Michael Farrell to launch 'Transforming Ireland' - book by DCU lecturers
- 17 November 2009

Venue: Royal Irish Academy
Date: 17 November 2009
Time: 6pm
EVENT: Michael Farrell, civil lawyer and civil liberties activist

Michael Farrell, will launch of 'Transforming Ireland' by DCU lecturers Prof Michael Cronin, Prof Peadar Kirby and Dr Debbie Ging.

The book is the first sustained and broad-ranging critique of the legacies of Ireland's Celtic Tiger boom. Contributors identify the damaging impact that the free market has had on a wide range of areas in public life, including the media and the pharmaceutical industry, and also examine its influence on health, education, state surveillance, immigrants, the welfare state, consumerism and the Irish language. Challenging the notion that there is no alternative for Ireland but the present economic and political dispensation, experts map out an alternative politics that could create spaces for hope and renewal in contemporary Ireland.

'Transforming Ireland' offers a more substantial and considered analysis, uncovering hidden aspects of everyday Irish life. It reveals that, virtually unnoticed by the media, there exist lively debates in today's Ireland which draw on international insights about globalisation to probe how it is reshaping Irish society. Covering four principal topics -- culture and society, media and social change, social control, and power and politics -- this impressive volume opens new and hopeful perspectives for students and also the general reader. Though primarily a book about Ireland, it is also a book about today's form of globalisation, offering a rare and accessible analysis of the damage done to society when market forces are given free rein. Transforming Ireland details a clear alternative to the political choices and economic policies which have bankrupted Ireland and mortgaged its future. The work above all offers hope for a truly radical and democratic transformation of Irish society.