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Attitudes towards death are shaped by our social worlds. This book explores how beliefs, practices and representations of dying and death continue to evolve and adapt in response to changing global societies. Introducing students to debates around grief, religion and life expectancy, this is a clear guide to a complex field for all sociologists.

Lodging and boarding were well-established housing options which played an important economic and social role in early twentieth-century cities, yet there has been little academic study of the phenomenon in an Irish context. For many people arriving to Dublin in search of work, as well as for adults who were not in a position to establish a separate household, lodging was an important accommodation choice. Offering lodgings was also economically beneficial to householders. Drawing on a range of sources, including census returns, city electoral rolls, newspaper and other archival sources, this article will examine the demographic and socio-economic profile of lodgers and the households in which they resided in Dublin in the early twentieth century. A wide variety of arrangements and durations of lodging is revealed for the period centred on the 1911 census, suggesting that this form of accommodation appealed to a diverse range of individuals due to their economic or family circumstances, or need for mobility.

ABSTRACT:At its inception, the Irish Free State faced an apparently intractable housing problem that required immediate action. This article examines the legislation enacted in the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on its impact on local authority housing in Ireland's provincial towns. Whereas the 1932 Housing Act has generally been heralded as the start of a concerted attack on the slums, this assertion is re-evaluated in the context of the debates of the 1920s. Following an overview of the national situation, a case-study of Ballina, Co. Mayo, explores the impacts of the housing drive. State-aided housing schemes made a significant contribution to the housing stock between 1923 and 1940. Although characterized by contemporary media as a triumph, however, the housing drive raised many issues including build quality, costs, opposition and social segregation. The article considers some of these challenges and raises a number of questions for future consideration.

This chapter presents a concise overview of the evolution and development of Irish suburbia from the nineteenth century to the present. As well as charting the changing nature, form, function and meaning of the Irish suburb, the chapter also recognises key phases in its development that reflect social, political and economic change. It reveals that while the growth and development of Irish suburbia largely mirrors the American and British experience, Irish suburbia has its own particular character and unique cultures.

Laurence O'Neill, described on the occasion of his election to a fifth successive term of office as a 'popular, useful, independent and energetic Lord Mayor', was the last person to hold the office under the British regime and the first to hold it under the Free State administration. His term, then, straddled a very turbulent period in Ireland's political and social history. It began in the midst of the First World War and continued through the 'troubles' of the early 1920s, coming to an end – perhaps- with the abolition of Dublin Corporation in 1924. The word 'perhaps' is apposite, because O'Neill did not vacate the Mansion House until 1925 and as late as 1926 a court case failed to conclude that he was no longer lord mayor, with the judge suggesting that 'probably' he remained lord mayor. In any case, it was O'Neill who was the proposer, in 1930, of the next elected lord mayor of the city, that well-known and charismatic leader Alfie Byrne, discussed in the following chapter.

Ireland experienced dramatic political, social and economic change in the twentieth century, of which the shift from a majority rural to a majority urban population was one of the most notable. These changes are refl ected in the nature and form of the built environment. In this essay, the evolution of urban and suburban housing during Ireland's first urban century is considered. Existing patterns of unplanned middleclass suburban expansion were supplemented, from the 1920s, by a programme of planned working-class suburbanization. State intervention thus impacted on the location and form of new housing estates, while layouts owed much to the early British town-planning movement. High levels of owner-occupation in Ireland, the combined result of government policy and individual preference, were also reflected in a preference for particular housing forms. The predominance of the standardised three- or four-bedroom, semi-detached or detached house, was not challenged until the 1990s when there was a surge in apartment provision, largely driven by tax incentives. Changing norms in terms of housing size, facilities and design were shaped by the standards adopted by government and local authorities, as well as to the pressures of the speculative building process.

Abstract  Taking one's own life is a moral and political transgression: it is taboo. As suicide is a special death that has warranted a panoply of sanctions, inscriptions and taboos across many cultures (Retterstol, 1993), suicide has come to play a crucial part in the formulation of social order in many political philosophies, including liberalism. The task of this article is to outline ways in which this making of political order can unfold in a liberal political context. Taking New Zealand as a particularly powerful case study, the discussion cuts a genealogical track through cultural practices of suicide regulation to make the case for a different way of understanding the political place of suicide in liberalism. Conventionally given the role of litmus test for liberal freedom, cultural practices of suicide regulation in New Zealand are shown to inscribe and enact particular ways of being free. Relays between colonial, social and advanced liberal modes of calculation and the criminally suicidal, the suicidally mad and those at risk of suicide are all shown to install a mode of power worked through links, networks and alliances that "govern persons in accordance with freedom" (Rose, 1999: 12). This genealogy sets out to dis‐quieten the assumption that suicide is a litmus test for liberal freedom. It is better to think of New Zealand's attempts to regulate suicide as in the service of governing through freedom.