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The Irish battle for legal contraception was a contest over Irish exceptionalism: the belief that Ireland could resist global trends despite the impact of second-wave feminism, falling fertility, and a growing number of women travelling for abortion. It became so lengthy and so divisive because it challenged key tenets of Irish identity: Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism. The Catholic Church argued that legalising contraception would destroy this way of life, and many citizens agreed. The Battle to Control Female Fertility in Modern Ireland provides new insights on Irish masculinity and fertility control. It highlights women's activism in both liberal and conservative camps, and the consensus between the Catholic and Protestant churches views on contraception for single people. It also shows how contraception and the Pro-Life Amendment campaign affected policy towards Northern Ireland, and it examines the role of health professionals, showing how hospital governance prevented female sterilisation. It is a story of gender, religion, social change, and failing efforts to reaffirm Irish moral exceptionalism.

The Irish famine of the 1840s ranks among the greatest natural disasters in modern history, and it is generally seen as a major dividing line in the history of modern Ireland. Yet Ireland experienced not one but two acute famines in little more than a century. The famine of the 1740s, though largely forgotten, probably killed an even higher proportion of the population. The fact that Ireland experienced two major famines within a century was mainly due to poverty, but the inadequacy of relief systems, or unresponsiveness – especially when compared with elsewhere in western Europe – is also noteworthy. Famine or its Absence, 1740–1840 Ireland escaped lightly during the major European food crises of the 1690s and the early eighteenth century. However, ‘twenty-one months of bizarre weather’, beginning in December 1739, which affected a large area of northern Europe, resulted in a major crisis. The Great Frost of 1740 was the longest period of extreme cold in modern European history. In Ireland 1741 was known as blian an air – the year of the slaughter. Frozen waterways disrupted trade and business: water wheels could not function, so milling came to a halt. Potatoes, which had traditionally been left in the ground until needed, were destroyed, so households had to rely on oatmeal; many consumed the seed grain and seed potatoes reserved for the coming season. Dublin food prices rose sharply during the summer of 1740, but as the new season crops were small and late, prices peaked again in December 1740, prompting food riots. Cattle and sheep perished from lack of fodder; many horses died because of an epizootic disease. In some areas livestock numbers did not recover for many years, and many under-tenants were ruined by the crisis, if they didn't die. The famine ended with a bumper harvest in 1741. The primary cause was the damage caused to crops by acute weather, but the lack of food imports, because of extreme weather in Europe, was a contributory factor. Burials in Dublin city in January–February 1740 were three times the normal figure. In St Catherine's parish burials from January 1740 to the end of September 1741 were double those of previous years.

The use of social networking sites (SNSs) has evolved rapidly this past decade with little concern for privacy. This study examines undergraduate students’ use of SNSs and online privacy preferences. Eighty-five students in social work classes were surveyed to determine the frequency of SNS access and privacy control usage. Student participants accessed SNSs (97.6%) more than the general population (72%) surveyed by the Pew Research Internet Project (Brenner & Smith, 2013). Most students restricted access to their profiles through friends-only privacy settings and took steps to eliminate unwanted posts. However, regrets over personal posts were still commonplace. The 2005 National Association of Social Workers and Association of Social Work Boards ethical standards suggest establishing professional boundaries and safeguarding personal information as part of technologically proficient practice. Social work educational programs should provide training on privacy risk management to protect students from unwanted and potentially career damaging disclosures on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other Internet sites.

This article describes one program's efforts at assessing academic advising as a part of the implicit curriculum. Following an initial survey undertaken by faculty members, student researchers were engaged to qualitatively study academic advising. Research, data, and statistics were evaluated to determine advising strengths and challenges for social work majors enrolled in a small public institution. Although most interviewees reported having good advising experiences, they suggested additional advisor contact, more handouts, expanded office hours, and monthly group meetings as possible improvements. University-sponsored training sessions for advisors were also recommended. Ways in which this assessment model can be replicated and recommendations for future efforts are offered.

