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Signalling the longevity of their struggle, Irish republicans active since 1969 frequently highlight family connections among previous generations of militant activists. First, this article interrogates how activists without republican lineage narrate their mobilisation and position themselves within the movement. Republicans without familial access to the movement, it is argued, frame their own commitment as uniquely independent, intense, and reflective. The article's second section examines the contentious, metaphorical formulation of "family" within Irish republicanism since the peace process of the 1990s. To maintain internal unity amid strategic reorientation, the Provisional movement leadership invoked a "republican family" within which misgivings and dissent could be contained and overcome. Conversely, Sinn Féin's republican critics rejected the Provisionals' attempts to delimit the "family." Simultaneously, senior Sinn Féin representatives strategically warned the London and Dublin governments of the volatility of the "family": sustaining the peace process, they claimed, required state actors to accommodate an enduringly truculent republican rank-and-file. Drawing upon republican oral histories and written autobiography, this article elucidates how republican families – both literal and metaphorical – have alternately cohered and stabilised the movement. It illuminates a continual contest for intergenerational political legitimacy, and for the right to determine the principles and programme of the republican "family." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland's relationship with the European Union (EU) has, since 2008, been tested by an enduring and complex series of economic and political crises. The contributions to this special issue examine these EU-linked crises through a variety of Irish perspectives, including the impact on public opinion, environmental policy, migration policy, foreign policy and the state's positioning on Brexit. In the introduction to this special issue, we review how the Irish-EU nexus was challenged by and responded to the financial crisis and Brexit. This sets the scene for a deep examination of how other crises have been experienced in Ireland; how collectively these developments have challenged Irish-EU relations; and what this means for patterns of Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation across different policy sectors and political settings. In this context, we highlight an evolving political and economic landscape of both continuity and change in Ireland where the relative influence of the EU, in the shadow of crisis, is determined by discrete political circumstances and policy specific dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chances are growing that an unexpected consequence of the 2016 UK referendum to exit the European Union (or "Brexit") may eventuate in the unexpected development of Northern Ireland exiting the UK, or what might be termed "NIRexit." In other words, Brexit may lead to Irish unification. The long-cherished dream of Irish nationalists for "a united Ireland" may therefore be the inadvertent consequence of the campaign to withdraw from the EU by the Brexiteers. Both demographics and economics are pushing Dublin and Belfast ever closer together. The increasing likelihood is that the attractions of remaining in the EU will be more important to Northern Irish citizens than age-old anxieties about joining the traditionally Catholic dominated Irish Republic. "Potatoes, not popes" may weigh more heavily than historical divisions between the Catholic south and the Irish north, especially because the Irish Republic is no longer dominated by the Catholic Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate information on public opinion is a necessary condition for the effective functioning of democracies. For Lasswell, the open interplay of public opinion with policy is the ‘distinguishing mark of popular rule’ [Lasswell, H. D. (1941). Democracy through public opinion. Menasha, WI: Banta]. Yet, despite its importance, there is a distinct gap in methods and tools to understand large volumes of public opinion statements on any issue. The 2013 referendum in Ireland on the abolition of the Seanad (Senate) was a prominent example of this gap. Opinion polls were perceived as misleading in suggesting that the referendum was going to pass. Aiming to address opinion noise, and the polarity suggested by opinion polls, we conducted an online study of subjectivity in the week before polling. Using Q-methodology and the stream of public opinion generated during the campaign, we identified three main perspectives on the issue of Seanad abolition. One perspective was in favour of abolition, two opposed the proposal. We conclude that Q-methodology could be used to support opinion polling and political communication by providing a supporting context of the range of social perspectives on the issue at hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price - the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical junctures are an enduring concept in the study of institutional change, but the literature prompts a certain amount of definitional ambiguity around what a critical juncture is, and how best we should approach describing and explaining these rare instances of change. This paper presents and utilises a revised critical juncture framework, which helps to explore the role of context, openings, institutions, ideas, agents and discourse in these significant change events. The framework is then utilised in relation to the Irish Department of Finance (DoF), which is a pivotal institution at the heart of the Irish system of government. It is argued that the DoF’s position and influence in government have been impacted by three institutional change events, involving the establishment of the Department of the Public Service (DPS) in 1973; its disbandment in 1987; and the establishment of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) in 2011. The available evidence supports a linkage between DPS’ establishment and DPER’s establishment almost 40 years later. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the crisis, Greece and Ireland did so much later. What accounts for 'early' versus 'delayed' truth seekers? The second concerns variations in learning outcomes. Iceland's commission paved the way for learning institutional lessons, but truth commissions in Greece and Ireland became overtly politicised. What accounts for these divergences? This article compares truth commissions in Iceland, Greece and Ireland and identifies two types of political learning -- institutional and instrumental -- related to the establishment of a truth commission. It argues that political elites in countries with higher precrisis levels of trust in institutions and public transparency are more likely to establish economic truth commissions quickly; this is the 'institutional logic' of learning. The 'instrumental logic' of learning, in contrast, leads governments interested in apportioning blame to their predecessors to establish commissions at a later date, usually proximal to critical elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political condition in Ireland following the Great Recession from 2008 to 2016. Topics include the impact of the recession to the economy in the country and in British and European economies, the main development in Irish politics since the global financial crises, and the key factors that will determine the future political stability in the area.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the economic and political crisis in Ireland, the history of the Irish republican politics, and how Irish literary production reshapes neoliberalism.

