Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Ireland is widely considered to be a “success story” within the field of development studies as its economy has been transformed over the past two decades. Yet in tourist literature Ireland continues to be marketed largely as a pastoral country that time forgot. This paper will investigate the politics of reimagining place within the Irish tourism model. How have government and private sector actors reinvented Ireland as a tourist attraction in the wake of the Celtic Tiger? How has economic growth and structural change have in turn changed the nature of the tourism sector today. Tourism remains one of the largest employers and sources of foreign exchange for the country. How has economic transformation affected the industry in Ireland?The findings are important not only for our understanding of tourism in Ireland, but also for larger issues of tourism and development and the IPE of tourism. Specifically, how do tourism stakeholders reinvent place in order to maintain or increase visitor flows? What are the consequences of such actions for hosts and guests?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The role of the European Union (EU) Peace II Fund and the International Fund for Ireland (IFI) in building the peace dividend in Northern Ireland is examined through the perspectives of community groups, funding agencies, local strategic partnerships, civil servants and development officers. The findings presented in this paper explore the role of economic assistance in building peace, reconciliation and sustainable development in Northern Ireland through examining the views of 98 participants from Northern Ireland, the Border Area, and Dublin with direct experience of the protracted ethnopolitical conflict and the role of EU Peace II and IFI. The focus of this paper is to explore the respondents images of the funding agencies in building the peace dividend in northern Ireland for both the EU Peace II Fund and IFI Fund.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that the local, everyday life dimension in the study of gay movements has been neglected. As a consequence the emergence of the Irish Gay Rights Movement in Ireland in 1974 has only been understood as a consequence of modernising forces that transformed socio-economic life.
In the paper I argue for an increased focus on the lives of the individual founders. Through biographical research I argue that greater focus should be placed on local structures as they propel individuals into collective action and are also the site of grievance and resistance. The paper also recognises the international context in which the movement was founded and draws parallels between similar movements in the United States and Britain.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The recent literature on war and collective violence has stressed the importance of using a relational approach toward studying armed conflict (Kestnbaum 2005, Tilly 2003, Gould 1995). This relational approach captures the complex patterns of social interactions between the various actors involved in armed conflict, particularly how violence �transforms relations among persons and groups� (Tilly 2003:5). A relational approach also helps one to understand war as � a complex social process and an extraordinary series of events in the lives and histories of peoples and states� (Kestnbaum 2005:254). According to Kestnbaum (2005:254), the processual quality of war permits insights into the linkages and alignments of social relations while the eventful quality of war highlights the distinctiveness of a conflict, including its temporal patterns as well as how it is experienced by the people. Using this relational approach, we plan to discuss a preliminary inventory of processes of war-making, e.g. brutalization, escalation, de-escalation, spirals of retaliation, mobilization, etc. and the events of war in the case of Northern Ireland. Field research in Northern Ireland from summer 2005 and summer 2006 will used to inform this discussion.

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: This extended abstract details a research project commencing in October 2005, which aims to map emerging transnational media networks and mediated communities in the Republic of Ireland. In the new millennium, 'celtic tiger' Ireland has shifted from being a nation of net emigration to becoming a relatively significant migration destination. Despite the public and academic debate occasioned by this transformation, scant attention has been paid to the cultural practices and media micro-economies of different diasporic formations often reductively referred to as the 'new Irish'. This extended abstract suggests that both the Irish public sphere and Irish media analysis has been to an understandable extent preoccupied with questions of representativity and multiculturalism, but to the cost of a research agenda that examines the finegrain of new media networks that may well bypass the integration-oriented questions dominant among majority commentators. In presenting this research project at its outset, I aim to present at the conference a grounded research agenda for this new area in irish media sociology.