Planning for Rural Housing in the Republic of Ireland: From National Spatial Strategies to Development Plans

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (formalized with the publication of the Irish National Spatial Strategy), as well as the level of housing construction that has been observed in an increasingly post-productivist countryside (triggered by counter-urbanization flows, increased affluence and demands for second holiday homes, etc.). The paper reviews all policy instruments that have been used to manage rural housing at various scales (from national strategies to local level development plans). It is argued that while spatial planning adopts an integrative vocabulary, as policy moves down the spatial scale hierarchy, multi-dimensional spatial goals are implemented through traditional, narrow land-use regulation. This often leads to rural housing being addressed in isolation from its wider social and economic context, disconnecting housing from wider rural community issues and ultimately failing to deliver a coordinated and coherent spatial policy for managing rural settlements.     

An Artist on Inis Oírr and Inis Meáin: Simon Coleman’s Visit to the Aran Islands in 1959 on Behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission

Abstract

Although the main emphasis of the work of the Irish Folklore Commission throughout the thirty-five years of its existence (1935–70) was on verbal tradition, it also sought, from the middle of the 1930s, to document the material culture of rural Ireland. While this work was carried out mainly by a staff member, the Commission also, in the late 1940s and 1950s, employed an artist, Simon Coleman RHA, to undertake fieldwork for short periods of time in a number of areas in the countryside, assisted by the Commission’s collectors. His task was to make drawings and, where feasible, paintings of traditional buildings, work practices, farm tools and machinery, sea-craft, fishing techniques, and tradition-bearers. This article surveys the contexts in which the artist worked and assesses the contribution that he made to the Irish Folklore Commission’s endeavours to document the material culture of the Irish countryside.     

Determinants of Net Migration to Rural Areas,and the Impacts of Migration on Rural Labour Markets and Self-Employment in Rural Sweden

Abstract

Across most of Europe, the countryside seems to show a polarized development in which large districts are depopulating, while certain areas, mainly around big- and mid-sized cities, are increasing in population. The latter development is often described in concepts of “rural gentrification” and “rurbanization”, symbolizing a transformation of rural communities to communities with urban values and lifestyles. Most studies of the effects of these processes have focused on social and cultural consequences, as e.g. the displacements of lower-income households with higher-income residents and of rural culture and values with urban ones. This paper examines the phenomenon from another perspective, namely the effects of the “rurbanization” processes on countryside's labour markets and economic life. This paper aims at analysing the determinants of net migration to rural areas in general and to different types of regions, and the impacts of in-migration on rural labour markets, self-employment and other socio-economic conditions in Sweden for the period of 2003–2005. We find that net migration into rural areas increases with the size of adjacent local and regional centres, whereas net migration decreases with the average commuting distance of workers in the rural areas. When comparing in-migrants to rural areas with rural area stayers, our results indicate that the former has lower incomes, a lower employment ratio and a lower degree of entrepreneurial activities. These differences could—at least partly—be explained by the fact that rural area stayers were on average 6 years older than rural area in-migrants, i.e. the two groups were in different stages of their life cycles.     

Indifferent but Mobilized: Rural Politics during the Interwar Period in Eastern and Western Europe

What did peasants discuss at party meetings? Were they mobilized by ethnic politics or indifferent to them altogether? The end of the First World War brought about universal male suffrage in much of Europe, and with it the process of mass politics began. The concept of national indifference is important in understanding interwar politics, because this period is often studied teleologically with attention focused on extremism and nationalism as the primary mobilizing issue

Agrarian movements have been under-researched, and when Agrarians have been studied, it has been through the prism of elite politics. This comparative paper seeks to redress this omission by looking at grassroots rural politics. The interwar countryside was marked by profound political, economic and social transformation but also in terms of what Robert Paxton has described as the ‘triple crisis of the countryside’ – worsening economic conditions, the declining status of the countryside and inadequate political representation. The paper will explore how reform and crisis impacted how agrarian politics functioned at a local level by asymmetrically comparing cases from Romania, Poland and Ireland, with the final case helping to contextualize Eastern Europe within the wider European experience This paper argues that the rural population was mobilized, but primarily in the context of local issues rather than national ethno-political questions. Local party organization was, to paraphrase James C Scott, the site ‘of an exchange of small arms fire’ in rural class conflict, as questions regarding the control of public space, generational conflict and power within the village mobilized peasants. Thus, I argue that it was the underlying socio-economic issues that mobilized the rural population, not nationalism. The dynamics of these conflicts were shaped by local economic, political and social power dynamics, and by using indifference as a concept, we can look more deeply at interwar politics from a grassroots perspective and develop a more nuanced understanding of local, national and European politics.     

