This chapter focuses on the experiences of immigrants as a part of Irish society and on their relationship with the twenty-first-century Irish nation. Politicians and media refer immigrants as the new Irish. Non-Irish nationals according to the 2011 Census made up more than eleven per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland. But immigrants constituted only about one half of one per cent of Irish citizens living in the Republic. The vast majority of Irish citizens are drawn from the same ethnic group. Irishness still seems to be heavily associated with the majority ethnic identity. The place of naturalised immigrants within this Irish nation remains somewhat ambiguous. Most immigrants lie empirically outside the Irish nation as this is institutionalised though citizenship. Localism within politics and community life has the potential to offer wider definitions of what it is to be Irish than those institutionalised within the nation-state.

Scottish play-acting in continental Europe began with pipe and drum bands. This chapter examines the history of Scottish piping in Europe. It also examines what a pipe band is and how bagpiping came to be associated with Scotland. Joshua Dickson of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama suggests that the bagpipe has acquired symbolic meaning as a national instrument 'in communities both in Scotland and throughout the Scottish diaspora'. The chapter explores what the continental pipe bands of today have in common and what makes them part of an international piping community rather than just Dutch, Flemish, and Austrian phenomena. It looks at the two main motivations which seem to inspire the European pipe bands, namely the imitation of kilted soldiers and the quest for a seemingly lost European folk music tradition.

Chapter 8 examines the growth of Islamic identity and political organisation. It starts by discussing different approaches to Islam and the meaning of Islamism. It looks at groups linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, whose ultimate aim is an Islamic state, and how they build support through strong organisation, grassroots community work, prosletysing, and civic engagement. And it also looks at more radical groups – Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al Muhajiroun - who see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard for the restoration of an Islamic state. It argues that the turn to religion, which has happened throughout the Islamic world, is a consequence of the decline of a left alternative. Young Bengalis face alienation, racism, inequality, and no future. Islam offers them brotherhood, certainty and pride. It also argues that, while a very few have gone on jihad, it is dangerous to claim that Islamist ideas lead to extremist violence. However, Islamism has led to conflicts with non-political Muslims (especially concerning alleged war criminals from 1971) and has put difficult peer pressure on college students. It also perpetuates separatism.Finally, the chapter looks at how governments have deliberately promoted faith groups - which has consolidated religious power, encouraged conservative values, and cut across class-based organisation.

This chapter introduces Gary Snyder, who has had the reputation of being a serious, committed Buddhist. His poetry imparts religious knowledge and spiritual insight, and his dedication to Zen has gone hand in hand with ecological activism. The chapter reveals that Snyder demonstrated that spirituality may be complemented by political engagement, and also studies the dialectic between nature and vision.

This chapter deals with Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) and his fiancée Doreen (Shirley Ann Field) sitting on a hill overlooking a new estate that is being built. The film actually closes with him and Doreen walking down the hill leaving audiences with a question that what happens to them in the future. John Hill reaches a conclusion, what he calls the ‘new wave’ narrative. Hill reaches this conclusion by drawing on Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the passage in a narrative ‘from one equilibrium to another’. This passage begins with a stable situation that is disturbed and thus becomes ‘a state of disequilibrium’. Eventually, the original equilibrium is restored but now it is somehow different from the original situation. For Hill, the narrative of a film such as Reisz's loosely adheres to this model, with the film's central disturbance ‘usually a socially or sexually transgressive desire’. Moreover, as Hill continues, this movement from disequilibrium to a new equilibrium is not random but patterned in terms of a linear chain of events.

Policy-makers’ perceptions of older people’s interest organisations and the degree to which these organisation influence the policy making process are addressed in Chapter 6. It explores policy actors’ interpretations and constructions of older people’s interest organisation and the relationship these constructions have with organisations’ involvement in age-based social policy development.

Society is always changing as a result of human migration, and to feel comfortable with that is often a challenge. In Ireland, historically, the idea of home has not been one to be taken for granted, because of the painful memories of poverty, emigration and war. To be able to feel at home in contemporary Ireland requires of people that they stretch themselves, adopt a cosmopolitan attitude and welcome difference into their homes and communities. The ways in which various types of immigrants adapt to the expectations of their host communities and develop their own cultural confidence lead to the emergence of different forms of hybrid identities. In 2004, the Migrant Rights Centre of Ireland published a report documenting widespread exploitation and maltreatment of foreign domestic workers in Irish middle-class homes. The movement of Irish people around the world has created a strong diaspora community.

Swedish social democracy has long since lost its hegemonic position in domestic politics. Nevertheless, the situation since 2006 is itself relevant to our understanding of the way that social democracy's capacity of action in the present suffers from a series of historical mistakes that it has performed over time. The particular historical events addressed here is the restructuring process of the 1990s. This chapter argues that the consequences of these mistakes are today actively circumscribing social democracy's capacity for reformism on the strategic as well as on the ideological level. Social democrat policy makers in Sweden and elsewhere have, at least since the 1990s, have understood the market as a central vehicle for politics and for the active building of middle-class values and individual preferences. The institutional shifts in the Swedish welfare state have been accompanied by a massive shift in resources, and in some cases important speculative effects.

Chapter 1 introduces the Irish District Court as the lowest yet busiest court in the ordinary courts system, examining the type of crime it deals with and the extent of its criminal jurisdiction in terms of offences and sanctions. It then moves onto to look at the nature of proceedings, how offences are processed and at the characteristics of some of the main participants (notably the prosecution, judge and defendant). Finally, it explores the legal process in terms of legal language and courtroom discourse on the basis that the District Court is a predominantly verbal arena.