established with the Irish Council ofChurches; it soon became our Northern Irish counterpart. In Septembera firstconference was held, quickly followed by a second one. From participants of the first conference a new request for a conference was made and after this one even more conferences were organized, altogether 18 between 1973 and 1983. We worked with neighborhood groups, politicians, paramilitaries, social workers, police officers, adult educators, social workers, journalists and editors, Catholic and Protestant clergymen. In the conferences ofthe protestant politicians and the clergy it was not possible to have a mixed group; we had to be content with having some either Catholic or Protestant "observers" at the conference. Inthe late seventiesthesecurity situation inNorthern Ireland improved. The necessity oftraveling to the Netherlands to have a conference became less evident. Because our work remained in demand, we organized weekends in Northern Ireland itself from 1981 onwards, mainly in Corrymeela, an ecumenical adult education center near Ballycastle. Money was coming from several sources, but mainly from the Dutch Reformed Church. To handle the money well we decided in 1975 to become a trust: the "Dutch Northern Irish Advisory Committee." It was typical ofthis trustthat its constitution stipulated that no conference or any Peace Education andthe Northern Irish Conflict137 other activity... (shrink)

The potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845 led to ineffable suffering that sent shockwaves throughout the Anglosphere. The Irish Famine is deemed to be the first national calamity to attract extensive help and support from all around the world. Even though the Irish did not receive adequate support from the British government, their ordeal was mitigated by private charity. Without the donations from a great number of individuals, the death toll among the famished Irishmen and Irishwomen would (...) have been definitely higher. The greatest and most generous amount of assistance came from the United States. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Congress did not decide to earmark any money for the support of famine-stricken Ireland, the horrors taking place in this part of the British Empire pulled at American citizens’ heartstrings and they contributed munificently to the help of the Irish people. Aiding Ireland was embraced by the American press, which, unlike major British newspapers, lauded private efforts to bring succour to the Irish. Such American newspapers as the Daily National Intelligencer, the New York Herald and the Liberator encouraged their readers to contribute to the relief of Ireland and applauded efforts to help the Irish. The aim of this essay is to argue that the American press, in general, played a significant role in encouraging private charity in the United States towards the Irish at the time of An Gorta Mór and, thus, helped to save many lives. (shrink)

From 1848 to 1850, 4175 female orphans from Irish workhouses were sent to the Australian colonies to escape from the Irish famine and to address the gender imbalance in the colonies. Anglo-centric colonial newspapers condemned the girls for their supposedly inferior demographics – Catholic, illiterate, Irish and female – and raised the spectre of Catholic predominance, leading to the cancellation of the immigration scheme at a time of great humanitarian need. Using the original shipping lists of the (...) girls who landed in New South Wales and the colony’s census data, this paper uses a quantitative analysis to argue that while newspapers were relatively correct in characterizing the girls’ demographics, they were incorrect in their claims about how the girls’ arrival would influence the colony’s demographic development. (shrink)

"This book is about the way shifting conceptions of ecology, biology and technology significantly alter what it means to write poetry about nature in a time of environmental crisis. It offers a radical re-reading of three major British poets, Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon and JH Prynne, and their aesthetic strategies for negotiating the complex feedbacks between organisms and their environments in a technological world. Their poetry not only provides ways of thinking and communicating about ecology and biology, but shows how (...) the unpredictable processes of thought and communication impact on organic life in the Anthropocene, providing a substantial challenge to aesthetics, ethics and politics" --. (shrink)

With the increased acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) within society, new research reflects deeper folk health histories beyond formal medical spaces. The contested relationships between formal and informal medicine have deep provenance and as scientific medicine began to professionalise in the 19th century, lay health knowledges were simultaneously absorbed and disempowered (Porter 1997). In particular, the ‘medical gaze’ and the responses of informal medicine to this gaze were framed around themes of power, regulation, authenticity and narrative reputation. These (...) responses were emplaced and mobile; enacted within multiple settings by multiple agents and structures over time. The work is drawn from secondary material from Ireland, which identify more indigenous narratives of health and act as potential sources for medical humanities. While assumptions have been made as to the place of folk-medicine being essentially rural, evidence will be presented which shows a more complex network of health beliefs and practices. The narratives of informal practice and folk-medicine drawn from evidence from Ireland point to more fluid and hybrid relations with formal medicine and suggest that the complementary nature of the two models reflected wider cultural debates and models of belief (Del Casino Jnr., Health & Place 10:59-73, 2004). (shrink)

