Rural Ireland Research Articles

Broken rhythm and slow time: temporalities in John McGahern’s novels

ABSTRACTThis essay, informed by postcolonial and ecocritical criticisms of modern temporality, examines the “strange sense of timelessness” in John McGahern’s novels. McGahern’s novels are punctuated with dysfunctional timepieces, which seem to invoke a modernist sentiment that distrusts mechanic time. Differing from modernist works, however, McGahern’s novels are primarily concerned with rural Ireland, as opposed to the urban settings with which his modernist predecessors were mostly preoccupied. The “broken rhythm” in his rural writing, then, may signify the multi-layered temporalities in postcolonial states, where colonial modernity is paradoxically resisted and replicated. The meandering narrative and a sense of environmental consciousness in his later novels, moreover, register an ecological “slow time” at odds with the modern temporality of speed. Beginning with modernism and moving on to postcolonial and ecocritical frameworks, this essay explores the ways in which McGahern’s use of time, suggested by his temporal figures and narrative strategies, serves as a subtle critique of the globalising modernity of our time. In thus doing, this essay teases out the enduring social critique in McGahern’s work and engages with the growing scholarly interest in ecocritical aspects of his writing.

‘She done Coriolanus at the Convent’: Empowerment and Entrapment in Teresa Deevy's In Search of Valour

This article explores the gender politics of a neglected one-act play by Teresa Deevy, first staged at the Abbey in 1931, that revolves around the young female protagonist's recollection of a convent production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in which the title role was taken by a young woman. This role model offers inspiration for a character confined as a domestic servant and defiantly seeking an alternative to the stultifying circumstances of life in rural Free State Ireland. While Ellie Irwin resembles other spirited Deevy heroines, the doubling of the young servant with her memory of Charlotta Burke as a non-cross-dressed Coriolanus adds a different dramatic dimension and raises questions of gender performance that the play's critical reception has not always acknowledged.

Civilising rural Ireland: the co-operative movement, development and the nation state, 1889–1939. By Patrick Doyle. Pp 248. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2019. £80.

Civilising rural Ireland: the co-operative movement, development and the nation state, 1889–1939. By Patrick Doyle. Pp 248. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2019. £80.

Rural household vulnerability a decade after the great financial crisis

Abstract This paper examines the continuing impact of the 2007/08 financial crisis in rural Ireland, examining the vulnerability and coping strategies at the household scale. Therefore, rather than re-examining the causes of the financial crisis, in this paper we seek to focus on the responses to the crisis within rural households, primarily focused on the geographies of household vulnerability and household financial responses. In this context, Ireland provides an illustrative case study given its severe economic crash, as well as the urban focus of its current recovery. To examine these themes, the paper advances a holistic vulnerability/resilience framework tested through a household survey. This focuses on four key components of vulnerability/resilience – exposure, sensitivity, capacity of response, and adaptive capacity – for understanding how rural households respond to change. The results emphasise the negative impact that the crisis continues to have on rural households, suggesting that the national economic recovery is uneven and further entrenches urban-rural differences. Moreover, the ability of households to cope with the crisis related to pre-crisis household (e.g. financial literacy) or spatial attributes, suggesting the need to consider vulnerability and resilience within a holistic framework.

Irish Women Evicted: The Rural Home and the Gendered Politics of Economic Morality in Claire Keegan’s Walk the Blue Fields

At first glance Claire Keegan’s collection of short stories Walk the Blue Fields, published during the tail end of the Celtic Tiger, seems out of place. While her contemporaries situate their counter-narratives of wealth disparity, gender identity crisis, and familial demise within urban high-rises, impoverished slums, and brooding cityscapes, Keegan’s priests, farmers, and housewives inhabit a seemingly timeless rural Ireland filled with sprawling farmlands, Protestant estates, and ancient cliffs. However, Keegan destabilises and re-appropriates traditional Ireland, making the rural a resource for challenging the gendered hierarchy of spatial, and by extension, economic relations in contemporary Ireland through the image of the home. In both ‘The Parting Gift’ and ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’, not only does Keegan position women in precarious relationships to land, property, and the rural home to identify the unequal social impact of economic morality for women, but also to illuminate the ways in which the continuing dependence on traditional precepts of gender and national belonging are employed to regulate what the prevailing power structures of the state conceive as a threatening femininity in contemporary Ireland. Underneath the rhetoric of hostile femininity, Keegan reveals the regressive and unequal gendered moral logic present within a neoliberal ‘new’ Ireland.