Women's monastic enclosures in early Ireland: a study of female spirituality and male monastic mentalities

Early Irish communities of religious women have never been adequately studied. However, Irish hagiography, unique among medieval saints' lives because of the incidental details it offers, provides much evidence about nuns and nunneries. Because the Irish saints' lives were written by monks, this information also reveals the monastic attitude towards nuns. Hagiography shows that many nunneries were established before the seventh century. But these communities began to disappear soon after, so that today only the location of a dozen or so are known to historians.Women's religious communities disappeared for a combination of reasons, political, social, economic, and spiritual. Secular society was hostile towards these communities from the start because they consumed a resource considered precious by men: unmarried women. Male ecclesiastics held an ambiguous attitude towards nuns and nunneries. They believed that women could attain salvation as well as themselves. Yet the entire church hierarchy of Ireland was dominated by supposedly celibate men, whose sacral functions and ritual celibacy were threatened by women, especially women's sexuality. Hagiography expressed this threat with the theme of sinful, lustful nuns; even the spirituality of women vowed to chastity and poverty was suspect. This attitude affected the structure, organization, and eventually the survival of women's monastic enclosures in early Ireland.     

Strategic spatial planning and contested ruralities: Insights from the republic of Ireland

Since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), a growing body of literature has emerged related to European spatial planning. Much of this literature is focused on the influence of the ESDP on city regions and urban policy in individual member states. Much less attention has been paid thus far to the influence of the ESDP on the formulation of spatial strategies and plans for rural areas. Within this context, this paper aims to explore the formulation of a national framework for spatial development in the Republic of Ireland, and in particular to examine the expression given to rural development and planning issues. This paper reviews the extent that the Irish National Spatial Strategy can provide a basis for a spatially defined (rather than sectoral based) rural policy by examining the policy construction of rurality and how this will impact on three aspects of rural planning policy: the conceptualization of the urban–rural relationship; managing rural settlements; and rural development. The paper concludes by developing wider lessons from the Irish example in the application of the European Union discourse of spatial planning to rural regions, and the difficulties associated with developing and implementing spatial policies in a deeply contested rural arena.     

Reframing the “Irish Question”: the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the formation of Irish nationalism, 1900–22

This article examines the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the early twentieth century and argues that it played a crucial role in shaping a popular understanding of the “Irish Question”. This mass-membership movement impacted upon the development of the Irish state and population. By taking this rural, social movement as a lens to analyse Irish society in the early twentieth century, social and economic issues re-emerge as central components to a contemporary understanding of Ireland's increasingly contested position within the Union. As the expectation of some kind of political resolution to demands for political independence grew during the First World War, radical nationalism absorbed a social and economic discourse that originated within the co-operative movement in its critique of the British state as it operated in Ireland. Irish co-operation represented a sophisticated form of political economy that provided an influential ideological platform for Irish nationalists as they anticipated some form of political independence.     

The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century

"A classic case where out-migration interacted with many other geographical phenomena is provided by rural Ireland in the nineteenth century. The apparent turning point was the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the areas with the greatest suffering from starvation did not necessarily show the greatest population decline, suggesting that other forces were active. Considerable economic and social changes were already taking place before the Famine: fertility was being reduced, later marriage was becoming established and considerable emigration was already taking place. Immediately after the Famine those areas which had been hardest hit often reverted to pre-Famine conditions and did not show strong population decline until the 1870s. The Famine was a most serious event, but the modernization of Irish rural life, which linked emigration with changes in family structure, agriculture and population numbers, was more important in bringing about geographical change."     

