This chapter focuses on the impact of ecoviolence – in particular, climatic uncertainty – on the language and culture of three areas within the Northwest Wales Coastline and within the county of Gwynedd. These are considered the Cadarnleoedd y Gymraeg. The Cadarnleoedd is often contested as a political tool rather than a formally recognised linguistic or cultural territory, as is the Gaeltacht in Ireland and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland. Here, it is used to describe the areas in Wales where the Welsh language is strongest, with at least 50 per cent of the population able to speak it. There has been a consistent decrease in the number of people able to speak Welsh in Wales, which is challenging the sustainability of the language in its traditional heartlands.

‘Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized’, or so the famed journalist W. T. Stead believed at the turn of the twentieth century. But what did people understand by ‘Americanisation’ and who was doing the Americanising? The term was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used by a range of political figures, writers and commentators, typically with reference to mass migration. At the time of Stead’s comment nearly two million Irish-born people resided in the United States. Through their communications and return journeys to Ireland, emigrants became the primary image-makers of America in Ireland, making distinctive interventions in the development of political ideas and organisational models in Ireland. This chapter examines perceptions of the impact of the United States, and Irish America, on Irish politics and how different American influences were welcomed, withstood, filtered, and were in competition with each other in the period from the end of the Great Famine to the 1920s. They made significant contributions to different types of political activity in Ireland, but they were always entangled with a range of other transnational influences.

Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in Dublin to the post of Professor of Greek at University College Dublin in February 1884. He was thirty-nine. He died of typhoid in his university rooms in June 1889, a month short of his forty-fifth birthday. Never the most prolific of poets, Hopkins wrote about twenty-five completed or near-completed poems in his five and a half years in Ireland, including undoubted masterpieces. Caught between devotion to church and resistance to state, Catholic Ireland was not exactly hostile to the priest who worked there for five years before his death, but its divisiveness immeasurably deepened the pitch and the discomfort of a poetry tugged in two ways, between the desolations of self and the consolations of church and state.

Chapter 12 analyses Irish law on police access to digital evidence. It outlines the domestic legal framework regarding data retention, interception of communications and access to stored data. It then considers the law governing cross-border requests for data. It assesses the extent to which these rules are adequate for law enforcement purposes and whether these rules are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and data protection standards.

Examines Robert Montgomery’s early years as consul in Alicante, Spain focusing on his multiple identities as Irishman, American, and Spaniard. Discusses Alicante’s evolving commerce and the growth of American shipping networks despite the impact of the Barbary Wars.

International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.