Ireland showed little interest in regional or physical planning before the 1960s. The satirical columnist Myles na Gopaleen commented that ‘the whole country lacks the population that would sustain even the fraction of “planning” that is proper to the temperament and economy of this country … The problem to be addressed here is simply that of the falling birth-rate’. Economic development changed the picture, creating new pressures on housing and infrastructure in areas with a growing population and industrial investment, and, paradoxically, even greater pressures from areas where the population was still declining. Ireland, accustomed to population decline and economic stagnation, was ill-equipped to cope with a rising population, industrial development and shortages of houses, office blocks and other trappings of modern life. Despite efforts to devise measures that would enable small farms to survive, the 1960s brought a growing recognition that manufacturing industry offered a more reliable lifeline to rural Ireland. The spread of industry into small towns, where factories were unknown, changed the culture of communities that were previously dominated by farming. New industries were welcome because they provided much-wanted jobs and their arrival helped to modify some of the traditional prejudices of rural families against factory work. Farmers hoped that children who did not inherit the farm would find work in secure occupations such as the gardai, nursing, teaching and public service. A 1960 study of rural families in the neighbourhood of the Shannon industrial estate found that they aspired to see their children in white-collar, public service jobs, despite the fact that nearby factories were hiring workers. By the end of the decade, attitudes were changing; Damien Hannan, who surveyed adolescents in Cavan – a predominantly rural county – in 1965 and again three years later, reported a more positive attitude towards factory work in 1968 among farmers’ sons, though not daughters: ‘factory girls’ were believed to have less promising marriage prospects; in some instances, local boys were reported as refusing to dance with them. This attitude was not unique to Ireland; French farmers also kept their daughters at school longer than sons and hoped that they would leave the land. A study of Scariff and Tubbercurry – two small towns in Clare and Sligo – suggested that industrial development offered the best prospect for stabilising the rural population.

Some years ago in the County Mayo This story all began, Before emigration was finally cured By the first economical plan. Economic plans do not commonly feature in ballads, but the 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion was known in rural Ireland, and it was credited with transforming the economy and ending emigration. Economic planning was very much in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s. This was prompted by both Marshall Aid, which required recipient countries to devise a plan, and the development of national income statistics and a literature on economic growth. By the 1960s, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain had all engaged in some form of planning. Ireland appears to have been heavily influenced by the success of Italy's Vanoni Plan and by France, which transformed itself into a dynamic prospering economy, apparently because of the Commissariat du Plan. Yet the most successful economy at the time, West Germany, was averse to such exercises, and many scholars have questioned whether planning had any significant effect on economic growth during these years. Nevertheless, by adopting an economic programme Ireland was following the European fashion. Contrary to what is often stated, this was not Ireland's first effort at economic planning. While the self-sufficiency programme introduced by Fianna Fail after 1932 did not set targets for GNP (the concept had not been developed), it did set out ambitious and often unrealisable targets for the share of the domestic market to be supplied by industry and agriculture. Wartime neutrality also demanded considerable planning to ensure sufficient fuel, grain and other products – again not always successfully. Ireland also had to devise a plan to qualify for Marshall Aid, though Whitaker suggested that this was regarded as ‘an exercise that had to be undertaken to persuade the Americans to give us Marshall Aid’. While many words have been written about the significance of the publication in November 1958 of the government's Programme for Economic Expansion and Whitaker's Economic Development , the events passed largely unnoticed at the time. John McCarthy claims that all members of the Oireachtas (Parliament) received copies of the Programme for Economic Expansion on 11 November, and ‘Eamon de Valera invited Whitaker to attend the parliamentary session and personally congratulated him’, but the Dail was not sitting on that date, and there is no record in the Oireachtas Debates of the publication, or of Whitaker being congratulated.

On 12 July 1963, the Time magazine cover story featured the Taoiseach Sean Lemass with the headline: ‘New spirit in the ould sod’. Lemass was pictured against a garish green curtain, covered with shamrock motifs, which opened to reveal an electricity generating station and modern high-rise buildings. The story juxtaposed traditional images such as the Lakes of Killarney, horse-racing and GAA football with a factory assembling Volkswagen Beetles, a traffic jam on Dublin's O'Connell St and a vegetable processing plant. Economic success was, and remains, the central image of 1960s Ireland. This chapter casts a critical eye on that representation. My underlying argument is that the economic turnaround over the period 1958–1973, though dramatic when compared with the previous performance, is much less impressive when Ireland is compared with other European countries: not just Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux, but less developed and more peripheral economies, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. During the 1960s, the economies of OECD countries grew by more than 50 per cent. Ireland (with Britain) was among the minority who failed to achieve this target. Furthermore, while the story is generally presented as one where an Irish government decides to abandon long-established protectionist policies and introduce a programme for economic development, Ireland had no alternative other than to do this, in the light of the creation of two Western European trading blocs and increasing competition in the British market from Commonwealth countries and Britain's European Free Trade Area (EFTA) partners. The popular story of Ireland's economic success fails to acknowledge how difficult it was to transform an economy that had been slumbering complacently for many decades and how partial that transformation proved to be. Despite achieving significantly higher growth than in previous decades, the gap in GNP and living standards between Ireland and the rest of the OECD actually widened during these years. The 1960s are also celebrated as the decade when the population of independent Ireland began to rise after more than a century of decline – the decade when it appeared that emigration had ended. Yet while the 1971 Census recorded a population of 2,978,248, which was 6,256 higher than 1926, the numbers in employment were 40,000 fewer than in 1951 and only 2,300 above the historically low 1961 figure.

