http://hdl.handle.net/10468/204 2017-10-29T22:05:20Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/3832 A retrospective public health analysis of the Republic of Ireland's Food Harvest 2020 strategy: absence, avoidance and business as usual Kenny, Tara; Cronin, Mary; Sage, Colin The concept of an Ecological Approach to health and including Health in All Policies warrants inter-sectoral and transdisciplinary collaboration to improve health determinants and reduce health inequities. Agriculture policies, which greatly influence food production and its environmental impacts as well as food availability and dietary consumption, are therefore of interest to public health. Increasing rates of non-communicable diseases linked to diets containing high levels of processed foods, increasing numbers of households unable to access nutritious food and the environmental consequences of the food system are amongst the major health challenges of today, both globally and in Ireland. In 2010, Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries published Food Harvest 2020 a roadmap for Irish agriculture for the subsequent decade prepared against a backdrop of rising diet-related ill-health and increasing environmental concerns. This article critically analyses the process of consultation and stakeholder involvement in the development of Food Harvest 2020 from a public health perspective. Publically available documents including submissions to the Food Harvest 2020 consultation process were the primary source of data. This study highlights a distinct absence of public health representation in the process, an avoidance of some key public health challenges and the dominance of a ‘business as usual’ approach. 2017-03-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4636 Youth and austerity in the city: geographies of precarity in disadvantaged urban areas in Ireland van Lanen, Sander This thesis presents a qualitative understanding of the transformations of urban life and space in the context of austerity. It argues that the lifeworld of disadvantaged urban youth increasingly tightened as opportunities for employment, personal development and independent living diminish. As urban neoliberalisation intensifies, urban space excludes young people from ‘decent’ urban living or even the city itself. The urban roots and impacts of the 2008 financial crisis are well documented. However, where such work investigates new structural conditions and policies, this thesis focusses on its recipients to explore the lived experiences and spaces of austerity. Through a critical return to humanistic geographies, especially the lifeworld, the ‘lifeworld assemblage’ is developed to bridge conceptions of place as constructed through networks of resources, power and knowledge, and the spatial experiences and meanings of those inhabiting the city-after-austerity. This concept is applied to disadvantaged urban youth in Ireland, one of the groups most severely affected by austerity. To investigate this group’s everyday lived experiences of austerity urbanism, 33 individuals aged 18 to 25 were interviewed, living in two of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Ireland: Knocknaheeny (Cork) and Ballymun (Dublin). First, austerity policy is assessed to establish how it creates and enhances spaces of exclusion, deepening exploitation and extending precariousness into the sphere of social reproduction. It then proceeds, using interview data and the lifeworld assemblage, to explore how local geographies determine the specific austerity encounters of disadvantaged urban youth. Next, it is argued that the lifeworld becomes saturated with neoliberal logic, denying any diverging horizon or possibility, with a specific focus on the labour market, urban accommodation and support services. Finally, austerity’s effect on youth’s multi-scalar sense of place is investigated using ‘at-homeness’. It is shown that varying scales carry different meanings for disadvantaged urban youth and play specific roles in the austerity experience. As years of austerity dramatically transformed Irish society, understanding its experience by those most vulnerable provides a critical position to interrogate how austerity gets embedded in personal and spatial relations, how it contributes to systemic colonisation of the lifeworld, and to identify the range of scales and sites from which austerity has emerged. It also provides the means to examine how the population has perceived and negotiated these impacts on and in their lifeworld. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4868 Markets, productivism and the implications for Irish sustainable rural development O'Shaughnessy, Mary; Sage, Colin Byrne, Edmond; Mullally, Colin; Sage, Colin 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4886 Environmental trade-offs of pig production systems under varied operational efficiencies McAuliffe, G. A.; Takahashi, T.; Mogensen, L.; Hermansen, J. E.; Sage, Colin; Chapman, Deborah V.; Lee, M. R. F. Production of pork, the most consumed meat globally, is estimated to emit 668 m tonnes CO2-eq of greenhouse gases each year. Amongst various production systems that comprise the pig industry, grainbased intensive production is widely regarded as the largest polluter of the environment, and thus it is imperative to develop alternative systems that can provide the right balance between sustainability and food security. Using an original dataset from the Republic of Ireland, this paper examines the life-cycle environmental impacts of representative pig farms operating under varying production efficiencies. For the baseline farm with an average production efficiency, global warming potential (GWP), acidifi- cation potential (AP) and eutrophication potential (EP) per kg carcass weight departing the slaughterhouse were estimated to be 3.5 kg CO2-eq, 43.8 g SO2-eq and 32.1 g PO4-eq, respectively. For herds with a higher production efficiency, a 9% improvement in feed conversion ratio was met by 6%, 15% and 12% decreases in GWP, EP, AP, respectively. Scenario and sensitivity analyses also revealed that (a) a switch to high-protein diets results in lower GWP and higher AP and EP, and (b) reducing transportation distances by sourcing domestically produced wheat and barley does not lower environmental impacts in any notable manner. To improve cross-study comparability of these findings, results based on an auxiliary functional unit, kg liveweight departing the farm gate, are also reported. 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z