Rural Irish Research Articles

'A Joycean Smutmonger': Echoes of Joyce in Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Rural Modernism

Since its publication, critics of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Irish-language masterpiece Cré na Cille (1949; Graveyard Clay) have consistently namechecked James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), usually for the sole purpose of conveying its perceived difficulty and/or vulgarity. Indeed, Cré na Cille was first refused publication because, in Ó Cadhain’s words, it was too long and too ‘Joycean’. Ó Cadhain himself evidently saw his work as existing in dialogue with his renowned progenitor and during a late lecture revelled in retelling an overheard conversation in which he was described as nothing more than a ‘Joycean smutmonger’. This article goes beyond such surface-level comparisons to unpick how Ó Cadhain proffers a radical portrayal of rural Irish modernity to compare with Joyce’s predominantly urban equivalent. It argues that Ó Cadhain’s characters, like those found in Joyce’s oeuvre, are consistently forced to navigate the forces of tradition and modernity, which existed at the heart of rural Irish society in the mid-twentieth century. This essay will first compare how Ó Cadhain and Joyce treat the predicaments of a young woman preparing for emigration in their respective short stories ‘An Bhliain 1912’ and ‘Eveline’, before moving on to treat Ó Cadhain’s experiments in form and language in Cré na Cille. In particular, it will examine such experimentation in the context of his lasting obsession with Finnegans Wake (1939), as evidenced by his stated belief that he ‘could write a work like Finnegans Wake’. Informed by recent developments in ‘alternative modernities’, this essay attempts to offer a nascent definition of what might be signified by ‘rural modernism’ in an Irish context.

Island Girl, Universal Woman: <i>Peig: A Scéal Féin</i> (1998) as Narrative of Class, Labour and Femininity

This article reappraises the Irish-language autobiography, Peig, as a unique account of the experience of life and work by a woman of the rural Irish speaking subsistence class. Peig is a seminal Irish language text, both as a depiction of class and gender-based conflict, and as an Irish language work that describes intersectional issues of justice, labour, rights and femininity from childhood to old age. I examine the narrative through the lenses of home, poverty, housing, work, marriage, children, friends, foes and loss. Peig depicts great resilience in the face of structural inequalities and localised injustice. The sustaining nature of intergenerational female friendships plays the central role in Peig’s account of her life. Arguing that the text belongs to the shared histories of women across the world, from China to the Middle East and Africa, I conclude that Peig is one of the most emotionally rich books in modern Irish. The article opens new ground in examining the question of class in Irish language literature, concluding that its universal themes continue to resonate in a contemporary multi-ethnic Ireland. Banner Image: Great Blasket (2019), taken by Maciej Brencz. Source: Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

THU250 Therapeutic Inertia In Primary Care With Poor Information Transfer To Specialist Care - A Rural Irish Experience

Abstract Disclosure: C.T. Coughlan: None. T.M. O'Sullivan: None. M.C. O'Donovan: None. M.J. Hannon: None. The burden of diabetes management in Ireland is shared between primary care physicans and specialists in secondary care, using current international management guidelines (1). However, long waiting lists and resource constraints limit the ability of secondary care to respond rapidly to all referrals. This study was designed to identify missed opportunities for early intervention in the management of diabetes in primary care. Written referrals of diabetes patients from primary care physicians to a specialist endocrinology service in a rural Irish hospital were audited to assess both the appropriateness of the referrals and to identify any missed opportunities for starting adjunctive treatments in primary care. We analysed all 74 referrals - mean age 58, 45% female – that were on the hospital diabetes clinic waiting list at the time of data collection. 61/74 (82%) had type 2 diabetes. The average time between date of referral and date of data collection was 231 days. Only 43/74 (58%) included a HbA1c value in the referral document. Of the type 2 diabetes referrals, only 12/61 (20%) included a BMI value. Mean HbA1c in the type 2 diabetes cohort was 71 mmol/mol (8.6%), and mean BMI was 30.6 kg/m2. Despite this, 19/61 (40%) were on monotherapy at time of referral, only 15/61 (25%) were on a GLP1 analog, and only 17/61 (28%) were on an SGLT2 inhibitor. Of the type 2 patients with documented BMI > 30 kg/m2, only 2/5 (40%) were on a GLP1 analog and only 2/5 (40%) were on an SGLT2 inhibitor. Lipid values were included in the referrals of 26/74 patients (35%), and blood pressure values in 25/74 (34%). Despite this, 44/74 (59%) were on a statin and 40/74 (54%) were on an ACE inhibitor or ARB. The renal function (serum creatinine or eGFR) was provided in 22/74 (30%), and information regarding microalbuminuria was provided in only 12/74 (16%). Foot examination was documented in 13/74 referrals (18%), and retinal screening status was documented in 17/74 (23%). Given the exponential increase in the numbers of patients with obesity and diabetes and increasing evidence on the importance of early multifactorial risk reduction, it is essential that cardiovascular risk factors and diabetes complications are documented and appropriate initial management commenced while patients await secondary care evaluation. Our study shows that referrals lack critical information which makes appropriate prioritization difficult. Also, the major classes of oral hypoglycaemic agents are under utilized in primary care, which exposes patients to damaging hyperglycaemia for an unnecessarily long time prior to secondary care evaluation. 1. Davies MJ, Aroda VR, Collins BS, Gabbay RA, Green J, Maruthur NM, et al. Management of hyperglycaemia in type 2 diabetes, 2022. A consensus report by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD). Diabetologia. 2022;65(12):1925-66. Presentation: Thursday, June 15, 2023

