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During the time of successive lockdowns due to the COVID pandemic, local organisations faced increased demand for ensuring that residents and businesses were kept informed and supported while simultaneously waiting for guidance to be passed down from central government to local authorities and on to communities. These community-based organisations include 10,000 town councils comprising the lowest level of government of England and covering 40% of the population. This article introduces town councils as policy instruments theorized from a political sociology perspective. It outlines the recent historic context of town councils in terms of national policy aimed at developing community engagement, with particular focus on the introduction of the localism agenda by the Coalition Government through to policies of austerity since 2010 and levelling up since 2019. This shows the lack of goals or consensus on the role of town councils, which function as policy instruments connected to policy for community engagement in a symbolic way and having limited expectations in terms of implementation. The article then addresses central government guidance to local authorities in the context of the COVID pandemic and lockdowns. The response of two town councils to the delays and confusion arising from the process of translation by ministers and Whitehall officials of directions from Downing Street is described. By means of the reflective hindsight provided in interviews with town councillors in two case studies, the role of town councils as policy instruments in developing community engagement during the pandemic is outlined. The article concludes on the case studies viewed as policy instruments set in the wider context of policy discourse on localism.

The British government’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic has meant wide-ranging restrictions imposed on people living in the UK with minimal parliamentary oversight. Thus, human rights and civil liberties were affected, as far as both individual freedoms and constitutional guarantees are concerned. However, given the urgency created by the health crisis and the controversial nature of human rights speech in the UK, using it to criticize the government’s measures was bound to be a politically charged choice. Through an analysis of parliamentary discourse in the main Covid-related debates both in the British Parliament and in the devolved legislatures, this article argues that human rights were not used as an expression of common values in a time of national crisis, but as a divisive rhetorical tool. Focusing thus on political discourse rather than on the effective effects of Covid restrictions on human rights allows us to identify ideological fault lines. Indeed, the analysis shows a highly differentiated definition of human rights between political parties on the one hand and between the different nations on the other.

The Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in the UK in a specific context where, in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, much of the political scene had been dominated by constitutional politics. Feeding into this debate about Scotland’s status within the UK, the Covid-19 crisis and its management became yet another argument for political parties to legitimize their constitutional policies. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach and using party manifestos, this article investigates how the Covid-19 pandemic is constructed in the discourses of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, and how it fits into the debate on Scotland’s constitutional future. The article concludes that the Covid-19 pandemic is instrumentalised in the larger constitutional debate, either to promote independence and constitutional reform in the case of the SNP, or to undermine nationalist rhetoric through the use of depoliticisation strategies in the case of the Scottish Conservative Party.

The UK’s policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the problems that arise in a highly centralised polity where the executive faces few countervailing political pressures. Westminster is a power-hoarding political system despite two decades of devolution. Intergovernmental relations (IGR) mechanisms of coordination and conflict resolution have struggled to cope with the realities of a severely asymmetric devolution settlement, as was glaringly apparent during the Covid crisis. Ministers in central government resisted pressure from the three UK devolved nations and English city-region mayors to rebalance UK and English IGR mechanisms. Even at the centre, the UK’s policy response illustrates that the UK core executive is often unable to govern strategically, coordinating services across entrenched departmental and multi-level boundaries despite government ministers enjoying a largely unchecked capacity to initiate policies, programmes and major departmental reorganisations with significant IGR implications. This central response exposes how over the last three decades the UK government, as the “English” central government, has strengthened its control of local government through financial oversight and outsourcing of services to the non-state sector.

This article examines the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK in comparison to previous shocks since 1980. It details the economic measures taken by the public authorities to deal with the crisis, including massive public spending to support household incomes and powerful monetary policy measures. The analysis then looks at the economic legacies of the pandemic, especially concerning public debt and inflation, noting that at the time of the general election in July 2024 Britain’s economic outlook had stabilised and inflation had ebbed. However, the article concludes that the era of unprecedented ultra-low interest rates which began in the wake of the global financial crisis (2007-2009) is over. It emphasises that while today’s high public debt is not unprecedented in British history it will weigh heavily on public spending in the years, if not decades, to come.

There is no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic, affecting the UK and the rest of the world since March 2020, put the Welsh Government, especially Mark Drakeford, the First Minister, in the limelight, not just in Wales, but all over the UK. Indeed, health being a devolved matter, some Welsh people came to realise they had a parliament and government able to devise a made-in-Wales policy. If, at the beginning of the pandemic, policies were much the same across England and Wales, the two countries quickly differed in their approach to tackling the crisis and implementing lockdown rules. And yet, the Welsh Government, due to its limited economic – especially budgetary and fiscal – powers, also had to adapt to decisions made by the British Government. It seems that the handling of the pandemic compounded the tensions between Boris Johnson’s and Mark Drakeford’s governments, at a time when the British Prime Minister was trying to recentralise power in London.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown and containment measures that were put in place by the UK government severely disrupted NHS mental health services. Surveys carried out during this period showed a decline in people’s wellbeing leading to fears that the country would soon face an unprecedented mental health crisis. This paper shows that not everyone was affected in the same way and that those whose mental health deteriorated the most were those who had already been most at risk prior to the pandemic. It concludes that rather than creating a new crisis, the pandemic merely exacerbated existing problems.