After 16 years of unbroken Fianna Fáil rule, the first four of the five general elections of the period 1948-1963 saw sitting governments unseated. Economic policy pivoted: protectionism was abandoned; foreign direct investment welcomed and an application for membership was made to the EEC. Whitaker’s Economic Development appeared in 1958. Lemass took over from de Valera as Taoiseach in 1959. The ‘long 1950s’ remains of enduring fascination to Irish historians. Conventional wisdom accords the bulk of the credit for the turnaround in policy to Seán Lemass, Minister for Industry and Commerce in most Fianna Fáil governments since 1932 and Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966, and T. K. Whitaker, Secretary of the Department of Finance from 1956 to 1969. This arguably downplays the importance of the intensified electoral competition of the time, and undervalues the achievements of the second inter-party government, which introduced export profits tax relief – the genesis of Ireland’s low corporation tax regime – in 1956. Fine Gael and Labour had long advocated liberalising the restrictions on foreign ownership of industry before Fianna Fáil finally yielded (Bew and Patterson, 1982, McCarthy, 1990). Whitaker’s particular role in the reform process is – to our minds – seriously misrepresented by Walsh and Whelan (2010) in a recent paper in this journal. The present note assesses their main assertions in this regard in the light of information available from the archival records.

T    of parental rights in the  Irish Constitution relates to education.Article  acknowledges the family as “the primary and natural educator of the child” and guarantees to respect “the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide for the moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children.” This paper examines how church and state treated parents’ rights with regard to their children’s education in the first fifty years after independence. In Ireland today, parental and children’s rights are enshrined in the  Education Act, whose objectives include “to give practical effect to the constitutional rights of children, including children who

I is the name of an island in the North Atlantic. Ireland is also the name of a state, comprising roughly three-quarters of that island, which secured independence from Britain in 1922. This article will explore the different names for the Irish state and their political implications. Article 4 of the Irish Constitution, adopted in 1937, says that the name of the state is “Eire, or in the English language Ireland.” This was regarded in Britain and Northern Ireland (the part of the island that remained within the United Kingdom) as exercising a claim over the entire island. This interpretation was supported by Article 2 of the Irish Constitution, adopted in 1937, which stated that “the national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.” Article 3, however, qualified this claim: “Pending the re-integration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the Parliament and Government established by this Constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of that territory, the laws enacted by that parliament shall have the like area and extent of applications as the laws of Saorstat Eireann and the like extra-territorial effect.” Britain did not use the term “Ireland” in any official document until the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, which included an undertaking by the Irish government to delete Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution. The dispute over nomenclature was by no means a one-sided matter. The Irish government had similar qualms about referring to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland because this title was seen as conferring official recognition on

Adolescence is a period when, as Granville Stanley Hall described, there is a moratorium on adulthood and young people are permitted to enjoy a ‘freedom that leans a little toward licence’ while retaining an element of ‘shelter and protection’ provided by parents or teachers.1 This chapter sets out to determine when adolescence came to be an experience enjoyed by a majority of young Irish men and women. The focus is on socio-economic aspects, such as work, schooling, contribution to the family, and dependence and subjection to the needs and dictates of the birth family. Psychology, sexuality and the private lives of adolescents do not come within the remit of this study. The central argument that the chapter will develop is that the demographic and socio-economic conditions of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and the early- and even mid-twentieth centuries — especially though not exclusively in rural Ireland — meant that a significant proportion of Irish men and women either found themselves taking on the premature responsibilities of adulthood — by having to support their family or survive independently as an emigrant — whereas for others a quasi-childhood type of dependency persisted into middle age and sometimes even longer.

