A Matter of Life and Death; The House of Osiris; The High Window; The Doctors

A series of individual poems selected for a special contemporary Irish edition of the American journal Atlanta Review.

Rough Waters, Dark Shadows and Cross-Cutting Winds:the impact of European Union enlargement on Turkey’s EU accession negotiations

For a multiplicity of socio-economic, geo-political, strategic and identity-based reasons, Turkey’s progress towards EU membership is often treated as a sui generis case. Yet although Turkey’s accession negotiations with the European Union (EU) are essentially a bilateral – and often stormy – affair, they take place within a wider and dynamic process of enlargement in which not only can the gloomy – sometimes dark – shadows of past and prospective enlargements be clearly detected, but so too can the often chill winds from ongoing, parallel negotiations with other candidates. How the EU negotiates accession and what it expects from candidates has continued to evolve since the EU began drawing up its framework for negotiations with Turkey ten years ago. This paper charts this evolution by first identifying changes in the light of Croatia’s negotiating experience, the ‘lessons learnt’ by the EU in meeting the challenges of Bulgarian and Romanian accession, the EU’s handling of Iceland’s membership bid and accession negotiations, and the revised approach to negotiating accession evident in the more recent frameworks for accession negotiations with Montenegro and Serbia. The paper then explores the extent to which these changes have impacted on the approach the EU has adopted in framing and progressing accession negotiations with Turkey. In doing so, it questions both the consistency with which the EU’s negotiates accession and the extent to which Turkey’s progress towards EU membership is conditioned by the broader dynamics of EU enlargement as opposed to simply the dynamics within EU-Turkey relations and domestic Turkish reform efforts.

Just a matter of time: Fungi and roots significantly and rapidly aggregate soil over four decades along the Tagliamento River, NE Italy

Fluvial islands are emergent landforms which form at the interface between the permanently inundated areas of the river channel and the more stable areas of the floodplain as a result of interactions between physical river processes, wood and riparian vegetation. These highly dynamical systems are ideal to study soil structure development in the short to medium term, a process in which soil biota and plants play a substantial role. We investigated soil structure development on islands along a 40 year chronosequence within a 3 km island-braided reach of the Tagliamento River, Northeastern Italy. We used several parameters to capture different aspects of the soil structure, and measured biotic (e.g., fungal and plant root parameters) and abiotic (e.g. organic carbon) factors expected to determine the structure. We estimated models relating soil structure to its determinants, and, in order to confer statistical robustness to our results, we explicitly took into account spatial autocorrelation, which is present due to the space for time substitution inherent in the study of chronosequences and may have confounded results of previous studies. We found that, despite the eroding forces from the hydrological and geomorphological dynamics to which the system is subject, all soil structure variables significantly, and in some case greatly increased with site age. We interpret this as a macroscopic proxy for the major direct and indirect binding effects exerted by root variables and extraradical hyphae of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Key soil structure parameters such as percentage of water stable aggregates (WSA) can double from the time the island landform is initiated (mean WSA = 30%) to the full 40 years (mean WSA = 64%) covered by our chronosequence. The study demonstrates the fundamental role of soil biota and plant roots in aggregating soils even in a system in which intense short to medium term physical disturbances are common.

Student life - Making politics matter

Nurse lecturer Siobhan McCullough developed a project to help her students become more politically aware. ‘What has politics got to do with nursing?’ This is a question I hear often as a lecturer in nursing with a specialist interest in politics, as is the comment: ‘I did not come into nursing to learn about politics.’

Macroscopicity in an optomechanical matter-wave interferometer

We analyse a proposal that we have recently put forward for an interface between matter-wave and optomechanical technologies from the perspective of macroscopic quantumness. In particular, by making use of a measure of macroscopicity in quantum superpositions that is particularly well suited for continuous variables systems, we demonstrate the existence of working points for our interface at which a quantum mechanical superposition of genuinely mesoscopic states is achieved. Our proposal thus holds the potential to affirm itself as a viable atom-to-mechanics transducer of quantum coherences.

The anticipatory space of the bunker, modernity’s dark mirror

The buried and semi-buried bunker, bulwark since the early eighteenth century against increasingly sophisticated forms of ordnance, emerged in increasing number in Europe throughout the twentieth century across a series of scales from the household Anderson shelter to the vast infrastructural works of the Maginot and Siegfried lines, or the Atlantic Wall. Its latest proliferation took place during the Cold War. From these perspectives, it is as emblematic of modernity as the department store, the great exhibition, the skyscraper or the machine-inspired domestic space advocated by Le Corbusier. It also represents the obverse, or perhaps a parodic iteration, of the preoccupations of early architectural modernism: a vast underground international style, cast in millions of tons of thick, reinforced concrete retaining walls, whose spatial relationship to the landscape above was strictly mediated through the periscope, the loop-hole, the range finder and the strategic necessity to both resist and facilitate the technologies and scopic regimes of weaponry. Embarking from Bunker Archaeology, this paper critically uncoils Paul Virillo’s observation, that once physically eclipsed in its topographical and technical settings, the bunker’s efficacy would mutate to other domains, retaining and remaking its meaning in another topology during the Cold War. ‘The essence of the new fortress’ he writes ‘is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in’. Shaped by this impulse, this paper seeks to render visible the bunker’s significance in a wider milieu and, in doing so, excavate some of the relationships between the physical artefact, its implications and its enduring metaphorical and perceptual ghosts.