For many years Irish rural sociology came to be defined in relation to Arensberg and Kimball's celebrated anthropological study, Family and Community in Ireland, for which fieldwork was undertaken in Clare between 1932 and 1934. It has been observed that ethnographers in Ireland post-Arensberg and Kimball were strongly inclined to take the community as their unit of analysis, focus their analysis of social life on kinship and social networks, and adopt structural functionalism as their theoretical model of local society. The essay republished here in abridged form accompanied the re-publication of Family and Community in Ireland in 2001. It critically examines the intellectual and political background to Arensberg and Kimball's ethnographic fieldwork in rural Clare, the manner in which their research unfolded and the subsequent reception of their published work over a period of some sixty years.

Both large and small-scale producers continue to operate in aquaculture, even if frequently the economic pressures on small fish farmers are immense and some branches of aquaculture (such as salmon rearing) have tended to organise on an ever-larger scale. How small producers have survived in Irish rope mussel aquaculture is the question posed in this paper. Based on 18 months of ethnographic study in the West of Ireland's Killary Harbour, the contribution that formal and informal cooperation has made to the persistence of small-scale mussel production is assessed. Although formal and informal forms of cooperation are by no means the only conditions of the persistence of small-scale production in the Killary site, they are shown to have critically improved the survival chances of individual producers and of groups of producers. What is also shown is that informal cooperation has significantly eclipsed formal cooperation since 2000.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

A major stream of community development in Ireland has been identified with Muintir na Tire ("People of the Land"), a movement that has concerned itself with the promotion of the social, economic and cultural welfare of mainly rural localities since the 1930s. What Muintir offers is a vision of where community development should fit in the public life of the Irish nation, and a model that enunciates some basic principles as to how local representative self-help groups should organise and operate. Muintir has always existed on two levels: at local level, where there are now about 120 Muintir-affiliated community councils, and at national level, where a central office attempts to represent and service community councils, as well as local communities more generally. This paper will focus on two central issues: the serious difficulties that have confronted Muintir at all levels in recent years, and the manner the movement has sought to negotiate the various obstacles it has encountered. Our conclusion is that while Muintir has shown undoubted ingenuity and resilience in weathering many storms, the ongoing crisis it now faces continues to raise serious questions about its future both as a national movement and as a significant force in Irish community development.

No abstract

No abstract