CORA
Cork Open Research Archive (CORA) is UCC’s Open Access institutional repository which enables UCC researchers to make their research outputs freely available and accessible.
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The compensation culture in Ireland: towards a greater understanding and recommendations for reform
(University College Cork, 2026-04-14) Leahy, Jessica; Hedley, Stephen William; O'Callaghan, Patrick; University College Cork
This thesis employs both a socio-legal and doctrinal approach to examine understandings of the phrase “compensation culture”, in order to consider the coincidence of perceptions and reality in the functioning of Ireland’s tort system. The term, though often used, is ill-defined and used as an umbrella term to cover many issues from personal injury fraud, an excess of claims, to a lack of personal responsibility, amongst others. The project’s ultimate objective is to determine stakeholder perspectives on issues in the system and whether identified issues require reform or are simply ingrained perceptions that have already been appropriately addressed through either legislation or caselaw. Three research questions were developed to achieve these aims: 1) How have ideas around compensation culture developed and what are the central themes of external accounts i.e., public views of the tort system? 2) What themes can be developed from the perspectives of those internal to the system? 3) Are the concerns raised valid legal issues or rather unfounded perceptions? If the former is accurate, what potential reforms could resolve these issues?
The thesis explores external views of the tort system in relation to the concept of compensation culture by examining use of the term through a thematic analysis of newspaper articles. This informed an interview study conducted with 21 solicitors and 3 insurance industry representatives to uncover the internal understanding of the issues identified in the public view. A number of topics were identified as relating in various capacities to the term “compensation culture” when it is used. Not all could be addressed due to practical constraints but those considered in the thesis include personal injury claim volume, award levels, fraud and exaggeration, duty and standard of care, cost of insurance, personal responsibility, settlements and reform. The thesis critically analyses issues within the context of each overarching topic that have added nuance through the internal stakeholder view, using doctrinal analysis.
In light of different approaches to compensation culture or litigation crisis type concerns in England and Wales as well as Australia, reforms are considered. In particular, it is argued that awards reform has not resulted reduced insurance costs. Therefore, it is suggested that awards should not continue to be targeted. Instead, it is proposed that awards be updated in line with inflation and legal costs be provided for within the Injuries Resolution Board process. The aim being to encourage acceptance of awards made by the body and reduce delivery costs as compared with litigation. With respect to insurance costs, accountability and transparency are the focus. It is proposed that reform similar to that adopted in England and Wales be implemented here. Namely, a statutory requirement for the industry to report whether and how reform savings have benefitted consumers. Fraud and exaggeration are also addressed, with the caveat that there is no reliable statistical or empirical indicator as to how prevalent these issues are. It is argued that a lapsed Bill that provisioned for a mandatory costs order to be made against the plaintiff when a case is dismissed be revived. The position of the “deliberate exaggerator” is also evaluated. Lastly, the thesis considers the power of perceptions and cautions against reactive reform that may not result in the desired outcome. It is argued that placing the common law on statutory footing is unlikely to assuage public concerns and proposes the use of information campaigns instead.
In dialogue with the vampire: influence of Bram Stoker’s Dracula on twentieth and twenty-first century vampire tropes
(University College Cork, 2025-06-24) Roche, Mairéad; Allen, Graham; O Gallchoir, Cliona; Jones, Darryl
This thesis focuses on the dialogue between Stoker’s Dracula and subsequent twentieth and twenty-first century vampire narratives via their building blocks, tropes. Stoker’s Dracula is not the original vampire story. However, Dracula, since its publication in 1897, has become the effective source material and the lens through which so many of the twentieth and early twenty-first century’s concepts of how vampires are viewed when they appear on our pages and screens. As the canonical, recognisable vampire text, Stoker’s Dracula has set the standard for vampires in how they look, operate and how they can be fought. To create a vampire narrative after the publication of Dracula, therefore, is to be in dialogue with the text, either cleaving to its tropes or innovating them. By situating Stoker’s text within the origins and lineage of the vampire genre, this thesis explores how Stoker’s choice of tropes has established how we discuss and recognise vampires. The focus on tropes is within the framework of Roland Barthes consideration of codes and signifiers in how we ‘read’ a narrative to break down and identify recognisable, repeated elements between narratives.
