This thesis investigates the law of pledging as presented in the early Irish laws and draws connections to its relations within the overall system of security. At the centre of my research stands the question what pledges Irish law recognised and how their application was determined, so as to provide a paradigm for the law of pledging in its entirety. A pledge is usually a movable, material object of symbolic and economic worth that is given to another person as a security deposit for an outstanding obligation. The main findings of this thesis are a first paradigm of the law of pledging and a methodological and contextual categorisation of all types of pledges that opens doors for future research into property law. The combined discussion of pledges, hostages and sureties offers the reader insight into a triple method of security and its differences. Moreover, the close relationship between given pledges and distrained pledges is unravelled for the first time. Of further note is the comparative investigation into pledging. Therein, the reader is presented with how pledges are used in Welsh, Salic, Lombard, Visigothic, and Burgundian law. The objective is to offer the reader a view into the possibilities of pledging and to provide a framework against which the Irish evidence can be probed, which reveals how sophisticated and attentive to detail the Irish laws were. Finally, a translation of the primary source text 'Bretha im Fuillemu Gell' (Judgements concerning Pledge-interests) is made available to the reader in the Appendix.

This thesis examines the representation of Ireland in images and texts produced in Britain and France between 1839 and 1855. I argue that in this period, Ireland functioned as a crucial site for the negotiation and transformation of the relationship between the two nations. Chapter One examines a popular middle-class British publication of 1845, Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.. .and Emmett's Insurrection. Through an analysis of George Cruikshank's illustrations to this work, I explore the ways that a predominant image of the Irish was linked to British anxieties concerning a potential political alliance between the French and the Irish based on what was represented as a "natural" religio-racial connection between the two nations. Developing this transnational focus, I argue that French concern with Ireland exacerbated such constructions. Chapter Two examines liberal and leftleaning French publications that took up representations of the Irish between 1839 to 1846 in order to critique Britain's role as a modern industrial nation. In Chapter Three I analyze how "Irishness" in the French press between 1845 and 1847, and in satires by artists like Cham and Paul Gavarni, served both as a warning against French adoption of the English economic model of laissez-faire capitalism, and as a commentary on domestic working class poverty. Chapter Four explores how the Irish were taken up both visually and textually in the French press to be momentarily transformed into active agents of radical change in the year of France's revolution of 1848. My final chapter concludes with an analysis of French artist Gustave Courbet's figure of an Irishwoman as a complex marker of both pauperism and potential revolution in a contentious painting displayed strategically outside Paris' 1855 Exposition universelle. In the course of this analysis "Ireland" is shown to raise a range of issues concerning relations between France and Britain. While images of Irishness evoked the mobility and exchange that characterized an early moment of free trade, those same images could simultaneously arouse anxieties in both Britain and France around industrialization, the "advancement" of civil liberties, the growing pauperization of populations, and the threat to both nations of calls for republican reform. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