'Just lie there and die': barriers to access and use of general practitioner out-of-hours services for older people in rural Ireland.

Demographic changes and shifting populations mean growing numbers of older people are living alone in rural areas. General practitioner (GP) out-of-hours (GPOOH) services have an essential role in supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible, but little is known about use of GPOOH services by this cohort. This research examines how rurality impacts accessibility and utilisation of GPOOH services by people aged 65 years or more in rural Ireland. Conducted in the mainly rural counties of Cavan and Monaghan in the north-east of Ireland, this research used a mixed methods approach. Questionnaires and focus groups were conducted with 48 older people in six locations across both counties. A thematic analysis was conducted on the data using NVivo software. The challenge for older rural populations includes difficulties accessing transport and the limited availability of support networks during times of a health crisis, especially at night. The present findings show such challenges are further compounded by a lack of information about available services. Rurality complicates each of these challenges, because it adds to the vulnerability of older adults. This is most acutely felt by those who live alone and those living the furthest from GPOOH treatment centres. The most important concern for older people, when unwell outside doctor surgery hours, is the need for access to medical care as quickly as possible. Inability to use GPOOH services leads many older people to seek help from accident and emergency departments, where faster access to clinical care is sometimes assumed. For rural-dwelling older people, becoming ill outside GP surgery hours is complex and the barriers faced are often insurmountable at times of greatest need. Worries about accessibility and lack of information give rise to a hesitancy to use GPOOH services in a population that is already known to be reluctant to ask for help, even when such help is justified. In turn, the lack of familiarity with what is a fundamental community health service further impacts the willingness of older adults to call on GPOOH services for help when needed. Addressing the impact of rurality on access and use of out-of-hours medical services is essential to enable more older adults to live longer in their rural homes and communities, supported by services that are responsive to their needs regardless of where they live. Given GPOOH is the only current alternative out-of-hours medical service to accident and emergency departments, more research is urgently needed on both accessibility of GPOOH services by older adults and the impact of inaccessibility on use of emergency services by older people in rural areas.

What type of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) do primary care doctors want?

Purpose of the study: The purpose of this study is to ascertain what type of AEDs General Practitioners (GPs), who had previously been supplied and used AEDs, would prefer as replacements for existing defibrillators. Previous studies have identified AEDs as the most suitable defibrillators for GPs. 1 Colquhoun M. Resuscitation by primary care doctors. Resuscitation. 2006; 70: 229-237 Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (20) Google Scholar , 2 Masterson S. Wright P. Dowling J. Swann D. Bury G. Murphy A. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) survival in rural Northwest Ireland: 17 years’ experience. Emergency Medical Journal. 2011; 28: 437-438 Google Scholar , 3 Bury G. Headon M. Egan M. Dowling J. Cardiac Arrest management in general practice in Ireland: a 5-year cross-sectional study. BMJ Open. 2013; 3: e002563https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2013-002563 Crossref Scopus (17) Google Scholar This study aims to focus on the type of AEDs required by GPs in advance of a phased replacement of AEDs primarily to rural GPs in the North West region of Ireland.

The challenges to public health nurse practice in rural Ireland.

The primary objective was to understand the contemporary public health nurse's (PHN) role and the issues that they face working in rural Ireland. This study was based on an ethnographic approach with 13 PHNs working in rural areas in the South West of Ireland. A combination of solicited diaries and semi-structured interviews referred to as the diary/interview method were employed. Diaries were used by the PHNs to record their working day on a staggered basis from February to April 2017 with the subsequent interviews carried out in June and July 2017. Working as a PHN in a rural area presented a number of issues such as time spent on traveling as a result of geographical disparity & poor road networks; client transport issues; a sense of working in isolation; communication issues with respect to computer/tablet hardware availability, mobile phone and broadband connectivity and the availability of, and the physical access to services. PHNs operating in rural communities face a distinct set of challenges that they have a limited ability to address. Legislators, health care providers and policymakers need to create a supportive environment that helps address these challenges in Ireland.

