Justin Carville draws on recent debates in relation to photography and the everyday in order to examine the role of street-photography in the cultural politics of religion as it was played out in the quotidian moments of social relations within Dublin’s urban and suburban spaces during the 1980s and 90s. The essay argues that photography was important in giving visual expression to the social contradictions within the relations between religion and the transformation of Irish social life, not through the dramatic and traumatic experiences that defined the nation’s increased secularism, but in the quiet, humdrum and sometimes monotonous routines of religious ceremonies and everyday social relations.

This chapter explores how the efforts to increase the availability of human organs by moving to an institutional arrangement based on presumed consent necessarily extend beyond shaping people's cultural attitude towards organ donation. Transforming the prevailing cultural attitude and habitual behaviour in respect of organ donation also requires subtle but significant shifts in how people imagine the dead body, the individual and her or his responsibilities to others, and the limits of medicine. The chapter considers the debates in light of the ideas of Michel Foucault about the construction and government of the modern individual. Central to Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality is that the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual, homo economicus, co-determined each other's emergence. Peter Wehling is ambivalent about the emergence of active biological citizenship, which he regards as a new and significant element in contemporary governmental regimes of medicine.

Mortality among the members of the nineteenth-century medical profession was high in relation to other professions and to non-professional occupations. This chapter examines the role and visibility of the inquest in determining acts of suicide in nineteenth-century England and Wales. It then looks in more detail at the 285 medical deaths investigated or reported as suicides between 1800 and 1890, with particular reference to the behavioural patterns, methods, and motives that emerged in inquest evidence. The chapter concludes with the case of William Whitfield Edwardes, whose suicide in 1883 generated intense social commentary and presented the consolidating medical profession with a quintessential dilemma. The generation of exceptionally high expectations within the profession about the acceptance and management of stress make practitioner suicide entirely comprehensible and even predictable. Narrative motifs in reporting suicides co-opted the language of shock, tragedy, pity, and melancholy rather than the available alternatives for framing a suicide.

This chapter takes a number of priests with a public profile and examines the extent to which they are prophetic voices or complicit functionaries. Choosing the French priest-writer Jean Sulivan (1913-1980) as a comparator, Eamon Maher examines the published work of Joseph Dunn, Vincent Twomey, Mark Patrick Hederman and Brendan Hoban, before concluding that they all share the prophetic tendency of raising uncomfortable and often unpopular issues while remaining within the institution. He further argues that being so closely aligned to the Church makes it difficult, and professionally dangerous, for priests to criticise certain practices within the institution. However, while retaining a huge love of, and devotion to, the main tenets of Catholicism, these men nevertheless feel obliged to point out things that are going wrong, even when expressing such views can often involve them in conflict with their superiors at home and in Rome.

Borrowing on a tradition of radical journalism dating back more than 200 years, modern Irish republicans, in particular, Sinn Féin, have used activist media to articulate their ideological since the late 1960s and the start of the Troubles. At times of marginalisation from the political mainstream through broadcasting bans and structural bias in the media, republicans used their own activist newspapers, pamphlets and promotional materials to convey their political messages. In the same period Sinn Féin began and finished the journey from being the marginal political wing of the Provisional IRA to being arguably the most prominent political party in Irish nationalist politics. Its transformation from minority voice of an armed organisation which saw violence as central to its goals to the main voice of republicanism that had accepted ceasefires and the political path was remarkable. Activist media was central to ideological journey of the Shinners, providing an internal space in which to articulate and interrogate dynamic shifts in ideology and an outward face to communicate these developments.

In 1822, George Webb Derenzy, a former captain in the British army, published a volume titled Enchiridion: Or, A Hand for the One-Handed. The text highlighted what Derenzy called his ‘One-Handed Apparatus,’ a collection of twenty instruments that he had made after losing his arm in the Napoleonic Wars. Designed to ease his daily routines of washing, eating, writing, and socializing, Derenzy’s inventions included, among other items, an egg cup that tilted in any direction and a card-holder that fanned out and folded up for easy transportation. This chapter examines Derenzy’s motivations for publishing the Enchiridion; the responses he received from readers around the globe; and the presuppositions about gender and class that ultimately constrained his consumer appeal and profit. Derenzy chose to publish, not patent, his contraptions due to his charitable desires to share them with others with lost limbs. His focus on using his prostheses to reclaim aspects of his social respectability and manly independence that his impairments seemed to threaten, however, ended up alienating poor, middling, and female patrons and limiting his success as an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. Perhaps due to these marketing missteps, Derenzy experienced the plight of many physically-impaired people during the period; unable to profitably labour, he sustained a steady descent into poverty.

Approximately 1,250 independent candidates contested Dail elections between 1922 and 2016. They are a very heterogeneous category, ranging from representatives of the protestant community to catholic defenders of pro-life interests, from socialist independents to right-wing business candidates. This chapter constructs a typology of independents that examines their nature, the support they attract and their electoral fate. The construction of a typology of independents involves distinguishing independents from minor parties. The chapter presents working definition of an independent, in particular how they differ from micro-parties. It suggests a number of areas that warrant further examination to understand the presence of independents in Irish politics. There are six types of independent families: vestigial independents, corporatist independents, ideological independents, community independents, apostate independents and quasi-parties. Within these six families exist nine categories of independents: independent unionists, independent farmers, independent business candidates, left-wing independents, independent republicans, single-issue independents, community independents, apostate independents and quasi-parties.

Welcome and La Graine et le mulet investigate the inner-outer configuration of local-migrant relationships, and provide new ways to understand Mireille Rosello's work on the dynamics of hospitality. Both films explore how the international impacts on the local in multilingual, contemporary French society, especially in its contentious border areas. For La Graine et le mulet, multilingualism is a natural and sustainable solution to globalisation in France. Unlike Welcome, the migrant trajectory in La Graine et le mulet matches that of many earlier characters in French film. Both Welcome and La Graine et le mulet are set in port cities and on coastal borders where even the most domestic spaces are impacted by a culture of movement, migration and transition. These films oscillate between scenarios of inclusion and exclusion, formulating a complex view of language relations on contemporary French soil that extends beyond Eurocentric hierarchies.