Donnacha Seán Lucey – författare

This book examines Irish Poor Law reform during the years of the Irish revolution and Irish Free State. This work is a significant addition to the growing historiography of the twentieth century which moves beyond political history, and demonstrates that concepts of respectability, social class and gender are central dynamics in Irish society. This book provides the first major study of local welfare practices and exploration of policies, attitudes and the poor.This monograph examines local public assistance regimes, institutional and child welfare, and hospital care. It charts the transformation of workhouses into a network of local authority welfare and healthcare institutions including county homes, county hospitals, and mother and baby homes.The book’s exploration of welfare and healthcare during revolutionary and independent Ireland provides fresh and original insights into this critical juncture in Irish history. The book will appeal to Irish historians and those with interests in welfare, the Poor Law and the social history of medicine and institutions.

This book examines the policies, politics, and management of health care in Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1973, tracing its evolution from a fragmented, locally driven system to the most centrally managed model within the National Health Service. At its core is an analysis of the interest groups that championed change or resisted reform. It explores poor law, municipal, and voluntary provision in the interwar years, then considers the 1940s, shaped by wartime experience and Northern Ireland’s reluctant adoption of the welfare state. The discussion of the post-war decades highlights the complex relationship between health and politics and shows how the technocratic and managerialist reforms of the Terence O’Neill administration fractured unionist health policy in the years leading to the Troubles. Overall, the book offers original insights into Northern Ireland’s health care, politics, and modern history.

Twentieth century public health initiatives have been crucially informed by perceptions and constructions of risk. Notions of risk identification, assessment and mitigation have guided political and institutional actions even before these concepts became an explicit part of the language of public administration and policy making. Past analyses investigating the link between risk perceptions and public health are relatively rare, and where researchers have investigated this nexus, it has typically been assumed that the collective identification of health risks has led to progressive improvements in public health activities.Risk and the Politics of Public Health addresses this gap by presenting a detailed critical historical analysis of the evolution of risk thinking within medical and health related discourses. Grouped around the four core themes of 'immigration', 'race', 'armed conflict' and 'detention and prevention' this book highlights the innovative capacity of risk related concepts as well as their vulnerability to the dysfunctional effects of dominant social ideologies. Risk and the Politics of Public Health is an essential reference for those who seek to understand the interplay of concepts of risk and public health throughout history as well as those who wish to gain a critical understanding of the social dynamics which have underpinned, and continue to underpin, this complex interaction.