Raiders of the Lost Archive: the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Film Industry 1942

In 1938, Sean Lemass, as Minister for Industry and Commerce, established a three man committee with a broad remit to examine and report on every aspect – actual and putative – of the Irish film industry. This report would examine not merely the exhibition, distribution and production of film but also its potential as a cultural force and the extent to which the established censorship regime was fulfilling its obligations to ‘protect public morality against any danger of contamination or deterioration which might threaten it through the influence of cinema’ (RICFI, 1942: 44)

Tackling the Directive: Television Without Frontiers and Irish soccer.

With the liberalisation of European Broadcasting from the 1980s and the early identification by new commercial channels of sporting events as key content to encourage viewing/subscription the relationship between sports and media organisations has inevitably become closer and more lucrative. However with the amendment of the Television Without Frontiers directive in 1997 a new element - the state - entered the equation, rendering it all the more complex. This paper demonstrates the extent to which in the modern era sports journalism can only offer a truly comprehensive account of events by adopting approaches more commonly associated with business and political journalism. It does so by examining the biggest Irish âsportsâ story of 2002: not the Irish teams participation in the World Cup but the subsequent sale of broadcast rights for that teamâs home games to BSkyB. The narrative throws light on the increasingly complex relationship between sport, commercial and public service media, and the state but also details an extremely novel application of the Television Without Frontiers directive by the Irish state

Revisiting Globalisation through the movie and digital game industries.

The 1990s saw the digital games industry adopt similar commercial strategies to the cultural industry which for 80 years has been most closely associated with the process of globalisation â the Hollywood-based movie industry. The major console players, Sony, Nintendo and more recently Microsoft, expanded on a global scale, vertically and horizontally integrating through alliances and take-overs as they sought to control hardware, content development, publishing and distribution. Moreover the relationship between the two industries has become increasingly symbiotic. Vivendi Universal has moved into the exploitation of both game and film assets on a global scale and would seem to exemplify what we understand by contemporary globalisation. This paper considers globalisation through an analysis of the movie and digital game industries both globally and from the perspective of a small country like Ireland which has a high level of cinema attendance and game sales but is struggling to establish domestic movie and game industries. Key Words: globalisation, convergence, movie industry, digital games, power, cultural imperialis

The development of universal telephone service in Ireland 1880-1993

This research examines the development of universal service in Ireland over the period from 1880 to 1993. Universal service is a key element o f telecommunications policy. Its precise meaning is the subject o f dispute between differing political outlooks buts its objectives are essentially understood as socially-oriented, promoting the diffusion of telecommunications technologies beyond that achieved by the market, and facilitating access to those same technologies at affordable rates. Differences over the precise meaning of universal service are also the result of the long history of universal service. Although the term itself is a twentieth century one, it has been argued that its fundamental tenets are embodied in particular policy objectives and in particular the long established concept of public service. Thus this research has examined the history of the concept in Ireland over the period of a century with a view to understanding how the current working definition of universal service has been arrived at. The research looks in depth at the development and diffusion of the telephone across Ireland. It describes how the telephone network has expanded from the cities to reach the entire geographical extent of Ireland. It also examines the factors which have driven and the factors which have constrained the development of the telephone network: the overall economic condition of the country, the respective influences of industry, agriculture and society at large, the development of new telecommunication technologies and the perception of the role of the telephone on the part of those with the greatest influence on its expansion: the private companies, governments departments and state agencies which have been charged with the operation of the telephone service. In short this research seeks to identify the specific political, economic, social and technological factors that shaped the development of the telephone system in Ireland. in the final chapters, the research describes universal service as it is in Ireland of the 1990s, concluding that ultimately the scope o f universal service policy in Ireland has been severely constrained both by economic factors (the cost of providing the service) and a political unwillingness to effectively recognise the social role of the telephone. Thus whilst the research considers how new information and communication technologies will affect future conceptions of universal service, it argues that the philosophy underlying the provision of the “plain old telephone service” in Ireland falls far short of the ideal of universal service

