The immense power the Catholic Church once wielded in Ireland has considerably diminished over the last fifty years. During the same period the Irish state has pursued new economic and social development goals by wooing foreign investors and throwing the state's lot in with an ever-widening European integration project. How a less powerful church and a more assertive state related to one another during the key third quarter of the twentieth century is the subject of this book. Drawing on newly available material, it looks at how social science, which had been a church monopoly, was taken over and bent to new purposes by politicians and civil servants. This case study casts new light on wider processes of change, and the story features a strong and somewhat surprising cast of characters ranging from Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Father Denis Fahey.

The political economy of the Irish welfare state provides a fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital. Using official estimates, Professor Powell demonstrates that the welfare state is vital for the cohesion of Irish society with half the population at risk of poverty without it. However, the reality is of a residual welfare system dominated by means tests, with a two-tier health service, a dysfunctional housing system driven by an acquisitive dynamic of home-ownership at the expense of social housing, and an education system that is socially and religiously segregated. Using the evolution of the Irish welfare state as a narrative example of the incompatibility of political conservatism, free market capitalism and social justice, the book offers a new and challenging view on the interface between structure and agency in the formation and democratic purpose of welfare states, as they increasingly come under critical review and restructuring by elites.

This volume explores the critical reactions and dissenting activism generated in the summer of 1968 when Pope Paul VI promulgated his much-anticipated and hugely divisive encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which banned the use of ‘artificial contraception’ by Catholics. Through comparative case studies of fourteen different European countries, it offers a wealth of new data about the lived religious beliefs and practices of ordinary people – as well as theologians interrogating ‘traditional teachings’ – in areas relating to love, marriage, family life, gender roles and marital intimacy. Key themes include the role of medical experts, the media, the strategies of progressive Catholic clergy and laity, and the critical part played by hugely differing Church-State relations. In demonstrating the Catholic Church’s important (and overlooked) contribution to the refashioning of the sexual landscape of post-war Europe, it makes a critical intervention into a growing historiography exploring the 1960s and offers a close interrogation of one strand of religious change in this tumultuous decade.

Through a collection of essays that reflect the complexity of the island’s historical past as it operates today, Public History in Ireland delivers a scholarly yet accessible introduction to contemporary topics and debates in Irish public history. Despite the reputation that Ireland, both north and south, has gained as a place of contestation, this is the first book-length study to tackle its diverse and often ‘difficult’ public histories. Public History in Ireland offers examples drawn not only from museums, heritage and collections, prime mediators of public historical interpretation, but also from the work of artists and academics. It considers the silences in Ireland’s history-telling, including those of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland and of the traumatic public discoveries and re-evaluations of the island’s institutions of social control. The book’s key message is that history is active, making itself felt in ongoing debates about heritage, identity, nationhood, post-conflict society and reparative justice. It shows that Irish public history is freighted and often fraught with jeopardy, but as such it is rich with insight that has relevance far beyond this island’s shores. This book is useful for students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of public history and the history of Ireland.

In Being Gay in Ireland: Resisting Stigma in the Evolving Present, Gerard Rodgers argues that existing theory and research on the lives of gay men often exhibits a social weightlessness such that self-beliefs are frequently decoupled from an analysis of society. History and conventions inform and shape gay men’s self-beliefs, yet psychology as a discipline rarely dialogues with historical or political scholarship. Rodgers corrects this oversight with a critical analysis of the decades of socio-political struggle in Ireland and elsewhere. Rodgers captures the lives of gay men who are situated in varied contexts and who all, despite their different situations, possess self-beliefs that are shaped by wider historical traditions and evolving social change. Rodgers argues that the nuances and particulars of self-beliefs are significantly affected by wider historical traditions and evolving social and political changes. Through his reconstruction, Rodgers provides practitioners of applied psychological and therapeutic disciplines with an in-depth picture of how historical context and social justice successes have interacted with gay men’s self-beliefs, with a particular focus on how prosocial resistances against prejudice have incrementally eroded historical standards of gay stigma.

This fascinating book provides a detailed account of the history of maternity and child welfare in Dublin between 1922 and 1960. In so doing it places maternity and child welfare in the context of twentieth-century Irish history, offering one of the only accounts of how women and children were viewed, treated and used by key lobby groups in Irish society and by the Irish state. Mother and child is of critical importance to understanding the political and social history of modern Ireland as it examines the responses of the State, the church, voluntary groups and women to the emergence of the welfare State in Ireland. As such it makes a welcome contribution to Irish political, social, medical and gender history.