Chapter One ‘Origin: Folklore’ establishes the vampire’s origin story found in Eastern European folklore, medical reports by imperial forces, and the subsequent spread of the vampire story through Western European media and scholarship. The vampire’s origin story establishes recognisable signs to identify a vampire which have developed into many of the tropes considered within this thesis. To understand the development of vampire folkloric tropes is key to understand vampire narrative tropes. Chapter Two ‘Origin: Critical Reception’ also explores the critical tradition surrounding vampires and how the vampire figure, once placed outside of serious scholarship, was from the 1970s onwards, invited into academia via the work of two historians and vampires gaining residency in Gothic Studies. We will also consider how the study of vampires has developed and expanded during the twenty-first century and the place the study of vampire tropes in dialogue with Stoker’s Dracula can occupy within this field of study. Chapter Three ‘Vampire Markers’ considers vampiric identity markers. Focus is centered on vampire capes, who wears them and what is being communicated to an audience once a vampire dons the cape. As the vampires being discussed are all blood drinking vampires, the mouth and teeth of these predatory characters is discussed via vampire dentistry. Vampires with fangs, be they permanent or retractable fangs or without fangs altogether, is examined as a traditional marker to identify a vampire.
For all their strengths, vampires have vulnerabilities and Chapter Four ‘Vampire Vulnerabilities’ discusses three such vulnerabilities via the tropes of skin, native soil and invitation. How these apparent vulnerabilities are used to create social commentary is brought to the fore in this chapter whilst demonstrating the dynamicism of innovation using tropes in vampire narratives. The agents of action in Chapter Five ‘Agents of Action’ are doctors and slayers. The trope of having medical doctors within vampire narratives has been a cornerstone of the genre. Doctors and/or scientists who are ignorant or knowledgeable about the medical threat of vampires, allow for an exploration of ethics within these stories. Who occupies the position of doctor and vampire slayer is shown in this chapter to be continuously evolving. The presence of the doctor and slayer is a reassuring one within the narratives. Identifying them is as crucial as that of identifying the vampires and has become a fertile ground for innovation. The choice of tropes is placed under scrutiny with an understanding of prospective future work in this area. This thesis concludes with a final consideration of the influence Stoker’s Dracula continues to have on the genre.
Intrinsic and extrinsic factors impacting the gut microbiome along the mother-infant axis
(University College Cork, 2026-06-10) Joos, Raphaela; Ross, R. Paul; Stanton, Catherine; Lavelle, Aonghus
The human gut microbiome has received substantial attention within the global research community in recent years. Commonly denominating the entirety of gastrointestinal microbial organisms, including fungi, archaea, viruses and bacteria, as well as all their genes encoding metabolic activity, it plays a crucial role in human functioning. Infancy especially is a critical window, as microbial assembly co-occurs with overall development, thereby potentially having long lasting effects on current and future health. Accordingly, the early-life gut microbiome has repeatedly been in the focus of modern biomedical research as a potential clinical biomarker. However, despite considerable enthusiasm, significant conceptual and methodological challenges remain, particularly in relation to its high inter-individual variability, rapid developmental dynamics, methodological heterogeneity, and its pronounced malleability in response to early-life exposures including prenatal factors, mode of delivery and infant feeding patterns. The aim of this thesis was to address these challenges by critically examining both the promise and limitations of the infant gut microbiome as a biomarker in development and health. In doing so, it focused not only on generating empirical findings but also on interrogating previous assumptions, definitions and analytical strategies that currently underpin early-life microbiome research.
First, an overview of current evidence on the role of the early-life gut microbiome in infant development is provided, alongside a critical discussion of methodological approaches used to generate these findings. Traditional statistical methods were compared with machine-learning approaches, highlighting both their demonstrated successes and persistent challenges within microbiome data analysis. Collectively, this work positions the infant gut microbiome as a dynamic and context-dependent system, underscoring both its promise and its limitations as a biomarker of early-life health. After, we addressed one of the most fundamental and pressing questions in contemporary microbiome research: what constitutes a “healthy” microbiome? Beyond discussing current approaches to defining microbiome health, i.e. the binary categorisation of disease states versus healthy controls, this chapter critically examined emerging conceptual frameworks and future perspectives. In doing so, it outlined a road map for how microbiome science may draw on principles of epidemiology to enhance interpretability, reproducibility and translational relevance, while also providing a conceptual foundation that informed the design, analytical choices, and interpretation of findings throughout the remainder of this thesis.