Nuclear Economies and Local Supply Chains in Peripheral Areas: The Case of West Cumbria

The aim of this paper is to fill the gap in data relating to local supply chains in the proximity of nuclear sites by investigating the site of Sellafield in West Cumbria, UK. Using information obtained from invoice data provided by Sellafield Ltd, the site-licenced company, and from primary research, the authors explore the relevance of nuclear procurement within the area, by evaluating levels of economic leakage and seepage resulting from suppliers’ subcontracting and work carried out locally. The study shows that the presence of a nuclear site has a crucial role for the surrounding area and for its economy. The results indicate a significant level of financial retention in the area with regard to work carried out in-house and local subcontracting at a first tier. In particular, the results identify cash flows related to second-tier suppliers located in West Cumbria, demonstrating that about a third of the total work carried out or subcontracted at the nuclear site stays in the area. These findings underline the significant impact of Sellafield on the West Cumbria economy and, more generally, provide an overview of the importance of nuclear sites for local supply chains in peripheral and remote areas.     

Commodification and Creative Destruction in the Australian Rural Landscape: The Case of Bridgetown,Western Australia

This paper examines the destructive tendencies associated with the commodification of rurality in some of Australia’s more scenic and accessible rural areas. While development based on the consumption of idealised rural landscapes and cultures can contribute to the accumulation of capital in rural areas, it can also result in the destruction of those aspects which consumers find attractive. These attributes include traditional farming landscapes, picturesque country towns, scenic rural environments, and perceptions of congenial and cohesive local communities. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the processes that lead to the degradation of these attributes. The discussion is set within the context of the ‘commodification of rurality’ and ‘creative destruction’ perspectives, and uses the case of Bridgetown in the south‐west of Western Australia to illustrate how an almost unfettered pattern of development is leading to the gradual destruction of the countryside ideal.     

Understanding Local Leadership in Building the Capacity of Rural Communities in Australia

Current approaches to rural community development in Australia provide for limited government intervention. Such intervention is usually housed within programmes that seek to build the internal capacity of communities to achieve long term socio‐economic sustainability. A fundamental implementation strategy for capacity building has been developing local leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach is that good leadership will result in existing resources being mobilised for a more sustainable function and new resources attracted. What though is good leadership in terms of building the capacity of rural communities to develop sustainable socio‐economic futures? This paper compares the conceptualisation of leadership within rural development policies and leadership training programmes with the nature of local leadership as it exists in on‐ground community building projects. From an in‐depth review of the role and nature of local leadership within six Australian rural communities it was found that local leadership could result in improved adaptive capacity if the leadership is similar in nature to Burn's (1978 ) transformational model of leadership. Within policy, local leadership was most often conceptualised as being similar to this transformational model. However, rural leadership training programmes tended to conceptualise leadership as a top‐down process, similar to Burn's (1978 ) transactional model. While this study of leadership within rural communities revealed that transactional skills, as taught in leadership training programmes, were important for successful project management, such skills did not necessarily result in improved community adaptive capacity. It is suggested that, while transactional leadership can have an important role in influencing the development of rural communities, greater attention needs to be given to developing strategies to support transformational leadership.     

Family stories,public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.     

Forms of secularism and multiculturalism: Charles Taylor and Ireland

This article seeks to frame the work of the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor in terms of its significance for Irish culture. Taylor came to wide prominence for his work on multiculturalism, but the varying ways he understands this term are especially important for Ireland. “Multiculturalism 1” speaks to the kinds of difficulties between nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. “Multiculturalism 2” speaks to the more widely understood meaning of the term, which is connected to a cultural diversity that is often born of immigration. Taylor has had a strong role in the emergence of the term “interculturalism” to describe a form of cultural diversity that explicitly seeks to balance the needs of minority and majority cultures, and in Canada and Quebec that term has taken on a different understanding than the one that is common in Ireland. That work on interculturalism also strongly underwrites Taylor’s work on secularism, and he traces that social phenomenon in ways with clear relevance for Ireland. Although Taylor’s explicit engagement with Ireland is rare, it is clearly time to bring his work into the mainstream of studies of Irish culture.     

Three 19th-century house sites in rural Ireland

Abstract

This report describes archaeological research at three house sites in rural Ireland. The anthropologically-based research began in 1994 with the goal of attempting to understand the material conditions of daily life in the 19th-century Irish countryside. The excavation results presented here were obtained from individual households in counties Roscommon, Sligo and Donegal, at sites dating from the early to mid-19th century. Two of the sites are known to have been abandoned as a result of forced eviction. Particular attention is paid to the ceramics found.     