ABSTRACT Intellectual historians have tended to focus either on shifts in sensibility or, more analytically, on the substance and structure of thought. They might usefully, however, examine both, as well as the reciprocal action of the one upon the other. This applies equally to political and religious ideas. In early twentieth-century Ireland, it was the relationship between religion and politics that stirred controversy. How would the institutions of church and state function, respectively, under Home Rule and the Union. Opposing camps (...) advanced competing prognostications. This contest forces us to rethink the claim that revolutionary insurgency in Ireland was a species of ‘political religion’. The evidence points to a more complex picture while at the same time highlighting the persistence of sectarian attitudes in the historiography of the period. (shrink)

Assessing national levels of happiness has become an important research and policy issue in recent years. We examined happiness and satisfaction in Ireland using phone text messaging to collect large-scale longitudinal data from 3,093 members of the general Irish population. For six consecutive weeks participants’ happiness and satisfaction levels were assessed. For four consecutive weeks (weeks 2 to 5) a different random third of the sample got feedback on the previous week's mean happiness and satisfaction ratings. Text messaging proved (...) a feasible means of assessing happiness and satisfaction, with almost three quarters (73%) of participants completing all assessments. Those who received feedback on the previous week’s mean ratings were eight times more likely to complete the subsequent assessments than those not receiving feedback. Providing such feedback data on mean levels of happiness and satisfaction did not systematically bias subsequent ratings either towards or away from these normative anchors. Texting is a simple and effective means to collect population level happiness and satisfaction data. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Eternities: Henry James’s Horatian Sense of Time KATHLEEN RILEY Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. —Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 On a visit to Bodiam Castle in Sussex in 1908, Henry James remarked to Edith Wharton: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”1 The potency of those two words derives from their immediate evocation of an arrested (...) moment between the day’s halcyon perfection and its imminent dying fall. Small wonder that those same words were later used to mythologize an Edenic Edwardian England poised on the brink of war, to preserve in aspic the fancy of a gilded innocence and order, and the promise of “blue remembered hills,”2 careless of the teeming, tumultuous reality of an England already in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge. James’s masterpiece of 1881, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with a luxuriously redolent depiction of a summer afternoon, of the hours before dusk that constitute a pleasurable little eternity, of the languorous rhythms and rituals of what Disraeli called “the sustained splendour of [a] stately life.”3 Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.4 This passage, it strikes me, is essentially Horatian in its Epicurean delight in the passing moment. For the Augustan poet Horace, this delight, which is intrinsically elegiac, is expressed in the sympotic pleasures of wine and friendship, in the freedom aestivam sermone benigno tendere noctem (“to prolong the summer night with genial conversation,” Epistles i.5.11). For Henry James, it rests in “the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” in the lengthening shadows on an English lawn by “the reedy, silvery Thames” (PL 32). In both cases the evanescence of these simple pleasures is deeply felt and pleasure itself heightened by an undertone of melancholy, by a nostalgic apprehension of the present. LOCI AMOENI in his review of Augustus J. C. Hare’s Days near Rome (1875), Henry James commented: “The smallest pretext for quoting from Horace—the most quotable of the ancients— should always be cultivated.”5 His own facility for quoting from Horace was evident from his earliest published works, and belied an “extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous” education shuttling, at his father’s restless instigation, between New England, Britain and Continental Europe.6 James’s biographer, Leon Edel, recorded the family legend that William James (Henry’s Irish grandfather), “who was eighteen in 1789, when he set foot in the New World, 22 little eternities brought with him a ‘very small sum of money,’ a Latin grammar and a desire to visit the fresh battlefields of the Revolutionary War.”7 Young Henry’s instruction in Latin grammar seems to have begun in the Old World, under a private tutor in London in 1855, a Scotsman named Robert Thomson who later ran a small school in Edinburgh attended by Robert Louis Stevenson. It... (shrink)