Continuity, change and new ways of being: An exploratory assessment of farmer's experiences and responses to public health restrictions during the COVID‐19 pandemic in a rural Irish community

AbstractFarming occupations are, in the Global North, generally solitary, and a growing body of research identifies this as one of the factors that underpins low levels of wellbeing and poor mental health amongst farmers. The primary public health response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic focused on reducing transmission of the virus by limiting interactions of people. This article seeks to assess the impact of these restrictions on farmer's experience of isolation and how it shaped their wellbeing. Applying a broad socio‐ecological framework, we analyse change, continuity and shifts in social and economic relations and their spatial reconfiguration during the COVID‐19 pandemic as recounted in semi‐structured, qualitative interviews. We found that while COVID‐19 has disrupted socio‐spatial relations, including key sites of socialisation for farmers and rural communities, occupational isolation was viewed as a positive feature of farming as was working in nature. Familial and informal networks of support were important throughout the pandemic, while novel engagements with communication technologies facilitated both change and continuity of social and economic interaction. Whilst these findings are broadly positive, the reconfiguration of, particularly, economic relations is viewed as accelerating the turn towards service delivery using technology and, consequently, further reducing opportunities for social interaction.

Erica Van Horn’s creative exercises

ABSTRACT Erica Van Horn is an American artist and writer who has been living in Ireland since 1996, and runs Coracle Press with the poet Simon Cutts from their home in rural Tipperary. Van Horn’s work often takes as its starting point local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider, creating journal entries, books and ephemera that present a one-sided, coolly recorded, wryly humorous set of observations. This is the first study of the representation of Ireland in Van Horn’s work. The article draws on Claudia Kinmonth’s study of the resourcefulness of the rural Irish material economy. Van Horn’s work shares the “inventive and resourceful” qualities praised by Kinmonth, “making do” with the physical, visual, and verbal raw materials in her immediate environment. Following a comparative reading of Van Horn alongside the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons, who have both written books in rural Ireland from the perspective of the “blow-in,” this article proposes that Van Horn’s work is a form of “local looking” and “attending to what is close at hand,” qualities that have been called for by the writer Tim Dee as a means of fostering imaginative engagement with place at this time of climate crisis.

General Practice Doctors Bag and Emergency Bag Audit – A Quality Improvement Project (QIP) in a Rural Irish General Practice

General Practice Doctors Bag and Emergency Bag Audit – A Quality Improvement Project (QIP) in a Rural Irish General Practice