“Believe My Word Dear Father that You Can’t Pick Up Money Here as Quick as the People at Home Thinks It”: Exploring Migration Experiences in Irish Emigrants’ Letters

This paper aims to investigate the conceptualisation of migration experiences in the personal correspondence exchanged between Irish emigrants to the United States, Australia and New Zealand and their significant others in Ireland between 1840 and 1930. In doing so, the study proposes a corpus-pragmatic examination of the words land and situation in order to elucidate the various ways in which the concepts of migration, enhancement of social standing and belonging are linguistically and pragmatically constructed in epistolary discourse. Using the Word Sketch function on Sketch Engine corpus tool, the quantitative analysis involves examining the collocational behaviour of land and situation in both datasets. Secondly, a qualitative examination of the linguistic patterns is conducted in order to compare and contrast migration experiences in Australia/New Zealand and USA and ascertain the extend to which specific migration experiences influenced Irish emigrants’ emotional attitudes towards departure and life abroad. The collocational analyses of land(s) and situation(s) highlight two main themes in the Australian letters: (1) settlerism and the search for restoration of social status and (2) the role of letter writing as a means for sense-making. In contrast, the USA data unveils a contradictory and rather negative image of America that couples with an acute homesickness. Finally, the study discusses the pragmatic functions homesickness may have served to encourage or discourage emigration in rural Ireland.

(Re)Interpreting Fieldwork: Jos Koning in East Clare

(Re)Interpreting Fieldwork:Jos Koning in East Clare Helen Shea (bio) In the early summer of 1975 a young man rode his bicycle into Feakle, the County Clare village tucked into the southern slopes of the Sliabh Aughty mountains that border County Galway, about twenty miles northeast of Ennis. Jos Koning was then a graduate student in anthropology and ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam, beginning what was to become the first ethnomusicological study of Irish traditional dance music. Koning observed in Feakle a population diverse in age, socioeconomic status, and aspirations. He documented their participation in various dance-music genres, from pub sessions and dances to competitions and céilithe. His aim was to account for that multiplicity, to discover the relationships between groups of people and their musical participation, and to explain how these had developed over time. This approach was new to studies of Irish traditional music, and it challenged the assumptions of cultural continuity and cohesion in rural Ireland that are at the core of received narratives of Irish traditional music. These assumptions derive in part from the harmonizing nativist discourses of cultural nationalism and folklore studies, which informed the work of the most influential anthropologists of rural Irish life, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball. County Clare's status as the reputed "home of traditional music" similarly draws on nativist discourse that locates the heart of Irish culture in the rural west, among Irish-speaking, religiously devout, and hard-working small farmers. The county's reputation also derives from George Petrie's fascination with its music in the early nineteenth century (Breathnach, Folk Music; Stokes; Petrie), a status more recently boosted by tourism, the work of folklorists and broadcasters, and an ever-expanding number of traditional-music festivals. These include the annual festival in Feakle, referred to as "the very heart of Irish music" ("Feakle Festival"), where the renowned fiddle player Martin Hayes [End Page 188] and concertina player Mary MacNamara pay tribute to the men who inspired and mentored them. These musicians include P. J. Hayes, Martin Rochford, Paddy Canny, Mikey Donoghue, Bill Malley, and Joe Bane (Hayes, "Liner Notes"; MacNamara), all of whom feature in Koning's research. Drawing on Koning's records of this project, including two doktoraal scripties (master's theses), field journals, recordings, and published articles, which he generously donated to the Clare Library's Local Studies Centre, this article considers the significance of his study for our understanding of the diverse and changing social meanings and sounds of Irish traditional dance music. I outline Koning's findings that musical participation and values were aligned with social status and discuss the implications of social change for both musicians and their music as they split into two stylistically different groups. Later, I turn to Koning's published articles—a reflection on the roles available to an outsider musician ("Fieldworker") and an analysis of fiddle playing among Feakle musicians born in the early twentieth century ("That Old Plaintive Touch")—which indicate that the musical performance and values of these older musicians differed from those of visiting musicians from the urban revival, while their opportunities to play in public declined with the rise of modern instruments. Conrad Arensberg and the Lure of Authenticity The work of distinguished American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball provided both a baseline and a template for anthropological studies in Ireland up to the 1970s (Gibbon; Wilson) and remains a touchstone for representations of a typically Irish rural way of life. More widely read, at least in the United States, than their coauthored Family and Community in Ireland (Byrne et al. 48), Arensberg's Irish Countryman focused on rural communities in County Clare, while Kimball wrote about the townsfolk (Family and Community xlvi). Two features of their work in particular shaped the ways in which the two studies influenced subsequent scholarship and especially the tendency of their findings to valorize rural cultural life. The anthropologists were heavily informed by contemporary theoretical approaches to anthropology and folklore studies, and they drew from (and reinforced) the discourse of cultural nationalism. Arensberg and [End Page 189] Kimball introduced their joint study as a test of the basic...

