Abstract
A number of incidents and community movements in the post-economic growth era have come to shape understandings of the Republic of Ireland’s marginalised groupings. These groups exist in both urban streetscapes and rural communities; all have come to represent a new culture of transgressive resistance in a state that has never completely dealt with issues of political legitimacy or extensive poverty, creating a deviant form of ‘liquid modernity’ which provides the space for such groupings to exist. The article demonstrates that the prevailing ideology in contemporary, post-downturn Ireland have created the conditions for incidents of ‘cultural criminology’ that at times erupt into episodes of counter hegemonic governmentality. The article further argues that these groups which have emerged may represent the type of transgressive Foucaultian governmentality envisaged by Kevin Stenson, while they are indicative of subcultures of discontent and nascent racism which belie the contented findings of various affluence and contentment surveys conducted during the years of rapid growth. The paper develops this theme of counter-hegemonic ‘governmentality’, or the regional attempts to challenge authorities by local groups of transgressors. The paper finally argues that, in many ways, the emergence of a culture of criminality in the Irish case, and media depictions of the same, can be said to stem from the corruption of that country’s elites as much as from any agenda for resistance from its beleaguered subcultures.
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Notes
Adapted from Young (2007, p. 18).
Ferrell and Hayward (2011) Cultural Criminology The Library of Essays in Theoretical Criminology, London: Ashgate.
The development of the concept of anti-hegemonic ‘governmentality’ put forward in this article has its origins in Stenson’s own interpretation of the notion of ‘governmentality’, and must be acknowledged. Dean’s work has also shaped my thinking on the parameters of this Foucaultian idea, which the author has combined with his own perceptions of social movement contention and Irish sociology, politics and history.
Criminal gangs have linked with dissident paramilitaries to secure weapons, and activities have overlapped in some cases.
While Bauman is writing about London, his illustration of globalized urban breakdown is applicable in the case of Ireland’s cities, and to Dublin, with its problems of poverty and drugs crime, in particular.
Young (2011) The Criminological Imagination, London: Polity Press.
(Ibid).
We can further understand responses to the crimescapes of urban modernity by examining justice related social movements in a manner put forward by writers such as Braithwaite (1998), Young (1999, 2007) and Hil (2002).
Said (1979) Orientalism.
Irish Times February 27 2006.
Leonard and Kenny (2010) Review of Cultural Criminology, An Invitation by Ferrell, Hayward and Young, Theoretical Criminology, 14 (1).
Attempts by the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI), a rights-watch group, to investigate the Shell to Sea case and other episodes of corruption in Ireland led to the CPI being closed down after interventions by the state.
The Fianna Fáil/PD/Green Party coalition cut funding to the blind, to Crumlin Children’s Hospital and reduced teaching assistants for disabled and disadvantaged children to fund its bailout of the banking and property-development sectors.
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Leonard, L. ‘Cultural Criminology, Governmentality and the Liquidity of the Failing State: The View from Ireland’ for Critical Criminology . Crit Crim 22, 293–306 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9217-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9217-0