NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Managed retreat in response to flooding: lessons from the past for contemporary climate change adaptation
No full textManaged retreat is increasingly advocated as a means to promote resilience and adaptation to climate change. However, there are various uncertainties and challenges associated with the impacts of displacement and attachments to place. In this context, it is useful to study past examples of relocation to understand how these challenges have been addressed. This paper draws on a case study relocation scheme which took place in Ireland following major flooding in 1954. This represented a radical and comprehensive approach to relocation which sought to address the root causes of vulnerability. The analysis shows that this comprehensive approach was made possible through a connection between managed retreat and land reform. The scheme also faced opposition linked to attachments to place and property. This led to compromises and a failure to fully address the effects of flooding on livelihoods but contributed to resilience through ensuring that family and community ties remained intact. The paper’s distinctive contributions are its analysis of the requirements of transformative approaches to adaptation and relocation, its identification of challenges associated with place and property even in the context of such transformative approaches, and its adding of historical depth to contemporary debates on climate adaptation
Exploring state pension provision policy for the farming community
No full texthis paper explores Irish Government Pensions Reform proposals, from the perspective of the self-employed community and specifically the farming community. It investigates whether the proposed changes to the State Pension System set out in the Governments “Roadmap for Pensions reform 2018–2023” will, in the context of farmers and the stated objectives of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, keep pensioners above the poverty line and help ensure the survival of rural Ireland or whether, the family interdependencies which currently exist and the vulnerabilities that arise as a consequence, will remain largely unaddressed.
This paper illustrates the stark reality that under the current State Pension System, low-income farmers can fail to qualify either for the State Pension (Contributory) or the State Pension (Non-Contributory) leaving them faced with working long into their retirement years or financially dependent on family members in their old age, and that proposed changes to the State Welfare System do not alleviate this predicament. This has subsequent consequences for the sustainability of generational renewal in the agricultural industry and consequently could have far reaching societal impacts.
Conscious of the view that farmers should “pay their way” as far as state pensions are concerned, we recommend a model for achieving undisputed entitlement for all farmers to the Contributory State Pension, going forward
The student perspective on teaching and assessment during initial COVID-19 related closures at Irish universities: implications for the future
No full textThe aim of this research is to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 closures from the perspective of students studying mathematics at university level in Ireland. A survey was designed and administered to students who were enrolled in at least one mathematics module in an Irish university at the time of the closures. The survey comprised three sections: teaching and learning, assessment and personal experience, with a focus on how the changes in teaching and assessment were viewed by students. A total of 263 students from six universities responded to the survey. The corresponding data are described, as are various trends that were identified through open-response questions. The data offer a window into the student experience during the tertiary level closures and show the effect that the sudden shifts (e.g., in delivery and support) had on learning, assessment and student well-being. The survey responses show that most students dealt with the rapid changes in a resilient and mature manner, particularly when confronted with adversity. Numerous insights can be gleaned from the students’ perspectives that have the potential to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics at tertiary level in Ireland in the future. Many of the findings could also apply to teaching and learning in other subjects and internationally
‘A Corkscrew in the Neck’: Interrogating Popular Representations of Femininity for the Postmillennial Period
No full textThis project examines representations of femininity in contemporary popular fiction. Specifically,
it interrogates a crucial paradox: the dissemination of popular literature produced by women
authors, for a largely female readership, which eroticises and fetishes gender-based violence.
The novels under study were marketed as disparate genres — domestic noir, crime fiction, psychological
thriller, erotica & YA romance — but I interpret them as contemporary reiterations of the
popular romance formula, reanimating recognisable tropes from chick lit, the modern gothic romance
and the Harlequin romance. These tropes, I argue, have been modified by and for a neoliberal
postfeminist culture climate. As such, my project utilises feminist genre theory and feminist cultural
theory to explicate the significance of the current revival and reformulation of ‘romance’ in
this new context of neoliberal postfeminist culture and ideology.