This manuscript presents a demonstration study of Quiet Time, a classroom-based Transcendental Meditation intervention. The aim of the study is to assess the feasibility of implementing and evaluating QT in two pilot settings in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This study contributes to the field by targeting middle childhood, testing efficiency in two settings operating under different educational systems, and including a large array of measures. First, teacher and pupil engagement with QT was assessed. Second, the feasibility of using a (...) quasi-experimental design and a wide range of instruments to measure changes in pupil outcomes before and after the intervention was assessed. This allows us to obtain information about which instruments might be feasible to administer and most sensitive to change. The first setting included 89 students from a primary school in the United Kingdom: those in sixth grade received the QT intervention, while those in fifth grade practiced meditation using the Headspace application. The second setting included 100 fifth- and sixth-grade students from two schools in Ireland: one received the QT intervention, the other served as a control. Recruitment and retention rates were high in both settings, and the intervention was feasible and accepted by students, parents and teachers. Implementation fidelity was lower in the United Kingdom setting where delivery started later in the school year and the practice was affected by preparation for the Standard Assessment Tests. These results show that QT may be feasibly delivered in school settings, and suggest the use of a compact battery of tests to measure impact. We find suggestive evidence that the intervention affected executive function as children who practiced QT showed improved working memory in both settings. In the Irish setting, pupils in the QT group had improved ability to control responses. These results have implications for future studies by a) demonstrating that implementation fidelity is highly context dependent and b) providing suggestive evidence of the malleability of children’s skills in middle childhood. The results of this demonstration study will be used to inform a larger RCT of the QT intervention. (shrink)

If ever a prize is to be given for the most cantankerous figure in the history of science and medicine, Almroth Wright will surely be on the short list. With the exception of himself, Wright was a man who did not tolerate fools lightly. Even the author of this biography, who tries very hard to see Wright's point of view, becomes exasperated with him at times. More commonly known today as Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's (...) Dilemma, Wright was born of stern, fanatical Irish Protestant parents in 1861. Extremely gifted, Wright graduated first in modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin. After switching to and qualifying in medicine, a gadfly postgraduate career followed. His first permanent job was as pathologist at the army's medical headquarters at Netley near Southampton, where Wright developed the agent for which his name remains inscribed on the bacteriologists' roll of honor: prophylactic typhoid vaccine. Its passage into common use, however, was far from easy. Statisticians, clinicians, and military authorities lined up against him. Wright's belief in the vaccine's value was vindicated in World War I. The controversy over its efficacy has been analyzed by J. Rosser Matthews in his Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty . Dunnill does not refer to this, but, there again, scarcely any modern secondary source is recognized in this book. This is not that sort of a biography, which is not to decry its great merits. Dunnill is a pathologist who sticks very close to the primary sources, including large amounts of hitherto‐unpublished manuscript material. His approach is very evaluative of what Wright got scientifically right and wrong by today's criteria, but the judgments are made in a subdued and relatively unobtrusive way. This is a great virtue in dealing with any aspect of the volatile Wright. His views on woman's place in the world and her claim for the right to vote would drive any intolerant feminist historian to apoplexy. Dunnill, however, takes great pains to situate Wright's views in context.A man like Wright was never going to be happy at Netley since the military hierarchy weighed on him, crushing his individualism. Only the dictatorial control of an autonomous empire would suit him, and this is what he eventually got. Wright became the head of the pathology department at St. Mary's Hospital, London, and there he was effectively responsible to nobody. This was possible because he turned his laboratory into a vaccine‐producing factory and used the drug company Parke Davies to market his products. These included not only prophylactic agents but now‐discredited ones for the treatment of the then‐common bacterial diseases such as pneumonia. The Great War saw Wright in France struggling to introduce another innovation that was finally accepted. “Listerian antisepsis” was a hallowed phrase among surgeons, and the more infected war wounds became the more intense became their antiseptic applications—sadly, to little effect. Wright campaigned for simple saline washing of wounds, a practice eventually adopted with much better results. After the war, separated from his wife, at odds with the Medical Research Council, and estranged from some of his colleagues , Wright turned to the consolations of philosophy—unfortunately writing rather than just reading it. His otiose productions solving the riddle of the universe now lie unread. This conventional but highly readable biography offers no new insights into the science of the period, but it does merit attention as a study of the relations of personality and empire building. (shrink)

With a memoir by Mervyn Wall. A selection of entries from the journal which Ussher kept for many years. A first collection was published in 1978 and of this The Irish Times wrote: There is more wit and wisdom in this little book than in a hundred longer and more pretentious productions. Presents a more extensive sampling of Ussher's thoughts than has previously been published.

