In early 1988, the residents of Killeagh, a small
village in Cork County, Ireland, were informed
that an American transnational company proposed
to build a chemical factor in their locality, which
was predominantly devoted to dairy farming.
Merrell Dow argued that their proposal would
bring investment, employment, and development
to the area. The Irish State fully backed the
corporation. Many local residents, however,
objected to Merrell Dow's plan from the outset and
a small number of farm families and their
neighbours committed themselves to defeating it.
A TIME OF RECKONING: The politics of Discourse in
Rual Ireland examines the political conflict that
resulted by charting the course of the local
opposition movement from its inception through to
it eventual triumph. Adrian Peace argues that
subsequent events are best understood as a site of
struggle between eh populist discourse of grass
roots resistance to the proposal and the scientific
discourse elaborated by Merrell Dow and the Irish
State in a public hearing, which brought the
contending parties together. The analysis of the
politics of the extended hearing, herein described
as a "theatre of control," constitutes a substantial
part of this fine-grained ethnography. The book
concludes by described how, in true ironic
fashion, the residents of Killeagh were spared this
major threat to their way of life by a multinational
takeover on the other side of the Atlantic.
Adrian Peace has a D.Phil. in social Anthropology
from the University of Sussex. His early research
was conducted among migrant workers in
southwestern Nigeria, and focused on questions of
ethnicity and class, detailed in a series of articles
and a book. Since the mid-1980's, Dr. Peace has
spent almost three years researching the changing
character of an Irish village, and the politics of
environmental issues. He also writes on the
anthropology of environmentalism in Australia,
particularly conflicts in the native forests of New
South Wales.
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