Irish Journal of Sociology

The article contributes to debates on the relationship between the state and ‘the people’ in post-national contexts, specifically those characterised by intra-state conflicts. The article critically theorises the articulation of this relationship in the Good Friday Agreement as part of the Northern Irish peace process. It employs the concept of ‘state universality’ to examine the way in which the state-people relationship is constructed on the basis of the recognition of multiple peoples, establishing the universality of the state in a postnational fashion. The article also draws on the work of Claude Lefort to examine the implications of this form in terms of political representation, arguing that the recognition of multiple peoples at stake in the Good Friday Agreement is predicated on the particularisation of the two communities, thus divesting political representation of the dimension of universality.

This paper examines the intersection between food, recollection and Irish migrants’ reconstructions of their housing pathways in the three English cities of Leicester (East Midlands), Sheffield (South Yorkshire) and Manchester (North). Previous studies have acknowledged more implicitly the role of memory in representing the Irish migrant experience in England. Here, we adopt a different stance. We explore the mnemonic power of food to encode, decode and recode Irish men’s reconstructions of their housing pathways in England when constructing and negotiating otherness. In doing so, we apply a ‘Proustian anthropological’ approach in framing the men’s representations of their formative residential experiences in the boarding houses of the three English cities during the 1950s and 1960s are examined. The extent to which food provided in the boarding houses was used as an instrument of discipline and control is examined. The relevance of food related acts of resistance, food insecurity and acts of hedonic meat-centric eating in constructing the men’s sociocultural identity are also explored.

This article analyses Abundant Life Christian Church in Limerick City, a multi-ethnic, Pentecostal/charismatic congregation in the Assemblies of God denomination. It provides insights about how religious groups are negotiating immigration and ethnic diversity and how charismatic expressions of Christianity are engaging in Ireland's post-Catholic public sphere. The study revealed remarkably harmonious relationships between native Irish and immigrants of diverse backgrounds, which were built in large part on a leadership model in which one ethnic group did not hold significantly more power than others. The study also found that people at Abundant Life seemed anxious to establish their legitimacy as a Christian church, a concern that was rooted in previous, and even current, experience of Ireland as a ‘Catholic country’. Congregants displayed varying degrees of openness towards Catholicism, but what was striking was how often they described their own faith in contrast to Catholicism. The institution that is the Catholic Church in Ireland cast a long shadow over Abundant Life congregants’ own experience of Christianity and continues to define Ireland's post-Catholic religious market.

It was not until the mid-1990s that the extent of child abuse within the Irish Catholic Church began to be investigated and reported by the Irish media, yet why did it take so long for these scandals to emerge? This article analyses how the Irish media investigated and reported on the Irish Catholic Church from a socio-historical perspective. Drawing from Bourdieu, analytical concepts of habitus, capital and field are employed to examine transformations in journalistic practice. By doing so, this article explores the symbolic power of the clergy in Catholic society and traces the erosion of their moral authority. The Bishop Eamonn Casey paternity scandal is analysed as a means of unpacking journalistic practice in the early 1990s, on the cusp of the widespread emergence of child sex abuse reports in the mainstream media. The case study builds from a series of semi-structured interviews with journalists who reported on clerical scandals, including religious affairs correspondents from the 1960s to present, and produces insight into the practices, perceptions and dispositions (habitus) of journalists over time. It is argued that the reporting of paternity scandals in the early 1990s reflects wider processes of social change taking place within the journalistic field and the religious field. While focusing on these specific fields as sites of inquiry, this study reveals the erosion of social and cultural barriers which finally led to the widespread reporting of clerical child abuse scandals in Ireland.