The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner, Samuel Beckett, assembled for himself a history of western philosophy during the 1930s, just at the point at which his first novel, Murphy, was coming together. The 'Philosophy Notes', together with related notes taken at that time about St. Augustine, thereafter provided Beckett with a store of knowledge, but also with phrases and images, which he took up in the major work that won him international and enduring fame, from the dramas Waiting (...) for Godot and Endgame, through to the late prose works Worstward Ho and Stirrings Still. This edition presents, for the first time, Beckett's full 'Philosophy Notes', which constitute his most extensive unpublished text. The Notes display Beckett's own interests and emphases within the history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratic Greeks onwards, together with more familiar figures in the study of his work, such as Descartes, Leibnitz, and Geulincx. Here we see Beckett's original thoughts on all of these figures for the first time. The Notes also, tellingly and often comically, display Beckett's impatience with many aspects of philosophy, such as its anthropological or anthropomorphic bias, or the idealism of the Enlightenment and Kant. The Edition contains an extensive Introduction, outlining the origin of Beckett's Notes, his major sources and approach to them, the historical context for his view of philosophy, and the significance of Beckett's 'Philosophy Notes' within his mature writings. The many footnotes then suggest ways in which particular aspects of the philosophy narrated here by Beckett suggest fresh insights into those later writings-the images, but also the creative impulses, behind some of his most famous texts. This Edition, further, raises larger questions about, and perspectives upon, the relation between philosophy and literature in the twentieth century and beyond."--Back cover. (shrink)

Irish Supreme Court upholds paramountcy of parental right to determine a child's best interests at the expense of the rights of children themselvesCan a court force on parents who are careful and conscientious a view of their child's welfare which is rational, but quite contrary to the parents sincerely held but non-rational beliefs? The Supreme Court of Ireland has recently held that it cannot do so, and that the Irish Constitution requires that the right of the family to (...) determine its own direction must be respected except in the most narrow of circumstances, such as an immediate threat to the life of the child or risk of serious injury. The ruling leaves the assessment of a child's best interests to the wide discretion of parents, but at the same time fails to offer a means to resolve potential conflicts between the rights of the family and the rights of the child.FACTS OF THE CASEIn North Western Health Board v W 1 an action was brought by a local health board against the parents of 14 month old Paul, seeking a declaration that their refusal to submit their son to the heel prick test for phenylketonuria was a failure to vindicate their son's rights and that it would be lawful to proceed without parental consent. Phenylketonuria is a metabolic condition which can lead to severe and untreatable mental impairment if not detected in its early stages, but a simple variation in diet can stave off this outcome. While Paul's parents did not doubt the veracity of this medical opinion, nor indeed the importance of the test, they refused to subject their son to the invasive heel prick, offering instead samples of urine or hair, such that the test could be carried out by non-invasive means. These means, however, are considerably …. (shrink)

Of recent time, there has been a proliferation of concerns with ethical leadership within corporate business not least because of the numerous scandals at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, and two major Irish banks – Allied Irish Bank (AIB) and National Irish Bank (NIB). These have not only threatened the position of many senior corporate managers but also the financial survival of some of the companies over which they preside. Some authors have attributed these scandals to the pre-eminence of (...) a focus on increasing shareholder value in Western business schools and/or to their failure to inculcate ethical standards. In this paper, we challenge these accounts and the aetiological view of knowledge from which they derive but are grateful for the consensus that they convey regarding the importance of business ethics. The paper focuses on different approaches to ethical leadership concluding with a view that some hybrid of MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Levinas’s ethics of responsibility may serve as an inspiration for both educators and practitioners. (shrink)