Thin Places (2021) is a piece of work which defies categorization. It is partly a memoir filled with traumatic personal events, partly a reflection on loss in all its manifest forms (physical, familial, linguistic, environmental), and partly an uplifting plea for allowing the exploration of our natural surroundings to function as a meaningful form of care. Kerri ní Dochartaigh uses the materiality of the sentient beings that surround us, and deep care for our ecosystem, as a means of recovery. Earth care as self-care. Ní Dochartaigh is concerned with both the materiality and the immateriality of objects of care and manages to incorporate both through her interest in “the liminal space between things”, to borrow the title of an article by Timothy Morton (2014). The narrator foregrounds her mental health difficulties brought on by a violent and traumatic childhood in Northern Ireland yet also places the focus on the ways in which Ireland’s natural habitat, its material reality and its immaterial Celtic portals, “hold us” (2022: 228) in unsuspected care relationships. In the process, “[a]rt happens […] in the liminal space(s) between things, in conversations between metal and sky, humans and metal, era and era, heaven and earth” (Morton 2014: 270-1). A poignant process of recovery is recounted, highlighting firstly the refusal of care before slowly moving towards co-constituted acts of care: as ní Dochartaigh gradually recovers her lost mother tongue, and pays attention to the beauty of her natural surroundings, as she begins to care for both, she also starts to feel cared for. The sensory experience of loss, gain, and care in Thin Places is predicated upon several ecologies and resonates strongly with Joan Tronto’s definition of care as ultimately “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves (sic.), and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993: 103; original emphasis). Kerri ní Dochartaigh celebrates, in the most understated manner, the full complexity of this “life-sustaining web” and this article proposes to unpack all of the above elements to show how her very singular aesthetics places the emphasis on the coloniality of loss and the restorative power of stories.

“The Tale of Slawkenbergius”, also known as the “Episode of the Nose”, is one of the most recognised and quoted passages from Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759-1767). This short story from the fourth volume of Sterne’s novel has received a great deal of attention in the specialised bibliography. However, the studies so far published analyse the story as an isolated episode and concentrate mainly on the use of irony, double entendre and puns as a means of alluding to sexual issues (Gallagher 2018; Walsh 2009). The aim of this paper is to study “The Tale of Slawkenbergius” no longer as a humorous representation of the grotesque, but as a metaliterary manifestation of Sterne’s poetics, thus relating the tale to the structure of the novel. The way in which Sterne uses the device of the “strange loop” in this passage to express his subscription to Hogarth’s aesthetics and to Hogarth’s ideas about the “lines of beauty and grace” will be determined. It will also relate the apology for the beauty of a colossal-nosed, disproportionate hero that is established in this episode to the defence of “deformed” art forms, removed from neoclassical aesthetics, that Tristram establishes throughout his narrative.

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

This essay examines Luis Martín-Santos’ second novel, Time of Destruction, unfinished at the time of his accidental death in 1964, in connection with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). To date, Marisol Morales-Ladrón remains the only scholar who has dealt extensively with both texts (2005: 162-182), a sharp contrast to the numerous studies that have discussed the traces of Joyce’s Ulysses in Martín-Santos’ first novel, Time of Silence (1962). The publication, in 2022, of Mauricio Jalón’s new edition of Martín-Santos’ Time of Destruction, one with significant textual amendments to the first edition (1975), provides an ideal opportunity to expand the scholarship on this scarcely researched topic. The first section of this essay offers a brief discussion of the new edition of Martín-Santos’ novel and reconsiders it in relation to Joyce’s work. The second section proposes a reading of A Portrait and Time of Destruction in light of the tension that exists between the narrators and the two main fictional figures in these novels, Stephen Dedalus and Agustín. The final section considers both novels in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of history and morality.

Tim Robinson’s acclaimed two-volume account of the Aran Islands, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986) and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth (1995), originated both in the author’s personal fascination with the islands and his professional, cartographic project when he was encouraged to produce a detailed map of the area. The digressive narratives in the companion volumes are structured around Robinson’s walks along the coast (Pilgrimage) and through the interior of Aran (Labyrinth). His generically hybrid books combine topography, folklore, human and natural history, culture and nature. Although sceptical about the tradition of romanticising the Aran Islands and a self-professed non-believer, Robinson nevertheless tends to transcend down-to-earth, factual reporting towards reflections on the spiritual and the universal. This approach paves the way for the use of metaphorical language. The article examines the intersection between the scholarly and the creative, the objective and the personal in Stones of Aran, and especially the tension between the writer’s simultaneous proclivity for and resistance to figurative language.

