In this chapter, the author utilizes ideas drawn from governmentality to explore the emergence, and sometimes uneasy co-existence, of the biomedical discourses in the mental health policy arena. As Michel Foucault and other authors have noted, discourses constructing mental health have been strongly tied to biomedical understandings of mental illness and the medical speciality of psychiatry. The operational elements of A Vision for Change: Report of the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy (AVFC) betray the claims to whole-population relevance of mental health and reinforce a narrow conception of mental health as a euphemism for mental illness. The theoretical framework of governmentality can be helpful in exploring tensions between the mentalities and practices of governing, and discourses as they have developed around mental health policy and practice in Ireland.

This chapter explores globalisation's world-regionality dynamic and its implications for mega-events. It discusses the role of mega-events such as the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the Shanghai 2010 Expo and their legacies in China's contemporary development, both at the national level and also particularly at the urban level. China's rapid economic growth and urbanisation in the post-Deng period generated an unprecedented interest among Chinese urban leaderships in strategies of bidding for and staging mega-events. The design of the 2010 Shanghai Expo reflected a number of the macro factors and structural themes relating to contemporary China and to mega-events, as well as more local and urban issues relating to Shanghai city. The chapter also discusses the influence of mega-events on the development of London as a world city, and looks in particular at the London 2012 Olympic Games and its urban legacies.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the potential of governmentality-inspired ideas to develop a more nuanced and indeed critical understanding of the construction of health-based policy in Ireland. One of the key points underpinning accusations of governmentality's limited critical potential relates to the suggestion that studies often fail to capture the messy actualities of social and political relations. The book provides a clear example of how different and often competing voices, each drawing on different types of knowledge, build into governmental visions and approaches to organ donation. It illustrates how the management of obesity is increasingly being placed in the hands of individuals, by vesting them with a technology designed to monitor their waist circumference.

Research into the urban impacts of Olympic events, as of mega-events more generally, has long been of variable quality. Mega-events and their associated costs naturally reflect the long-term inflationary movement of prices in modern economies. This chapter begins by looking from early Olympic Games onwards on the construction of sport facilities. It looks, on the one hand the arguably negative Olympic legacy cases of the Montreal 1976 and Athens 2004 Games events, and on the other hand the widely recognised positive Olympic legacy case of the Barcelona games of 1992. The chapter looks into the mega-event projects and the equally unavoidable struggles they involve and the determination they require from their planners and organisers to promote positive event legacies in host cities and avoid the risks of negative legacies.

Independents have been a constant feature of the Irish electoral landscape. They have maintained a continuous presence in the Dail right back to the 1922 elections, the first in the Irish Free State. This is in contrast to their electoral performance in other established democracies, where independent candidates struggle to win votes, let alone seats. This chapter examines the comparative performance of independents in countries outside of Ireland, with particular attention given to Australia and Japan, the two other established democracies where independents have been prominent at national parliamentary elections. As well as placing Irish independents in an international context, the comparative dimension also assists an analysis of the factors behind their significance. The chapter focuses on the Irish case, with an outline and analysis of independents' history at Dail elections back to 1922 and provides a cursory enquiry into the geography of their electoral history.

The 1980s had seen the development of a new kind of serialised conspiracy drama demonstrating great anxiety over the growing hegemony of Thatcherite politics. In the final years of the decade, however, a new conspiracy drama would take a somewhat different approach, beginning instead with the apparent defeat of Thatcherism. A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) opens with the coming to power of a radical socialist Labour government in an imagined General Election of 1991 on a manifesto of reversing a decade of Thatcherite policies and unilateral nuclear disarmament. The victory of a socialist Labour government is therefore sited in an imagined popular disenchantment with the dominant political culture of the 1980s, and furthermore a reformed social-democratic consensus to reclaim the country on behalf of the economically marginalised. A Very British Coup converges two paranoid visions of the intelligence world.

This chapter seeks to analyse the reform process initiated in 2005, examining the policy tools used to improve care provision and their impact on older people. It examines the impact of recent budgetary constraints on the long-term care sector, as a result of the recession in Ireland's free market economy. The chapter also examines how older people are conceptualised and analyses the relationships between the state and other stakeholders in the design and implementation of long-term care reform policies between 2005 and 2015. It is guided by a governmentality perspective, critically analysing the changing power relations within the long-term care sector in Ireland. Drawing on the particular conceptualisation of power, Michel Foucault developed the concept of governmentality, or 'the art of government'. Foucault's work on governmentality has been used by many other scholars as a framework for analysing power relations in society.

The Irish government has developed policies that set out its vision, priorities and direction for improving and sustaining the health of its people. This chapter critically appraises how these strategies have been configured to structure responsibility for health. It exposes a number of key characteristics of neoliberal governmentality, including the shift towards a market-based model of health, and the distribution of power across a range of agents and agencies of health. The need to reduce healthcare expenditure appeared in the first national, strategic public health policy, Shaping a Healthier Future. The chapter illustrates three evolving rationalities in strategic public health policies in Ireland. They are a market-based model of healthcare, devolution of responsibility, and capabilities and techniques to manage the self and ensure individual behaviour aligns with political objectives.

This chapter explores the organising effects: how sea creatures like crabs and prawns were made into tradeable commodities, and how commodity relations affected ownership of boats and gear and the distribution of the fishing surplus among owners and crew. The development of the live whole prawn market with 'a better price' was crucial to the revival of the prawn creel fishery, a more labour-intensive method of fishing which could not otherwise compete with the trawlers on price. The chapter demonstrates the understanding that political economy can bring to anthropological and fishing studies, and also in understanding 'why things are this way'. Fisheries anthropologist Charles Menzies argues that an understanding of the pressures of capitalist commodity production, and the social relations it requires, are important to understanding fisheries. Fisheries are frequently described as if their existence was a natural fact that simply reflects the presence of fish.

In a cinematic landscape increasingly characterised by multiculturalism and linguistic diversity, a number of contemporary French films are beginning to represent multilingualism as a means of attaining and exerting social power. Multilingual cinema is a particularly salient phenomenon in France, both in terms of production and reception. A year during which France's complex multicultural identity and hybrid social fabric was thrown into the spotlight, 2005 was a crucial time for multilingual film production in France. Contemporary French multilingual cinema contains a plethora of films composed of multiple languages. Postcarding is still a phenomenon which appears in the contemporary era, but strategic and meaningful multilingualism has overtaken superficial renderings of language difference. In contrast to more traditional, twentieth-century portrayals of multilingualism, contemporary French multilingual films often portray language difference as a narrative device in itself, and a means of obtaining and wielding influence over others.

The Afro-Asian bloc responded in a largely positive manner to Operation Morthor as it represented a significant step towards restoring territorial integrity to the Congo. Through 1961 the events in the Congo had displayed the inability of Britain to influence substantially either US or UN policy on the Congo or on decolonisation. Following Dag Hammarskjöld's death the State Department revised US Congo policy with the aim of strengthening Adoula's Central Government, by advancing the campaign against Katanga. British intransigence over the Congo, and much diminished influence with Afro-Asian countries and within the Commonwealth, closed down avenues of Anglo-American cooperation and increased the determination of the State Department to generate a Congo policy more in line with the Afro-Asians. British feeling that the organisation was a 'damned nuisance' continued to divide Anglo-American opinion even after the Kitona Accords.