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Sexual crime in the Irish Free State was more than an issue of law, it carried ideological importance in a nation that legitimised itself as a beacon of Celtic Catholicism whilst struggling to maintain credibility in a contested post-colonial landscape. The nation’s police force, An Garda Síochána, had a central role in preserving the nation’s reputation for piety. This chapter explores the views of two of An Garda Síochána’s most senior officers regarding female sexuality and sexual crime; features that were to influence the level of protection and justice Ireland’s women and children were afforded under law.

How do transnational social movements organize? Specifically, this paper asks how an organized community can lead a nationalist movement from outside the nation. Applying the analytic perspective of Strategic Action Fields, this study identifies multiple attributes of transnational organizing through which expatriate communities may go beyond extra-national supporting roles to actually create and direct a national campaign. Reexamining the rise and fall of the Fenian Brotherhood in the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to organize a transnational revolutionary movement for Ireland’s independence from Great Britain, reveals the strengths and limitations of nationalist organizing through the construction of a Transnational Strategic Action Field (TSAF). Deterritorialized organizing allows challenger organizations to propagate an activist agenda and to dominate the nationalist discourse among co-nationals while raising new challenges concerning coordination, control, and relative position among multiple centers of action across national borders. Within the challenger field, “incumbent challengers” vie for dominance in agenda setting with other “challenger” challengers.

This article explores the hypothesis of Clifford Geertz concerning the importance of essentialism (culture) and epochalism (economics) in the creation of new states. It focuses on the Irish state‐building process, examining the thought of the two leaders of the 1916 rising. It finds that Patrick Pearse throughout stressed cultural revitalization and James Connolly stressed economic/social transformation. The article lends support to Geertz’s hypothesis but notes that each leader also came to appreciate the primary concern of the other.

This chapter examines symphysiotomy in twentieth-century Ireland as one example of a systematized obstetric violence that has characterized Ireland’s modern history. Expanding scholarly interpretations of state- and Church-inflicted abuse of women in the twentieth century, this analysis establishes the medical profession as a central actor alongside the twentieth-century state-Church coalition that regulated women’s reproductive lives and engaged in systematic repression. This chapter recognizes that Ireland’s history of reproductive abuse and coercion did not just involve contraception or abortion but also labor and birth experiences. In addition, it offers a more complete and complex interpretation of obstetric violence by highlighting the experiences of married women with wanted pregnancies; almost all research to date focuses on the experiences of unmarried pregnant women or unwanted pregnancies. This examination of symphysiotomy and obstetric violence in Ireland illuminates the ways in which religious, national, and medical power has been mapped on women’s reproductive bodies, particularly in the decades after independence in 1922. It also makes essential links between Ireland’s past and present, demonstrating that a careful analysis of the history of obstetric violence and the religious underpinnings of it are essential in understanding Ireland today. With this research, we also place symphysiotomy within the context of the global reproductive justice movement, asking how a reproductive justice framework – one that links reproductive rights with social justice – can help us interpret obstetric violence and address the wounds of Ireland’s past.

There exists a rich sociological literature dealing with secularisation. Such nineteenth‐century sociologists as Weber and Durkheim and twentieth‐century sociologists as Greeley, Bellah, Berger and Wilson have contributed. Berger refers to secularisation as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols”, while Wilson defines it as “the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose social significance”. These definitions represent the thrust of academic thinking about secularisation. Generally, social scientists interpret secularisation as the decline of religiosity — a movement from faith to reason. They cite numerous indicators of the change: decline in such areas as church attendance, praying, use of religious rites and rituals, recruitment to the church bureaucracy, church construction. Often they suggest a kind of inevitability relating to urbanisation and industrialisation. The focus of the process involves man becoming less concerned with the spiritual and more concerned with the mundane. Eventually, the spiritual becomes irrelevant; the Age of Enlightenment triumphs over the Age of Faith.