Influenced by Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie, my project addresses and critiques several
key attributes of ‘neoliberal postfeminism’. These include: a pervasive emphasis on individualism
and personal responsibility; a ubiquitous ‘makeover’ cultural paradigm; an insistent requirement
for self-monitoring, self-surveillance and body-work; the celebration of consumerism and its
associated pleasures; the prescription of mandatory optimism and suppressing one’s ‘negative’ emotions;
the endorsement of choice as a primary marker of women’s empowerment. While much critical
attention has been devoted to those attributes and their pernicious effects, I propose that one
significant repercussion has been largely overlooked in contemporary cultural criticism: how the
combination of these ideologies effectively sanctions gender-based violence. And so, by modifying
longstanding tropes from the romance genre for the postmillennial period, the novels under study
function as crucial spaces for interrogating and challenging contemporary gender ideologies — specifically
how those ideologies reify violently gendered power dynamics
The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting
No full textDevlin was among the "youngest generation" of Irish poets, modernists such as Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, in whom a year earlier Samuel Beckett located "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland" in his August 1934 essay in The Bookman "Recent Irish Poetry," a blistering attack on the "antiquarians" in the line of the Irish Revival.3 On October 4, two days after Italy invaded Ethiopia, de Valera addressed the nation a day later than scheduled on Radio Athlone (known as 2RN prior to 1933), in which he conceded that all hopes for a League-sponsored resolution to the crisis were now gone. The most striking intervention in this regard is made by Edna Longley in Yeats and Modern Poetry (2013), in which the rap sheet against modernism includes the assertion that its post-hoc "hegemony" only gained currency in the 1960s Anglophone academy, while the emphasis in new modernist studies on a plurality of modernisms instead of a tidy, overarching definition provokes Longley to suggest that modernism is a term of almost meaningless incoherence that critics would be better to jettison.7 Leaving aside the fact that problems of historical, and by definition "posthoc," categorization bedevil any major cultural-aesthetic complex (Longley's preferred substitution, "modern," is an obvious example, with Symbolism and Romanticism also relatively unproblematic terms in her book), the archival traces of 1930s radio wars between latter-day revivalists and modernists challenge Longley's assertions. The "younger generation" and Irish Modernism The background to Devlin's broadcast defending Irish modernism situates it as one intervention within a noisy, variegated cultural conversation which has only belatedly received sustained scholarly attention, a fact that obscures the actual state of play of modernism in 1930s Ireland.8 Longley's skepticism regarding the historical validity of Irish modernism is not an isolated viewpoint. "12 In "Against Irish Modernism: Towards an Analysis of Experimental Irish Poetry," Francis Hutton-Williams seems to concur with Longley in describing the concept of Irish modernism as "industry-driven," a tool blunted through too-capacious application, and in any case belied by what he sees as the failure of modernism to thrive in the conservative clerisy of the Free State.13 While these, and other recent contributions to Irish modernist studies have usefully problematized the binary of modernism versus revivalism/Celticism, Beckett's "Recent Irish Poetry" is isolated as an iconic, lonely declaration of modernist tenets—however complex that declaration is ultimately found to be, or "shorthand" scholarly abuses of it lamented.14 More to the point, critical expansions of modernism share with Longley's arresting dismissal an implicit acknowledgment of modernism's original premise: its meaning, as Jennifer Wicke argued, is "inseparable from its uses and its overdeterminations
Maximum extent and readvance dynamics of the Irish Sea Ice Stream and Irish Sea Glacier since the Last Glacial Maximum
No full textThe BRITICE‐CHRONO Project has generated a suite of recently published radiocarbon ages from deglacial sequences offshore in the Celtic and Irish seas and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide and optically stimulated luminescence ages from adjacent onshore sites. All published data are integrated here with new geochronological data from Wales in a revised Bayesian analysis that enables reconstruction of ice retreat dynamics across the basin. Patterns and changes in the pace of deglaciation are conditioned more by topographic constraints and internal ice dynamics than by external controls. The data indicate a major but rapid and very short‐lived extensive thin ice advance of the Irish Sea Ice Stream (ISIS) more than 300 km south of St George's Channel to a marine calving margin at the shelf break at 25.5 ka; this may have been preceded by extensive ice accumulation plugging the constriction of St George's Channel. The release event between 25 and 26 ka is interpreted to have stimulated fast ice streaming and diverted ice to the west in the northern Irish Sea into the main axis of the marine ISIS away from terrestrial ice terminating in the English Midlands, a process initiating ice stagnation and the formation of an extensive dead ice landscape in the Midlands. © 2021 The Authors Journal of Quaternary Science Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
New technique to quantify chaotic dynamics based on differences between semi-implicit integration schemes
No full textMany novel chaotic systems have recently been identified and numerically studied. Parametric chaotic sets are a valuable tool for determining and classifying oscillation regimes
observed in nonlinear systems. Thus, efficient algorithms for the construction of parametric chaotic sets are of interest. This paper discusses the performance of algorithms
used for plotting parametric chaotic sets, considering the chaotic Rossler, Newton-Leipnik
and Marioka-Shimizu systems as examples. In this study, we compared four different approaches: calculation of largest Lyapunov exponents, statistical analysis of bifurcation diagrams, recurrence plots estimation and introduced the new analysis method based on
differences between a couple of numerical models obtained by semi-implicit methods. The
proposed technique allows one to distinguish the chaotic and periodic motion in nonlinear
systems and does not require any additional procedures such as solutions normalization
or the choice of initial divergence value which is certainly its advantage. We evaluated
the performance of the algorithms with the two-stage approach. At the first stage, the
required simulation time was estimated using the perceptual hash calculation. At the second stage, we examined the performance of the algorithms for plotting parametric chaotic
sets with various resolutions. We explicitly demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has
the best performance among all considered methods. Its implementation in the simulation and analysis software can speed up the calculations when obtaining high-resolution
multi-parametric chaotic sets for complex nonlinear systems
Application of Optimal Control of Infectious Diseases in a Model-Free Scenario
No full textOptimal control for infectious diseases has received increasing attention over the past few decades. In general, a combination of cost state variables and control effort have been applied as cost indices. Many important results have been reported.