The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey by Elizabeth Mannion

Reviewed by: The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey by Elizabeth Mannion Patrick Lonergan (bio) Elizabeth Mannion. The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. P. xvii +218. $34.95. The international reputation of Ireland's Abbey Theatre is strongly influenced by its early dramas about peasant life in rural Ireland. From Kathleen ni Houlihan (the 1902 W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory drama that is sometimes credited with inspiring the 1916 Easter Rising) to Synge's riot-provoking Playboy of the Western World (1907), the most famous plays of the Irish dramatic movement celebrated the rural as the source of an authentic Irish identity. The anomaly in that pattern was Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy of 1923–1926, three now-classic plays set in inner-city Dublin tenements. But despite the urban setting of the Trilogy, the tendency in scholarship has been to see plays like Juno and the Paycock (1924) as peasant dramas by default—as being grounded in the extravagant speech patterns and antiheroic outlook that we find in Synge's Playboy. In other words, O'Casey's [End Page 293] plays are seen as part of an unbroken and coherent tradition of representing Irish life on the stage of Ireland's national theatre, their urban setting regarded as largely incidental. Given this context, Elizabeth Mannion's Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre is a book with apparently modest ambitions that has undeniably major consequences. It provides a survey of plays produced from the founding of the Abbey in 1904 to the destruction by fire of its first building in 1951—which means that some readers might be tempted to overlook it on the basis that it is exploring minor works. But the book's urgency for Irish theatre scholarship lies in its persuasive claim that we must revise our understanding of the early Abbey, Sean O'Casey, and much else besides. Through engaging in a process of intensive archival investigation, Mannion has identified fifty-one urban plays that premiered at the Abbey before 1951. The word "urban" is used broadly, to encompass both setting (plays that happen to take place in one of Ireland's cities) and theme (plays that explore the distinctive characteristics of urban life). Thus the book necessarily considers both the practice of playwriting and the practical use of stage space. That figure of fifty-one plays is from a total of 370 new Irish dramas, representing roughly 14 percent of the overall output during the theatre's first half-century. Most are unknown, many are out of print, and few have been revived. That might seem like a small proportion of a relatively unimportant body of work, but it does represent an average of one new play each year—and, in helpful chronologies at the start and end of the volume, Mannion demonstrates that they did indeed appear at roughly annual intervals. And although many of those plays imitated the themes of the Abbey's peasant plays, others used their urban setting to explore topics such as social class, housing, and labor. In summary, Mannion provides compelling evidence of a distinctive tradition running over several decades. The book's subtitle, "beyond O'Casey," is therefore particularly apt. One of its strengths is that Mannion's close reading of several plays is complemented by an awareness of the practical demands of making theatre. She is comfortable discussing the relative aesthetic merits of key works, but she is also able to draw on data such as box-office receipts to explain audiences' enthusiasm for one work over another. For example, she notes that a five-day run of a drama called Money sold only a third of the tickets that a three-day revival of Juno and the Paycock had generated, a variation that demonstrates that audiences liked some urban plays more than others (35). Similarly, she provides revealing context for the arrival to the Abbey stage of the first urban plays, which were written by W. F. Casey. Appearing in 1908, his [End Page 294] two plays replenished the Abbey coffers at a time when its financial security...

