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This paper examines the emerging bioethical debate on assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Ireland, which is shaped by the long-standing contentious issue of abortion and the constitutional protection afforded to the ‘unborn’. The focus of the paper is on the way in which the terms of this debate are shaped and constrained by the historical relations of power between church, state and medicine. Since the representation of Ireland as a post-Catholic, plural republic is becoming increasingly mainstream to cultural and political discourse, we pay particular attention to how the Catholic Church embraces bioethics as a meta frame or code for refocusing questions of values, beliefs and meanings to sustain the ideal of Ireland as a ‘pro-life’ and essentially Catholic nation. The Catholic Church is not simply asserting its voice of dissent in the context of public debate as one voice amongst a plurality of other voices, but to shape the emerging debate as a powerful, institutional actor. The opportunity to do so is afforded by the lack of public debate on bioethical issues and the exceedingly slow pace at which bioethics is moving towards an institutionalised framework in Ireland. These events can be explained by the legacy of the social power of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the direct and indirect influence it has long exercised over public policy vis-à-vis the state and its institutions, including medicine. There are two interconnected threads to the contextual analysis presented in our case study: first, the legacy of the social power wielded by the Catholic Church, and its slow and incremental demise reflected in the pace of secularisation in Ireland and the privatisation of morality; second, the emergence of a bioethical regulatory debate on ART, which is mired in the abortion controversy. Our analysis focuses on a number of key contradictions and tensions in the way in which the key institutions of church, state and medicine navigate their own positions vis-à-vis a bioethics debate, and how this constrains public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group-level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present paper draws upon data from interviews conducted with members of two broadly-defined categories recently arrived in the Republic of Ireland, Muslims and Nigerians. Results indicate that while members of both immigrant categories experience a good deal of ethnic conflict or hostility, such conflict is rarely collective and invariably varies across individuals. The research data are consistent with Donald Black's theory of moralism. Black's theory, based on his theoretical system known as pure sociology, predicts that ethnic hostility increases with the social inferiority and cultural distance of the immigrant, and that higher status immigrants are more assertive in responding to hostility, though they experience less of it (the status paradox). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are strong theoretical reasons for hypothesizing that those sections of the population who are most exposed to modernization processes are more likely to marry outside their own religious group. We examine this for Catholic-Protestant intermarriage in the Republic of Ireland. We use a multivariate analysis on survey data to test the hypotheses that urban dwellers, persons of non-farming parents, persons with higher levels of education and the young are more likely to be religiously intermarried. While the odds of being in an intermarriage are greater for urban dwellers, this is in large part due to their being non-farmers. The farming effect is not necessarily related to religiosity. The odds of being in an intermarriage do not increase significantly for persons with third level education and this can be explained in terms of the marriage market for minority groups. It is shown that the historical context and the minority position of religious group should be taken into account in explanations which relate modernization to the pattern of religious intermarriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]