Explorations in a meaning making system: Kerry as an entrepreneurial platform and the equine sector as a cluster

This Portfolio is about the changes that can be supported and achieved through transformational education that impacts on personal, professional and organisational levels. Having lived through an era of tremendous change over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first the author has a great drawing board to contemplate in the context of professional career experience as an engineer. The ability to engage in ‘subject-object’ separation is the means by which Kegan (1994, 2009) explains that transformation takes place and the Essays in this Portfolio aim to support and bring about such change. Exploration of aspects of ‘Kerry’ is the material selected to both challenge support change in the way of knowing from being subject to certain information and knowledge that to being able to consider it more objectively. The task of being able to distance judgement about the economy and economic development of Kerry was facilitated by various readings around of a number of key thinkers including Kegan, Drucker, Porter and Penrose. The central themes of Kerry or the potential for economic development are built into each Essay. Essay One focuses on reflections of Kerry life - on Kerry people within and without Kerry - and events as they affected understandings of how people related to and worked with one another. These reflections formed the basis for transformational goals identified which required a shift from an engineering mindset to encompass an economics-based view. In Essay Two knowledge of economic concepts is developed by exploring the writings of Drucker, Penrose, and Porter with pertinence to considering economic development generally, and for Kerry in particular in the form of an ‘entrepreneurial platform’. The concepts and theories were the basis of explorations presented in Essays Three and Four. Essay Three focuses on Kerry’s potential for economic development give its current economic profile and includes results from interviews with selected businesses. Essay Four is an exercise in the application of Porter’s ‘Cluster’ concept to the equine sector.

An Irish apostle: articulating and actualising apostolicity in the early Irish church

This thesis examines the earliest extant Latin Lives of Brigit and Patrick; Cogitosus’s Vita Brigidae and Muirchú’s Vita Patricii as evidence for a seventh-century debate on Irish apostolicity. While often dismissed as mere propaganda, this thesis shows they are highly sophisticated demonstrations of the continuing connection that Kildare and Armagh had to their patron saints and their authority. It examines the importance of this connection for concepts of ecclesiastical organisation, teaching authority and episcopal succession against the backdrop of the seventh-century Easter question in the Insular Church. This will show that apostolicity was considered to be intrinsically linked with orthodoxy and universality. A textual focus brings forth general patristic themes and ideas that Irish hagiographers evoked through specific words and phrases. The thesis contextualises hagiographical material using evidence from Hiberno-Latin and early Insular exegetical commentaries, referring to major patristic exegetes such as Origen, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great as support. The introduction discusses the importance of apostolic ideology for the seventh-century Irish Church, and outlines a methodology for examining such abstract themes. The first chapter looks at how developments in apostolic ideology led to ideas of apostolic primacy seen in the Insular material. Chapters two, three, and four examine metaphors of food and feeding, the fountain and the stream, and the head and the body, as significant articulations of apostolicity. Chapter five examines how corporeal relics were understood as the visible proof of this continuity and preserved a saint’s authority for their episcopal heirs. Chapter six looks at how Muirchú engaged with Patrick’s connection to the universal Church and his self-professed lack of disciplina to reconcile his apostolicity with seventh-century norms. Chapter seven places the issues considered thus far in a thoroughly Insular context by examining how the earliest English sources present the Irish legacy in Northumbria after the synod of Whitby. Chapter eight looks at how the text of Patrick’s Confessio in the Book of Armagh relates to a wider seventh-century campaign by Armagh to rehabilitate Patrick’s apostolicity. The conclusion briefly summarizes the thesis, and suggests further avenues for researching this topic in the Insular material