Search

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersecting roles of Catholic religious orders and psychiatrists in the development of residential care for people with an intellectual disability in Ireland during the fifty-year period after political autonomy from the UK in 1922. The context is the postcolonial development of the country and the crucial role played by the Catholic Church through several of its religious orders in developing and staffing intellectual disability services. The paper will consider the divergent positions of church and psychiatry in the foundation and contemporary position of what was originally known as the care of people with a mental handicap nursing in the 1960s. The development of this form of nursing during the mid-twentieth century can be seen as part of a wider postcolonial response to health and social care by the newly independent Irish state. The author argues that intellectual disability nursing in Ireland has been nuanced by association with the nation's struggle for self-determination from colonial oppression through adoption of a religious identity. This conflation of education and social care combined with a specific form of Catholic nursing has left an enduring legacy on the service provision to people with an intellectual disability in contemporary Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that discourse on community as a socio-political problem needs to be located within historical, institutional, and socio-structural contexts if it is to be properly understood. In particular, it suggests that the role of religion in promoting forms of communitarian discourse and practice needs to be given greater attention than it has hitherto received within the social sciences. The article pursues this argument through examination of the religious discourse on community cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By providing an analysis of its role in Catholic responses to three major socio-political crises in Ireland between the 1890s and 1960s, the paper suggests that not only does socio-religious discourse on community constitute a powerful alternative to secular social-scientific discourses, but that such discourse is particularly effective in helping to constitute specific groups as communities, given favourable sociological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899) established the blueprint for modern evangelical revivalism. He targeted a broad audience and so avoided contentious points of theology and local political issues. The result was that how Moody was interpreted by those who heard him is often more revealing than the content of his addresses. Moody's three evangelistic campaigns in southern Ireland (1874, 1882–1883, 1892) offer a suggestive case study of how his brand of modern revivalism was accepted and challenged in a particular context. His first tour was significant because it was the first time he had worked in a location with a Catholic majority; his second and third missions took place against a background of political unrest associated with the growing demand for Irish "Home Rule". This article examines the effect of Moody's brand of modern revivalism on unity amongst southern Ireland's protestant minority. It also investigates the impact of Moody's missions on Catholic Ireland, and the extent to which he was able to transcend religio‐political divisions. It demonstrates that Moody promoted evangelical unity yet generated friendly criticism as well as opposition from Protestants, and that the efforts to convert Catholic Ireland that he stimulated provoked a variety of responses that ranged from tolerance to outright hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores John Wesley's relationship both to Ireland and to the Roman Catholic faith and argues that Wesley's reputation as a proto‐ecumenist needs to become more muted and less idealised. Many in Ireland drew the intellectual content of their grievances against British rule from the rhetoric of liberty employed to support the Americans. Wesley's opposition to the rebellion of the colonists, as well as his support for the Church of Ireland and the Protestant landed gentry weakened the appeal of his message to the Catholic Irish. Wesley's ministry among the Pietist diaspora communities in Ireland, shows that he preferred their form of piety to that of the Catholic population. Wesley's anti‐Catholic sentiment was in keeping with widely‐held fears about Catholicism as a threat to Protestant liberty, and is considered here in the context of the rising strength of the Irish Catholic population in England and corresponding Acts to grant them greater liberties from the late 1770s. Wesley's support for the Protestant Association and the false accusation that he was an instigator of the 1780 Gordon Riots, his numerous anti‐Catholic pamphlets, and his correspondence with the Irish Capuchin monk Arthur O'Leary bring together an outline of Wesley's approach to Roman Catholicism which he saw as both a false religion and a threat to Britain's role as a global Protestant power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined social psychological factors contributing to the restoration of the intergroup relationship between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. A theoretical model of reconciliation orientation (ROM) was developed, with intergroup forgiveness and subjective evaluation of past violence as the main precursors of that orientation. Data from a Northern Irish sample (N = 318) validated and extended the model. Forgiveness and evaluation of past violence were predicted by 'competitive victimhood' (a belief in having suffered more than the out-group), negatively and positively, respectively. These associations were fully accounted for by the strength of identification with the in-group and trust in the out-group. Empathy functioned mainly as a direct predictor of forgiveness. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The following attempts to clarify the origins and character of the “movement” toward Catholic emancipation in the British empire by examining the negotiation of two early relief measures, the Quebec Act (1774) and the Irish Catholic Relief Act (1778), from an institutional perspective. It explores how institutions structuring Anglo-Quebec and Anglo-Irish political relations affected policy outcomes in each case, and what influence the Quebec case had on the Irish act four years later. While the Quebec Act offered a response to the Catholic question that was to assist supporters of the Irish bill, both were hard won against the inertia of institutional precedent. Neither act was accompanied by indications that greater freedoms were forthcoming. An institutional analysis thus challenges leading approaches that can represent the “movement” toward Catholic emancipation as more spontaneous and less contested than is sustained by actual events. [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]