The physical-force elements in the Northern Ireland conflict were Irish republican illegal organizations versus illegal loyalist organisations; ranged against both but more often aimed against nationalists were the armed police force, its auxiliaries and the British army. Constitutional elements were the SDLP, representing nationalists, various unionist parties ranging from moderate to extreme, Irish politicians and British secretaries of state. Political reform and reconciliation progressed slowly, and 3,663 people of all ethnicities and origins died before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 put an end to hostilities.

Independent Ireland was characterised by political tension, repression, unemployment, emigration and social activism. Some new, short-lived political parties were formed. Ireland voted to join the EEC in 1973 and became more formally integrated with Europe over the succeeding decades. Women entered the workforce in greater numbers and attained high public visibility, clamouring for social welfare, employment and reproductive rights. Birth control was fully legal by 1990, homosexuality decriminalised in 1993 and divorce legalised in 1995. The late 1990s saw investment in public services, rising employment and falling emigration and immigration. The Catholic church, rocked by sexual scandals and challenged by growing secularism, saw its power wane.

The work of Bourdieu and Foucault can help identify the processes and strategies bywhich the Irish Catholic Church gained dominance and control over the lives of itsmembers.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the increasing power ofthe Church in Ireland, not least by its control over key institutions.  People lived ‘inCatholic time and space’, internalizing systems of discipline and codes of conduct.The intricate knotwork of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ identity meant that Church dominationwas bound up with the drive to modernize and civilize the nation. The keymechanisms used to create obedient subjects were penitential practices, corporalpunishment, confession, and confinement. John McGahern’s fictionand memoir explore the ways in which Catholic corporal punishment and patriarchalauthority extended into domestic spaces. His writings offer a useful representation ofthese mechanisms of control and punishment, but also narrate quiet moments ofresistance.

The Prologue establishes the author’s personal journey of discovering Nordic capitalism as a transformative lens for understanding market economies. Through firsthand experiences living and working in Nordic countries, it reveals how encountering their universal social services, tax systems, and union participation challenged fundamental assumptions about capitalism formed as an American MBA student and corporate employee. The chapter positions Nordic capitalism as a practical alternative to American neoliberalism when mounting sustainability challenges demand new paradigms, likening the present moment to a potential Kuhnian “scientific revolution“ and paradigm shift away from neoliberal ideology. It introduces key features distinguishing Nordic capitalism, including democratic accountability, stakeholder cooperation, and market alignment with sustainability goals. The Prologue frames the book’s investigation of Nordic capitalism not as a pursuit of utopian ideals, but as a pragmatic exploration of proven approaches for evolving capitalism toward sustainability, an approach that provides hope in a challenging world.

Anglican Gothic fiction proceeds beyond broad anti-Catholicism to consider theological problems. To some Anglican writers, the novel appealed as a more attractive vehicle for these ideas than religious tracts. In Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin articulates in novel form the ideas of an earlier sermon, which argues that specific, false doctrines of Catholicism lead to damnation. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray approaches idolatry as obstructive because it places objects between the believer and paths to salvation. Both in Carmilla and in short fiction, Sheridan Le Fanu asserts what he believes are central topics for Victorian religious debate: the implications of science for theories of the natrural order, and damnation and persecution as realities of a spiritual life.

Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.

This chapter continues the book’s focus on the indirect effects of international litigation, examining how pending cases can help spur social movements at the domestic level. It analyzes the case of KESK, Turkey’s public sector union confederation, which mobilized international human rights law to carve out space for union organizing amid post-coup repression in the 1990s. Even before favorable rulings were issued, KESK activists invoked the authority of ratified treaties and the threat of ECtHR litigation to legitimize their demands, attract new members, and challenge state restrictions. In the post-2000 period, however, the AKP government shifted to more covert tactics, cultivating a clientelist relationship with a pro-government union to marginalize KESK and stifle dissent. As its organizing strength weakened, KESK increasingly turned to litigation, but ECtHR rulings proved ineffective at disrupting the structural constraints unions faced. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork data and archival material, the chapter shows how litigation evolved from a dynamic tool of mobilization into a strategy of documentation and symbolic resistance. KESK’s trajectory underscores a key insight of the book: the transformative potential of international courts depends less on their enforcement power than on the strength, strategy, and mobilization capacity of grassroots actors.

‘Songs of our land, ye are with us forever’, sang Donegal’s ‘blind poetess’ Frances Brown in the 1840s, but she was wrong. Although feted and garlanded in her time, and awarded a pension by Prime Minister Robert Peel (not a noted lover of Ireland, as we shall see), she and her stirring anthems are virtually forgotten now. Histories, like songs and poems, belong to the time in which they are written, and inevitably reflect their writers’ interests, preoccupations and experiences. This concise history is written by an Irish female born in 1960 and reared in an urban, lower-middle-class Catholic extended family in which there was as strong a devotion to history in all its forms (political, social, archaeological, local, national, international and, of course, familial) as there was to religion.

Contrary to the narrative of the Irish Catholic Church’s decline, there exists a range of evidence for a twenty-first-century religious revival. Some of the modern religious deviate from formal practice, engaging with Christianity away from the major churches, while other spiritual practices accord with twenty-first-century Ireland’s cultural diversity. Irish literature has challenged literature but, at times, idealised it. As the religious landscape of Ireland changes, Irish culture finds new ways to explore faith.

Meteorite falls can produce light phenomena (meteors, fireballs), sonic booms, and electrophonic sounds. Doppler radar can identify falls by their positions and velocity vectors. Incoming meteoroids lose mass during atmospheric passage; after slowing, the remaining pieces develop a fusion crust, typically a 1–2-mm thick melt-coating that solidifies in the air. Most meteoroids also develop regmaglypts during descent due to localized vortices of hot, turbulent gas sculpting the meteoroid’s surface. Some specimens maintain a fixed orientation during atmospheric passage and develop nose-cone shapes. The disruption of a meteoroid in the atmosphere can shatter it into thousands of fragments; when these individuals hit the ground, they form an elliptical pattern (strewn field) in which the largest fragments tend to occur at the terminus of the field along the line of the meteoroid’s trajectory. There are fossil ordinary chondrites recovered from Ordovician sedimentary rocks. Terrestrial impact craters associated with ordinary-chondrite remnants include Carancas (Peru) and Morokweng (South Africa). Meteorites have been concentrated on Earth in cold deserts (e.g., Antarctica) and hot deserts (e.g., the Sahara).

Precise definitions can aid in meteorite classification and reduce confusion during interactions across disciplines.