From Silence to Plenty: The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction

From Silence to Plenty:The Famine in Early Twentieth-Century Periodical Fiction* Lindsay Janssen (bio) "The remains of centuries are here; and the mind wanders from the wonderful and sublime in natural scenery to contemplate in solemn, gloomy silence the waste and desolations of time."1 "The Famine had fallen upon the land, with a cloud of horrors unknown to other peoples, undreamt of by the men of this generation. It was not merely that thousands sickened of starvation and walked the land, gaunt and ghastly heralds of fast following death. The gasp of the dying, the silence of the dead—these were awful and appalling."2 In 1850, toward the end of the Great Irish Famine (1845–51), William Stevens Balch—an American preacher, evangelist, journalist, politician, and historian—published Ireland as I Saw It. As the first of the above epigraphs demonstrates, Balch's narrative is marked by a duality found in travel writing about Ireland in the post-Famine decades; his admiration of the landscape stands in uneasy contrast to his remarks invoking desolation and silence.3 The second epigraph appeared almost a quarter-century later when the exiled nationalist John Mitchel returned to Ireland. To describe his warm reception, his life, and his accomplishments, the New York Irish-American reprinted an article from the Dublin Freeman's Journal. In that biographical [End Page 123] sketch's references to the Famine, the article's author alludes to the "silence of the dead." "Silence" and the related word "absence" have become key terms in academic and popular discourse about the Famine. Especially since its 150th anniversary and the accompanying commemorative boom of the mid-1990s, scholars, politicians, and journalists have insisted on the appropriateness of both words in their assessments of how Irish and diasporic communities approached the event and its human costs. Many have emphasized the paucity of material as the starting point of any sustained engagement with the Famine. Such presumed "silence" and "absence" are read in light of psychoanalytic trauma theory that turns to both concepts to describe symptoms of a society suffering the effects of traumatic repression. Scholarly research since the commemoration years, however, including work by Christopher Morash, Margaret Kelleher, Vincent Comerford, Melissa Fegan, Christopher Cusack, Marguérite Corporaal, and this author counters such perceived absence by unearthing ample textual confirmation of Famine memory. Yet despite such accumulated evidence, the conviction that the Famine has been cloaked in silence persists in both Irish and Irish American discourse. Building upon previous scholarship, this essay seeks to further qualify notions of traumatic silence and repression in relation to the impact of the Great Famine. After reviewing recent developments in the understanding of that event as a cultural trauma in psychoanalytic discourse, I turn to a literary case study to demonstrate an early twentieth-century engagement with the Famine's legacy—thereby complicating readings assuming communal silence and repression. This exploration focuses on a selection of stories about rural Ireland published in the Dublin story paper the Irish Packet between 1903 and 1906. Although the essay's argument is informed by a larger corpus of rural fiction in the magazine, I will limit the analysis to four examples: "Con the Quare One" and "Herself" by Jane Barlow (1857–1917), "The Frenzy of Famine: A Tale of '47" by Harry Allen, and "The Holy Well" by the magazine's editor Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1849–1933).4 My current research on Irish and Irish North [End Page 124] American periodical culture between 1850 and the early twentieth century demonstrates a plethora of material, both fiction and nonfiction, that engages with memories of the Famine and Irish famines more broadly. The Irish Packet is just one of many examples that demonstrate the pervasive role of such memory in popular periodical literature. I have selected this Dublin magazine as my central case study for several reasons. The contents of the Irish Packet suggest that representations of the Famine were considered suitable matter for creative work. Moreover, these rural stories evidence the formulaic nature of Famine fictions as they tap into familiar representations of victimhood. And, crucially, the Irish Packet stories have a moral dimension in that they provide opportunities to...

