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2021 has been a year for looking back as well as forwards. In this article, I reflect on the state of languishing induced by lockdown, and the intensification of uncertainty in our everyday lives. I offer some biographical details of the early years of my career, which has largely been within a single institution, Maynooth University. The late Professor Liam Ryan was my boss and later my friend from 1990 until his death in 2015. His (typically) acerbic insights on the state of Irish sociology were recorded in 1984 for an issue of the Sociological Association of Ireland Bulletin. Re-visiting his prognosis today, I reflect on North–South relations in the discipline, on the challenge of forging a public role for Irish sociology, and on the growth of a precariat within the academic discipline. I conclude with some comments on the enduring relevance of sociology as we come to terms with post-pandemic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an outsider, still thinking and re-thinking the meaning of sociology, I was somewhat baffled by being asked by the IJS editors to write on 'the development of sociology in Ireland over the course of my career'. At this stage it becomes clear that I believe that the crisis in Irish sociology is not being unable to better do quantitative work, or rather do Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)-type policy work, and facilitate government policies, but rather in not becoming better at public sociology. In other words, this means that Sociology in Ireland regards itself as fitting into [1] professional and policy sociology rubrics, more so than his critical and public sociology slots, as I argue later, though this may be gradually changing. Indeed, writing about the "crisis in Irish sociology" in 2016, Carmel Hanan bemoans the dearth of quantitative methodology training and calls for 'Big Data, increases in transdisciplinary research and developments in mixed methods research', to facilitate sociologists in Ireland to do better policy research. [Extracted from the article]

In contemporary Irish Society there is considerable uneasiness about both the existence of and threats to the ‘patriarchal dividend’ (O'Connell, 1995a: 82). It is suggested that this wider social and cultural context, characterised by male dominance of key institutions, militates against the identification of gender related private troubles as public issues. Burawoy's (2005) focus on the public aspect of each of the four types of sociology he identifies (viz., policy, critical, public and professional sociology) is used as a framework to explore the recent contribution made by sociologists in Ireland to the identification of gender as such a public issue. The article concludes that, by not explicitly focusing on it their contribution as agenda setters has been more limited than it might otherwise have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]