Private troubles, public issues: the Irish sociological imagination

Introduction: When I first read, with great excitement, The Sociological Imagination in the late 1960s, I was an 18 year old University student, in a society that was beginning to wake from its cultural torpor. A reluctant geographical migrant in childhood, reared in a middle class but poor family in a working class area, I had grown accustomed to the experience of ‘transcendental homelessness’ (Lukacs, 1971). Thus with a deep appreciation of the honour, and the irony, of being asked to give this keynote address – and perhaps an insufficient sense of self preservation- I will begin.