NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Professional and Family Carers’ Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact on Supported Decision-Making with Adults with Intellectual Disabilities: A Qualitative Online Survey
No full textBackground: COVID-19 restrictions in Ireland varied in levels of severity throughout 2020 and 2021. The aim of the present study was to explore the experiences of professional and family carers in supporting people with intellectual disabilities to make their own decisions during these restrictions. Methods: Participants recruited between July and December 2021 via social media, disability services, and academic experts completed a qualitative online survey. Results were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Data from 16 participants (eight professional carers, eight family carers) were included. Three main themes were identified: 1. centring the person, 2. adapting to COVID, and 3. restricted lives. Anxiety, confusion, and boredom among adults with intellectual disabilities during restrictions were reported by both professional and familial carers. Professional carers reported some positive outcomes, including greater chances for independence among service users and new activities becoming available via online resources. Family carers reported more negative outcomes, including isolation from disability services. Conclusions: People with intellectual disabilities had their choices markedly curtailed during the restrictions. Future studies should focus on improving the ability of services to reach users who may not have the ability to attend services in person
Imagining climate resilient futures: A layered Delphi panel approach
No full textThis paper in using a novel application of the Delphi panel method, explores and consolidates the future visions of a low carbon and climate resilient future in Ireland through community-based visioning processes that emerged through co-created, deliberative approaches at local level. It embraces a visioning process that applies a transdisciplinary approach, which aims to match different visions and stakeholder needs, combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives. Community visions were articulated by means of a series of deliberative futures workshops facilitated by the transdisciplinary project research team. Through iterations of the Delphi feedback loop, the notion of deep and shallow agreement is explored to examine the spectrum of consensus to dissent around the co-developed future visions and pathways of climate action, articulated by the Irish community case study. This approach enables a critical exploration of the conventional science-policy-practice nexus through the use of innovative creative communication and engagement methods. Findings suggest that more deliberative forums which bring together a diverse range of stakeholders are needed to develop a shared vision for the future; the importance of language use and the creation of a shared vocabulary of climate action; and the power of civic imaginaries in helping to create useful future narratives
Indicators of Global Climate Change 2022: annual update of large-scale indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence
No full textIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific
evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), including the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement that will conclude at COP28
in December 2023. Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information
on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system.
However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information
gap between report cycles.
We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working
Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related
to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas
concentrations, radiative forcing, surface temperature changes, the Earth’s energy imbalance, warming attributed
to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of
this effort, grounded in an open data, open science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate
indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8000192, Smith et al., 2023a). As they
are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and
help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel.
The indicators show that human-induced warming reached 1.14 [0.9 to 1.4] ◦C averaged over the 2013–2022
decade and 1.26 [1.0 to 1.6] ◦C in 2022. Over the 2013–2022 period, human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 ◦C per decade. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of
greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 54 ± 5.3 GtCO2e over the last decade, as well as reductions
in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have
slowed, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s
decade could track a change of direction for human influence on climate
Climate change impacts on ocean circulation relevant to the UK and Ireland
No full textWhat is happening
• Observations of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or
Gulf Stream System since the 1980s have shown a strengthening in
the 1990s and a weakening in the 2000s, with no clear overall trend.
• Shifts in North-east Atlantic circulation, leading to a greater
influence of warmer subtropical-origin waters which can impact
marine ecosystems and economically important fish species such as
mackerel. The changing subpolar ocean circulation is also having
impacts on the food supply for deep-sea ecosystems.
• The subpolar gyre recorded its freshest values on record in the
2010s. Ongoing freshwater build-up in the rapidly changing Arctic
Ocean may exacerbate this freshening.
What could happen
• Projections from climate models consistently project a weakening of
the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation due to
anthropogenic climate change.
• Warming of Atlantic waters is expected to reduce the depth of mixed
layers and limit nutrient supply to surface layers
Decision-Makers, Institutional Influences and the Role of Ethical issues in the Patenting of Biotechnological Inventions in Europe: Enter the Unitary Patent System.
No full textThis chapter focuses specifically on one long contested area, namely, the role of ethical
considerations in patent decision-making for biotechnological inventions in Europe.
More
specifically, the chapter examines to what extent the introduction of the UPC– and the
unitary patent system more generally – has the potential to influence the current
interpretative approach for how ethical issues are considered in the patenting of
biotechnological inventions in Europe. It puts forward the case for why a renewed
conversation is urgently needed around what normative role ethical issues should play in
European patent law at this juncture
Trade unions participation and infuence in decentralised collective bargaining
No full textThe aim of this chapter is to analyse the role of trade unions in decentralised collective bargaining, specifically regarding trade union and works
council participation in and influence on the processes and outcomes of
collective bargaining at company level. To identify and explain differences
and similarities in trade union and works council practice regarding
company-level collective bargaining, the authors use an analytical framework based on the power resources approach and focus on structural,
associational, and institutional power. The analysis suggests a degree of
interchangeability in these power resources. Structural power resources
are, for example, important for the outcomes of company bargaining,
however, institutional and associational power resources may complement
the lack or presence of such structural power resources
A Process Model for Continuous Public Service Improvement: Demonstrated in Local Government Context for Smart Cities.