Building on this conceptual foundation, the first experimental chapter (Chapter 3) turned to methodological considerations and their critical influence on microbiome research outcomes. More specifically, we investigated how long-term frozen storage and DNA extraction methodology impact DNA yield and microbial community profiles samples from infant stool. Unanalysed infant stool samples collected in 2013 as part of a probiotic infant formula clinical trial were used to quantify differences in pre-extracted DNA and deep-frozen stool processed with an updated DNA extraction protocol. Whole-genome shotgun sequencing was applied to both extraction methods, respectively both timepoints, to estimate microbial abundances. Besides a high degradation rate of 92.6% observed in pre-extracted DNA aliquots over time, DNA quality metrics remained stable, while clear differences in DNA yield and microbial profiles were observed according to Gram stain. Notably, inter-individual variation exceeded methodological variation by approximately 42-fold, supporting the viability of both extracted DNA as well as stool samples for downstream analyses when stored under appropriate conditions.
In Chapters 4, 5, and 6 we aimed to explore the role of the early life microbiome in infant development, employing longitudinal data from the Cork-based COMBINE cohort. In brief, 456 infants were followed from birth to two years of age, resulting in over 1800 metadata variables collected at nine distinct study visits, and 541 stool samples collected at six visits up to one year of age, curated with whole-genome shotgun sequencing and the BioBakery suite. Our first aim was to examine how dietary transitions, i.e. the introduction of solid foods around 4 to 6 months of age, manifests in the infant gut microbiome – particularly on a functional level (Chapter 4). Using a repeated-measures study design, we selected infants with one sample collected during exclusive milk-feeding, and one during complementary feeding, and conducted a quantitative analysis of the impact of feeding patterns on microbial composition and function. Overall, community diversity increased by 33% over the first year of life, manifested in a shift in community composition from (facultative) aerobes to a more anaerobic gut environment, as well as a change from carbohydrate metabolism of simple, predominantly milk-derived, sugars to more complex, fibre-based substrates. Formula-fed infants, particularly, demonstrated high microbial volatility and diversity during early life, supporting a dose-response effect of breastfeeding on a more paced microbial maturation process.
In Chapter 5, differences in compositional and functional microbial profiles were investigated according to cognitive development outcomes assessed at age two years. A multivariate clinical analysis was paired with a covariate analysis of the microbiome to determine what early-life exposures covarying with cognitive outcomes also covary with microbial profiles, and what microbial differences between differential cognitive outcomes we can observe. We found cognitive outcomes to differ based on household income, infant sex, gestational age, maternal height, as well as with feeding practices in the first year of life, the latter also covarying distinctly with infant gut microbiota. Low cognitive outcome infants showed high microbial diversity early on, which progressed to low community diversity at one year of age, when functional, as opposed to compositional, taxa showed alterations based on cognitive outcome.
Finally in Chapter 6, we applied a machine-learning approach to build a microbiota age model, predicting chronological age from microbial community maturity. Overall, the model explained 52% of differences in age, successfully predicting age with a mean absolute error of 8.01 weeks and a root mean squared error of 11.05 weeks. The most important predictors of age were feeding-associated taxa including Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, Firmicutes bacterium CAG 41, Erysipelatoclostridium ramosum, Anaerostipes hadrus, Agathobaculum butyriciproducens, and Ruminococcus gnavus. While baselines were the most difficult to predict, most infants followed a normative microbiota maturation trajectory during the first year of life. A smaller proportion exhibited heterogeneous, non-normative patterns, which was only poorly explained by early-life exposures.
Taken together, the findings presented in this thesis extend our understanding of the role of the early-life microbiome in health and disease on a methodological and (meta-) scientific level. As such, the collective findings of this thesis suggest that the most valuable contribution of early-life microbiome research may not lie in identifying individual microbial taxa as clinical biomarkers, but rather in developing trajectory-based, probabilistic frameworks that integrate microbiome function, developmental timing, as well as individual context and exposures. By highlighting individuality and novel conceptual approaches, this work contributes to a more realistic roadmap for successfully translating infant microbiome research into meaningful health insights which could potentially be applied in a clinical setting.
