This chapter outlines the AMU’s history immediately post 1918 and its moves towards merger with the National Orchestral Union of Professional Musicians (NOUPM) to form the Musician’s Union (MU) in 1921. It examines the resignation of Joe Williams and the problems faced by his successor as General Secretary, E.S.Teale and his successor, Fred Dambman. Changes within the music profession as musical tastes change are outlined. The advent of broadcasting is discussed and the BBC’s developing role as a key employer of musicians is highlighted. The development of the recording industry is discussed and the crisis in musical employment caused by the advent of the “talkies” in the cinema outlined. Problems caused for the Union by “alien” musicians working in the UK are noted.

This chapter examines the special position women hold in a discussion of minority rights. They are seen as victims who need rescuing or as sexual exotic beings. This was as true under colonialism as it is now, particularly with regard to Muslim women. The logic of “civilising” is inherent to this logic, particularly expressed around what is seen as an inferior culture. Feminists are not exempt from this attitude. I examine the politics around the veiling issue in France, and forced marriages in Britain, as examples of this trend.

Chapter 7 concludes the study by first noting how ambivalently clerical sociologists responded to the changes wrought by state planning practice in the 1960s. Demands from champions of such planning that the discipline should begin to play a different societal role are next examined. During the 1970s the Hierarchy combined failure to plan for a continuation of a significant clerical presence among practitioners of sociology with the casting of itself as the conscience of Irish society. The warding off of abortion, contraception and divorce was thereby entrusted to a highly selective but this-worldly `sociological’ empiricism rather than to theological dogmatism. Initially successful, this strategy has become progressively less effective as popular confidence in church leaders has declined dramatically. Detached from the institution the framed the working lives of their disciplinary predecessors, today’s sociologists debate the respective contributions that factors such as higher education levels, economic marginalisation of the poorly educated and the uncovering of hidden histories of the abuse of clerical power have made to this decline.

Underlying the institutional politics of the Irish university question was the clash between scientific rationalism a papal-championed revival of the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. But in social science, as the growth of a Catholic social movement and a succession of Irish-published sociology textbooks illustrate, a natural law perspective long went unchallenged by secular alternatives. It was Catholic clerical academics who first embraced an empirical approach to social science in the Ireland of the 1950s but in the succeeding decade they found themselves marginalised by a new breed of state technocrats who perceived empirical social research as a useful tool for their planning project.

The editors introduce the volume and the chapter is in two parts. The first part summarises the themes of the book and the arguments of each of the essays and the second part is an appreciation of the life and work of the person in his whose honour the essays have been written.

A key reason why the Irish Catholic social movement failed to realize its project of reconstruction was because a conservative Hierarchy baulked at the radicalism of some of its proposals. Critiques of banking and finance capital formulated within the movement were particularly divisive and on these issues ecclesiastical disciplinary mechanisms were invoked to silence some of its radical voices. During the Second World War/Emergency period communist influence became the movement’s overriding concern and Catholic adult education initiatives were launched to counter this threat. To provide such education a number of new institutions with a social science focus – the Catholic Workers College and the Dublin Institute of Catholic Sociology – were created alongside the colleges of the National University of Ireland.

This chapter outlines the history of the MU from the mid 1930s to the end of the Second World War. It includes sections on the state of the music professions, the Union’s internal politics, the introduction of a “ban” on foreign musicians entering the UK to work, relations with the BBC and PPL and the effect of war in the music profession.

Jean-Claude Brisseau’s early forays into filmmaking were inseparable from the social milieu he knew best, the blighted world of the social housing projects surrounding Paris and the particular institutions, formal or informal, that shape the prospects of French youth in particular. In the space of a decade, from the late 1970s to the year of the release of De Bruit et de fureur, Brisseau crafted a metaphysical approach to suburban existence that bears witness to the delinquency, disquiet and dereliction that parch the imaginary. Beneath the despoiled surface of ordinary things, the director consistently unveils a maleficent, almost supernatural essence that compounds the suffering of the human animal. Youth who routinely strive for transcendence, or simply for the right to receive an education, are brought to the brink of crisis. Focusing on violent death in La Vie comme ça (1978), on the instrumentalisation of relationships in L’Échangeur (1981) and on the Shakespearean vision informing De Bruit et de fureur (1988), the author paints a portrait of a humanity torn between elevation and despoilment, between nothingness and the light.

This chapter look at the hyphen between nation and state in the term in nation-state. It theorises that the nation is ideologically and culturally constructed as opposed to the state. Minorities have to be integrated in both formations. However while they are legally part of the state and are citizens, they are excluded from the nation at many levels. Thus they live a hyphenated existence, between two formations.

New Labour’s support for FOI was partially through willing embrace and partially through having it forced upon them. By the 1990s party backing, policy shifts and pragmatic opportunism had pushed the law centre stage.FOI was partly thrust upon the Labour Party leadership. In the legislature, FOI’s long support in the Labour Party had built into a powerful current of cross-party support. It was also powered by the spread of FOI around the world and, perhaps mostly importantly, by rapidly shifting technology and changing public expectations in the area of information provision.FOI was embraced by the leadership as very much a product of Labour’s eighteen years of out of power. FOI was an opportunistic policy that served to embarrass the secretive and ‘sleaze’-ridden Conservative government. It also chimed, after the experience of Thatcherism, with a current of Labour Party thought on breaking up power, and locked into a wide-ranging programme of constitutional reforms aimed at redesigning politics. More than this, the idea itself had obtained a powerful magnetic force. It was bound up with Labour’s sense of self and appealed as a policy that symbolised Labour’s radicalism and its new approach towards government and the people.