The case of Ireland provides an example of a long-term critical reflection on the nature of democracy that is not linked to social movements. Instead it is the result of an interplay between social science research, mass media, and parliamentary debate, all of which employ the notion of clientelism. The structural feature on which the respective critique focuses is the peculiar relationship between public representatives and voters in Ireland. It is strongly based in constituency service and individual brokerage and thus contradicts universalistic expectations towards modern politics. The article starts with a justification of the choice of the case and the theoretical framework, i.e. the sociology of critical capacity proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot. It then introduces records of parliamentary debates and newspaper articles as the empirical material and qualitative content analysis as the main method of analysis. Subsequent sections reconstruct the dynamics of the critical reflection over a thirty-year period and highlight significant patterns of critique and justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. This paper uses conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. It examines the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. Drawing on comparative political economy literature, it distinguishes between two such paradigms – market-conforming and social equity – and applies them to three reform themes: reconfiguration of public budgets, the public service pay bargain, and the organizational profile of state competences. The findings entail lessons for understanding the malleability of policy choice, and how state policy choices in response to crisis are framed and implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although immigrants have been arriving in Ireland in the last years and contributed to the economic development of the country, their underrepresentation in politics seems to be a hot issue. In order to prove this hypothesis, the political broadcasts used in the 2011 general and presidential elections will be analysed. I will observe the presence or absence of immigrants in the broadcasts and the way politicians refer to them. In addition, the construction of Irishness in the videos will be observed as well. Accordingly, this research paper will consider the discursive representation of immigrants in the 2011 campaigns and to the way they are (or are not) taken into consideration in the construction of Irishness; I will do so by scrutinising the spoken texts in the broadcasts. The sample will consist of the most representative TV broadcasts of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Fein, Labour Party, Green Party and the Socialist Party. As regards methodology, critical discourse analysis, and particularly social actors theory (van Leeuwen, 2008), will be used. The analysis will show that immigrants are not mentioned directly and do not appear as explicit actors, probably because they are not among the groups of the population with right to vote. This makes clear that, although they have helped Ireland grow in the last fifteen years or so, their social situation is not a priority for contemporary Irish politics and, therefore, they cannot contribute to Irishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Budget oversight by the Irish parliamentary chambers, the Houses of the Oireachtas, is under-developed by international standards. Many stakeholders and participants question whether the existing process is meaningful or impactful. Nevertheless, there is a strong momentum for reform with Ireland's public administration. Against this background, the OECD presents in this report an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Ireland's system of parliamentary engagement in budgeting, and outlines a number of proposals for continued reform by reference to international experience, for consideration by the Houses of the Oireachtas and by other institutional actors and by the political system more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests the hypothesis that ethnic identities in divided societies lose their significance after the implementation of consociational power-sharing arrangements. It analyses and compares the cases of Northern Ireland and Malaysia, as both have a substantially different experience of liberal consociationalism. In Northern Ireland, power sharing is strictly enforced through the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998, whilst in Malaysia it is exercised more informally within the Barisan Nasional coalition, which has governed the state since independence in 1957. Malaysia, therefore, has a considerably longer history of consociationalism than Northern Ireland. It is thought that if a mitigation of the salience of ethnic identities is taking place, ethnic political parties would become less prevalent. This article argues that these parties remain highly significant and, therefore, a shared identity is not being realized in either case. This conclusion does not, however, demonstrate a shortcoming of consociational theory but instead shows that managing conflict in divided societies is not the same as removing it altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clientelism, pork-barrel politics and ‘pulling a stroke’ are important topics in Irish political science, and growing evidence demonstrates that Irish government ministers deliver disproportionate capital investments for their constituencies in grant allocations.Smarter Travel, a new policy area in the sustainability agenda, began providing capital funding for cycling projects in 2012 and offers a study of clientelism in a new field. This article shows that in 2012 and 2014, the Minister with responsibility for commuter and public transport overruled civil servant recommendations to fund four