The Letters of John McGahern ed. by Frank Shovlin

Reviewed by: The Letters of John McGahern ed. by Frank Shovlin Yen-Chi Wu The Letters of John McGahern, edited by Frank Shovlin (London: Faber and Faber, 2021, 880 p., hardcover, $40) In the 2005 documentary A Private World, John McGahern is seen in his Leitrim farmhouse, walking around the neighborhood with his dog, and reading books in his humble study room. These images seem to confirm a common perception of McGahern as a rural Irish writer, a wordsmith disengaged from the Dublin literary establishment. In his early career, when the controversy surrounding the banning of his second novel, The Dark (1965), placed him in the limelight, the young writer kept a low profile. In his later career, when the success of Amongst Women (1990) attracted renewed public attention, the mature writer stayed mostly at his country homestead, keeping publicity activities to a minimum. Partly because of his reticence, much of McGahern's life—private and professional—remained undisclosed. In this regard, The Letters of John McGahern, edited with admirable professionalism by Frank Shovlin, is an important contribution to McGahern scholarship, painting a fuller picture of McGahern as a literary man and a professional writer. The subjects of McGahern's literary relationships and biographical stories have attracted much critical attention, but most scholars focus on the writer's early career. John Killen's edited work, Dear Mr McLaverty (2006), is the first collection of McGahern's letters. While it gives us a glimpse of McGahern's epistolary style, it is restricted in scope, collecting only his correspondences with fellow writer Michael McLaverty. Similarly, Denis Sampson's Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist (2012) centers around the formative years of McGahern's writing career. Sampson's short biography shows us that McGahern was uninterested in the literary scenes of Dublin's Grafton Street—which he later dubbed "the Dublin pub crowd"—dominated by big personalities such as Patrick Kavanagh; nor was he comfortable in Mary Lavin's literary salon, which McLaverty encouraged him to attend. Reading Sampson's account, one is left with the [End Page 137] impression that McGahern was an outlier. McGahern's Memoir (2005)—published in the United States as All Will Be Well—does little to rectify this view of him as a lone writer. The memoir is more about his parents than himself. Most of his adult life, especially his later career, is skimped in the end. The Letters of John McGahern is thus a significant contribution: it places McGahern front and center, while the figures of his parents retreat to the background and his early and later careers receive equal attention. Among its achievements, the book complicates the common perception of McGahern as a recluse by showing the networks that he built around himself; it also shows a professional writer at work from the mid- to late twentieth century. In the introduction, Shovlin writes: "contrary to certain received views of him as an isolated gentleman farmer," McGahern "travelled a good deal and lived at many addresses in Ireland, England, the United States and France." McGahern's second wife, Madeline, is an American immigrant, and she owns properties in Paris. The couple vacationed in France regularly. Moreover, many of these relocations were facilitated by university fellowships. McGahern was a visiting fellow or writer-in-residence at numerous institutions outside Ireland, including Colgate University (where he returned more than once), University of Reading, Durham University, Newcastle University, and University of Victoria in Canada, among others. He formed good relationships with his colleagues in these institutes. Through their correspondences, we see McGahern working as a professional writer, engaged in literary events, giving lectures, and doing the odd editorial work. For instance, he proposed to edit a collection of Irish prose writings for Faber, which did not come to fruition; he also championed literary works that he admired—under his recommendation, Vintage reissued American author John Williams's Stoner (1965), which became a publishing sensation. McGahern might have kept his distance from the Dublin literary circle, but he was certainly not an isolated gentleman farmer; he had established himself in a global literary network. Similarly, although he shunned the big personalities in Dublin's literary pubs, he maintained good...

