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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.

This provocative new history of Ireland during the long 1960s exposes the myths of Ireland's modernisation. Mary E. Daly questions traditional interpretations which see these years as a time of prosperity when Irish society--led by a handful of key modernisers--abandoned many of its traditional values in its search for economic growth. Setting developments in Ireland in a wider European context, Daly shows instead that claims for the economic transformation of Ireland are hugely questionable: Ireland remained one of the poorest countries in Western Europe until the end of the twentieth century. Contentious debates in later years over contraception, divorce, and national identity demonstrated continuities with the past that long survived the 1960s. Spanning the period from Ireland's economic rebirth in the 1950s to its entry into the EEC in 1973, this is a comprehensive reinterpretation of a critical period in Irish history with clear parallels for Ireland today. -- Introduction -- Part I. The Economy: 1. 'Bringing up the rear of the pack' in Europe's golden age of economic growth 2. Transforming the economy: whose plan? 3. Coping with change 1: industry and trade unions 4. Coping with change 2: agriculture and rural Ireland 5. Coping with change 3: regional and physical planning -- Part II. Society: 6. The optimism of a rising tide 7. Farewell to 'the vanishing Irish' 8. Women, children and families 9. Second-wave feminism and the Irish family 10. The churches 11. Education, health and welfare -- Part III. Politics and International Relations: 12. Party politics: the revolution that never happened 13. International relations 14. Northern Ireland -- Conclusion: abandoning the past? -- Bibliography -- Index