The Anglo-Irish war of 1919-1921 was an international historical landmark: the first successful revolution against British rule and the beginning of the end of the Empire. But the Irish ...revolutionaries did not win their struggle on the battlefield - their key victory was in mobilising public opinion in Britain and the rest of the world. Journalists and writers flocked to Ireland, where the increasingly brutal conflict was seen as the crucible for settling some of the key issues of the new world order emerging from the ruins of the First World War. On trial was the British Empire's claim to be the champion of civilisation as well as the principle of self-determination proclaimed by the American president Woodrow Wilson."The News from Ireland" vividly explores the work of British and American correspondents in Ireland as well as other foreign journalists and literary figures. It offers a penetrating and persuasive assessment of the Irish revolution's place in a key moment of world history as well as the role of the press and journalism in the conflict. This important book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Irish history and how our understanding of history generally is shaped by the media.
The leader writer Maurice Walsh
Irish Journalism Before Independence,
05/2016
Book Chapter
From his three years as a sub-editor on The Times of London, Graham Greene remembered, ‘the slow burning fire in the sub editors’ room, the gentle thud of coals as they dropped one by one in the old ...black grate’. For Greene the gently soporific memory of the fireplace in the subs room was a symbol of ‘the peaceful life’.¹ He knew of no one at the newspaper who had ever resigned or been sacked and so when he left in 1929 – after his first novel, The Man Within, turned out to be a spectacular success – the editor
In 1971 Brian Cleeve published his well-received novel, Cry of Morning, anatomizing “the new Irish revolution.” The blurb on the cover advertised the novel as a story of “money and expensive cars and ...towering office blocks among the Georgian slums.” It opens in a Dublin television studio crackling with tension as the countdown begins for another live edition of the popular current affairs show, Friday at Ten. The host, suave and handsome John Lennox, is the only person at ease under the fierce studio lights. His guests, property developers and conservationists united in enmity in a superheated space, can barely
Parents who volunteer, or who lobby for improvements in school quality, are generally seen as providing a school-wide public good. If so, straightforward public-good theory predicts that free-riding ...will reduce average involvement at larger schools. This study uses longitudinal data to follow families over time, as their children move from middle schools to high schools, thus netting out unobservable differences among families. Increases in school size result in significant reductions in parental involvement, although the magnitude of the effect is small. If parents experience a doubling in school size, they are 2 percentage points less likely to increase their contacts with the school, and 5 percentage points less likely to increase their volunteering. A continuous-treatment propensity-score method tests whether the results are driven by selection into treatment. The parental contact results are robust to this test, while the volunteer results are not. Also, there is some evidence that parents see their involvement as a substitute, rather than a complement, for perceived school quality.
Critics of school choice argue that cream-skimming will worsen outcomes for those left behind in public schools. Since “high ability” families may have already sorted themselves out of the schools in ...question, this paper will examine whether existing within-school heterogeneity leaves any scope for cream-skimming to operate. It asks, “given the current level of within-school heterogeneity, how strong would peer effects have to be to significantly worsen outcomes for those left behind?” In order for cream-skimming to lower math test scores by one half-year's progress, the peer effect would have to be as strong as increasing class sizes by 8–20 students, or cutting per-student funding by $400–2000. These results indicate that current levels of within-school heterogeneity are so low that peer effects would have to be unrealistically strong to give cream-skimming any bite.