A question of national identity or minority rights? The changing status of the Irish language in Ireland since 1922

When the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, the Irish language was a substantial feature of the politics that led up to this event. Subsequently the language was recognised as the national and first official language of the Irish Free State. Since then, the de jure position of Irish appears to have evolved. Most recently, legislation was introduced in the Republic of Ireland, and statutory duties were placed upon certain public bodies with regard to the Irish language in Northern Ireland. This article examines this historical shift in the status of Irish in the two political jurisdictions in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland [as a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK)], and explains its significance.     

The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars

The importance of Ireland to an understanding of Oscar Wilde has been the subject of contentious discussion in recent years. For one group of critics Wilde has been considered “a militant Irish republican”, an Irish “terrorist by another name”, whose literary practices resembled those of “guerrilla warfare”, an ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, and committed Irish nationalist whose work is suffused with references to Ireland and the Irish Question, very influenced by his Irish background and political views, possibly shaped by a genuine interest in and awareness of Irish folklore and the Irish oral tradition, and deeply engaged with issues of Irish identity and culture. For an opposing set of critics Wilde should at best be considered a “reluctant” Irish patriot, who referenced his Irish “identity” only when it suited him commercially, was more interested in exploiting intellectual fashions and fads than making genuine political points, was a shallow thinker in most areas of life and certainly didn’t use his writing to pursue Irish nationalist issues, was probably more of a British imperialist than an Irish nationalist, knew precious little about Irish folklore or Irish oral traditions, and his works contain few if any references to Irish issues or themes. The differences between these two interpretive communities certainly seem quite large, and these differences have been emphasised in a disputatious manner which has shed more heat than light on the messy matter of Wilde’s national identity. In this article I want to begin to clear up some of the misunderstandings I think have crept into this critical dispute and suggest fruitful ways in which opposing critics can come together in if not harmony then perhaps a less acrimonious, more productive way.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

Gast! A Breton moment in Cré na Cille,and why it matters

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s famously difficult Irish language novel Cré na Cille contains a cluster of Breton words that have not all been recognised as such. These words are a clue that the French-speaking airman, arguably the only character in the novel with a significant “arc”, is in fact supposed to be a Breton. His immersion in Gaelic Ireland, his frustrated hope of fulfilment in philological studies and pan-Celticism and his ultimate lapse into patriotic Frenchness mirror the experiences of Breton nationalists of the 1940s – some of whom were helped by Ó Cadhain himself to take refuge in Ireland after the Second World War – and represent a subtle critique of Brittany’s pan-Celticist hopes within the novel’s larger multifaceted critique of Irish rural life.     

Multiculturalism and the immigrant “Irish woman” after the Celtic Tiger: marginalisation,gender-based violence and family dysfunction in Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls

This article breaks new ground in examining how “new Irish” immigrant women have responded to the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the different forms of gender discrimination and marginalisation they face both within their minority ethnic communities and the Irish host society. It approaches Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls (2013) as an exemplary work of fiction which exposes unresolved injustices and inequalities suffered by immigrant women. Akpoveta creates a narrative that complicates previous representations of cultural encounters between newcomers and long-established members of Ireland’s host society, not least because her Nigerian female protagonist arrives as a postgraduate student rather than an asylum seeker or refugee. She fictionalises female experiences of marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction within an all-Nigerian family that outwardly appears to be a model of integration and social inclusion in an open and welcoming Irish multicultural society.     

Political imprisonment and the sanctity of death: performing heritage in ‘Troubled’ Ireland

The ‘Troubles’ is a euphemism associated with sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Similarly, that term also is used to depict turmoil in all of Ireland between 1916 through 1924. During both eras, political imprisonment coupled with various forms of political violence (e.g. bombings, executions, and prisoner abuse) marred Irish society in ways that invoke socio-religious meaning. In particular, the sanctity of death captures the intense semiotics of those events and points to further theorising along lines of the Durkheimian tradition. As we shall examine herein, violations of the sanctity of death compound social conflict and the resistance it creates. Fieldwork was undertaken in Dublin and Belfast where official landmarks were explored in-depth: Kilmainham Gaol and the Crumlin Road Prison, respectively. Additionally in Belfast, other – unofficial – cultural sites provide further evidence of socio-religious symbolism, most notably the Irish Republican History Museum, Roddy McCorley’s Club in West Belfast, and murals in both Loyalist and Republican communities. Whereas Durkeimian theory remains at the forefront of the analysis, insights also are informed by heritage studies, in particular notions of cultural performance in contested societies.