This article examines the collecting that occurred after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, using the collections database as a lens for understanding how this recent period of Irish history is currently being narrativized. The Eighth Amendment prohibited abortion in almost all circumstances by equating the life of a pregnant person to that of the unborn child; its repeal was a result of four decades of grassroots, feminist campaigning. The collections now being preserved depict this activism, and are made up of campaign documents, photographs, and first-person stories archived from Facebook. Through a close analysis of the database of the Digital Repository of Ireland, where most of these materials are held, this article argues for an interpretation of the database as a political infrastructure, which refracts existing tensions surrounding the future of Irish feminisms and the activist archive. It also examines the database’s politics of visibility in relation to the shame and silence that defined women’s position in Ireland prior to the referendum and advances a theorisation of the archival database as a historiographical technology, which plays an active role in the production of Irish identity in the wake of the Eighth.

Between 2010 and 2019, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were implemented. To what extent were those conditions implemented? After conditionality, to what extent have governments rolled back changes pursued under external constraint? Do we find variation across governments regarding implementation and reversals, and if so, why?. This paper presents a database allowing the answers to those questions, the Data Base on EcoNomic Adjustment Policies (ENAP) database. We codified all policies and reforms included in the MoU’s, and whether those were subsequently fully or partially implemented. We also codified all decisions taken by bailed out countries since the beginning of the financial crisis and verified whether those had been kept or fully or partially reversed until December 2019. For each condition or policy, a series of explanatory variables were coded: policy sector, type of reform, timing and type of reversal, origin of reversal and number of veto players. The ENAP shows that in all countries, MoU’s were largely implemented and are resilient.

In this article social movement theory is used to assess the strategic repertoire of a relatively new sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) advocating for migrants rights in Ireland. Pro-migrant NGOs are majority community-led and face a challenging political and societal context for mobilization including a restrictive immigration regime, political and media discourse that racializes migrants, weak public support for the expansion of migrants’ rights, and high rates of discrimination and social exclusion experienced by migrant communities. A competitive funding environment also inhibits pro-migrant NGOs capacity to work with emerging migrant-led organizations that simultaneously compete for state and foundation funds. Pro-migrant NGOs in Ireland have responded with a three levelled strategy, namely alliance building with sympathetic public officials and service and information provision to state bodies, campaigns contesting negative media and societal framing of migrants, and networking with transnational NGO coalitions working on immigration issues.

Meals-on-wheels services in Ireland and elsewhere rely heavily on volunteers to operate. Meals-on-wheels services that draw extensively on volunteers’ contributions both benefit from and augment social capital within communities. Based on interviews with voluntary and paid meals-on-wheels coordinators and staff carried out in early 2007, this article examines: (1) the recruitment and retention of volunteers; (2) motivations for volunteering; (3) the nature of the contributions of volunteers; and, (4) the future role of volunteering within the service. The article argues that volunteerism in meals provision for older adults in Ireland is in crisis. The recruitment and retention of volunteers may be improved if service providers gain a better understanding of the motivations of volunteers and develop strategies to ensure that volunteers have an opportunity to engage in work that corresponds to their original motivations, which includes enhancing the social capital of their communities.

This article reviews recent non-statutory attempts at charity fundraising regulation in the UK and Ireland. It explores the definition of success for each regime and examines whether broader policy lessons for fundraising regulation may be learnt from these implementation experiences to date. To this end, the article compares the UK framework for fundraising regulation (via the Fundraising Standards Board) with recent Irish proposals for non-statutory regulation. It also identifies the key challenges facing each regime. The article draws upon current Canadian, Dutch and American regulatory experiences and benchmarks these alternative non-statutory efforts against the Anglo-Irish models by way of comparative analysis. The article tackles the broader question of how we measure success in regulatory terms and argues for better identification of the constituency to be regulated, thereby enabling prioritisation of the salient performance indicators that should be included in any non-statutory framework.

Credit unions are voluntary cooperative financial institutions. At present there are 621 credit unions in Ireland serving two million members. Credit unions espouse the principle of gender inclusiveness, which is viewed as a fundamental cooperative concept. Based on a survey of 500 Irish credit unions, this study explores the role of women in credit unions. Judged against participation rates for women in the labor market and in specific organizations such as trade unions, the study suggests that gender balance in credit unions is superior to that elsewhere in Irish society. There is, however, some evidence of gender imbalance in the composition of credit union boards with this being most visible for key decision-making positions such as Chair and Vice-Chair. It also emerges that gender imbalance becomes more pronounced for larger credit unions supporting the contention that women are found in greater numbers on small and less well-connected not-for-profit boards.

Volunteers are integral to the delivery of health and social services in many countries. Volunteer motivation is the key phenomenon around which research into the psychology of volunteering behaviour has been based in the recent past. This study comprised interviews with 26 volunteers working with eight health and social care organizations in Ireland. The study aimed to describe and interpret reasons for initial and continued volunteering involvement. Four key themes were proposed on the basis of a thematic analysis: volunteer motives; personal connections to organizations and causes; benefits; and challenges arising from volunteering. These themes are analysed in light of social psychological theory to better understand why people volunteer and maintain their involvement in the face of competing demands. The findings suggest that benefits and challenges merit a higher profile in research into the volunteer process, and that bonds of perceived obligation motivate many volunteers to begin and continue their involvement in health and social care.