By the 1930s the marriage rate in Ireland was the lowest in what we would now term the developed world, but family size was among the highest. Yet while much has been written about Ireland’s low marriage rate and late age of marriage and the impact on the lives of women and men, much less attention has been devoted to marital fertility. The article begins with a brief description of marital fertility, by occupation, religion and social class, and how these variables changed during the period under study. It then examines the available evidence regarding family limitation in twentieth‐century Ireland before considering the impact of large family size on health, poverty and economic welfare, the burden that it imposed on parents, and on older siblings, and its consequential influence on the marriage rate and age of marriage. It goes on to discuss the reluctance on the part of the Irish state or the Irish Catholic Church to address the consequences of large families. This appears to have been a taboo subject...

"CLEARLY, male Irish political leaders saw women only in domestic terms. Women were mothers. Women were wives. Women minded the hearth and home." (1) Most historians would accept this evaluation of the position of women in the early years of the Irish Free State, but there are a number of dissenting voices. Caitriona Clear rejects the idea that there was a "domestic ideology" in Ireland in the first decades after independence; she argues that the attacks on women's citizenship and employment rights in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s-"substantial as they were--were piecemeal and inconsistent." (2) She proceeds to note that "de Valera's irritation at feminist opposition to the constitution [of 1937] suggests that he did not inhabit a political environment that was entirely indifferent to women's views: indeed, he told the late Professor T.P. O'Neill that Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1933) had had a major impact on his thinking and forced his attention onto protecting Irish women and children from the worst effects of what he hoped was Ireland's industrial revolution. The fact that de Valera felt the need to invoke a feminist authority for his reference to women in the Constitution is indeed significant." (3) This is not the only instance where de Valera invoked feminist authority for his actions. In 1934, at de Valera's request, John J. Hearne, the legal adviser of the Department of External Affairs, sent draft clauses from the 1934 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Bill to Mice Paul with a request that she comment on them. Alice Paul was a prominent equal-rights feminist in the United States, founder of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and the National Woman's Party, and the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, an unlikely point of reference for de Valera or indeed any leading Irish politician at this time. The clauses sent to Mice Paul related to the treatment of citizenship in marriages between an Irish citizen, male or female, and a foreigner. The citizenship of women in transnational marriages was a topic of major concern to women's organizations during the 1920s and 1930s. In Ireland the matter was inextricably linked with efforts by the new state to establish that Irish citizenship was not simply a local variant of British nationality but rather a distinct status with international standing. (4) The clauses relating to married women provide new insights into de Valera's attitude toward women, citizenship, and the family that may require us to reconsider the comparable clauses in the 1937 constitution. But first it is important to examine why the citizenship of women who married foreigners became such a heated issue in the interwar years. I In 1914 it was the almost universal practice that a woman who married a citizen of another country automatically lost her citizenship of birth and acquired that of her husband. Under common law, which applied in Britain and Ireland, marriage had no impact on nationality, (5) but in 1870 the United Kingdom parliament passed the Naturalisation Act, which provided that a British woman who married an alien automatically lost her British nationality, even if she continued to reside in the UK. This provision complemented legislation introduced in 1844, providing that an alien woman who married a British subject would be deemed a naturalized British subject with all the rights and privileges of a natural-born subject. (6) These laws were consistent with widely held Victorian attitudes toward marriage and the family: the belief in the unity of the family and the conviction that husband and wife had complementary roles, with the woman responsible for the private sphere. One legal scholar noted that "the rational basis for the rule that a woman should assume the nationality of her husband was the general subjection, under most legal systems, of the wife to the husband." (7) In Britain the provision that a woman who married an alien should automatically lose her British nationality and assume his legal status appears to have first attracted significant criticism during the war years of 1914-18, when British-born women who were married to German citizens and living in Britain found themselves subject to the Enemy Aliens Act of 1914, which gave the home secretary authority to prevent them from leaving the state, to restrict their movement within Britain, and to search or intern them. …