Clúdach / Cover

Clúdach / Cover Angela Griffith (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Cover. Geraldine O’Reilly Illustration for Mary O’Donnell’s poem “Heron and the Women” in Unlegendary Heroes (limited-edition box set of letterpress poems and silk screen prints, 2021) Used with the artist’s permission the heron’s prehistoric pterosauresque form is suspended against the whiteness of the page. Skillfully rendered hand-painted marks capture the creature’s physicality, grace, and power. However, while the artist has carefully observed its anatomical details, its genus undisputed, the bird is decontextualized from its natural surroundings, removed from familiar environments. Its separateness takes on a symbolic power in the viewer’s imagination. All at once it is beautiful and majestic, yet its isolated state is unexpected, its presence uncanny and disquieting. The heron’s removal from nature allows the viewer to project their own meaning, emotions, and memories onto its shape. They are free to imagine, or remember, other places and events. However, despite its lack of pictorial context, the heron is not alone on the page. On this landscape-oriented sheet, to the left of the image are the words of the poet Mary O’Donnell. The printed poem entitled “Heron and the Women” was the inspiration for the artist, Geraldine O’Reilly. The artist and poet have known each other for years. Encouraged by another poet, Dermot Healy, O’Reilly creates work that draws on what she knows. She admires the same trait in O’Donnell’s writing, in particular what O’Reilly describes as the poet’s ability to get to the heart of the matter, and her use of direct, unambiguous language [End Page 158] when doing so. Much of O’Donnell’s oeuvre focuses on the lives of women, past and present, restoring their voices and recognizing the personal agency of generations of women previously ignored, neglected, or exploited. Geraldine O’Reilly is one of Ireland’s most prolific and respected artists. She has been a visual arts member of Aosdána, a peer-elected association of Irish artists, writers, and musicians, since 2004. O’Donnell is a fellow member for literature. Over two years ago, O’Reilly invited O’Donnell to collaborate on an art project where the poet’s words and the artist’s responding images would be presented side by side. The result is a limited-edition solander-boxed set of ten single-sheet screen prints with originally letterpressed poems entitled Unlegendary Heroes. Over the course of the project, O’Reilly partnered with other leading women in their fields: the poetry was set by Mary Plunkett of Belgrave Press, and the presentation boxes were handmade by book binder Éilís Murphy of Folded Leaf. The series was printed at Graphic Studio Dublin, the longest-established print workshop in Ireland. The paper is Fabriano Rosaspina Bianco, a mold-made 60 percent cotton paper, smooth to the touch. Unlegendary Heroes comes from the title of a celebrated poem by O’Donnell which is also included in the collection. The poem is an elegy to the lives of rural Irish women, women who were often consigned homogenously to the roles of “wife of,” “daughter of,” or “servant of the parish.” While the poem comprises a list of fictious names and domestic achievements, the narratives are grounded in reality, representing women encountered and recollected by O’Donnell. The poem particularly resonates with older generations, including O’Reilly, as they remember similar women. The theme of women’s lives and experiences, contemporary and historical, continues throughout this new series. O’Reilly selected ten poems from three different collections by O’Donnell: Unlegendary Heroes (1998), Those April Fevers (2015), and the most recently published Massacre of the Birds (2021). The artist produced a watercolor illustration in response to each, working in a medium notable for its delicacy and nuance. This technique also showcases the artist’s consummate draftswomanship. O’Reilly transferred her images photographically to silk screen, a process that preserved her mediative handmade marks. An artist renowned for her work as a printmaker, O’Reilly is fascinated by the visual qualities of the printed word. The poems were letterpressed first, then transferred photographically to a silk...

Design and Year-Long Performance Evaluation of a Pump as Turbine (PAT) Pico-Hydropower Energy Recovery Device in a Water Network

Despite the existence of a vast scientific literature on the subject of hydraulic energy recovery from water pipelines by means of micro- and pico-hydropower using pumps as turbines (PAT), such technology has found a very limited application thus far in practice. In fact, the selection of a pump as turbine for a specific site is a matter of nontrivial trade-offs between a variety of technical and economic parameters and this aspect has not been sufficiently captured and integrated into a reliable, proven, and practical selection methodology available to designers and practitioners. Hence, a multi-objective PAT selection software was developed and utilized to design a 3 kW energy recovery installation at a rural Irish water network. The performance of the scheme was monitored over 13 consecutive months, resulting in the generation of nearly 16,000 kWh of electricity and validating the output from the PAT selection software.

Lived Lives at Fort Dunree: a rural Irish community perspective.

Background: Elevated suicide rates have alarmed policy makers and communities. In these circumstances, the value of understanding more about communities and their potential role in suicide intervention is becoming more apparent. This study involved evaluating feedback from individuals with and without previous suicidal thinking who participated in an arts-science rural community-based intervention project around suicide in County Donegal, Ireland ( Lived Lives at Fort Dunree). Methods: A combined quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was used to evaluate individual and community responses to the Lived Lives project. Results: Participants ( n = 83), with and without a mental health history and previous suicidal ideation, reported they believed Lived Lives could have potential to help suicide-bereaved families, people with mental illness and people with suicidal thinking. Qualitative results suggested its' suitability for specific groups affected by suicide. Discussion: The evaluation of the Lived Lives project indicated that supervised, "safe-space" community intervention projects around suicide have inherent value with positive impacts for bereaved individuals and communities, including those who have experienced suicidal feelings. Future research should explore the transferability of these findings to other communities, and at-risk groups.

