Exploring key areas relating to media, power and cultural identity, this study looks at the effects of the media in Ireland, first radio, then television, and now the newer media.

Offering up-to-date research and analysis of the Irish media by Ireland's leading experts in the field, this book focuses on a wide range of media including the more traditional broadcast and print media, and also engages with newer media such as the internet and DVD, and newer media genres such as reality TV.

This book explores how Ireland’s community media outlets reflect and shape identity at the local level. While aspects of its culture date back centuries, the nation-state of Ireland is less than one hundred years old. Because of this and other elements of the island’s history, Irish identity is a contested topic and the island is a place where culture, identity and geography are tightly intertwined. By addressing how community media serve as agents for community building, the book examines how they in turn influence the way individuals connect with their communities.

Irish Media: A Critical History maps the landscape of media in Ireland from the foundation of the modern state in 1922 to the present. Covering all principal media forms, print and electronic, in the Republic and in Northern Ireland, John Horgan shows how Irish history and politics have shaped the media of Ireland and, in turn, have been shaped by them. Beginning in a country ravaged by civil war, it traces the complexities of wartime censorship and details the history of media technology, from the development of radio to the inauguration of television in the 1950s and 1960s. It covers the birth, development and - sometimes - the death of major Irish media during this period, examining the reasons for failure and success, and government attempts to regulate and respond to change. Finally, it addresses questions of media globalisation, ownership and control, and looks at issues of key significance for the future. Horgan demonstrates why, in a country whose political divisions and economic development have given it a place on the world stage out of all proportion to its size, the media have been and remain key players in Irish history.

This work brings together 14 national reports and a detailed account of television in the European Union. It provides data on the contradictory processes of media globalization and decentralization and offers an optomistic approach to the future of television in the new era of digital broadcasting.

Topics in this book include Irish church-media relations, public service broadcasting in Ireland, and the dangers posed to democracy by the new media monopolies.

Focusing on a decade in Irish history which has been largely overlooked, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland provides the most complete account of the 1950s in Ireland, through the eyes of the young people who contributed, slowly but steadily, to the social and cultural transformation of Irish society. Eleanor O'Leary presents a picture of a generation with an international outlook, who played basketball, read comic books and romance magazines, listened to rock'n'roll music and skiffle, made their own clothes to mimic international styles and even danced in the street when the major stars and bands of the day rocked into town. She argues that this engagement with imported popular culture was a contributing factor to emigration and the growing dissatisfaction with standards of living and conservative social structures in Ireland. As well as outlining teenagers' resistance to outmoded forms of employment and unfair work practices, she maps their vulnerability as a group who existed in a limbo between childhood and adulthood. Issues of unemployment, emigration and education are examined alongside popular entertainments and social spaces in order to provide a full account of growing up in the decade which preceded the social upheaval of the 1960s. Examining the 1950s through the unique prism of youth culture and reconnecting the decade to the process of social and cultural transition in the second half of the 20th century, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on 20th-century Irish history.