Can a long-term perspective on human adaptations to climate change inform Ireland’s response to the crisis we face today?
Climate and Society in Ireland is a collection of essays, commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy, that provides a multi-period, interdisciplinary perspective on one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Combining syntheses of existing knowledge with new insights and approaches, contributors explore the varied environmental, climatic and social changes that occurred in Ireland from early prehistory to the early 21st century. The essays in the volume engage with a diversity of pertinent themes, including the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks; changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820; and how Ireland is now on the threshold of taking the radical steps necessary to shed its ‘climate laggard’ status and embark on the road to a post-carbon society.
With contributions by Máire Ní Annracháin, Katharina Becker, David M. Brown, Lucy Collins, Lisa Coyle McClung, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Rosie Everett, Benjamin Gearey, Raymond Gillespie, Seren Griffiths, James Kelly, Francis Ludlow, Meriel McClatchie, Conor Murphy, Simon Noone, Aaron Potito, Gill Plunkett, Phil Stastney, Graeme T. Swindles, John Sweeney, Graeme Warren.
James Kelly, MRIA, is Professor of History in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University, and a past president of the Irish Historical Society, Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and Irish Economic and Social History Society. He has served as a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and, as editor, of Studia Hibernica and Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. A specialist in the history of late early modern Ireland, he has written extensively on eighteenth-century Irish history, since the publication, in 1992 of his first monograph: Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish politics in the 1780s (Cork University Press, 1992). His publications include: That damn's thing called Honour: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860 (Cork University Press, 1995); Poynings' law and the making of Law in Ireland, 1660-1800 (Irish Legal History Society, 2007); Sport and Society in Ireland 1600-1840 (Four Courts Press, 2014) and Food rioting in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Four Courts Press, 2017). His major editions include The proclamations of Ireland, 1660-1820 (5 vols, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2014). He is editor of volume 3 of the Cambridge history of Ireland: Ireland, 1730-1880 (Cambridge, 2018), and co-editor (with Tomás Ó Carragáin) of Climate and Society in Ireland: from prehistory to the present (Royal Irish Academy, 2021) He is currently investigating the graphic satire tradition in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Dr Ó Carragáin is a graduate of UCC and the University of York and joined the staff of the Archaeology Department, UCC, in 2002. His research is focused on the archaeology of early medieval Ireland and its European context (c. AD 400-1200). Among other subjects, he has published widely on the archaeology of Christianisation, archaeological approaches to ritual practice including pilgrimage, early medieval architecture and sculpture, the archaeology of territories and boundaries and the relationship between material culture and social memory. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London (FSA).