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of (...) regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression. (shrink)

Arthur Norman Prior (1914-69) was a logician and philosopher from New Zealand who contributed crucially to the development of ‘non-standard’ logics, especially of the modal variety. His greatest achievement was the invention of modern temporal logic, worked out in close connection with modal logic. However, his work in logic had a much broader scope. He was also the founder of hybrid logic, and he made important contributions to deontic logic, modal logic, the theory of quantification, the nature of propositions and (...) the history of logic. In addition, he discussed questions of ethics, free will, and general theology. Prior’s philosophical works comprise about 200 titles. His earliest articles center on philosophical theology and historical studies of Scottish Reformed Theology. This led on to the publication of his first influential work on ethics: Logic and The Basis of Ethics (1949). With the invention of tense-logic in the early 1950s, his focus shifted to investigations into the syntax of tempo-modal logic leading to his seminal Time and Modality (1957), a volume derived from his John Locke Lectures in Oxford in 1956. Furthermore Prior, together with the Irish mathematician and logician C.A. Meredith (1904-76), made important early contributions to the semantics of possible worlds. Prior’s tense-logic provided a strong conceptual framework for problems pertaining to the philosophy of time. In Time and Modality, Prior discussed the philosophical implications of Ruth Barcan’s famous formulae for tense-logic, and in the 1960s he worked on the notion of the present. The most persistent problem running through Prior’s work is his study of the questions surrounding human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and more general philosophical problems emerging from this classical theological question. His thorough analysis of this problem, with the conceptual tools of tense-logic, received a crucial impetus from his correspondence with the young Saul Kripke, when the latter suggested the semantic tool of branching time to Prior. Prior’s development of two solutions based on branching time for the problem of future contingency, the Peircean and the Ockham solution, was most thoroughly developed in Past, Present and Future (1967), the most important work published by Prior. Characteristically for Prior’s methodological approach, the development of these two solutions were at the same time a development of two new systems of tense logic, and vice versa. One of Prior’s significant contributions to logic was his work on world propositions and instant propositions. In the course of developing these notions he also made one of the earliest formulations of hybrid logic. In Papers on Time and Tense (1968), he presented this idea in a more detailed manner in the context of his four grades of tense-logical involvement. (shrink)

This article theorizes a research process in a highly politicized environment in which we, as feminist researchers, found ourselves standing outside the feminist standpoint which dominated Irish public discourse, viz advocacy of a Swedish-style, neo-abolitionist, prostitution policy. We suggest that our increasing personal and intellectual discomfort as that policy position gained support contained valuable epistemic insight. We theorize this principally by drawing on Pillow’s concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’. This article offers an account of the messy dynamics of a (...) research process in which we, in time, recognized our own psychosocial worlds as sites of social critique. We contribute to debates about reflexivity by exploring the insights which this approach brought when applied to the dynamics of power politics between us as researchers and the wider policy field within which we were immersed. (shrink)

_A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds_ The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are (...) not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, “inoculate” the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds—whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces—neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option—sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times—the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11—Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy. (shrink)

By comparison with the Irish mission to Northumbria, the mission of Augustine to Kent can seem unexciting. One modern historian has even had occasion to ask “whether Augustine was quite the unimpressive figure which is usually depicted.” This impression is created even though, or perhaps because, the mission of Augustine is among the best-evidenced acts of evangelization in the early Middle Ages. Given the involvement of Gregory the Great and the direct interest of Bede, as well as the more (...) tangential interest of the anonymous author of the Life of Gregory the Great, written at Streoneshealh in Northumbria, it is not surprising that the story of Augustine's mission should be among the best known in Anglo-Saxon history. Nevertheless, there are difficulties in the traditional narrative, as has long been recognized. Despite the vindication of certain aspects of Bede's account, his overall interpretation of the mission still gives cause for concern. At the same time the letters of Gregory the Great continue to provide the opportunity to reassess the context in which the mission must be understood. Further, certain aspects of Gregory's theology allow an insight into Augustine's approach to mission, and may ultimately explain why he can appear so much less interesting than his Irish counterparts. It is, therefore, worth considering these issues yet again. (shrink)