The Irish Female Migrant, Silence and Family Duty in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

Set in the 1950s, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) traces the life experiences of Eilis Lacey, who is urged by her family to migrate to Brooklyn due to the lack of opportunities for young women in her native Enniscorthy, a small town in rural Ireland. Just as she begins to establish a new life in America, a tragic event at home calls her back to Ireland. During her visit, Eilis faces the terrible dilemma of having to choose between her sense of familial duty and the fulfillment of her own desires. In his novel, Toibin provides a subtle and complex portrayal of the socio-familial pressures affecting the life of the protagonist, whose unverbalised thoughts speak for the decisions she is not allowed to make. In this way, Toibin denounces the historical and cultural silences surrounding the subjectivity of the Irish female migrant.

Mind the Gap: The Big House in Cinematic Representations of the Anglo-Irish War

It goes without saying that the Big House was intended to be a symbol: as more than one critic has remarked, these houses really were only “big” in comparison to the poverty of the lesser structures that surrounded them. They were to be a bastion for British and Anglo-Irish culture and a center for social and administrative interactions. In this sense, they straddled the gap between the towns of Dublin and London, whence their power came, and the villages to whom they administered: it is no coincidence that these garrisons of British power bore the brunt of Republican anger during the Troubles of 1919-1921. Examining two of the rare films to focus on the War of Independence from the perspective of rural Ireland (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Ken Loach 2006, The Last September, Deborah Warner 1999) allows us to examine the representation of the Big House and its place between the Irish village and the British-ruled town. Loach’s film, which emphasizes the Socialist associations of the Anglo-Irish War and is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of British rule, highlights Republicans blending in to the landscape, walking from the activity of the village to the windswept hills of the countryside; the Big House, however, is reached only by (Black-and-Tan) jeep, and though landowner Sir John Hamilton may know his own servants, he fails to recognize the Republican members of the community. Deborah Warner’s The Last September takes a more clearly revisionist stance, and can be seen adding both the Irish and the British to its adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen’s novel about an Anglo-Irish family residing in the Big House of Danielstown during the war. In so doing, the Naylors become the middlemen in the struggle between the Black-and-Tans and the Republicans, once again associated respectively with town and country. In so doing, the films “mind the gap”, focusing on the Big House, so obviously present in the landscape, but which ultimately symbolizes the absence of middle ground between the two factions.

Polyphony, Provincialism, Nostalgia and Involution in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012)

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the narrative and thematic structure of Donal Ryan’s debut novel, The Spinning Heart (2012), which offers a snapshot of rural Ireland after the Celtic Tiger period and questions its benefits, the modernisation of Ireland and the response of Irish people faced with critical times. It draws on three theoretical frameworks for the analysis of Ryan’s narrative structure, thematic content and style: first, a variation of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia at social and stylistic levels; second, the conceptions of the parochial and the provincial in post-Celtic Tiger rural Ireland; third, the concept of nostalgia. The analysis concludes that the proliferation of voices and the use of monologues show Ryan’s need to portray disaffection and regret when a silent dialogising discourse reigns. Ryan’s novel denounces the loss of collectivity in rural communities to a more individualistic society. It proposes a parochialism that is universal albeit rooted in the local.

‘One of our National Treasures’: the biography of the skull of Turlough Carolan the Blind Harper

Abstract Many Irish musicians will have heard of Turlough Carolan (1670–1738), frequently referred to as the Blind Harper. Less well known is that his skull was exhumed in 1750, twelve years after he was buried. Since that year and throughout the nineteenth century, a human skull, declared to be that of Carolan, was displayed in various prestigious locations. In the early twentieth century it was received by the National Museum of Ireland, where it still resides. This paper traces the story of the skull from grave to museum stores, providing an insight into the fascination exerted by remains of the deceased and the special significance given in Ireland to the remains of a revered musician. The skull is where multiple histories meet: it embodies a record of customs in rural Ireland; it tells us something of the display of collections by Irish gentry and the middle classes; and it is a route into exploring the cultural meanings of our collections.

