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Entrepreneurs need to develop a range of skills to be successful, including skills in decision making, risk management, problem solving, communication, and teamwork. Games and simulations are increasingly being used in both academia and business to encourage such skills development. This paper describes a business simulation module whereby postgraduate students use a game to simulate managing and operating a business. The game replicates real-world scenarios, thereby providing an innovative and contextualized learning environment. This paper presents extracts from students' reflective essays, which describe various learning outcomes. The paper concludes with some guidelines for teachers considering integrating game-based learning into their curricula to facilitate skills development, as well as recommendations for future research.

This paper describes the conceptualisation and appropriation of narrative in the design of digital storytelling technology (DST), to augment reflective practice among Irish pre-service teachers. Reflective practice remains a predominant professional formation component of programmes of teacher education. In this key developmental activity, teacher education traditionally privileges written reflections, e.g. pro forma post-lesson evaluations and essays. Our aim in this research was to supplement, not supplant, these important written reflective modalities, and by doing so, open up a wider set of possibilities for using narrative and technology to support creative, potentially transformative reflection on practice. We have been inspired significantly in this DST work by Bruner's ([2002]. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) functional view of narrative inquiry--that storytelling serves as the principal, foundational means by which we form our identities, relate to others and make sense of our place in the world. We thus sought to explore how innovative storytelling designs, combined with, and augmented by digital technology, might afford new narrative inquiry possibilities for pre-service students to conceptualise, create and collaborate in their early-career, reflective practices. This paper presents R-NEST, the educational design we developed in a principled and participatory fashion over 3 years, collaboratively with 323 student teachers. We trace the narrative of the development and refinement of the bespoke R-NEST design, illustrated with analysis of an exemplar, student-designed digital story. The paper concludes with insights regarding the creative, reflective use of DST, suggesting potentially wide scope for this mode of narrative technology in education.

In this essay, the role of the National Library of Ireland in collecting and preserving the manucripts of twentieth-century Irish poets is considered, together with the Library's acquisition policy and methods of selection, collection, and cataloguing. Does the Library fulfil its stated aim and statutory function, 'to provide an accurate record of Ireland's output in manuscript, print and other media for present and future users'? Is the Library as active as it should be in acquiring literary manuscripts? Which poets' papers are acquired and made available to readers? Who gets 'in' and who is left 'out', and why? Does the Library's manuscript collection accurately represent twentieth-century Irish poetry? What in fact is 'an accurate record of Ireland's output in manuscript?' These and other complex issues are discussed in the article, some facts and figures adduced, and some suggestions made. The essay includes a personal memory of the process of acquiring one poetry archive, that of Eithne Strong, and comments by a scholar on the significance of the Dorothy Molloy papers, also held in the Library, for her understanding of the poet's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the paradigm of 'terrorism' needs to be abandoned by those academics engaged in exploring political violence. The authors, through the prism of their various disciplinary backgrounds and their research experience in Northern Ireland, argue that those engaged within Terrorism Studies must go further in their critique of the concept of 'terrorism'. Taking fives steps into the field of Terrorism Studies, this article argues that the term is indefinable; and that some of the common elements of a definition are unconvincing; explores the significant implications of using such a label; engages with the arguments of Richard Jackson and other critical terrorism studies' scholars; and, finally, draws upon lessons learnt from the Northern Ireland case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the extent to which some of the political upheavals of twentieth-century Ireland, and their related theatrical manifestations, might reveal a series of affinities with the organized political radicalism of nineteenth-century England. Specifically, the playhouse of dramas written by the executed leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, Pádraic Pearse (also known as Pádraig or Patrick) point back to the earlier Liberal reform meetings that took place in the English midlands. The key connecting figure is the revolutionary leader’s father, James Pearse, who spent his life netween Birmingham and Dublin, but who has tended to be overlooked by historians in the years since 1916. This paper will explore the way that throughout the twentieth-century a focus on Pádraic Pearse’s mother has tended to obscure the influence of James Pearse. Yet I suggest that James–influenced by Liberal thinkers such as the MP John Bright–helpedto link on kind of waning English radicalism with the developing nationalism of twentieth-century Ireland. It is in this context that my paper explores the political implications of Patrick Pearse’s theatrical writings, The Kings, The Master and The Singer, tracing connections between these plays and the Birmingham radicalism of James Pearse, with a particular focus on James’s nonconformist reformism and day-to-day involvement with the Catholic pomp of the Hardman church-furnishing company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Lynch has been prominent in the practice of community theatre in Northern Ireland through works like The Stone Chair and The Wedding Community Play and his role as founding Chair of Belfast's Community Arts Forum. This essay argues, however, that in his work as a playwright engaged in staging the remembered histories of Belfast's working class, it is possible to regard him as a radical playwright. Locating Lynch in the tradition of John McGrath's popular theatre allows his work to be seen as both recovering working class experience and, crucially, probing mythologies that have justified and perpetuated political violence. The paper is focused particularly on two of Lynch's most recent works: Holding Hands at Paschendale (2006) and The Long Kesh Chronicles (2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the American Civil War as reported in the Irish National Press. It focuses on two parts including how the Irish saw the Civil War as directly related to Irish conditions and the movements of nationalism and liberalism. The author presents his arguments on how the Irish papers interpreted and discusses the events that took place during the Civil War in relation to the conditions of Ireland during that time.

