Assessing the impulse control of violent offenders using computer-based cognitive performance tasks

The topic of this thesis is impulsivity. The meaning and measurement of impulse control is explored, with a particular focus on forensic settings. Impulsivity is central to many areas of psychology; it is one of the most common diagnostic criteria of mental disorders and is fundamental to the understanding of forensic personalities. Despite this widespread importance there is little agreement as to the definition or structure of impulsivity, and its measurement is fraught with difficulty owing to a reliance on self-report methods. This research aims to address this problem by investigating the viability of using simple computerised cognitive performance tasks as complementary components of a multi-method assessment strategy for impulse control. Ultimately, the usefulness of this measurement strategy for a forensic sample is assessed. Impulsivity is found to be a multifaceted construct comprised of a constellation of distinct sub-dimensions. Computerised cognitive performance tasks are valid and reliable measures that can assess impulsivity at a neuronal level. Self-report and performance task methods assess distinct components of impulse control and, for the optimal assessment of impulse control, a multi-method battery of self-report and performance task measures is advocated. Such a battery is shown to have demonstrated utility in a forensic sample, and recommendations for forensic assessment in the Irish context are discussed.

Farmers, agriculture and politics in the Irish Free State area, 1919-1936

Given the economic and social importance of agriculture in the early years of the Irish Free State, it is surprising that the development of organisations representing farmers has not received the attention it deserves from historians. While the issues of government agricultural policy and the land question have been extensively studied in the historiography, the autonomous response by farmers to agricultural policies and the detailed study of the farmers’ organisations has simply been ignored in spite of the existence of a range of relevant primary sources. Farmers’ organisations have only received cursory treatment in these studies; they have been presented as passive spectators, responding in a Pavlovian manner to outside events. The existing historiography has only studied farmers’ organisations during periods when they impinged on national politics, epecially during the War of Independence and the Economic War. Therefore chronological gaps exist which has led to much misinterpretation of farmers’ activities. This thesis will redress this imbalance by studying the formation and continuous development of farmers’ organisations within the twenty-six county area and the reaction of farmers to changing government agricultural policies, over the period 1919 to 1936. The period under review entailed many attempts by farmers to form representative organisations and encompassed differing policy regimes. The thesis will open in 1919, when the first national organisation representing farmers, the Irish Farmers’ Union, was formed. In 1922, the union established the Farmers’ Party. By the mid- 1920’s, a number of protectionist agricultural associations had been formed. While the Farmers’ Party was eventually absorbed by Cumann na nGaedheal, local associations of independent farmers occupied the resultant vacuum and contested the 1932 election. These organisations formed the nucleus of a new national organisation; the National Farmers’ and Ratepayers’ League. The agricultural crisis caused by both the Great Depression and the Economic War facilitated the expansion of the league. The league formed a political party, the Centre Party, to contest the 1933 election. While the Centre Party was absorbed by the newly-formed Fine Gael, activists from the former farmer organisations led the campaign against the payment of annuities and rates. Many of them continued this campaign after 1934, when the Fine Gael leadership opposed the violent resistance to the collection of annuities. New farmer organisations were formed to co-ordinate this campaign which continued until 1936, the closing point of the thesis.

The contribution of warlordism to the disintegration of the western Roman army (c. AD 395-480)

My thesis investigates the dynamics behind the changing nature of the leadership of the western Roman army in the fifth century through the concept of ‘warlordism’. I carried this out by analyzing those cases of insubordination and military unrest in the officer class of the western Roman army, which can be shown to be linked to the slow decline of central authority and the imperial office in the period 395-480. My thesis demonstrates that theories of ‘Warlordism’, as developed in social sciences, can be useful for both the late Imperial west as for other eras of ancient history, such as the late Roman republic. Warlordism was a way of continuing politics, if necessary by military means, when commanders found themselves outside the legitimate framework. Unlike the case of usurpation of the imperial office, when there was little hope of achieving permanent recognition and acceptance, it offered insubordinate officers a chance of returning to the ruling imperial regime depending on circumstances and the success of their resistance. I propose that warlordism functioned as an alternative to usurpation, a tool for military dissidence, fuelled by an economy of violence. Contrary to modern warlordism, the warlordism of the fifth century AD represented a transient phase which no imperial commander was willing to prolong indefinitely. At some stage, given the means, warlords in the western Roman army wanted to become part of the imperial echelon again. Yet these alternative methods of violent opposition, and the acquisition of force through private means, ensured the breakdown of the state’s monopoly on violence and the disintegration of centralized armies. What started as an accidental revolution became a new form of military rule.

Evangelicals, Islamists and the globalisation of apocalyptic discourse

After 9/11, it has become increasingly obvious that strongly held religious convictions about the end of the world cannot be dismissed as the predictable consequences of deprivation, as several generations of social scientists once claimed. Instead, it has become clear that these kinds of ideas, having a life of their own, may establish discourses which may have extraordinary capacity to cross nations, cultures and even religions, encouraging passive withdrawal from the political world as well as inspiring vicious and sometimes violent attempts at its subjugation, underwriting the ‘war on terror’ as well as inspiring some of those intent on the destruction of the United States. This article describes one of Ireland’s most successful intellectual exports – a very specific system of thinking about the end of the world known as ‘dispensational premillennialism.’ And the article will move from county Wicklow in the early nineteenth century, through the troubled decades of American modernity, to arrive, perhaps unexpectedly, in the company of the soldiers of radical jihad. The article will describe the globalisation of a discourse which was developed among the most privileged classes of early nineteenth-century Ireland to explain and justify their attempt to withdraw from the world, and which has more recently been used to explain and justify sometimes violent political interventions by both prominent Western politicians and some of the most marginalised and desperate inhabitants of our broken twenty-first century.