Explaining election frames: A content analysis of twelve newspapers in the 2011 Irish general election

The framing of elections represents the most overt instance of the media’s power to influence politics. We content analysed twelve newspapers’ coverage of the 2011 general election in Ireland. Ireland’s newspaper market has some special advantages for social scientists, as it allows us to separate the newspaper types/formats (tabloid versus broadsheet) from their commercial basis (vulnerability or otherwise to short-term sales and profits). Therefore, we are able to make a particular contribution to the long-standing debate about the interaction of free market capitalism and the media. Our results do not find a homogeneous general election frame in Ireland. The variation in framing across Irish newspapers was much greater than that between the five countries for which we can find strictly comparable results. The different commercial statuses of the newspapers do seem to be related to different dominant frames of election coverage, but only after we develop a new measure which takes account of the relative overall prominence of election coverage in the newspapers examined

Crisis elections and the primacy of policy: explaining media framing of election coverage

Media coverage of elections in Europe and North America has increasingly tended to focus on the horse-race and the campaign as a game rather than the policy debate pertinent to the election. This is often explained by the changes in media pressures. It may also make sense given the narrowing of policy space between left and right and the comparative prosperity enjoyed in Europe and North America. But the relevance of politics varies. The economic crisis in the west might have led to an increased interest in policy among voters and focus on it by media. Ireland experienced both extremes of boom and crisis between the late 1990s and 2011. The Irish case allows us use a quasi-experimental approach to test the impact of crisis on media framing of elections. This article uses original data from Ireland’s last three elections, and with a design that shows when other pertinent variables are held constant, we find empirical support for the theoretical expectation that the context of the election affects the relative focus on campaign or horserace versus substantive policy issues

New Media: New Pleasures? STeM Working Paper, Dublin City University

This paper is based on the findings of a DCU funded pilot project which ran from Oct. 03-March 04. Developed by Dr. Aphra Kerr, Dr. Pat Brereton and Dr. Roddy Flynn, all members of the STeM research centre, they benefited considerably from the presence of Julian Kücklich, a visiting PhD student, funded under the EU's Marie Curie Programme. The project team all have experience researching and teaching about traditional and new media and their theoretical expertise ranges from political economy of the media to cultural studies, literary theory and social theory. The project was funded by the Research Advisory Panel in DCU and builds on previous STeM projects including Computer Games: Production, Texts and Users (00-03), gamedevelopers.ie (03-04), European Media Technology and Everyday Life (00-03), Cost A20; The Impact of the Internet on the Mass Media in Europe (00-2003) and Transformations in Irish Broadcasting (02-03), as well as previous Marie Curie student projects on interactive television and the internet (see http://www.stem.dcu.ie/ ) This project was motivated by one core question: do new media provide new pleasures to their users? The answer has important implications for designers of new media, regulators and media educators. However the question is deceptively simple and brings with it three inter-related but complex challenges which this pilot project set out to explore: 1.How do we define pleasure and where do we situate our work in relation to previous work on pleasure? 2.Can we differentiate between the pleasures provided by traditional media like cinema and new media like DVDs? 3.Can established research methods capture the pleasures provided by new media

The impact of the economic crisis on media framing : evidence from three elections in Ireland

Media coverage of elections in Europe and North America has increasingly focused on the campaign as a game rather than a policy debate. This is often explained by the changes in media pressures. It may also reflect the narrowing of policy space between left and right and the comparative prosperity enjoyed in Europe and North America. But the relevance of politics varies. The global economic crisis might have led to an increased interest in policy among voters and focus on it by media. Ireland experienced both extremes of boom and crisis between the late 1990s and 2011. The Irish case allows us to test the impact of the crisis on media framing of elections. This article uses original data from the three most recent national elections in Ireland, with a research design that holds other pertinent variables constant. We find empirical support for the theoretical expectation that the context of the election affects the relative focus on campaign or horserace versus substantive policy issues