Lived Lives at Fort Dunree: a rural Irish community perspective

Background: Elevated suicide rates have alarmed policy makers and communities. In these circumstances, the value of understanding more about communities and their potential role in suicide intervention is becoming more apparent. This study involved evaluating feedback from individuals with and without previous suicidal thinking who participated in an arts-science rural community-based intervention project around suicide in County Donegal, Ireland ( Lived Lives at Fort Dunree). Methods: A combined quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was used to evaluate individual and community responses to the Lived Lives project. Results: Participants ( n = 83), with and without a mental health history and previous suicidal ideation, reported they believed Lived Lives could have potential to help suicide-bereaved families, people with mental illness and people with suicidal thinking. Qualitative results suggested its’ suitability for specific groups affected by suicide. Discussion: The evaluation of the Lived Lives project indicated that supervised, “safe-space” community intervention projects around suicide have inherent value with positive impacts for bereaved individuals and communities, including those who have experienced suicidal feelings. Future research should explore the transferability of these findings to other communities, and at-risk groups.

Fraught with frights or full of fun: perspectives of risky play among six-to-eight-year olds

ABSTRACT Outdoor play provides children with unique opportunities to explore and expand their worlds, and to incorporate risk and challenge into play events. However, international research indicates that children are being exposed to fewer opportunities to engage in outdoor, risky play, while few studies have explored risky play among children aged six-to-eight years in differing cultural contexts. This qualitative study explored children’s perspectives and experiences of outdoor risky play in a rural Irish town. Ten children took part in focus groups, drawings, photography, a child-led tour of the local community and a map-making session. Three themes emerged; Risky play and me, my power to play and ‘sometimes it is kind of worth it!’. Findings suggest that risky play categories evolve as children age, and some new categories surfaced, including risky construction and breaking the rules. Further exploration of risky play is warranted to ascertain its characteristics more fully among this age group.

Living in the Wake of Rural Irish Troubles: building an institution for sustainable peace through emotive out-of-place tourism

During the thirty-year period (1968–1998) known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, 3500 people died and thousands more suffered physical disabilities and psychological trauma. Belfast, among other conflict cities, helped inspire the term ‘dark tourism’ in 1989. The country continues to be in conflict but is officially in a period of peace. Northern Ireland has been the theme for much peace and reconciliation research, but literature to date concentrates on polarised discourses rather than rural representation. Toward meeting and expanding the UN SDG16 peace goals, this research explores how what we term emotive peace tourism can be used as a methodology to affect emotional reconciliation registers in a unique rural Northern Ireland visitor experience. Bringing domestic tourists from Catholic and Protestant communities into face-to-face contact through a liminal participative ‘out-of-place’ visitor experience, we choreographed and performed a series of “Troubles” events: a guided night walk through a checkpoint, an IRA Wake, a UDA Funeral, and a Mixed-Marriage. Contributing to the debate as to whether tourism is more of a ‘peacekeeper’ than a ‘peacemaker’, our research demonstrates that an in situ liminal, emotive peace tourism experience, can generate sustainable tolerance, respect, trust, sympathy, and empathy towards others in post-conflict Northern Ireland and likely elsewhere.