cycling-based projects in his own constituency and in another constituency immediately prior to a Dáil by-election. The allocation of €27 million in National Cycle Network and Active Travel Towns funding is examined using Freedom of Information requests and the role of the Minister is highlighted. This study of pork in a new field reveals some of the dynamics between the civil service and a government minister and suggests a process of manipulating funding schemes to deliver largesse. Clientelism and the consequent distortion of funding objectives are shown to be in conflict with the effective implementation of cycling policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article describes a statistical method for aggregating the information from Irish opinion polls. Such aggregate estimates provide academic researchers with a time series of support for political parties, and inform the public better about opinion polls by focusing on trends and uncertainty in these estimates. The article discusses the challenge of aggregating opinion polls in a multi-party setting with a comparatively limited number of polls available and presents daily estimates of party support for the 1987–2016 period. The article develops a method to better model major sudden political and societal events, which have been common in Ireland since 2007. Finally, it discusses how polling aggregation estimates can enhance opinion poll reporting in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that Ireland's major party elites enjoy an unusual degree of ideological flexibility, which in turn provides the parties with an uncommon capacity to adjust programmatically when changing electoral opportunities, or challenges, present themselves. Evidence from two originally designed parliamentary surveys, conducted in sharply different contexts in the 2007 and 2011 elections, supports this finding. A closer examination of individual TDs’ policy positions reveals that TDs possess considerable flexibility to adapt their policy appeals. Although parties may appear programmatically similar at the aggregate level, the high degree of internal ideological heterogeneity reinforces that the autonomy individual TDs have to alter their positions within their local electoral context. These findings point to a conclusion that the presence of a high degree of ideological flexibility, especially at the level of individual TDs, not policy positions in themselves, is critical for understanding electoral politics in Ireland. This conclusion stands in contrast to the popular perspective that competition over policy may alter the nature of party competition in Ireland. The findings also provide a deeper appreciation of how Irish parliamentarians are able to assume policy positions among their constituents that often differ from the party line in legislative votes in parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top-down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post-New Public Management emphasis on recentralizing administrative capacity. This article, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in large part due to the global financial crisis. Governments have gained stronger controls over the structures and practices of agencies, but agencies are also key players in securing better governance outcomes. The implication is that the crisis has not seen a return to the archetypal command-and-control model, nor a wholly new implementation of negotiated European-type practices, but rather a new accountability balance between elements of the Westminster system itself that have not previously been well understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the clichéd status of the phrase ‘the party’s over’ makes it almost redundant, the esteem in which parties are held has never been lower. One facet of party decline is the renewed interest in independents. Previously confined to transition states and non-democracies, they have begun to make some political headway in more established states. This is a worrying development for both political parties and those who profess their normative value. This article examines the source of the re-emergent independent presence via a case study of Ireland, a party democracy where they have had the greatest impact. Using constituency-level data, the influences of political, cultural and institutional factors are examined. It is found that independents are a product of both a small political system and declining party attachment. They are a protest option for those not drawn to ideological anti-establishment parties, while there is mixed evidence concerning the influence of a centre–periphery socioeconomic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the history of childhood and history of education have gained status as political concerns through the establishment of numerous truth commissions and inquiries into historical institutional child abuse. This article discusses the methodological and ethical dilemmas that arise when writing the history of abused children with the objective of both recognising and redressing the victims as well as offering an account of ‘what really happened’. Comparing how inquiry commissions in Ireland, Sweden and Denmark evaluate and approach victims’ oral testimonies and written records from child welfare agencies, the article explores the acts of balancing between different epistemological approaches to the concept of ‘truth’. The results suggest that while inquiries have to address and convince several audiences simultaneously, empiricist positivist methods of inquiry have dominated the approaches to ‘truth’. However, this approach has not been without ambivalence, and there are examples of constructivist approaches as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many claims have been made for the impact of deliberative democracy in generating