Referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have increased in recent years. Services are already under-resourced and the adverse psychological impact of Covid-19 is likely to increase demand. Accordingly, an understanding of prevalence of mental health (MH) disorders among youth is imperative to help inform and plan services.

The way that people communicate, consume media and seek and receive information is changing. Forty per cent of the world's population now has an internet connection, the average global social media penetration is 39 % and 1·5 billion people have internet access via mobile phone. This large-scale move in population use of digital, social and mobile media presents an unprecedented opportunity to connect with individuals on issues concerning health. The present paper aims to investigate these opportunities in relation to dietary behaviour change. Several aspects of the digital environment could support behaviour change efforts, including reach, engagement, research, segmentation, accessibility and potential to build credibility, trust, collaboration and advocacy. There are opportunities to influence behaviour online using similar techniques to traditional health promotion programmes; to positively affect health-related knowledge, skills and self-efficacy. The abundance of data on citizens’ digital behaviours, whether through search behaviour, global positioning system tracking, or via demographics and interests captured through social media profiles, offer exciting opportunities for effectively targeting relevant health messages. The digital environment presents great possibilities but also great challenges. Digital communication is uncontrolled, multi-way and co-created and concerns remain in relation to inequalities, privacy, misinformation and lack of evaluation. Although web-based, social-media-based and mobile-based studies tend to show positive results for dietary behaviour change, methodologies have yet to be developed that go beyond basic evaluation criteria and move towards true measures of behaviour change. Novel approaches are necessary both in the digital promotion of behaviour change and in its measurement.

Over the course of the last 50 years the Republic of Ireland has gone from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest; however, it is now experiencing increasing rates of obesity and non-communicable chronic disease. Although several national nutrition surveys have been carried out in Ireland since 1990, there is little information on the Irish diet before then. We analysed the FAO food balance sheets for Ireland from 1961 to 2007 in order to characterise the changes in energy and nutrient supply that took place during that period. Food balance sheets were downloaded from the FAOSTAT database and per capita supply of commodities was analysed using dietary analysis software. Energy from carbohydrate as a percentage of total energy fell from 55 % in 1961 to 46 % in 2007, whereas energy from fat increased from 29 % to 34 %; these values are well outside WHO recommendations for the prevention of chronic disease. Energy from alcohol as a percentage of total energy has doubled within the last 20 years. On a nutrient-density basis, vitamins and minerals met or exceeded WHO recommendations, apart from vitamin D, folate, Ca and Fe. Although there are methodological limitations associated with the use of food balance sheets, the present results demonstrate that the current imbalances in the Irish diet were already evident several decades ago. Because they are so long established, they will be difficult to reverse unless major public health nutrition interventions are implemented.

Although the harbour seal (Phoca vitulina vitulina) is relatively common in coastal waters of the Republic of Ireland, it remains largely unstudied. Issues including potential interactions with coastal fisheries and the occurrence of phocine distemper virus outbreaks in 1988 and 2002 have highlighted the need to increase our knowledge of the ecology of these animals. The diet of harbour seals was investigated using a combination of approaches: hard-part analysis of scat contents and fatty-acid analysis. A total of 102 scat and 13 blubber samples were collected from two locations in Ireland and were analysed following standard methodologies. Results from scat analysis indicate that the seals are opportunistic, generalist feeders, and probably consume prey in relation to its availability. Eighteen prey species were identified, with sandeels (Ammodytidae spp.) constituting 55% of the prey items by number. Biomass of prey was reconstructed using otolith-length regression equations, with and without the application of digestion correction factors and sole (Solea solea) (16.1%), sandeels (15.2%), and Trisopterus species (12.4%) were found to be the most important species by weight. Rarefraction curves were used to determine prey species diversity on a sample site basis and we used accumulation curves to ascertain whether sampling was sufficient on a site basis. Sixty-four fatty acids were isolated from the blubber and analysis of the fatty-acid profiles revealed the possible influence of season, seal weight and sex on the seals' long-term diet. Some of the prey species recorded in the diet overlap with commercially and recreationally caught fish species in Ireland; however, there was little overlap with marketed size-ranges.

This paper reports a study of the risk factors for social and emotional loneliness among older people in Ireland. Using the ‘Social and Emotional Scale for Adults’, the social and emotional dimensions of loneliness were measured. Emotional loneliness was conceptualised as having elements of both family loneliness and romantic loneliness. The data were collected through a national telephone survey of loneliness in older people conducted in 2004 that completed interviews with 683 people aged 65 or more years. It was found that levels of social and family loneliness were low, but that romantic loneliness was relatively high. Predictors for social loneliness were identified as greater age, poorer health, living in a rural area, and lack of contact with friends. Living in a rural setting, gender (male), having a lower income, being widowed, no access to transport, infrequent contact with children and relatives and caring for a spouse or relative at home were significant predictors of family loneliness. Romantic loneliness was predicted by marital status, in particular being widowed. Never having married or being divorced or separated were also significant predictors for romantic loneliness. The findings indicate that loneliness for older people is variable, multi-dimensional and experienced differently according to life events, with, for example, the death of a partner being followed by the experience of emotional loneliness, or the loss of friends or declining health leading to social loneliness.

This overview of mental illness services in Ireland, North and South, over recent decades, is a descriptive account. It refers to policies, development and operation of the services, with certain figures relating to hospital admissions, human resources and costs in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The paper points to the need for more detailed comparisons, which would require more rigorous, systematic health services research.

In Ireland I think it could be said that while archaeology plays an important role in national identity, this role is implicit and not very welldefined. Images of monuments in mist or glorious sunshine and artefacts displayed as treasure or jewellery are very widely deployed. This constructed past serves a variety of different purposes for a rapidly changing present, from utilization as a symbol of the long tradition of Ireland's high technological expertise — nowadays being best expressed in the computing industry, as a backdrop for the sustained (as opposed to sustainable) drive to increase tourism, to the context for a call of a revitalization of Celtic spirituality (see discussion in Gibbons 1996). More traditionally, of course, material remains played a very important role in the construction of national identities in Ireland (e.g. Crooke 1999). For these varied reasons archaeology is seen in a positive light, as a positive project, both by political decision-makers and the public. One illustration of this is the Discovery Programme, a government-funded research initiative set up in 1991 to enhance knowledge of Ireland’s past through integrated programmes of archaeological research (Waddell 1997; Eogan 1998).