‘ An beochaoineadh ’ (Un byo-kh-ee-na), lament for a person who has gone away,1 from ‘ beo’, alive and ‘ caoineadh’, lament song. This Irish language word describes a lament for a person who remains alive but is lost to us in a permanent, painful way. The concept endorses profound loss and anguish but rejects death as a needful basis for the loss and does not diminish the personhood of the lost loved one. In solemnly elevating bereavement without death, (...) the word may offer a helpful construct in dementia grief models.2 The ‘beochaoineadh’ authorises, respects and even demands recognition of grief in the absence of death. Disease-modifying drugs for dementia are here and it is an electrifying time to work in dementia care. Much of the research and public discourse on dementia in recent times focuses on early and mid-stage illness. Yet even in this age of disease-modifying drugs, people will die with and from neurodegenerative illness. There have been many essential and affirming representations of living well with dementia. There remains comparatively little space in popular culture for living with advanced dementia, which can leave carers and healthcare workers feeling their experiences have been flattened or erased and …. (shrink)

This study examined the impact of perceived ethical culture of the firm and selected demographic variables on auditors’ ethical evaluation of, and intention to engage in, various time pressure-induced dysfunctional behaviours. Four audit cases and questionnaires were distributed to experienced pre-manager level auditors in Ireland and the U.S. The findings revealed that while perceived unethical pressure to engage in dysfunctional behaviours and unethical tone at the top were significant in forming an ethical evaluation, only perceived unethical pressure had an impact (...) on intention to engage in the behaviours. Country was also found to have a significant impact, with U.S. respondents reporting higher ethical evaluations and lower intentions to engage in unethical acts than Irish respondents. Implications of the findings and areas for future research are discussed. (shrink)