Analyses of voting in European Union referendums typically distinguish between ‘second‐order’ effects and the impact of substantive ‘issues’. In order to explain change in referendum outcome, two types of substantive issues are distinguished in this article. Focusing on Irish voting in the Lisbon Treaty referendums and using data from post‐referendum surveys, it is found that perceptions of treaty implications outperform underlying attitudes to EU integration in predicting vote choice at both referendums, and perceptions of treaty implications are strong predictors of vote change between the referendums. The findings have broadly positive implications for normative assessments of the usefulness of direct democracy as a tool for legitimising regional integration advance.

This article examines a decade of charity law review processes in six jurisdictions—Australia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales and Ireland. Using a life-cycle basis viewed through a functional comparative lens, it examines review terms of reference, stakeholder involvement in public consultations, report recommendations and governmental responses. The article compares post-review recommendation implementation across government-owned and independent review processes. In identifying areas most open to and most difficult to reform (including charity definition and advocacy) and probing the hidden state/non-profit sector tensions that underlie such reform attempts, this article provides new insights for future review processes.

While there is a long established and deeply embedded tradition of voluntary action and nonprofit organizing in Ireland, there has been very limited debate on a philosophy of voluntary action or on the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. It is against this background that practitioners and academics are beginning to articulate their individual understandings of the role of the third sector in Irish society. This paper presents a framework developed from three questions to consider the place of the third sector in a modern democratic state. The questions are: What are the roles of the third sector in a society? What relationships exist between the third and other sectors? How are third sector organizations resourced within that societal context? Answering these questions contributes to a conceptualization of the third sector in Ireland, North and South.

We examine and discuss the state of political science in Ireland, using a new dataset on articles published in major domestic, European, and international academic journals by authors affiliated with Irish institutions during the period 1999–2014. Our main findings are as follows: political scientists in Ireland have generally focused more on comparative politics and international relations than on methodology, political theory, or public policy. In terms of methods and authorship, however, there are some notable differences between articles published in domestic, European, and international journals. Qualitative analysis and single case studies have been more commonly employed in national-level publications, while inferential quantitative analysis and large-N data have been more widely used in international-level articles. Gender balance in authorship is now more the norm in national journals than in European and international journals. Finally, Irish political science has undergone significant changes during the period examined. There have been increases in co-authoring and the use of inferential quantitative methods and large-N data which are typically associated with the approaches taken in the major international journals of political science. In this regard, Irish political science has become more ‘globalised’.

This article examines the charity financial reporting regimes of three common law jurisdictions: Ireland, the UK and the US. It assesses whether these respective disclosure models improve either nonprofit behaviour or enforcement odds. Three core aspects of the regimes are reviewed: the reliability of the disclosed information, the consistency of such information and its ability to facilitate comparison between charities, and the level of enforcement arising from disclosure. Particular attention is paid to oversight mechanisms, including audits, and their rates of effectiveness in the regulation of charities. The article examines ongoing efforts to reform broader international accounting standards and considers the impact such moves are likely to have at both regional and national level for charity accountability. It concludes that given the markedly different spheres in which for-profits and nonprofits operate, care should be taken in modelling charity disclosure regimes on those developed for for-profit entities.

This presentation introduces the analytical framework applied in this symposium for the analysis of publishing trends of European political scientists. Our goal is to ascertain the degree to which the discipline in four contrasting countries (Ireland, Norway, Portugal and Spain) speaks to a wider European or international audience. Is political science insular in these countries, or is it internationalised? On which aspects are the publications similar at the domestic, European and international levels, and on which do they differ? What dynamics have affected publishing habits over time? Is it possible to observe a process of convergence or divergence across levels over time? To face these questions, we set up a cross-national research team composed of graduate students and professors from the four countries, and created a common dataset that collected information on articles published in the highest ranked national, European and international journals between 1999 and 2014. The findings suggest that political science research in these countries has been running in two separate worlds: the domestic and the foreign levels. Also, the analyses point to a divergence between north and south regarding the predominant fields, topics and the interest for Europe, and institutional concentration.

The catchall party remains a useful concept despite the lack of a widely agreed definition or list of parties. This article suggests defining catchall parties based on how they act strategically. Although catchall parties act strategically on both the organisational and ideological dimensions, this article concentrates on three key ideological features: catchall parties are ideologically centrist, dispersed and flexible over time. Relying on original surveys in the Republic of Ireland, which interviewed two‐thirds of parliamentarians, it is confirmed that Ireland's ‘catchall’ and ‘programmatic’ parties clearly differ in terms of how they compete ideologically. Ireland's catchall parties employ all three identified strategies. Smaller, more programmatic parties are consistent over time, non‐centrist and extremely ideologically coherent on core programmatic issues. The competition between catchall parties and ideological populist parties is a pressing issue, and the Irish case provides new theoretical insights and empirical evidence to understand these party types.