Spring 2023
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Amanda Slevin
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Climate, Communities, and Capitalism: Critically Imagining and Co-Creating Pathways for a Sustainable Ireland
Amanda Slevin
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleWildfires, droughts, floods, beloved species facing extinction – a selection of stark indicators of the accelerating climate and ecological emergency. Underpinned by human patterns of production, consumption, and associated environmental degradation, the ‘triple planetary crises’of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution pose an existential threat to human and non-human species. Consequently, socio-ecological and scientific imperatives for urgent, transformative action have become firmly established, yet with only a few years to 2030 (a landmark year for climate commitments) our shared island, encompassing people on both sides of Ireland’s politically constructed border, is woefully unprepared to tackle the massive difficulties we collectively face.
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Irish, ‘Celtic’, and the Future
Alan Titley
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleWhen I was asked to imagine Ireland, and the place that the Irish language, literature, and culture might have in it in 2030, I had to swallow hard. It is difficult enough to examine a past that is always changing, almost impossible to assess a present that is in constant flux: so what chance is there to imagine a future that will never be what we think?
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Living Lightly on Our Planet: Challenges for Ireland
Peadar Kirby
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleAt the time of writing this article in the autumn of 2022, a slew of authoritative reports and studies underline the extremely precarious nature of the current situation facing humanity and the other species with which we share this beautiful planet. To take a few examples:
• The UN Emissions Gap Report showed that updated national emission-reduction pledges since the Glasgow climate summit in late 2021 make a negligible difference to predicted 2030 emissions and that we are far from the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.
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Regenerating the State: The Key to Ireland’s Response to Climate Change
Johnny Gogan
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleThe purpose of this paper is to discuss how the response to the prospect of fracking in the border counties of Leitrim and Fermanagh could inform the wider imperative to decarbonize at a national level in the face of potentially irreversible climate change.
I was invited by the Royal Irish Academy to speak on this issue, and the issue of sustainability, based on my long-term participation in the group Love Leitrim, one of a number of groups formed in 2011 to address the potential introduction of fracking into Ireland. This community response resulted, six years later, in the passing into law of one of the most progressive pieces of fossil fuel legislation heretofore, at the heart of which was a ban on fracking in Ireland. Recognised as an achievement of sustained community action in the potentially affected border region, the measure secured all-party agreement in its various Oireachtas legislative phases.
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Regulating for the Future: The Law’s Enforcement Deficit
Orla Lynskey
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleDigitization has changed the way we operate as individuals and as a society in significant ways, with this change accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital technologies are now treated as ‘imperative’ across many spheres of life. A by-product of this digitization has been datafication, as formerly analogue phenomena need to be translated into data in order to digitize them. As our daily social, professional, administrative, and civic interactions have taken on a digital dimension, the data generated about these transactions are recorded and analysed for insights. The data generated by your morning coffee purchase might therefore reveal your location, your appetite for early mornings, and your price sensitivity, amongst many other insights. The aggregation of such insights across all your daily activities can create remarkably in-depth profiles of individual behaviour.
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Spring 2023: Ireland in 2030–Thinking Ahead
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The Algorithmic State? Challenges to Democracy in an Era of Digitalization
Jane Fountain
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleIreland 2030 will be a country awash in artificial intelligence, data analytics, machine learning, and other advanced computing applications whirring away in the background throughout the economy and government. While these emerging technologies offer tremendous benefits, they pose equally serious challenges. More broadly, the continuing development of the information society has been accompanied by increasing economic and social inequalities, an existential sense by some of being left behind, loss of community, and – in the wake of increasingly diverse populations – pernicious growth in systemic racism residing in biased data and analytical models that pervasively underpin decision-making.
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Thinking about Ireland’s Future, Then and Now
Philipp W. Rosemann
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€7.00 Purchase Single ArticleWhat would we like Ireland to look like in 2030? In what kind of society do we want to live, on both sides of the border? This seems like a simple question. 2030 is just seven years away, so surely politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and the general public are busy imagining our future. But this is not really happening. Initiatives like Project Ireland 2040, a national development plan for the Republic of Ireland, have in the past several years been overshadowed by emergencies that have demanded all our attention: climate change, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine. These emergencies have forced us to into a reactive, crisis-response mode. There is a sense that events are unfolding so fast that we can hardly keep up. This raises the question: Are we still shaping our future or are we merely adapting, breathlessly, to the rapid changes that characterize life in the twenty-first century?
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