To prevent and reduce the transmission of the coronavirus to vulnerable populations, the World Health Organization recommended the restriction of visitors to nursing homes. It was recognised that such restrictions could have profound impact on residents and their families. Nonetheless, these measures were strictly imposed over a prolonged period in many countries; impeding families from remaining involved in their relatives’ care and diluting the meaningful connections for residents with society. It is timely to explore the impact of public health measures (...) on people living in nursing homes from an ethical perspective. In order to foreground the ethical dimensions of the implications of visitor restrictions in nursing homes, we compiled an ethical case that reflects some recent experiences of nursing homes residents and their families, in the Irish Republic. We describe a series of events encountered by a woman and her family during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 and we deploy an ethical decision-making tool to guide and structure our analysis. Our case analysis draws attention to ethical principles that are relevant to explicating the ethical duties and obligations that arise in relation to the interests, well-being, and safety of residents and their families, as well as nursing home staff and the wider community during a pandemic. These include the right of autonomy, trust, minimising harm, and proportionality. We conclude that a number of different strategies should be adopted by nursing homes and relevant regulatory bodies. This includes honest, regular communication between the nursing home staff, the resident and their family. Central to communications is the resident’s wishes, their current clinical status and the all-important wider public health obligations. National strategies include mass vaccination, the timely provision of guidance documents and interventions from regulatory bodies that are patient-centred, adaptable, and cost effective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:More Evidence that Hume Wrote the Abstract David Fate Norton In the preceding paper, David Raynor has offered several reasons for discounting J. O. Nelson's unfounded claim that Adam Smith was the author ofAn Abstract of..."A Treatise ofHuman Nature." Prior to the discovery ofa copy ofthis work, it may have been plausible to suppose that the Abstract was written by someone other than Hume, but the internal evidence ofthe (...) pamphlet is so strongly in favour of Humean authorship that not even Nelson can bring himself to question this evidence—although he now chooses to ignore it. Given that Nelson's argument rests on the far from compelling assumption that in 1740 there were two and onlytwoMr. Smith's ofwhom Humehadknowledge and whomayhave had an interest in writingor publishing philosophy, it is especially useful to have William Smith, publisher of the Bibliothèque raisonnée, brought again to our attention, and especially since it is obvious that a copy of the Abstract had been sent to that journal prior to the pubUcation ofthe review ofthe Treatise published there in the spring of1740.1 In short, Raynor nicely shows why Keynes and Sraffa were wrong to suppose that Hume, Hutcheson and John Noon were all involved in a conspiracy to undercut Noon's interest by publishing an Irish edition ofthe Treatise2 and why Nelson is wrong to suppose that ifthe "Mr Smith" ofHume's letter is not John Smith of Dublin, then he can only be Adam Smith, and that thelatter musthave written the Abstract. I wish to consider further evidence, some of it circumstantial, relevant to this discussion. This evidence adds probability, I submit, to the conclusion that Hume wrote the Abstract. 1. In the autumn of1737 Hume told Henry Home that he could not give him a "general Notion ofthe Plan" or "Abridgement" ofwhat was to be the Treatise. A careless reading ofthe Abstract might lead one to suppose that this is evidence that Hume did not write this short work. But in fact the Abstract is not an abridgement. It is an effort to make clearer, by carefully tracing "one simple argument... from the beginning to the end," a work thathad been "complained of as obscure and difficult." 3 The available evidence confirms one in the belief that Hume could not abridge the Treatise, but on several occasions he did recast parts ofit in more accessible form. The first such recasting was theAbstract. That this briefworkis not merely an abridgement makes Volume XIX Number 1 217 DAVID FATE NORTON itless likely, I suggest, thatit was written by anyone other than Hume himself.4 2.The Abstract, although said to be "Printed for C. [C]orbet,B at Addison's Head, over-against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet-street," wasinfactprintedbyWilUam Strahan, fornone otherthanJohnNoon, the publisher of the Treatise.6 This we know from Strahan's ledgers. These are preservedin the British Library.7Moreover, onApril 19 and 20, 1739, Corbett placed the following advertisement in the London Daily Post and GeneralAdvertiser: Gentlemen, As I have very lately undertaken the Business ofa PubUsher, so will I as faithfully execute it, if at any time you please to employ, Your most Obedient, Humble Servant, Charles Corbett, Who will Inviolably keep secret all Names of Authors, Proprietors, &c. whatever. The fact that Corbett indicates his willingness to undertake clandestine, vanity publishing gives all the explanation one needs of his willingness to become front man for a puffproduced by Hume, and financed, as the Abstract was, by Hume's publisher.8 The fact that it was Noon who arranged for the London printing of the Abstract in no way proves that this work was written by Hume, but it is another bit ofevidence supportive ofthatconclusion,foritindicates thatNoon was in on the effort to publicize the poorly selling volumes ofthe Treatise that he had published.9 3.Robert Connon found a copy of volume three of the Treatise containing extensive manuscript amendments in Hume's hand. As he has also reported, a copy of the Abstract is bound together with this copy ofvolume three, and this copy ofthe Abstract is also amended by Hume. These amendments appear to be those of an author, not... (shrink)

The definitive life of John Stuart Mill, one of the heroic giants of Victorian England Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography can be read as an attempt to do justice to this eminent thinker, and it succeeds triumphantly. He reveals Mill as a man of action--a philosopher and radical MP who profoundly shaped Victorian society and whose thinking continues to illuminate our own. The product of an extraordinary and unique education, Mill would become in time the most significant English thinker of (...) the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty, and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off weekly articles demanding Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech, and opposed slavery--and, in his private life, for two decades pursued a love affair with another man's wife. To understand Mill and his contribution to his time and ours, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. The result is both a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised by his father to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all. (shrink)

In a book that challenges the most widely held ideas of why individuals engage in collective conflict, Russell Hardin offers a timely, crucial explanation of group action in its most destructive forms. Contrary to those observers who attribute group violence to irrationality, primordial instinct, or complex psychology, Hardin uncovers a systematic exploitation of self-interest in the underpinnings of group identification and collective violence. Using examples from Mafia vendettas to ethnic violence in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, he describes the (...) social and economic circumstances that set this violence into motion. Hardin explains why hatred alone does not necessarily start wars but how leaders cultivate it to mobilize their people. He also reveals the thinking behind the preemptive strikes that contribute to much of the violence between groups, identifies the dangers of "particularist" communitarianism, and argues for government structures to prevent any ethnic or other group from having too much sway. Exploring conflict between groups such as Serbs and Croats, Hutu and Tutsi, Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, Hardin vividly illustrates the danger that arises when individual and group interests merge. In these examples, groups of people have been governed by movements that managed to reflect their members' personal interests--mainly by striving for political and economic advances at the expense of other groups and by closing themselves off from society at large. The author concludes that we make a better and safer world if we design our social institutions to facilitate individual efforts to achieve personal goals than if we concentrate on the ethnic political makeup of our respective societies. (shrink)

