Before the Celtic Tiger: Change Without Modernisation in Ireland 1959-1989

This paper engages with and expands on a number of themes examined in Tom Garvin’s Preventing the Future. It asks if it is accurate to describe independent Ireland as poor before 1950, arguing that Ireland became poor in comparative terms only during the 1950s. While agreeing with the view that Ireland changed during the 1960s, the main contention of this article is that modernisation was severely constrained between 1959 and 1989 by the continuing dominance of traditional interests and attitudes. It also argues that Ireland’s poor economic performance was a consequence of this continuity as successive governments, privileged property owners and rural interests dominated other sectors of society. It suggests that the importance of culture and continuity in the process of change has often been underestimated and this requires closer attention if specific outcomes are to be explained in a satisfactory fashion.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem: Catholicism, contraception and change, 1922–1979

When Ireland became independent in 1922 there was widespread support for the imposition of a moral order that reflected Catholic teaching. This was remarkably successful: divorce was outlawed while contraception was prohibited as part of this process. The consensus on moral issues was challenged for the first time during the 1970s. The legalisation of contraception became the main battlefield between conservatives and liberals. This article analyses successive attempts to change policy and discusses the impact of social and political change in a homogeneous Catholic state. Ireland remained a predominantly religious country and the Roman Catholic Church wielded considerable influence. The controversy over contraception challenged the Church's authority and the society's deeply embedded moral values. For the first time, Irish politics was divided on matters of church and state. Resolution came in 1979, however the legislation reflected the continuing influence of the bishops on policy making. It also highlighted the caution of politicians who remained reluctant to act. In contrast to elsewhere in Western Europe, the legislation was not a turning point but an example of conservative retrenchment. The legislation generated a conservative backlash that successfully imposed traditional Catholic values on Irish society during the 1980s. The main sources used are the archives of the Departments of Justice and Health

Putin, national self-determination and political independence in the twenty-first century

This contribution focuses on the right of nations to self-determination after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It suggests that sovereignty and territorial integrity are not as secure as once thought. A number of articles and statements issued by Vladimir Putin are analysed to identify nationalist themes which he uses to reject Ukraine's right to exist outside the Russian state. Key themes include a primordial account of national origins, the conflation of state and nation, and a refusal to recognise a right to self-determination of territories that had once been part of Russia. Putin's nationalism draws on imperial nationalism, state nationalism, revanchism and majoritarianism to underwrite his claims. Such views are widespread among established states, contributing to the instability of the contemporary world. It is argued that a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and nation is long overdue, as is the inflexible nature of territorial integrity

Demonstrating Quantum Error Correction that Extends the Lifetime of Quantum Information

The remarkable discovery of Quantum Error Correction (QEC), which can overcome the errors experienced by a bit of quantum information (qubit), was a critical advance that gives hope for eventually realizing practical quantum computers. In principle, a system that implements QEC can actually pass a "break-even" point and preserve quantum information for longer than the lifetime of its constituent parts. Reaching the break-even point, however, has thus far remained an outstanding and challenging goal. Several previous works have demonstrated elements of QEC in NMR, ions, nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, photons, and superconducting transmons. However, these works primarily illustrate the signatures or scaling properties of QEC codes rather than test the capacity of the system to extend the lifetime of quantum information over time. Here we demonstrate a QEC system that reaches the break-even point by suppressing the natural errors due to energy loss for a qubit logically encoded in superpositions of coherent states, or cat states of a superconducting resonator. Moreover, the experiment implements a full QEC protocol by using real-time feedback to encode, monitor naturally occurring errors, decode, and correct. As measured by full process tomography, the enhanced lifetime of the encoded information is 320 microseconds without any post-selection. This is 20 times greater than that of the system's transmon, over twice as long as an uncorrected logical encoding, and 10% longer than the highest quality element of the system (the resonator's 0, 1 Fock states). Our results illustrate the power of novel, hardware efficient qubit encodings over traditional QEC schemes. Furthermore, they advance the field of experimental error correction from confirming the basic concepts to exploring the metrics that drive system performance and the challenges in implementing a fault-tolerant system

Soft Magnetorotons and Broken-Symmetry States in Bilayer Quantum Hall Ferromagnets

The recent report on the observation of soft magnetorotons in the dispersion of charge-density excitations across the tunneling gap in coupled bilayers at total Landau level filling factor $\nu_T=1$ is reviewed. The inelastic light scattering experiments take advantage of the breakdown of wave-vector conservation that occurs under resonant excitation. The results offer evidence that in the quantum Hall state there is a roton that softens and sharpens markedly when the phase boundary for transitions to highly-correlated compressible states is approached. These findings are interpreted with Hartree-Fock evaluations of the dynamic structure factor. The model includes the effect of disorder in the breakdown of wave-vector conservation and resonance enhancement profiles within a phenomenological approach. These results link the softening of magnetorotons to enhanced excitonic Coulomb interactions in the ferromagnetic bilayers.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; conference: EP2DS-1

Metamorphosis of a Quantum Hall Bilayer State into a Composite Fermion Metal

Composite fermion metal states emerge in quantum Hall bilayers at total Landau level filling factor $\nu_T$=1 when the tunneling gap collapses by application of in-plane components of the external magnetic field. Evidence of this transformation is found in the continua of spin excitations observed by inelastic light scattering below the spin-wave mode at the Zeeman energy. The low-lying spin modes are interpreted as quasiparticle excitations with simultaneous changes in spin orientation and composite fermion Landau level index.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure

A preliminary classification of lake types in Northern Ireland

The EC Water Framework Directive (WFD) introduces the concept of theecological status of surface waters. In order to compare the ecologicalstatus of, for example, lakes across Europe, methods based on either theidea of the continuum or of discrete biological communities need to bedeveloped. The best example of the use of the continuum approach is thatof RIVPACS for macroinvertebrates in rivers (Wright et al. 1998, 2000),and for discrete communities that of Johnson & Goedkoop (2000) for lakemacroinvertebrates

The Spectrum of the Dirac Operator on Coset Spaces with Homogeneous Gauge Fields

The spectrum and degeneracies of the Dirac operator are analysed on compact coset spaces when there is a non-zero homogeneous background gauge field which is compatible with the symmetries of the space, in particular when the gauge field is derived from the spin-connection. It is shown how the degeneracy of the lowest Landau level in the recently proposed higher dimensional quantum Hall effect is related to the Atiyah-Singer index theorem for the Dirac operator on a compact coset space.Comment: 25 pages, typeset in LaTeX, uses youngtab.st