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship1 Jeffrey Meyers I In Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s excellent book of interviews, Seamus Heaney recalled that he first met Robert Lowell in 1972 at Sonia Orwell’s party to celebrate Lowell’s wedding to Caroline Blackwood. Heaney was young enough to be Lowell’s son and from a rural Irish background, remote from Lowell’s patrician pedigree. He had not been invited to that grand occasion, but was staying with Karl Miller, editor of The Listener, who was on the guest list and brought him along. He was shy of meeting Lowell ‘because of that nimbus of authority that ringed his writings and his actions’,2 but ‘actually got into a corner with him for about half an hour and did the laundry list, as [Joseph] Brodsky used to say – checking out what was to be said about which poets … It was a genuine enough meeting, and he was immensely charming and even more immensely intelligent’.3 Later, on several manic and memorable occasions, the two developed a close friendship that influenced and inspired Heaney’s poetry. At the party Heaney was not only introduced to distinguished poets, but also gained insight into the politics of poetry: the prestige and power that controlled lucrative teaching jobs and lecture tours, fellowships and honours, of which he would later reap the full harvest. After Lowell’s untimely death in September 1977, Heaney wrote two essays, a memorial address and two poems about him. Lowell had social and political, as well as poetical, influence. Heaney remarked that ‘Lowell was the last American to be a dual citizen of the university and the world beyond it, at home in Harvard, but also at home among the metropolitan set, a figure to be photographed at cocktail parties and on marches to the Pentagon’ (SS, p.273). He used Keats’s description of Wordsworth to describe Lowell’s distinctive genius, and also explained why Lowell’s reputation, though not his poetry, fell after his death when fashions changed and standards declined: ‘Lowell is taking the punishment Studies • volume 109 • number 436 448 that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually; so no, I’m not surprised. Lowell was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric, egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind. He was on the winning side from the start: Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic’ (SS, p.280). When Heaney’s reputation later soared, he too took his share of low blows. Caroline Blackwood, a witty and talented writer, was also a considerable figure. Her wealthy and aristocratic family came (like Heaney’s) from Northern Ireland, but her father, killed in Burma in the Second World War, was the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. An heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, she was also a great beauty. Her first husband, Lucian Freud, had painted her portrait that was as stunning and sensuous as Botticelli’s Venus. In August 1975 Heaney invited Lowell to a poetry festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. As Lowell feared from past experience, the event became a week of drunken and quarrelsome reelings and writhings. Heaney expected Lowell to arrive for his midweek performance, but he came on the previous Sunday and stayed with him through the next weekend. Heaney’s nine-year-old son Michael, with unusually formal diction, told Lowell that he preferred soccer to sonnets: ‘I know you are a famous poet, but it’s my ambition to meet a famous footballer’ (SS, p.216). During that prolonged visit Lowell, a wayward and distant father to his own daughter and son, envied Heaney’s close family life and sadly remarked, ‘You see a lot of your children’ (SS, p.216) – as if that were a rare event. Heaney said that Lowell ‘had a wonderful way of coming close, personally and critically’ (SS, p. 216) and he valued both aspects of that intimacy. In a letter of 11 September 1975, a month after the Kilkenny chaos, Lowell advised Heaney to follow his own practice of salvaging the best...

Viral Intimacy and Catholic Nationalist Political Economy

Changes in the conduct and regulation of intimacy during the COVID-19 crisis in the Republic of Ireland has uncovered the legacy of Catholic nationalism in Irish capitalism. Many commentators analysed the increased welfarism and community service provision as the suspension of Irish neoliberalism. In fact, the Irish COVID-19 response is shaped by a longer tradition of political and economic approaches that have their genesis in the revolutionary Catholic state following independence from Britain. Based on ethnography of community development practices in a rural Irish region, the article describes how Catholic nationalist influences are present in the collection of institutions involved in the Community Response and its approach to spatial organisation. The governance of the response also sheds light on a lack of intimacy between citizen and state that is not only the product of neoliberal structural adjustments but is uniquely characteristic of the Catholic ethos that influences Irish capitalism.

The art of inclusion: phenomenology, placemaking and the role of the arts

ABSTRACT This paper extends emerging research on the role of the arts in placemaking by introducing readers to the theories of Hannah Arendt. Specifically, it outlines the value of an Arendtian phenomenological framework for conceiving why, how and in what ways ‘inclusion’ could and should operate in placemaking. The paper first presents an outline of Arendt’s phenomenological approach. An exploratory case study of arts activities in a rural Irish town is then employed to illustrate the explanatory potential of this approach. The paper closes by reflecting on how an Arendtian approach suggests important lessons for placemaking research and practice.

