This chapter takes a number of priests with a public profile and examines the extent to which they are prophetic voices or complicit functionaries. Choosing the French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) as a comparator, Eamon Maher examines the published work of Joseph Dunn, Vincent Twomey, Mark Patrick Hederman and Brendan Hoban, before concluding that they all share the prophetic tendency of raising uncomfortable and often unpopular issues while remaining within the institution. He further argues that being so closely aligned to the Church makes it difficult, and professionally dangerous, for priests to criticise certain practices within the institution. However, while retaining a huge love of, and devotion to, the main tenets of Catholicism, these men nevertheless feel obliged to point out things that are going wrong, even when expressing such views can often involve them in conflict with their superiors at home and in Rome.

In 1822, George Webb Derenzy, a former captain in the British army, published a volume titled Enchiridion: Or, A Hand for the One-Handed. The text highlighted what Derenzy called his ‘One-Handed Apparatus,’ a collection of twenty instruments that he had made after losing his arm in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to ease his daily routines of washing, eating, writing, and socializing, Derenzy’s inventions included, among other items, an egg cup that tilted in any direction and a card-holder that fanned out and folded up for easy transportation. This chapter examines Derenzy’s motivations for publishing the Enchiridion; the responses he received from readers around the globe; and the presuppositions about gender and class that ultimately constrained his consumer appeal and profit. Derenzy chose to publish, not patent, his contraptions due to his charitable desires to share them with others with lost limbs. His focus on using his prostheses to reclaim aspects of his social respectability and manly independence that his impairments seemed to threaten, however, ended up alienating poor, middling, and female patrons and limiting his success as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Perhaps due to these marketing missteps, Derenzy experienced the plight of many physically-impaired people during the period; unable to profitably labour, he sustained a steady descent into poverty.

This chapter offers a detailed description of how fishermen on the west coast of Scotland worked their fishing grounds and developed their productivity. The historical development of fishing techniques and fishing gear significantly affected what ground was considered 'workable'. James Gibson's and Tim Ingold's analyses of affordances offer a useful way of understanding the development of fishing grounds, and more broadly, how humans perceive, experience and transform the environments they find themselves in, in every moment of their lives. Anthropological studies of the role of human labour in human-environment relations have generally taken place outside industrial capitalist settings and are quite distinct from anthropological studies of waged labour and capitalism. Capitalism itself can be seen as a project to redefine what counts as productive activity, how productivity is assessed, and in particular, to re-shape people's 'own purpose' in their activities.

Patsy McGarry draws on the knowledge of the changed role of religion in Irish society that he has accumulated as religious affairs correspondent of The Irish Times through the troubled recent decades. He points out that until the Church hierarchy is prepared to acknowledge responsibility for their poor handling of the clerical abuse scandals and the pain inflicted on the survivors, there will be no healing. His treatment of the various scandals and the role of Irish bishops in trying to limit reputational damage to the Church, illustrate McGarry’s contention that the times are definitely ‘a changin’’ and they will continue to do so for some time to come in Ireland.

This chapter shows how it is not the law, as such, but only representations of it that affect behaviour. Citizens act in terms of how they think the law is and not necessarily as it actually is. Knowledge of the law is drawn increasingly from a range of media and persons download, view and ingest this knowledge in an ad hoc and unsystematic manner. There is now an established victim’s rights discourse embedded in journalistic practice and media generated legal narratives tend to play down the rights of defendants and undermine important legal principles that safeguard the efficacy of the trial process. A diet of victim-centred news coverage over time has tended to make the general public more retributive in their thinking. The public learn about the law through the media and there is a tendency to highlight the sensational and to see the world as far more violent than is typically the case, to hold to worse police detection rates than is actually the case and to misrepresent the racial make-up of offenders. Though there is excellent coverage of crime in the media there is little consideration of legal principles and procedures and the notion that law is a technical and elaborate system of knowledge is largely absent in the portrayal of crime in both news and drama. The chapter considers the so-called CSI-effect: the notion that citizens, notably jurors, hold to absurdly high levels of proof in relation to forensic evidence and how this fetishisation of forensic evidence is having real-world affects in terms of delivering proper verdicts. This chapter critically assesses the public’s level of legal awareness in relation to crime and argue for a robust Public Criminology.

Using Charles Taylor’s A Catholic Modernity? as its starting point, David Cochrane explores the evolving role of Catholicism in Ireland over the last half century and concludes that the disentangling of the Church from the dominant political and cultural institutions of society has paradoxically extended many of the very values Catholicism celebrates. Due to the severing of its close traditional connection to the State, the Church has rediscovered its original mission to provide a prophetic spiritual voice, especially in favour of the poor, and to align itself more closely with the concerns of its founder, Jesus Christ.

This chapter examines an aspect of myth building about law that is often overlooked, namely the role of Parliamentarians in shaping public beliefs about the European Court of Human Rights. Through an examination of recent debates in both Houses of Parliament about what became the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, the chapter illustrates how current public mistrust of the Court stems in part from ideas propagated by politicians during the course of Parliamentary debates. Specifically, the author shows the process by which two different myths about the Court have been created: first, that the Court poses a risk to the rights and freedoms of a significant group of people that national legislators, regardless of the laws that they pass, are unable to defend; second, that the Court has an inherent bias against religious groups and their adherents. The chapter demonstrates how seemingly factual legal arguments are used to strengthen and promulgate these myths. Ultimately, it shows how even at the heart of law, in the very places where law itself is made, myths about law are created and retained.

This chapter discusses the nature of the material spectacles connected with mega-events. It begins by recognising and exploring the importance of the 'material spectacle' aspect of mega-events throughout their history over the course of the modernisation process. Mega-events like Olympics and Expos evidently involve performative spectacle of various kinds. The early Expos contributed 'physical legacies' of various kinds to the long-term development of central areas of their host cities, even if only in intermittent and unsystematic ways. The chapter provides some historical information about the relation between, on the one hand, host cities and, on the other hand, mega-events and the material spectacles often associated with them for the 1850-1970 period. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Olympic movement began to get interested in the various possible legacies of Olympic Games events, including tangible legacies for the host city, in the 1990s.