This essay was prompted by a review by the Scottish poet, Robert Crawford, of Clare Bucknell’s recent book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture (2023). It provides a reading of Bucknell’s book in the light of other anthologies. So it is not in itself a review but, rather, a series of reflections on the construction and nature of anthologies stimulated by my reading of Bucknell’s book. Crawford insists on the omissions in Bucknell’s account from a Scottish perspective. But I want to take in a wider perspective, one that includes national identity. Initially, I focus on the index and on the entry for Palgrave’s father and his Jewish name. This leads to a discussion on the authoritative appearance of The Golden Treasury and perhaps on what it is hiding. The essay takes issue with the partial view of English poetry, where Wordsworth is afforded the most poems, and eighteenth-century poets hardly feature. The second half discusses Bucknell’s chapter on the popularity of poetry therapy and her omission of any discussion of recent women’s poetry. The anthology she dismisses out of hand is Yeats’s The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Such a conclusion invites a response at some length. The focus then shifts to another Irish writer, William Allingham, and his largely forgotten anthology, Nightingale Valley, which was published the year before The Golden Treasury and which Palgrave sought to better. In his thought-provoking choices, which includes possibly the first printing of Blake’s poems in an anthology, Allingham provides a counter to those who read poetry and literature simply in terms of the way they reflect history. In doing so he affords a valuable critique of The Treasuries and The Golden Treasury from over a century and a half ago.

This article aims at examining how systemic violence is connected with social stigma and structural vulnerability in the social novel The Spinning Heart, which was published by the Irish writer Donal Ryan in 2012. This much lauded work describes the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and its devastating effects in a small rural town in Ireland from multiple viewpoints. Although there are twenty-one first-person narrators, one per chapter, Bobby Mahon stands out among them. In fact, the story of this construction foreman connects with the trajectories presented by the other characters. Through all of them, Ryan denounces the practices and procedures that powerful and privileged institutions, groups and individuals resort to in contemporary Ireland in order to assert control or authority over other less favoured members of society, thus fostering a climate of violence. Attention is drawn in this article to the nature of the patterns of aggression and hostility developed by the main characters in the novel but also to the adverse impact these unjust, oppressive and stigmatising patterns have on vulnerable subjects by burdening them physically, psychologically, culturally and financially. Michael Staudigl’s theories on systemic violence in Phenomenologies of Violence (2014), Imogen Tyler’s notions on social stigma in Stigma. The Machinery of Inequality (2020), Judith Butler’s ideas on structural vulnerability in Vulnerability in Resistance (2016) and Pierre Bourdieu’s views on patriarchy in Masculine Domination (2001) inform this work.

The playwright and theatre director Phillip McMahon is also co-founder and co-director of THISISPOPBABY, a Dublin arts company founded in 2007 and said to have redefined modern Irish theatre, ripping up the space between popular culture, counterculture and high art. Their shows have played and toured around Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond. THISISPOPBABY voices queer culture on stage making space for the history and stories of the LGBTIQA+ Irish community positioning itself between performance and politics. The first play written by McMahon purely with LGBTIQA+ characters is Once Before I Go (2021), in which he explores and examines the legacy of the AIDS crisis in Irish queer lives. McMahon does not only voice the community’s historic pain, shame, and stigma, but he also foregrounds the fact that, despite marriage equality, the LGBTIQA+ rights movement has not come to an end. In fact, he claims that, after the COVID-19 pandemic, a wider society is ready to hear stories that have been long buried, forgotten, and suppressed.

This paper examines the inner debate in Basque nationalism resulting from the Easter Rising between 1916 and 1918. Basque nationalists firmly believed that the Irish Revolution would affect the British war effort, the outcome of the Great War and hence Basque political vindication itself. The official nationalist leadership and its organ, Euzkadi, supported Great Britain, arguing a British military triumph in Ireland and in the Great War would bring a worldwide era of autonomy for national minorities. Pro-independence militants, however, not only expressed solidarity and outspoken support towards the rebels, but also associated their victory with a post-war scenario favourable to independence movements. This study focuses on the two competing Basque nationalist interpretations as presented in the media. Simultaneously, traditionalist parties (i.e. Carlists and Integrists) exacerbated nationalists’ differences in order to weaken a direct political rival.