Advancing circular energy solutions in European industry: decarbonisation pathways through green hydrogen, carbon capture, and heat recovery
(University College Cork, 2025-12-19) Mostafa, Mohamed; O'Sullivan, Dominic; Bruton, Ken; Bose, Archishman; University College Cork; European Commission; SFI Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine
This thesis develops plant-specific, operations-aware methods to advance industrial decarbonisation through circular energy pathways: hydrogen blending in steel melt-shop operations, carbon capture integrated with renewable synthetic-methane production, and a cross-industry framework for direct heat-to-heat recovery. Grounded in European policy and market conditions, the work aims to generate decision-grade evidence that reflects operational constraints, electricity-procurement structures, and consistent emissions accounting.
The first strand examines the feasibility of introducing green hydrogen into existing natural-gas furnace systems in an electric-arc-furnace melt shop. A full-year operational framework evaluates blending limits, plant integration requirements, electricity-sourcing strategies and the interactions between hydrogen supply, storage, and safety constraints. The results outline the operational envelopes within which hydrogen blending can achieve meaningful emissions reductions using existing assets.
The second strand develops an integrated process and techno-economic framework that couples post-combustion CO₂ capture with catalytic methanation to produce synthetic methane on the same steel site. The modelling links CO₂ capture profiles with electrolytic hydrogen supply and incorporates industrial electricity-procurement arrangements. Comparative analyses across technologies and policy scenarios clarify when synthetic methane can act as a circular, drop-in fuel for high-temperature industrial demand.
The third strand advances a transparent multi-criteria decision-analysis framework for direct heat-to-heat recovery. Building on an existing tool developed within the wider project, the thesis contributes the methodological structure, technology catalogue, feasibility-first screening, and ranking procedure. A demonstration of an industrial case study illustrates how the framework enables explainable, preference-weighted shortlisting and reveals how stakeholder priorities shape early-stage technology selection.
Collectively, the thesis provides integrated frameworks for hydrogen blending, capture-to-synthetic-methane pathways, and heat-to-heat recovery. Together, they offer practical and scalable routes for industrial decarbonisation through circular energy pathways, including circular carbon utilisation where appropriate.
Biodiversity in urban landscapes – assessing trimmed habitats and wild zones within the UCC campus
(University College Cork, 2025-09-21) O'Mahony, Paula; Henriques, Rossana; Butler, Fidelma; McKeown, Michelle; University College Cork
Although urban landscapes present significant challenges for pollinator biodiversity, they can also support diverse plant–pollinator communities when managed properly. To address this question, I investigated how four different grassland management regimes implemented at the University College Cork campus (Ireland) affected pollinator activity, floral diversity, pollen viability, and soil organic matter (SOM) content. From June to September 2024, fieldwork was carried out weekly across Highly Managed (HM), No Mow (NM), Planted Meadow (PM), and Unmanaged (UM) sites. Using a wide range of methods (e.g., Flower-Insect-Timed (FIT) counts, floral surveys, pollen viability staining), I observed a total of 737 pollinator visits, with activity varying significantly between management regimes (χ² = 40.73, p < 0.001). Highly Managed sites sustained the lowest diversity and visitation, while Planted Meadows and Unmanaged sites supported the highest. Seasonal activity peaked in mid-summer, and pollen analysis confirmed high viability (>80%) across most wildflower species, underscoring their value as nutritional resources. SOM was highest in Unmanaged sites and lowest in Planted Meadows, reflecting long-term differences in management and organic inputs. The findings of this study suggest that targeted, low-intervention practices (e.g., extending no-mow periods, creating planted meadows, and retaining areas of natural succession) contribute to increased pollinator visitation, enhanced floral resources, and support for viable pollen production in urban grasslands. By demonstrating a clear link between floral diversity, pollinator activity, and resource quality, the results show how management choices directly shape ecological outcomes. Together, these findings provide evidence-based guidance for urban biodiversity strategies, complementing initiatives such as the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, and illustrate the potential for universities and other institutions to function as living laboratories for conservation efforts.