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Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
life of millions of people. For those who are undergoing the transitions, democratizations, revolutions, coups, wars and conflicts, social change appears much more confusing than the academic classifications addressing it, and oftentimes with a less concrete and predetermined sense of direction. Starting with the premise that all societies are built around a series of social myths or illusions, and that social solidarities are inherently connected to these myths and illusions, this book argues that transitions—such as the transition from communism to capitalism
public hospital care; almost 3% to a GP visit card to free GP care; while the remainder had access to public hospital care (DoH, 2014a). McDonnell and O’Donovan (2009) have demonstrated how a myth of social solidarity was built around PHI by generations of Irish politicians. PHI – with its ‘community rating’ payment structure (Health Insurance Authority, 2016) – was constructed as a proxy form of social health insurance carried by responsible citizens. This PHI myth obscured the fact that all citizens were already entitled to hospital care and ignored those who could
, challenging what is often a one-dimensional representation of their experiences. Humour also emerged in the discussions as a form of social solidarity for our participants: it enabled them to laugh at Home Office officials and others who had power over them, and to share jokes with each other. Crucially, humour and entertainment also played a role in developing an alternative analysis that challenged dominant readings of global conflicts and the 92 Interlude: Songs, jokes and movies immigration system (particularly in relation to legacies of colonialism). In this section
official documentation of the EU makes considerable play about concepts such as ‘social solidarity’ and removing forms of ‘social exclusion’.24 The various Irish social partnership agreements have taken up and amplified these themes. One writer has claimed that the Irish model of social partnership is an example of a ‘competitive corporatist’ strategy which has much to offer Europe as a whole: One of the futures that may prove appropriate for many European countries is that of ‘competitive corporatist’ social pacts which seek consensual and, in so far as is possible, an
the community’.6 New Left writers such as Hall, Charles Taylor and E. P. Thompson consistently associated terms such as ‘community’ and ‘society’ with equality, returning to the overlap between resource distribution and social solidarity espoused by earlier egalitarians. In Hall’s view, the Labour Party ‘had ceased to be alive’ to ‘the human and revolutionary priorities which a proper understanding of the words “welfare” and “community” would have given’. In current Labour discourse, claimed Hall, these concepts had lost their connection to the ‘central themes of
each worker had and knew their unique and disciplined place on the production line, Fordism became the dominant form of production and governance in the last century. In keeping with the productive insights of Taylorsim, the role of the worker was to preform simple and repeatable tasks, not to think for themselves, or, heaven forbid, imagine. The factory was the cultural metaphor of the age, factories that produced both wage slavery and social solidarity that combined to underpin twentiethcentury social democracy. And if this was the mode of production, then it would
certain degree, the political culture of a given community; (ii) be economically sustainable; (iii) be translatable into policies and institutions that have a reasonable prospect of delivering the goals underlying the policy; and (iv) be consistent with the degree of social solidarity amongst the citizens to which the policy is to apply. I begin by identifying a key question in the research agenda of non-ideal theory. Subsequently, I discuss the concept of feasibility, introducing two conceptual distinctions: “constrained” versus “unconstrained” feasibility, and
in the late nineteenth century, the Irish, marked out by accent, religion, and politics and, in many cases, language, were the most exotic element in the city’s population. This study focuses on the extent to which they retained their Irish identity through communal social solidarity, residential clustering, religious loyalties, communal celebration and political aspiration, whilst adapting the institutions, mores and institutions of the host society for their distinctive purposes. It is probably true that many Irish on arrival in Britain quietly abandoned their
also happening in other parts of the city.78 The explanation for this pattern of residential segregation lies in a combination of economic resources, the Manchester context and Irish social solidarity. In terms of personal economic resources there were always some quite prosperous people amongst the Manchester Irish, and there are indications they increased in number as time went on, but nonetheless the great majority were relatively poor, especially those who came as famine refugees in the second half of the 1840s.79 It is scarcely surprising therefore that large