Drawing on Seamus Heaney and his symbolic reference to a great sea change or tidal wave in epic poem “The Cure at Troy” (1990) – much referred to in these gradually post-pandemic times and indicating that a new chapter is about to begin – and “The City” by Ted Hughes, where a life is read like a poem and in the many depths of the urban space the writer roams “my own darkness”, this paper looks at human resilience in (...) the face of an interrupted COVID reality that has brought a fundamental shift to the way we view the world and our role in society. In our era of a New Normal, the idea that “less is more” is quickly becoming a mantra for our times, a time characterised by a gradual distancing from material hype while we turn to nature for solace and guidance – as importantly advocated by Heaney and Hughes who illuminate our path as we gain a greater understanding of what really matters at the core. We likewise begin to see commonalities between people and cultures, and we open up a space for a greater sense of authenticity. As we are now stepping into the initial stages of 2023, entering a new chapter; have we gained existential insights from the COVID-19 pandemic and will this lead to new beginnings where the written word helps us along the way? (shrink)

Our aim is to defend the Precautionary Principle (PP) against the main theoretical and practical criticisms that it has raised by proposing a novel conception and a specific formulation of the principle. We first address the theoretical concerns against the idea of there being a principle of precaution by arguing for a distinctively political conception of the PP as opposed to a moral one. Our claim is that the rationale of the PP is grounded in the fact that contemporary societies (...) wish to avoid morally unacceptable risks while at the same time pursuing other goals, aspirations and values. Following this political conception of the PP, we propose a specific formulation in terms of an argumentation scheme—the Argumentation Scheme for Appealing to Precaution—which is meant to solve, in turn, the main practical concerns that the PP has raised. We explain the advantages of our proposal by analysing appeals to precaution in the cases of (1) the European restrictions on the free movement of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) the discharge of nuclear wastes into the Irish Sea. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGiven the centrality of corporations in distribution of income and wealth studies, discursive constructions of corporate taxation are essential to understanding the production of inequality. The focus of this study is an interview with Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook on the Irish state broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann’s flagship news programme, Morning Ireland, following the ruling by the European Commission on the corporation tax arrangements between Apple Inc. and Ireland. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, a frame analysis is (...) provided. The significance and extent of the EC’s ruling has potential implications for corporation taxation policy, within and beyond the European Union, which provides a timely reflection in the Brexit era and in the context of rising economic nationalism generally. Thus, the discursive construction of this ruling in the media is of importance in understanding how inequality is produced and reproduced, and journalism’s role therein. (shrink)

Even today the "immaterialist" philosophy of George Berkeley , the Irish bishop, has the power to fascinate: with its apparent idiosyncratic and uncompromisingly idealistic colouring. However, with respect to his radically subjectivist, possibly even solipsist understanding of the time issue, even sympathizers of the philosopher normally share George Pitcher's opinion, according to which this element of his theory constitutes "a total disaster". – The following article entails a résumé of Berkeley's theory of time. The obviously courageous attempt is made, (...) then, to give a text-based interpretation with the aim to avoid "disastrous" consequences. This plan proves to be a difficult task indeed, but nevertheless in the end it is shown that a theistic interpretation in union with a 'Kantian' reading of a central statement of Berkeley's can avoid the aforesaid consequences. – From a historical perspective, this philosophy of time turns out to be a counterpart to Leibniz's critique of the Newtonian perspective of time, as both are documented above all in the famous correspondence with Newton's friend Samuel Clarke. That Berkeley and Leibniz really share common philosophical ground is also shown by the latter's marginal note in his personal edition of the formers Principles of Human Understanding: "Much of this is correct and just as I'd have said". (shrink)