Ireland is a country whose sons and daughters hold her dearly above all, and it is evident in your great country as in others, that their love does not wither because the soil beneath their feet is foreign soil. St Patrick planted more than the shamrock when he came to Ireland--he planted in the hearts and minds of her people a spiritual fire that nothing can extinguish--a fire which still burns brightly in the hearts and minds of Irish men and women and those of Irish descent the world over. St. Patrick's Day greetings from the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Hawaii, March 1957 (1) DESPITE many assertions to the contrary, Mary Robinson was not the first Irish leader to reach out to the Irish diaspora. (2) W.T. Cosgrave, President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932, broadcast a St. Patrick's Day message to the United States in March 1926, several years before King George V began his annual Christmas broadcasts to the British Empire. (3) Cosgrave's first live broadcast in March 1931 seems to have attracted a large audience, judging by the many letters and postcards that he received from listeners throughout the United States and Canada. (4) de Valera continued the tradition of sending St. Patrick's Day greetings to the United States until 1938, when he relinquished the honor to Ireland's first President, Douglas Hyde. This is not the only evidence that independent Ireland kept in touch with the American Irish. During the late 1930s de Valera and Eoin MacNeill explored the possibility of establishing Irish cultural centers throughout the United States, so that Irish Americans and other Americans might learn "something about our past and present," but the plan was abandoned at the outbreak of World War II. (5) In February 1946 de Valera entertained four Irish-American prelates--Spellman of New York, Mooney of Detroit, Stritch of Chicago, and Glennon of St. Louis--in Killarney, when they visited Ireland en route to Rome, where they were consecrated as cardinals. The party included James Farley, who had served as Post-Master General in Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet, and Fr. Robert Gannon, the President of Fordham University. (6) Visits to the United States by leading Irish politicians became more common in the 1950, with the introduction of regular trans-Atlantic flights; in 1956 John A. Costello became the first Irish head of government to spend St. Patrick's Day in the United States, inaugurating a pattern that many later Taoisigh have followed. In the morning he presented shamrocks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the White House, before flying to New York to preside at the St. Patrick's Day parade; that evening he was guest of honor at the annual dinner of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in Philadelphia. (7) Yet, despite evidence of regular contact between the Dublin government and Irish America, there is some validity in the belief that independent Ireland failed to keep in contact with the wider Irish community. This distancing seems to have happened during the 1950s and the 1960s because of changes in the Irish community in the United States, and in political and economic policies in Ireland. This essay concentrates on the perspective of the Irish government. (8) Mass emigration from Ireland to the United States came to a halt in 1929, following the Wall Street crash. By the late 1930 Britain had become the dominant destination for Irish emigrants, and by 1950 there were more people of Irish birth living in Britain than in the United States. Between 1951 and 1961 more than 400,000 men and women are believed to have emigrated from Ireland, but only 62,400 went to the United States. During this period, Irish immigrants filled less than 50 percent of the annual quota of 17,853 U.S. visas earmarked for Ireland in every year except 1957 and 1958, when a recession in Britain created greater interest in other destinations and the numbers emigrating to the United States increased to 9,124 and 10,383, respectively. …

In the proclamation that was issued on Easter Monday 1916 the provisional government of the Irish Republic undertook to grant ‘equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens’ and to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’. It also emphasised that the Republic was ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from a majority in the past’ and referred to the support given to the Republic ‘by her exiled children in America’. The belief that the Irish nation included all inhabitants of the island was a central tenet of Irish nationalism both before and after 1922, and the numerous visits that nationalist leaders have paid to the United States from the time of Parnell and Davitt to the present testify to the importance that has been attached to the Irish overseas. In November 1948, while introducing the second reading of the Republic of Ireland Bill, the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, noted that ‘The Irish at home are only one section of a great race which has spread itself throughout the world, particularly in the great countries of North America and the Pacific.’

Christine Kinealy has claimed that ‘more has been written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine than was written in the whole period since 1850’. This is probably true. Anniversaries of major historical events now give rise to commemorative events ranging from scholarly conferences to the unveiling of memorial plaques, even to pop concerts. There appears to be a premium on being first in the field, and a corresponding waning of interest as attention shifts to the next anniversary. Harvard University organised its conference marking the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1988. The summer of 1847 was taken as the cutoff point for the Irish government’s official commemoration of the Famine, in order to make way for the bicentenary of 1798, despite the fact that a majority of famine victims probably died after that date. Commemorating historical events boosts book sales, and publishers appear eager to respond to popular demand. Unfortunately the interest may prove too short-lived to afford time for major research, and many of the resulting books either recycle existing material or give the appearance of being in need of further work.

The shift towards competitive examinations within the public service in nineteenth century Ireland must be viewed against the background of Ireland's colonial status and the thrust for national independence. Although the introduction of competitive examinations undoubtedly increased Catholic and nationalist access to government positions, the transition was limited by inequalities of access in the Irish educational system and by the Northcote‐Trevelyan civil service structure with its emphasis on an elite first division. The latter was a source of considerable resentment to many second division Irish civil servants. As a result, while political independence in 1922 resulted in considerable continuity of personnel and procedure from the British‐controlled civil service, there was a substantially greater emphasis on promotion from within the lower ranks of the civil service and a consequential division between the civil service elite of the new Irish state and the university sector.