The construction and destruction of empire has been, from the beginning, a problem of human, political, economic and physical geography. Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the undertaking of a mapping project of unprecedented scale in the British Empire, and one whose legacy remains in dispute to the present day. On the one hand, the mapping of Ireland has been seen as of a kind with the often violent military surveying of all colonies; on the other, it has been lauded as the beginning of a genuine, if government-sponsored, attempt to remember and recover the past. This essay seeks to offer a new way to think about the survey of Ireland by interrogating the poetry of one of the employees of the Ordnance Survey, James Clarence Mangan, suggesting that his translations of Gaelic ruin poems in particular offer a nuanced vision of the dialectic between loss and preservation that subtends the work of mapmaking. It also draws on recent developments in the theorization of colonial archives to argue for a more subtle way of understanding the nature of mapping in Ireland, which may help to modulate received ideas about colonial mapping practices in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in 2006, at the end of an era that Fintan O'Toole has aptly characterized as one in which the Irish economy served as 'the poster child of free-market globalization,' (O'Toole, F., Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, London, Faber & Faber, 2009) this essay seeks to elucidate some of the features of what we might now designate late stage Celtic Tigerism. Its central concern is with an exploration of the affective parameters of boom-era Irishness in a period driven by the national priority of being 'business-friendly.' Charting a shift in the discursive repertoire of Irishness from warmth to coolness, and considering the emergence of Ireland's position as an exemplary scene of capitalism in the first half of the twenty-first century's first decade, the piece examine a range of suggestive examples including a music video by an Irish pop group, an Irish-themed financial advice book and the rhetoric of promotion that surrounded the opening of Ireland's largest shopping mall in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of state formation, representative institutions often serve as a primary arena in which authority is ‘negotiated’ between princes and subjects—or, in the case of colonial legislatures, between the agents of metropolitan governments and settler elites. The medieval Irish parliament falls into the latter category. It was an assembly of English colonists in Ireland presided over by a chief governor, who held the place of the king of England. The present essay investigates the process of ‘negotiation’ in the Irish parliament between c.1370 and 1420. It shows how parliament served both as a source of legitimation for unpopular chief governors and, conversely, as a forum for expressing the grievances of the settler community. The essay explores the complex structure of colonial politics by locating parliament within a matrix of institutions linking Ireland to England; and, in the final section, the discussion moves into the world of political ideas. The underlying issue that it seeks to address is how ‘parliamentarianism’ helped to shape the political identity of the colony. Expressions of dissent in parliament drew heavily upon English political traditions. To that extent Irish parliamentary disputes reinforced the Englishness of the colony's political culture; but, in a paradox familiar from later colonial situations, the rhetoric of English liberty was frequently turned against the crown's own representatives. Thus it is argued that the conflicts played out in the medieval Irish parliament acted as a catalyst in the crystallization of a distinctively colonial identity among the English of Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While much criticism of "The Playboy of the Western World" has focused on Christy's self-actualization through language, this essay asserts that Synge's imaginatively hybrid diction constitutes a critique of the discourses of heritage contemporaneous with the play's debut—biological and cultural, eugenic and evolutionary, as well as the projects of cultural and literary recuperation so central to the Irish Literary Revival. The drama's eugenic component reveals itself in the overarching objective of the main character, which is to kill his father and reinvigorate his lineage by marrying the beautiful and vital Pegeen Mike. The drama's cultural work is embedded in its linguistic negotiation between the colonizers' English and the land's native Gaelic. The inexorable force of unwanted heritage (biological, cultural, theatrical, linguistic) is subverted only through an imaginative act that both acknowledges and transforms the authority of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The savagery of the native Irish and, in particular, their predilection for severing heads, is repeatedly asserted, not only in the texts of conquest, but in representations of the "Wild Irish" on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. This essay tests this literary commonplace against the historical record of the early modern conquest of Ireland. Far from being merely the aberrant practice of the barbarous Gaels, beheading—and a form of judicial headhunting—became a cornerstone of the conquerors' policy of martial law. As atrocity was redefined as justice, so, in the hands of writers such as Spenser, Churchyard, and Derricke, was it aestheticized. But even as such writers wove inventive beheadings into their texts, Irish poets were elegizing the severed heads of patrons killed by the English. The poetry of beheading became a site of cultural confrontation and of unexpected assertions of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]