This chapter begins by mapping the key questions framing the research and begins to explore the Dreamfields ethos. It examines how the birth and development of the academies programme embeds and extends a vision of marketised education originating in the 1980s. Former Minister of State for Education Lord Adonis described how the schools would build aspirational cultures and act as 'engines of social mobility and social justice' at the 'vanguard of meritocracy'. The chapter provides a contextualised study of the education market in action by showing the implications neoliberal reforms and a result-driven focus have on the shaping of subjectivities. Academies have faced opposition for their lack of democratic accountability as they can set their own labour conditions, deviate from the national curriculum and operate outside local authority control.

In mental health terms, perhaps the most immediate and significant contribution that politics can make is to bring violence to an end. In terms of mental health and related needs arising from conflict it is important to review how and to what degree therapeutic measures address and improve the well-being of conflict-affected communities. The experience of Northern Ireland shows that policy and services need to be developed as conflicts unfold, end and transform in the post-conflict period. Community leaders, and civic and governmental bodies have key roles and tasks to undertake in the context of specific and on-going violence. As the example of Northern Ireland has demonstrated, the attrition of conflict on populations should be regarded as a significant risk, of public health proportions, for well-being, resilience and mental health.

Allegations of neglect or incompetence provided an evolving medical profession with a structured set of opportunities to set out the boundaries of acceptable practice. This chapter considers charges against practitioners that entailed their neglect, incompetence or questionable practice which occasioned a threat to patients' lives, and which were usually given public notice at the inquests on patients' bodies. As such it will cover allegations of unplanned or unintentional crimes against the body where the victim was a patient who died. Egregious cases of neglect and incompetence gave rise to charges of manslaughter by inquest juries, which were taken up by the police or others and could result in the criminal prosecution of a practitioner. Charges of neglect, manslaughter, and abortion collectively illustrate the risks and frustrations associated with rising expectations both inside and beyond the profession.

Joe Cleary’s chapter examines what the future of the Catholic Church is now that one of the great threats to its hegemony during the twentieth century, communism, has fallen largely into abeyance. Will the Church continue to align itself with capitalism and ignore the steady grip of the associated neoliberal agenda that favours secular, material values over religious ones? In contemporary Ireland, it often seems as though a blind adherence to religion has been replaced by an equally blind embrace of neoliberalism. Cleary asks what psychological price the Irish will pay for their submissive compliance with the fashionable ideas of the moment and explores how a healthy relationship with the Church might be developed in such a changed cultural environment.

In 1951 the filmmaker and poet James Broughton moved to London from San Francisco. At that time he was beginning to garner a reputation for his short, whimsical, films, which often made use of outmoded costumes and decaying public spaces. One important reason he gave for moving was the idea that Britain had a more open-minded society for queer artists like himself to work within, in contrast to the McCarthy-era USA. With the help of a number of figures from the British film establishment he managed to make a half-hour-long film The Pleasure Garden in London. The film is for the most part set among the ruins of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the surrounding park. Broughton’s film is an allegory of Britain as he found it in the summer of 1951, asserting its own vision of a post-war national identity in the Festival of Britain. This chapter examines the way in which the Festival of Britain revived certain ideas of national identity from the past, yet neglected others – and the way in which these ideas were doubled and questioned in Broughton’s film.

This chapter provides an introduction to the commodification of prostheses in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain and United States. By addressing some of the main processes used to commodify prostheses - invention, design and production; use and consumption; and promotion and patenting – it highlights how the medical profession, surgical instruments makers and individuals with physical impairments not only participated in shaping markets for new and modified assistive devices, but by doing so, redefined what it meant to be ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It argues that the redefinition of disability in this period – as a medical affliction that needed to be ‘corrected’ – led to the rise of disability rights activism in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The previously little explored history of prostheses commodification, introduced here, formed no small part in the rise of these movements.

This chapter examines the role of independents in parliament, specifically in terms of their contribution to the formation and maintenance of governments, because this is where their influence is most obviously exhibited. Independents have had a considerable role to play in the formation and maintenance of minority governments in Ireland. Parliamentary roll-call data is used to measure the participation levels of the independents, to what extent they worked collectively as a team and what level of support was offered to individual minority administrations. Of particular interest is the nature of the relationship between independents and such governments, since independents fall outside the whip system, the latter of which is claimed to be necessary for executive stability. In general, the stronger the working relationship between independents and the parties, the higher the level of support received from independents and the more stable the government.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is primarily organised around the story of the relationship between James Bond and Playboy, played out in popular culture as part of wider cultural relations, especially in the sixties. It deals with the first phase in the formal relationship between Playboy and Ian Fleming and the Bond novels, which began around 1960 and was overtaken by the second phase in the mid-1960s. The book examines how particular aspects of Sean Connery's Bond resemble the Playboy fantasy of individualism, social mobility and the work-leisure relationship, which was not without its contradictions and paradoxes. It talks about the similarities between the lifestyle habits and style of Playboy magazine and James Bond within the essential context of male consumerism.