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The Government of Ireland has published its plan to reorder the infrastructure it uses to accommodate and support migrants seeking International Protection (IP) in Ireland. This policy document - entitled The White Paper to End Direct Provision and Establish a New International Support Service - was published on 26th February, 2021. The White Paper proposes to replace Ireland's current but discredited system with a new IP accommodation and support process – to be entitled Ireland's International Protection Support Service. This new system is intended to "treat all applicants to the process with dignity and respect" (Government of Ireland, 2021: 7). Dissonances exist, however. The discursive framing of the IPSS and the spatialities inherent in the proposals suggest a potential rearticulation of state control rather that a diminution of same. I turn to the work of scholars inspired by Giorgio Agamben to help situate the spatialities of this shift, and suggest that the current 'white paper' should simply be seen as a mechanism deployed the Government of Ireland to ensure that its bio-political command and control processes can migrate from the spatially-defined set of control environments currently in effect to a diffuse construction of a spatially networked series of deterritorialised indistinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the debate quality in the plenary sessions of an Irish Citizens' Assembly and an Irish parliamentary committee to assess the epistemic effects of public deliberation on a contentious subject: abortion. The unusual occurrence of a similar process of detailed discussion on the same topic in different institutions at around the same time (in 2016–2017) allows us to compare the deliberative capacities of these institutions and thus contribute to discussions on the appropriateness of an increasingly debated democratic reform: assigning political offices by lot. We suggest that the epistemic effect of deliberation on abortion should facilitate nuanced multi-layered discussion that is both 'deeper' in being based on multi-faceted arguments and 'wider' in terms of a more accommodative view. We anticipate that these effects should be more pronounced in the more deliberative, less polarized, environment of a citizens' assembly rather than in a parliamentary committee. The analysis deploys the psychological concept of 'cognitive complexity'. We find that members of the Citizens' Assembly demonstrate a deeper cognitively complex grasp of the subject matter. In contrast, experts and parliamentarians tend to adjust their mode of delivery at a parliamentary committee reflecting the conflictual and strategic aspects of political debates in such a forum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises are extant. This paper provides the first systematic overview of this war-time discourse on Ireland. In doing so it sheds light on these writings and their significance for the history of late Elizabethan Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the subject of division in contemporary Ireland. Contrasting recent legalisation regarding same-sex marriage and abortion in the Republic with the socio-political approach to these matters in Northern Ireland provides an opportunity to analyse how past conflicts structure the sociopolitical landscape and are manifested in political division and social unrest. The impact of Brexit incited instability and a possible return of the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, putting immense pressure on the political point de capiton of the Good Friday Agreement. The border that previously divided the island and had a significant impact on its inhabitants can be compared with the psychical division of a conscious/ unconscious split subject. This invites scrutiny through reading these contemporary events through a Lacanian understanding of how speaking subjects are colonized by discourses and language in a way that can symbolically oppress individuals and groups. This paper demonstrates how unconscious psychical divisions can manifest and be visible in divisive oppressive laws and can trigger a return to acrimonious conflict and violence when signifiers fail to represent past trauma. By symbolically addressing trauma, there are opportunities for conflicting political parties to coherently articulate these divisions and demonstrate unity in this period of potential transformation, paving the way to stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral and practical regulation of sexuality and associated risk has been in some ways traditionally bound by Catholic religious doctrine in the Republic of Ireland. Over the last century, however, the emergence of professional social work as a state risk management strategy around sexuality is evident. This tallies with the disrepute of the Church following high-profile abuse scandals and publicized tragedies tied to institutional segregation. This paper presents theoretically informed critical commentary, through uptake of the Foucauldian notion of discourse. It concludes that critique of the regulation of sexuality, should be qualified on three counts. Firstly, tensions between Catholicism and social work remain. Secondly, wariness towards the operation of power is requisite. Thirdly, both that which is said, and unsaid, enlightens present debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the educational implications of the recent emphasis on the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer (LGBTQ) people in Ireland. Operating from the perspective that discourses constitute rather than merely reflect material reality, thereby shaping or ‘structuring’ how we think about, and act, in relation to queer experience, the paper critically engages with discourses which position LGBTQ youth as universally at risk of mental health difficulties, including self-harm and suicidality. It also challenges the corresponding preoccupation with homophobic bullying as the primary lens through which queer experience is understood and addressed in schools, arguing that more space needs to be devoted to other, less harrowing narratives of LGBTQ experience and identity. It highlights some of the more problematic effects of LGBTQ mental health research which frame LGBTQ experience primarily in terms of vulnerability and victimhood and makes the case for a more expansive engagement with LGBTQ identities. The article illuminates the potential that after-queer scholarship holds for a re-imagining of queer youth, sexuality and gender within educational and social research, curriculum materials and educational institutions more generally and concludes with a consideration of specific knowledge and skills that educators should be equipped with in order to disrupt normative understandings of gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds on the paradox whereby transcriptions are the object of study for investigations into the spoken language but yet omit so much of "what is heard" when an utterance is made. Transcriptions are agnostic with regard to Searlean notions of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect. The paper proposes that the enhancement of transcriptions with pragmatic and prosodic annotation overcomes that paradox and captures the original utterance more objectively. It argues that annotation is part of transcription. It presents with examples a brief summary of each part of the Pragmatic Annotation Scheme developed for the SPICE-Ireland Corpus: speech acts, tone movements, discourse markers, utterance tags and quotatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation of built heritage is a key planning process and goal which shapes urban development outcomes across European cities. In Ireland, conservation of the built heritage is a key part of the planning framework, albeit one that is, in comparative terms, only recently established. While it is widely recognized that the underlying rationale for conservation of built heritage varies considerably (from cultural priorities to place marketing), the literature suggests that heritage and conservation professionals perform a key role in controlling decision-making through an official or “authorized” heritage discourse (AHD), emphasizing expert values and knowledge and based around selective heritage storylines often reflecting elite tastes. Drawing on policy and practice in Ireland, in this paper, we contribute to these debates by further unpacking the AHD, exploring tensions within the heritage policy elite through examination of competing views and representations relating to the purpose of built heritage protection. Based on a discourse analysis following interviews with key national actors, we identify two key narratives—a “museum-curatorial” discourse and an “inclusive heritage” discourse—which in turn frame conservation practices. We argue that subtle variations of heritage meanings have the potential to either reproduce (museum-curatorial discourse) or challenge (inclusive heritage discourse) conventional modes of practice, particularly relating to the relationship between built heritage and identity and the role of public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Irish public sphere discourse about the United States has, particularly since the September 11 attacks, been regularly reproached for being 'anti-American'. This paper explores the cultural politics of this charge by creatively juxtaposing the analysis of an Irish current affairs programme with a Hollywood made 'Irish' movie. The value of our analysis, we argue, is that, taken together, both objects enable us to problematize the politics of the other, thus providing us with a more complex context for exploring the overdetermined question of political-cultural (dis) identification. We interrogate the ideological simplicity of the discourse structuring the anti-American charge, while at the same time showing how Irish news media representations enable such a discourse to be articulated. We also explore a more generous mode of Irish cultural identification through a reading of Jim Sheridan's 2003 movie In America, though we simultaneously problematize the assumption the movie can be read as a straightforward 'homage' to America. We conclude by cautioning against reified modes of analysis that project a fullness onto political-cultural identities that are always formally open, and over-privilege the national as an object of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]