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This case study analyses how four Irish "opinion leader" newspapers - The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune - constructed the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the four-year period from July 2000 to July 2004. A primary objective of this case study is to overcome some of the more prominent theoretical inadequacies that have characterised existing research in this area to date. Principally, because existing research has been mostly limited to analysing the American media context and to a lesser extent, the British and other core European contexts, very few analyses have been undertaken on the framing of foreign conflicts by media outlets that operate within entirely different national environments, such as the Irish media environment. Chapter I argues that already existing research has mostly been confined to "testing" propaganda, indexing, hegemonic and political control hypotheses regarding media roles in covering foreign conflicts. These hypotheses are based on assumptions that foreign conflict coverage is mostly influenced by extrinsic structural factors and that, therefore, the media's role is largely restricted to that of acting as conduits for government propaganda and elite perspectives. Consequently, research guided by these hypotheses neglects to investigate fully the influences exerted by the surrounding politico-cultural and media contexts on the various roles adopted by the media when reporting on different types of foreign conflicts. William A. Gamson and his colleagues' model of social constructivist media analysis was chosen as the most appropriate model for fulfilling the objectives of this research. This model analyses media coverage trends as outcomes of contested news construction processes that are potentially influenced by a range of different extrinsic environmental factors and intrinsic media, or news factors. This case study consisted of four different, yet interrelated, stages of research. The first stage consisted of a literature-based contextual analysis of the historical and political environments characterising the arena of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, as well as the arenas of Irish-Israeli and Irish-Palestinian relations. The second research stage involved a longitudinal and descriptive analysis of a representative sampling of coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune during the period from July 2000 to July 2004. The third stage consisted of qualitative frame analysis of news discourses. The fourth and final stage of research involved the undertaking of a series of exploratory, qualitative interviews with key media, political/diplomatic and NGO actors. Chapter 3 briefly outlines how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been historically manifested as a highly unequal, contested and multi-dimensional conflict. Chapter 4 analyses the potential contextual influences exerted by Irish political culture and foreign policy-makin(I-1t1ra ditions on the roles adopted by Irish media. It concludes that Ireland's "small state" and post-colonial status, its consequent lack of "hard power", or "vital" foreign policy interests in the Middle East, as well as its official dependency on UN and EU foreign policy perspectives, are likely to have exerted significant contextual influences on the ways in which the sampled newspapers covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chapter 5 explores the ways in which the changed political environment surrounding Israeli-Palestinian relations during the period of July 2000 to July 2004 had significant constructivist implications for how international media, including the Irish media, covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This case study's descriptive analysis of randomly sampled coverage by The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Sunday Tribune during the period of July 2000 to July 2004 generated a number of significant findings. Firstly, it was concluded that the regular patterns of attention that the sampled newspapers devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were reflective of the dynamics and politics of that conflict itself, as well as its ongoing international resonance. However, this coverage was frequently of a semi- or non-prominent nature, while the sampled newspapers accorded only miniscule amounts of frontpage, analytical and editorial attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was concluded that Ireland's "small state" status and its lack of appreciable national or foreign policy interests in Israel and the Palestinian territories influenced these latter trends. However, in addition to the formative influences exerted by the national politico-cultural context, media contextual factors and intrinsic news factors also had discernible constructivist implications for news outcomes. For instance, the finding that the majority of news items were sourced from foreign-based jourrialists and news agencies was related to the operation of news factors, such as editorial judgements and criteria, as well as reporting norms and values. Most significantly, the intense competition characterising the Irish media market overall, as well as the lack of historical grounding of Irish media within a "tradition" of foreign news analysis, exerted substantial influence on these news-sourcing patterns by constraining the sampled newspapers' commitment to foreign news coverage. In relation to the findings generated by this case study's topical analysis, it was also concluded that the operation of news factors, in relation to the wider politico-cultural context, influenced the ways in which the sampled newspapers topicalised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus, while news values tilted editorial decisions towards covering "conflict"/"political violence" topics, these values also served to reduce newspaper coverage of "peace" and other topics. Additionally, politico-cultural factors, such as the relative isolationist and dependent nature of Irish foreign policy worldviews, supplied an important context within which the sampled newspapers neglected to appreciably cover the international diplomaticsecurity context surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moreover, the low levels of coverage devoted to domestic Israeli and Palestinian topics reflected Ireland's lack of any "vital" interests in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its relatively weak politico-cultural and personal ties with Israel and the Palestinians. Finally, in relation to source access and representation trends, it was found that the sampled newspapers tended to be more or less contested sites (albeit unequal sites). variously featuring the assertions of competing Israeli and Palestinian politicaU"official" sources, rather than exclusively transmitting so-called consensual, hegemonic and elitist constructions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This emerged as a key finding of this research, as it challenges one of the primary theoretical assumptions of the propaganda, indexing, hegemonic and political control hypotheses - namely, that politically-powerful and economically resourceful conflict protagonists consistently have greater levels of media access than politically weaker protagonists, simply by virtue of the power disparities that pertain between them. Instead, this thesis argues that, within highly contested foreign conflict arenas, the protagonist sources' degree of access to international media attention is best viewed as a constructed and achieved outcome, which changes in line with developments in the wider political and media environments and changes in the operation of news factors.

Thesis--Bonn. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 322-351) and index.

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Having critically examined the dominant approaches to the study of development now current in Irish geographical and historical research, the thesis outlines the need for a structurally based, historical analysis of uneven sectoral and regional development in Ireland from circa 1550 to 1750. This is achieved through examining the dialectical relationships between class, colonialism and development, involving an analysis of, in turn, land confiscation and colonisation policies, the creation of a new landed aristocracy, legislation against trade and manufacturing, and the overall retardation of development on the island. Uneven regional development is examined through contrasting the differing evolution of the North-east, where factory based industry eventually became firmly established and the remainder of the island, where agriculture remained predominant. Throughout the thesis the changing relations between internal class, and external colonial, aspects of development are highlighted.

During the last main phase of glaciations (26-13kaBP) an ice cap developed in south west Ireland and ice, from a dispersal centre in the vicinity of Kenmare, flowed north and diverged on the southern slopes of the Macgillycuddy’s Reeks. On these slopes, a weathering limit separates ice-moulded bedrock, on low ground, from frost-weathered terrain above. Assessment of bedrock dilation joint characteristics, Schmidt hammer R-value data, clay-sized mineral contents and magnetic properties of basal soil samples confirms significant contrasts in the degree of weathering above and below this limit. The weathering limit declines in altitude along former ice flow-lines and is confluent with morainic deposits on the eastern side of the Gap of Dunloe and on the western slopes of Skregbeg. This evidence supports the assertion that the high-level weathering limit is a periglacial trimline that marks the former maximum upper limit of the body of ice, which occupied this area of southwest Ireland during the LGM. This evidence, however, does not confute the notion that cold based, non-erosive plateau ice may have covered some or all of the upland surfaces that occur above the recorded weathering limits. Reconstruction of the former ice surface profile from periglacial trimline limits along three former flow lines yielded mean estimates for basal shear stress that ranged from 104.2 to 125.9 kPa. Although these values are high, they are within the range deemed normal for glaciers and ice sheets. The values suggest that the reconstructed areas of the ice cap were warm based and flowing on a bedrock substrate. This is supported by the geomorphological evidence of these areas, which shows that a landform – sediment association has developed consisting of zones of glacial scour and a thin, discontinuous drift cover. This contrasts with the glacial geomorphology of northern parts of the study area, where drift cover is largely continuous, and extensive in valley bottoms and on surrounding hillsides, and is associated with large lateral moraines.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Sheila Emerson. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-235). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;