No full textThe new era of the smart city is accompanied by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and many other technologies to improve the quality of life for the citizen of the modern city, that in turn, has brought immense opportunities as well as challenges for government and organizations. Local authorities of the cities provide multiple services across different domains to the citizens (e.g. transport, health, environment, housing, etc.). Citizens are involved during different stages of smart city services and provide their feedback across those domains. Existing smart city initiatives provide various technological platforms for gathering citizens’ feedback to provide improved quality of services to them. Even though technological developments have resulted in a higher degree of digitalization, there is a need for improvement in the services provided by municipalities. There are multiple engagement platforms to obtain citizens’ feedback for the improvement of smart city services and to transform public services. However, limited studies consider the challenges faced by practitioners at the local level during the incorporation of those feedback for further service improvement. As a result, city services fail to fulfil the need of citizens and do not meet the goals set by existing engagement platforms. Technology-oriented solutions in the public sector domain require a logical and structured approach for the transformation of public services and digitalization. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can provide this structured approach to transform public services by providing a medium to manage change, and to respond to the need of multiple stakeholders including citizens. Thus, this research proposes a process model based on the guidelines of EA and the collaboration with practitioners that would assist local authorities to provide improved services to the citizens and fulfil their needs
The Development Discourses of Irish Development Workers and Missionaries: Their Attitudes, Beliefs and Work Practices
No full textThis thesis explores the varying discourses and concepts of ‘development’ used by those working in the development field, and the various biographical, institutional and macro-structural forces that shape them. It does so through a case study of missionaries and development workers from Ireland. Ireland’s history of engagement in development work provides an interesting case of ‘development work’ where missionaries dominated but have now been largely succeeded by a mix volunteers and professional development workers from a variety of occupational backgrounds, particularly in health and education.
The uniqueness of the Irish development field according to the OECD (1999) is the direct contact the Irish field has with the developing world. It also reflects the unusual degree to which the Irish social services field has been characterized by religious and civil society (NGO) service provision, intertwined with that of the state. This profile is reflected in the social services orientation of Irish development work as well as the role of religious and civil society-based practitioners.
Missionaries and development workers are immersed in a field which, according to Robert Chambers (2005, p.185), consists of “multiple realities - ecological, economic, social, political and personal”. These different realities are important because they structure the work and experiences of development. Thus, development workers and missionaries can experience and understand their work in different ways and in different realities, because “…who we are is formed by our admittedly fallible, reflections upon the world, meaning its natural, practical and social orders” (Archer, 2000, p.313).
In the development field knowledge is stratified between theory and practice both running in parallel lines. In the midst of these literatures the place of religion has been neglected and the role missionaries as development practitioners has been overlooked. More recently, authors have examined the individual development practitioner, and their work has focused on development worker motivations, values, work and biographies to get a better understanding of who these actors are and how they go about their work. This thesis endeavours to contribute to these debates by examining the development discourses of Irish missionaries and development workers and investigating the process of learning that generates these discourses and that occurs in a variety of employment, occupational, biographical, political and regional contexts. This understanding of development is critically important as it shapes what kinds of development practices are thought to be reasonable and even ideal, and to whom they can be legitimately and ethically applied, and in which circumstances
When give-back turns to blowback: Employee responses to learning from skills-based volunteering.
No full textSkills-based volunteering programs are designed by organi-zations to enable their employees to donate their job-related skills and develop new ones, while making a positive dif-ference in the community. Although skills-based volunteering is one of the fastest growing trends in corporate citizenship, we know little about how employees respond to it. Using interview data from a financial institution (volunteering man-agers, n=2; employee volunteers, n=27), we explored this research question: How do employees react when volunteering is framed as an avenue for learning? Our findings show that one-third of volunteers expressed anger or defensiveness and ultimately rejected the notion of learning from volun-teering; two-thirds reacted with curiosity, using the interview process to make sense of what they learned. These two groups of volunteers reported different attributions about why their firm supports volunteering. Whereas the former group was cynical about their firm’s motivations, the latter believed that the firm’s intentions were altruistic. However, not all of the participants fit neatly into this pattern; for a minority, manager support for volunteering altered the rela-tionship between attributions and acknowledgement of learning. The key contribution of this paper is a theoretical model that explains how employees respond when volun-teering is framed as a forum for learning
Megafloods in Europe can be anticipated from observations in hydrologically similar catchments
No full textMegafloods that far exceed previously observed records often take citizens and experts by surprise, resulting in extremely severe damage and loss of life. Existing methods based on local and regional information rarely go beyond national borders and cannot predict these floods well because of limited data on megafloods, and because flood generation processes of extremes differ from those of smaller, more frequently observed events. Here we analyse river discharge observations from over 8,000 gauging stations across Europe and show that recent megafloods could have been anticipated from those previously observed in other places in Europe. Almost all observed megafloods (95.5%) fall within the envelope values estimated from previous floods in other similar places on the continent, implying that local surprises are not surprising at the continental scale. This holds also for older events, indicating that megafloods have not changed much in time relative to their spatial variability. The underlying concept of the study is that catchments with similar flood generation processes produce similar outliers. It is thus essential to transcend national boundaries and learn from other places across the continent to avoid surprises and save lives