RURAL WOMEN AND AGING: IMPLICATIONS FOR WORK AND RETIREMENT OF OLDER WOMEN

At least half of the world’s female population live in rural areas, and many are ageing. For these rural women, agriculture and informal rural livelihoods are the primary sources of employment, posing critical challenges for them with regard to work and retirement. This paper focuses on the interaction between the twin phenomena of the feminisation of agriculture and the feminisation of ageing and the consequent implications for rural women’s work and retirement. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 48 older rural Irish women, the paper establishes the ‘invisibility’ of women’s economic contribution in agriculture, limiting their pension accumulation and constraining their retirement planning. The study found that even women property owners, and designated ‘farmers’, had uncertainty about their pension or retirement income. A key conclusion is that rural women’s pension rights are still not guaranteed posing increased risk of economic insecurity and wellbeing for older rural women.

331 Implementation of Community Based Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment and Intervention in a Rural Irish Setting

Abstract Background The Integrated Care Team for Older People (ICTOP) in Sligo formed in 2018 to provide home based rehabilitation for acutely frail older adults to enable them to continue to live independently. It serves a predominantly rural catchment area with 14.5% aged >65 years versus the national average of 11%.1 An in-home person-centred multi-disciplinary approach is utilized based on the principles of comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA). This observational study aims to describe the typical user of this service, interventions and outcomes to date. Methods An Excel database was compiled and analysed from CGA of consecutive referrals from June to December 2018. Results Of the 70 referrals studied, 69% resided in rural Sligo, two thirds were female and there was a mean age of 82.3 (range 68-95). The median Rockwood Clinical Frailty Scale level was 6 and the median Timed Up and Go was 28seconds. Hospital in-patients accounted for 58% of referrals with functional deterioration (74%), mobility decline (72%) and cognitive decline (28%) the most frequent referral reasons. Gait imbalance was the most prevalent co-morbidity (77%). There was an average of 4.5 home visits per person. Over 80% of referrals received combined physiotherapy and occupational therapy input, with Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) in Dementia involvement in 40%, speech and language therapy in 26% and social work in 15%. CGA identified additional clinical and social needs in 100%, and the team made 217 onward referrals to available community health and social supports. ICTOP referral decreased length of stay by 2.6days and only one patient required long term care. Conclusion The use of a multidisciplinary team providing domiciliary assessments decreased hospital stay, facilitated maintenance of independent living and addressed both identified and un-identified needs in a frail older person’s population. Further evaluation over time is needed to indicate impact on readmission rate.

A randomised comparison of two ‘Stress Control’ programmes: Progressive Muscle Relaxation versus Mindfulness Body Scan

This research study explores the relationship between treatment outcome and intervention type, by comparing two large group cognitive behavioural therapy based stress management programmes; ‘Stress Control with Progressive Muscle Relaxation’ versus ‘Stress Control with Mindfulness Body Scan’. The experiment was conducted in a rural Irish community setting, inviting participation from the general public (n = 86). All participants attended the standard six-week Stress Control intervention. Participants in Group A received Stress Control augmented with a 15-min Progressive Muscle Relaxation audio recording for home use between classes, while participants in Group B received Stress Control augmented with a 15-min Mindfulness Body Scan audio recording for home use between classes. All participants completed the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Questionnaire (DASS 21) at pre-intervention, post-intervention and at three-month follow-up. Participants in both groups were also asked to complete weekly skill practice questionnaires to assess adherence to treatment. Participants in both groups made significant improvement, over time, on measures of psychological well-being, stress and anxiety. Only participants in the ‘Stress Control with Mindfulness Body Scan’ intervention group demonstrated significant improvement in levels of depression. The data suggests that when treatment approaches are specifically tailored to target specific symptoms, the results lead to a greater degree of intervention effectiveness. Future research implications in view of the findings are considered.

Forging successful partnerships in psychosis research: lessons from the Cavan-Monaghan First Episode Psychosis Study.

Embedding psychosis research within community mental services is highly desirable from several perspectives but can be difficult to establish and sustain, especially when the clinical service has a rural location at a distance from academic settings with established research expertise. In this article, we share the experience of a successful partnership in psychosis research between a rural Irish mental health service and the academic department of a Dublin medical school that has lasted over 30 years. We describe the origins and evolution of this relationship, the benefits that accrued and the challenges encountered, from the overlapping perspectives of the academic department, the mental health service and psychiatric training. We discuss the potential learning that arose from the initiative, particularly for national programme planning for early intervention in psychosis, and we explore the opportunities for enhanced training, career development and professional reward that can emerge from this type of partnership.