What I want to do in this presentation is to set Donagh’s research, and maybe the rest of the day, in a broader context, coming out of my own research on the counter culture of the late 1980s but going beyond that to think about the various counter cultures in Ireland since the 1970s or so. And the first question that has to be answered is maybe: why does it matter? So here’s a quick answer to that. If we’re interested in social change, there might be all sorts of reasons why it comes about; and people are often very attracted to explanations which somehow go behind the backs of people who are alive at the time and make it look as though it was going to happen anyway. We could ask very interesting questions about why those kinds of answers are attractive, but for my purposes today the main point is that they are irrelevant. There may indeed be things going on, forces for change or against change, that are not particularly visible to us, but they aren’t that relevant to our action, because we can’t do anything significant about them. (This may of course be why they are attractive – because they let us off the hook, break the connection between what we feel is wrong in the world and ourselves as people who might actually take some action.)