Is There A Role For Paramedics In Primary Care In Ireland: An Exploratory Study

<div class="O"><p><strong>Background</strong></p><p>Paramedics are reported to be the most underutilised profession working within rural areas, due to the paucity of service requirements. (O’ Meara et al 2012). Infrequent opportunities to practice particular skills can lead to reduction in levels of confidence and competence that can have significant risk and safety ramifications for practitioners and patients. (Mulholland et al 2014). Traditionally paramedic practice provides emergency care and transport within the community, but current ambulance service models within rural Ireland may be inefficient and contributing to hospital overcrowding and increased healthcare costs. (Lightfoot, 2015). Alternative models of healthcare are implemented within alternative rural jurisdictions such as Australia and Canada that aims to address issues of practitioner underutilisation, skill retention and healthcare personnel shortages. (Wilson, et al 2009).</p><p><strong>Rationale</strong></p><p>Ireland’s population is ageing, with increased co-morbidities and reports of current and predicted workforce shortages in general practice. (Smyth et al 2017). With rising demands on general practitioners (GPs), measures to increase their supply and retention has become a challenging problem. Potential solutions to this will require immediate change to established work practices, to cater for current and predicted healthcare needs. (H.S.E, 2015). Paramedics with advanced skills (APs) could alleviate some of the shortages identified and enhance paramedic profile by transferring some tasks deemed appropriate from GPs to APs within both urban and rural communities. This process is globally known as task shifting where some competencies are transferred to alternative healthcare practitioners with less training. (WHO, 2007).</p><p><strong>Aim</strong></p><p>To ascertain the attitudes and opinions of paramedics and GPs associated with GEMS - UL, towards a new concept of joint collaboration in primary care that should be of mutual benefit to both groups, and also to identify potential barriers.</p><p><strong>Methodology</strong></p><p>Questionnaire survey of graduate Paramedics and General Practitioners associated with University of Limerick Graduate Entry Medical School and Paramedic Studies to identify competencies that GPs would deem appropriate to reassign to APs and ascertain both groups’ opinions towards this new concept of joint collaboration and practice.</p><p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p><p>Studies report successful outcomes in similar models of joint collaboration to support shortages of GPs in rural healthcare. (Reaburn, 2017). Collaboration on this scale has been shown to be beneficial for enhancing the paramedic profession within the wider healthcare system while providing essential support within primary care and general practice. Potential benefits have been reported with reduced emergency department admissions and early intervention in the management of chronic disease. (Blacker et al, 2009).</p></div>

Networking towards sustainable tourism: innovations between green growth and degrowth strategies

ABSTRACTThis paper uses network analysis to investigate features of a regional network of tourism enterprises in rural Ireland. In contrast to the economic-driven networks literature, it focuses on socio-ecological goals alongside the economic goals. Acknowledging the heterogeneity of sustainable entrepreneurs, member businesses are categorized by their ideological orientation towards sustainability, ranging from strict green growth to rigid degrowth approaches. The paper argues that sustainability networks support rural areas’ efforts for change; however, degrowth strategists need to be represented as key actors of communication and joint activities in the long term to realize a clear shift away from business as usual.

The fitness of persons in the landscape: isolation, belonging and emergent subjects in rural Ireland

The fitness of persons in the landscape: isolation, belonging and emergent subjects in rural Ireland

History, Hunger, and the Construction of an Irish Homeland: Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and Mary Gordon’s Pearl

ABSTRACTSet in rural Ireland in the 1850s, the Irish Canadian writer Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, The Wonder (2016), is an alternative historiographical narrative of the Great Famine. Narrated from the perspective of a nurse who eventually becomes the rescuer of the famished heroine, the novel pulls out the problematic dynamics between the politics of remembering/telling and the historiographical discourse of the Great Hunger. In Mary Gordon’s Pearl (2005), however, the performance of hunger is adopted by the novel’s heroine Pearl as a political means to provide a voice for the silenced ones. Yet hunger as such is also an inherently Irish act of remembering, both politically and historically. By looking into these two contemporary novels that undertake the rewriting of the history of Irish hunger memories, this article attempts to address the politics of remembering hunger and the historiographical construction of homeland in the diasporic context of a national narrative.