change in people’s opinions, and often in predictable ways. It is claimed that people involved in deliberation change their minds on important issues. We also know that political participation and attitudes towards certain issues depend on political knowledge and civic education. To what extent are these linked? Do certain types of people react differently to their involvement in deliberation and is opinion change contingent on the varying capacities and knowledge of participants? Using data from a nationwide exercise in deliberative democracy carried out in Ireland we find some evidence that the ‘deliberative’ citizen, or at least the citizen most likely to shift opinion following deliberation, is under 65, with median levels of knowledge. We also find that heterogeneous groups are important for deliberation to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the EU, the Great Recession begot economic and political crisis heralding a renewed march towards populism and party system fragmentation. Much commentary about Ireland remarked on the absence of a populist surge of the type seen in many other bailout states (Clifford, 2016; Pappas, 2015). But is this characterization of the Irish experience accurate? The imposition of austerity policies and the protracted recovery propelled long standing critics of the Irish economic model centre stage and in common with many other states, party system fragmentation advanced with the long dominant centrist parties suffering severe losses at general elections (Marsh, Farrell and McElroy, 2017; Kriesi et al., 2016). New and more radical political forces did emerge and general elections in 2011 and 2016 were among the most volatile in Western Europe since 1945. The traditional parties of government experienced a sharp contraction in their vote shares but they retained their hold on power and the parties which have been labelled populist, remain some distance from entering into government. The focus of research on populism in Ireland has been on the supply side to date, looking at parties and campaigns (O'Malley and Fitzgibbon, 2015; Suiter, 2017) and this paper seeks to further the debate by investigating voter attitudes. Using data from the 2016 Irish National Election Study, the paper will demonstrate that many voters hold views which are populist. Irish voters are most likely to hold anti-elite and anti system populist attitudes, sometimes labelled left-wing populism in the literature and a smaller group hold strong outgroup and national identity views, often times called nativism or right-wing populism. Anti-elite populists are most likely to support Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil and Independents while outgroup and national identity populists lean strongly towards Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two decades have witnessed very important economic and legislative changes in the Republic of Ireland, which have contributed to both the reinforcement of national beliefs, and the restructuring of traditional values as well as social practices. In this context, the tendency for some extremist groups to attack minorities such as Asians or Eastern Europeans, along with the allegedly institutionalised exclusion of Travellers, contrasts very much with a slowly but increasingly overall positive perception of an already marginalised group such as the LGBT community. Bearing the latter in mind, in this paper we aim to reveal how otherness is represented in the Irish print media, and the extent to which more or less discriminatory viewpoints are reinforced in the public domain. In particular, we concentrate on the discursive construction of gayness, and the potential homophobic imagery veiled and revealed in a corpus of newspaper articles from the last years of, and after, the so-called Celtic Tiger era. To do this, the detection of topoi will be combined with metaphor analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the radical left and its activities in Ireland. It mentions its conflicting assembly of anarchist, Marxist-Republican and Trotskyist idea instilled by a shared language. An overview of the political parties including Sinn Fénn, Right2Water and the Socialist Party is also presented.

Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates in an effort to avoid punishment by voters for supporting austerity measures while still adhering to strict party discipline by voting along party lines. Our test case is Ireland, a country that has experienced periods of rapid economic growth as well as one deep financial and economic crisis. Tracking dissent from 1987 to 2013, we show that austerity measures undermine government cohesion as verbal opposition markedly increases in direct response to the economic pain felt in a legislator's constituency. The economic vulnerability of a legislator's constituency also directly explains position taking on austerity budgets among both government and opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether variation in the social background characteristics of political elites is associated with variation in intra-party attitudes. The skewed distribution of gender, age and social class among political elites may substantively affect the distribution of political attitudes within a legislature compared to society as a whole. Although it is well established that party affiliation is the strongest predictor of attitudes within a legislature, social background may structure attitudes within political parties. This paper tests the extent of intra-party social background effects using a case study of Ireland, where inter-party attitude variance is low. It finds that gender and social class are the strongest social background predictors of intra-party attitudes, thus justifying a wider social focus on demographic rates of political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]