Covers 8th- session.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

A Bit Different: Disability in Ireland brings the reader on a journey exploring the ideas that influence our thinking about people with disabilities. In the year when Ireland ratified the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities, A Bit Different answers the question as to why the road to equal rights for people with disabilities is strewn with so many potholes. Its chapters analyse the impact of the Nazi programme to annihilate people with disabilities and create an ‘Aryan race,’ as well as the Irish habit of placing people with perceived differences into closed institutions. Drawing on examples from Germany, Romania, Italy and the US, the book casts a different or alternative light on the Army Deafness cases of the 1970s and the more recent Tuam discovery of unburied babies. Among its ten chapters, the author provides a new look at the rise of the independent living movement in Ireland among people with disabilities themselves and provides a critical appraisal of the increasing State regulation and enforcement of standards of living in residential centres for people with disabilities. Students of Disability Studies will find the first historical timeline of disability policy events over two centuries, especially useful in understanding the history of disability rights in Ireland. The intended readership for this book is among the 600,000 Irish people who describe themselves as having a disability or long-standing health condition, their friends, families, advocates, carers, social care supporters, work colleagues and employers.

In a bitterly divided 19th century Ireland, consensus was sought in the new discipline of political economy which claimed to transcend all divisions. This book explores the failure of that mission in the wake of the great famine of 1846-7.

First published in 1975. Using estate records, local newspapers and parliamentary papers, this book focuses upon two central and interrelated subjects – the rural economy and the land question – from the perspective of Cork, Ireland’s southernmost country. The author examines the chief responses of Cork landlords, tenant farmers and labourers to the enormous difficulties besetting them after 1815. He shows how the great famine of the late 1840s was in many ways an economic and social watershed because it rapidly accelerated certain previous trends and reversed the direction of others. He also rejects the conventional view of the land war of the 1880s, arguing that in Cork it was essentially a ‘revolution of rising expectations’, in which tenant farmers struggled to preserve their substantial material gains since 1850 by using the weapons of ‘agrarian trade unionism’, civil disobedience and unprecedented violence. This title will be of interest to students of rural history and historical geography.

Offering a unique insight into the habitual inebriate offender class in Ireland, this book examines the inebriate reformatory system in Ireland from its foundation in 1900 until its closure in 1920 and the three institutions charged with punishing or rehabilitating habitual drunkards: The State Inebriate Reformatory, The Certified Inebriate Reformatory and The Voluntary Inebriate Retreat. Using registers of inmates, annual reports, court cases and institutional records, Conor Reidy presents a stark account of the ways in which alcohol addiction and lack of opportunity condemned countless Irish victims to lives of poverty, misery and crime in the early twentieth century. The author also looks at the ways in which institutional staff sought to exact reform over the inmates through education, training, religion and discipline. This book profiles a hitherto little‐known system, giving it a place within the historiography of Ireland's complex web of so-called reformative institutions.

Having stagnated for decades in the shadow of the UK, the Irish economy's performance improved after it joined the European Union (EEC) in 1973. This Element shows how the challenge of EU membership gave focus and direction to Irish economic policy. No longer dependent on low value-added agricultural exports to Britain, within the EU Ireland became a hub for multinational corporations in IT and pharmaceutical products. This export success required and facilitated a strengthening of education and social policy infrastructures, and underpinned the achievement of high average living standards. EU membership has also brought challenges, and several severe setbacks have resulted from Irish policy mistakes. But the European flavour of Ireland's structural policies (leavened with exposure to US experience) has helped it navigate the hazards of hyper-globalization with fewer political tensions than seen elsewhere.