This study considers the extent to which economic modernisation has transformed the rural community. In doing so it discusses whether the distinctive character of rural identity has been eroded by powerful and distant political and cultural forces. This is the first full-length ethnography of an Irish community for a number of years. Since the early 1980s, the anthropological analysis of community life in Ireland has been limited to brief articles whilst major community studies have been published in other European countries. The author has regularly worked in Ireland.

RANDALL SILVIS is the author of 11 critically acclaimed novels, one collection of short stories, and one book of narrative nonfiction. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Frankfurt Book Award and was a finalist for the Hammet Award for Literary Excellence. He is a winner of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize. A novella, "The Indian," is forthcoming in October in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Best American Mystery Stories 2013. His twelve stage plays have been produced across the United States and Off-off-Broadway, and have garnered three National Playwrights Showcase Awards, the Ruby Lloyd Apsey Playwriting Prize, and two Sadie Awards for Best Drama in Erie. His screenplay “An Occassional Hell,” starring Tom Berenger and Valeria Golina, premiered in 1996. He is the recipient of the 2003 Screenwriting Showcase Awards Grand Prize and a 2004 and 2008 Screenwriting Fellowship Award from the Pennsylvania Council On the Arts. His screenwriting blog can be found at VirtualPitchfest.com.