The purpose of the study was to investigate how Irish pro-choice organizations work in respect of free choice in relation to abortion, since abortion is illegal except when there is a substantial risk to the mother’s life. This purpose was constructed with the significance of social work as a practical profession restricted by regulations, at the same time as it is a profession to support and help deprived people. This was a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews with seven different people from five different pro-choice organizations. The interviews indicated that in Ireland abortion was a stigmatized matter, as well as taboo to talk about. The results showed that the pro- choice organizations work to provide support and information and they viewed the right to abortion as a fundamental right and that women going through crisis pregnancy should be able to access a free choice. Still, it is the stigmatizing environment as well as the existing laws that become an obstacle for accessing free choice.

This dissertation examines the roles of popular sports baseball and Gaelic Games in Taiwanese and Irish society respectively between the years 1884 and 1968. During this period, the spread of each sport in popularity and the subsequent increased profile in the public realm highlighted similar challenges faced by the societies of each territory as inhabitants of minor players in a global political system dominated by major powers. The development of Taiwanese baseball and its spread in popularity during the colonial period reveals the extent to which divisions between colonial Japanese and local Taiwanese blurred beyond the parameters of governmental efforts at coexistence and assimilation. Two teams in particular, the Nenggao team of 1924-25 and the KANO team of 1931, give evidence of a colonial Taiwanese sporting culture that featured strengthening connections with sporting culture in Japan. In both cases, baseball displayed potential as an integrating force in colonial Taiwanese society between social groups resident on the island rather than as a source for opposition to colonial rule. This is in direct contrast to Irish society, where the resurgence in popularity of Gaelic Games occurred within the political context of exclusivist nationalism. Gaelic Games existed as cultural markers of an Irish culture defined by a Gaelic ethnic identity and political commitment to an Irish nation state, choosing to ignore the realities of partition and the existence of a sizable Loyalist community in the north of the country. This viewpoint persisted until the late 1960s, when the eruption of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland irrevocably changed the terms of Irish political participation. At the same time, Taiwanese baseball transitioned from a shared cultural form between Taiwan and Japan to a potent avenue for emerging Taiwanese political voices in 1968 with the widely celebrated success of the Hongye schoolboy baseball team. Baseball’s popularity had persisted in the face of ambivalent attitudes among ruling Guomindang officials following retrocession, but the Hongye victory marked the introduction of specific political overtones to Taiwanese baseball, bringing an end to decades of the sport’s primary role as an act of public participation with limited political connotations. / text

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The present study proposes a detailed examination of the Irish migration to Montreal between 1847 and 1867, that is to say between the Famine and Confederation. For vast numbers of Irish, Quebec and Montreal were of course merely staging-points in a weary journey whose end lay in Upper Canada or, more often, in the United States of America. [...]

In 1828 the Friends of Ireland formed in the United States in order to support Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in Ireland. The Catholic Association campaigned for Catholic Emancipation, a successful movement that promoted the participation of Catholic elites in the United Kingdom Parliament. In the 1840s the Friends of Repeal formed in the United States in order to support Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association in Ireland. This organization sought the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800, which had created the United Kingdom and dismantled the Irish Parliament. This time, the movement failed due to mounting sectionalism and sectarianism in both countries. Using Charleston's Catholic Miscellany and the Boston Pilot as primary sources, this thesis explores how Irish Americans participated in the Jacksonian-era public sphere and how the Emancipation and Repeal campaigns illuminated the sometimes competing claims of liberalism and democracy in the Atlantic world.

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No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1982.