This essay contends that emotional oscillations between subordination and emancipation are responsible for the inconclusivity and evasiveness of Le Fanu’s plots, which critics often emphasise but rarely try to explain. The parallels between, on the one hand, the dual structures that pervade Le Fanu’s works and, on the other, the binaries of latent dream thoughts and manifest dream content, the familiar and the uncanny, which Sigmund Freud employs in his explorations of the unconscious, shed significant light on the motivational forces at work in Le Fanu’s oeuvre. Le Fanu uses displacement and condensation, the major operations Freud attributes to dream work, to create an outside world, which reveals itself as an upended world within. This essay tries to demonstrate the psychological significance of central motifs in Le Fanu’s works, such as the double and the closed room. In light of later psychoanalytical insights into the influence of childhood traumatisation on the creativity of writers, Le Fanu appears absorbed by the incorporation of his innermost mortifications and yearnings into the defamiliarisations of his fiction. On the basis of Gothic patterns, he produces psychological fiction avant la lettre. He anticipates George Orwell’s dissection of mental processes in terms of manipulative social engineering, H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastic evocations of a Jungian collective unconscious, and literary interiorisation by modernist techniques, developed not long after Le Fanu’s death by the likes of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

In the present essay, Derek Mahon’s last four collections, from Life on Earth (2008) all the way to Washing Up (2020), are analysed in the context of ecology. I argue here that Mahon’s increased attention to man-caused environmental destruction is predicated on a withdrawal from the world of profit-obsessed capitalism in favour of a silent contemplation of nature, which Mahon evokes through the figure of Gaia. Relying on Bruno Latour’s revision of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, I show that Mahon’s late poetry represents an attempt to caringly engage the mystery and mystique of the Earth understood as a network of interrelated agents. This down-to-earth point of view, which Latour refers to as the terrestrial, characterises the Earthbound: the people who see the environment as an infinitely complex, material realm in which humanity is one subject among many. And it is the terrestrial vantage of the Earthbound perspective that Mahon evokes throughout his work, challenging the hegemony of capitalism and technology in an effort to reach the pulsating rhythms of what he calls “the still living whole”.

In the wake of the heightened attention accorded Michael Collins on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of his death in August 2022, this review essay addresses both the most recent and the most influential scholarly and popular treatments of his life and legacy. This material provides a window on both Ireland’s past and present – and also its future. When addressing Collins’s role in that contentious and much-contested past, new and more established scholarly studies by biographers and historians assist us not only to understand it better, but likewise also grasp the unique symbolic role that Collins occupies in Irish political life today. The fact is that many Irish people – and Irish Americans – simply cannot easily talk about Collins in balanced terms, or with the sort of historical detachment that they can bring to other bygone leaders of Ireland. He is a lightning rod for controversy in contemporary Ireland, with his very name sparking a debate whenever politically minded Irishmen get together. Unlike other Irish historical figures who have largely receded into the past, his life and death remain subjects of fascination on a national scale, with radio and television documentaries, fictionalised dramatisations, and even multimedia spectacles dedicated to the scrutiny of his brief life and tragic death. The review essay covers more than twenty biographies and biographical portraits, the majority of which have appeared in the twenty-first century, along with three dozen Collins-themed topical monographs as well as several research articles and selected pieces of journalism.

This article looks critically at Celia de Fréine’s Léaslíne a Lorg / In Search of a Horizon (2022), a poetry collection entirely devoted to the lockdown experienced during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic by an Irish woman – easily identified with the poet herself – from her house in Dublin. In the 18 poems that make up the collection, published in bilingual format (English and Irish), de Fréine addresses issues as relevant as the supposed objectivity of the scientific discourse around the virus, the human-nonhuman connection, environmental damage and the historical links of the COVID-19 pandemic with previous health crises lived through in Ireland, specifically the Hepatitis C Scandal. My analysis will close-read the poems, adopting both a national and a transnational perspective. The ultimate aim of this essay is to look at the virus in its socio-cultural dimension in order to complement the biomedical narratives around it.

The decades that followed Irish independence witnessed a doubling down of efforts to reinforce established gender roles and conservative systems of power in the fledgling state. The tensions that emerged between the cosmopolitanism outside of Ireland and the increasingly isolationist policies within found suitable expression in the contradictory treatment of Kate O’Brien’s work, lauded outside of Ireland, yet subjected at home to the stringent censorship laws that saw both Mary Lavelle (1936) and The Land of Spices (1941) banned upon publication. While, across the Atlantic, Maeve Brennan, then at the very outset of her career, was undergoing a form of self–censorship writing her first extended work, later to be published as The Visitor (2000). In the mid-twentieth century, Brennan and O’Brien explored depictions of women living on the margins of normative domestic life, beyond the institutions of marriage and motherhood. And in this, they paved the way for the radical cultural and spatial re-formations that would signal a new Ireland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, I consider Kate O’Brien’s novel Mary Lavelle (1936), alongside recently uncovered drafts of Brennan’s roughly contemporaneous novella, as a challenge to the patriarchal hegemony that emerged in the newly conceived Free State. And I suggest that in drafting her first extended work of fiction, Brennan was conscious of the proscriptions that O’Brien had fallen foul of in Ireland.