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Teachers’ unions are the organizations responsible for safeguarding the conditions of teachers’ employment. Union supporters claim strong synergies between teachers’ interests and students’ interests, but critics of unions insist that the stance of teachers in collective bargaining may disadvantage students as unions reduce the power of administrators to manage, remove, reward or retain excellent teachers.

In A Collective Pursuit, Lesley Laveryunpacks how teachers’ unions today are fighting for contracts that allow them to earn a decent living and build “schools all students deserve.” She explains the form and function of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions. Lavery then explores unionization campaigns in the Twin Cities charter schools. A Collective Pursuit also examines teacher strikes and contract negotiations, school finance and finance reform, and district and union attempts to address racial achievement gaps, to provide a context for understanding the economic, political, and demographic forces that inspire teachers to improve conditions for students.

A Collective Pursuit emphasizes that while teachers’ unions serve a traditional, economic role, they also provide a vast array of valuable services to students, educators, parents, and community members.

Ascending to power after the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a violent revolution against the United Kingdom, the political party Cumann na nGaedheal governed during the first ten years of the Irish Free State (1922–32). Taking over from the fallen Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, Cumann na nGaedheal leaders such as W. T. Cosgrave and Kevin O'Higgins won a bloody civil war, created the institutions of the new Free State, and attempted to project abroad the independence of a new Ireland.

On the role smartphones play in the lives of the aging in contemporary Ireland.

This volume documents a radical change in the experience of aging. Based on two ethnographies in Dublin, Ireland, the book illustrates how smartphones enable old people to focus on crafting a new life in retirement. For some, the smartphone is an intimidating burden linked to being on the wrong side of a new digital divide. But for most, however, it has become integral to a new trajectory towards a more sustainable life, both for themselves and their environment. The smartphone has reunited extended family and old friends, helped resolve intergenerational conflicts though new forms of grandparenting, and has become a health resource. This is a book about acknowledging late middle age in contemporary Ireland and examines how older people in Ireland experience life today.
 

This edition of his journal is perhaps the first serious scholarly effort to place Tocqueville's journey to Ireland in its proper intellectual, geographical, and historical context.

An Immigrant Bishop is a revised examination of the Irish intellectual roots of Bishop John England’s American pastoral works in the diocese of Charleston, South Carolina (1820-1842). The text focuses on his political philosophy and his theology of the Church, both of which were influenced by the Enlightenment and a theological, not a political, Gallicanism. As the study demonstrates, we now know more about England’s intellectual life prior to his immigration than we do about any other Catholic immigrant from Ireland. Neither Peter Guilday’s monumental two-volume biography (1927) of England nor any subsequent scholarly study of England has uncovered and analyzed, as this book does, England’s many unpublished and published writings in Ireland—his explicitly authored texts, his published speeches before the Cork Aggregate meetings, and his pseudonymous articles in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle between 1808, when he was ordained, and 1820, when he emigrated to the United States. John England (1786-1842), the first Catholic bishop of Charleston, was the foremost national spokesman for Catholicism in the United States during the years of his episcopacy and the primary apologist for the compatibility of Catholicism and American republicanism. He was also the first Catholic bishop to speak before the United States Congress and the first American to receive a papal appointment as an Apostolic Delegate to a foreign country (in this case to negotiate a concordat with President Jean Pierre Boyer of Haiti). He is considered the father of the Baltimore Provincial Councils and the nineteenth-century American Catholic conciliar tradition. He was also the only bishop in American history to develop a constitutional form of diocesan government and administration. Among other things he was the first cleric to establish a diocesan newspaper that had something of a national distribution. England’s contribution to the early formation of an American Catholicism has been told many times before, but he has the kind of creative mind and episcopal leadership that demands repeated re-considerations.

Ireland has been marketed as the poster boy of EU austerity. EU elites and neoliberal commentators claim that the country’s ability to suffer economic pain will attract investors and generate a recovery.

In Austerity Ireland, Kieran Allen challenges this official image and argues that the Irish state's response to the crash has primarily been designed to protect economic privilege. The resulting austerity has been a failure and is likely to produce a decade of hardship.

The book offers a deeply informed and penetrating diagnosis of Ireland's current socio-economic and political malaise, suggesting that a political earthquake is underway which may benefit the left. Austerity Ireland is essential reading for all students of Irish politics and economics, as well as those interested in the politics of austerity and the eurozone crisis.