Nevertheless, it seems that the interpretation of the optimal control law for an epidemic system has received less attention.
In this paper, we have applied Pontryagin’s maximum principle to develop an optimal control law to minimize the number
of infected individuals and the vaccination rate. We have adopted the compartmental model SIR to test our technique. We
have shown that the proposed control law can give some insights to develop a control strategy in a model-free scenario.
Numerical examples show a reduction of 50% in the number of infected individuals when compared with constant vaccination. There is not always a prior knowledge of the number of susceptible, infected, and recovered individuals required
to formulate and solve the optimal control problem. In a model-free scenario, a strategy based on the analytic function is
proposed, where prior knowledge of the scenario is not necessary. This insight can also be useful after the development
of a vaccine to COVID-19, since it shows that a fast and general cover of vaccine worldwide can minimize the number of
infected, and consequently the number of deaths. The considered approach is capable of eradicating the disease faster than
a constant vaccination control method
The interactions of a Chinese MNE with local institutions in sub-Sahara Africa and the implications for workforce management in the subsidiary
No full textThe unique nature of China’s interactions with Africa has been professed to respond better to the continent’s developmental and labor needs than the colonial and post-colonial engagements with Western countries. This has also been an impetus to the calls for more research on the implications for the institutional environments and management approaches of Chinese companies in Africa. This paper examines how a Chinese state-owned MNE interacted with the evolving and complex institutional context in Cameroon to manage its workforce. Evidence from the case study showed that the Chinese MNE actively disrupted the “rules of the game” as it championed the adoption of local work and employment practices and promoted newly-defined government priorities. In so doing, the Chinese MNE garnered a reputation of being a good employer and actively engaged in the maintenance and creation of new institutions of the country’s labor market. This research contributes to revealing the linkage between the underpinnings of the Chinese state investment motives and the contextual exigencies that shape, and in turn are influenced by, HRM policies and practices within their MNEs in Africa
Well-being, Interventions and Support during Epidemics (WISE): Protocol for a qualitative longitudinal study of older adults’ experiences during COVID-19
No full textBackground: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has the potential to trigger multiple stress domains and lead to long-term repercussions in an individual’s quality of life, health and well-being. Stressors from the pandemic are likely to be experienced in many ways by older adults with heterogeneous life experiences and supports available. In this context, it is necessary to tease out the underlying mechanisms leading to positive and negative well-being and mental health across interdependent individual, social and environmental factors. The aim of the present study is to explore community-dwelling older adults’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on mental health and psychosocial well-being.
Methods: An exploratory longitudinal qualitative study will be conducted with data collected through written submissions, sitting interviews and walk along interviews with older adults living in Irish community settings. Data collection will take place 3 to 10 weeks apart to enable the exploration of individuals’ responses to the evolving social, economic and environmental circumstances derived from the COVID-19 pandemic in Ireland. An iterative thematic analysis will be carried out to identify data themes, linkages, and explanations within a socio-ecological framework.
Ethics and dissemination: Ethical approval has been granted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Research Ethics Committee (REC202011028). Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed journal publications, oral presentations at relevant conferences, and in consultation with Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) contributors. A lay summary of findings and infographic will be distributed to multiple stakeholders including our PPI panel, older people, caregivers, community organisations, charities and media