This edited collection is the first to apply the theoretical lens of post-Foucauldian governmentality to an analysis of health problems, practices, and policy in Ireland. Drawing on empirical examples related to childhood, obesity, mental health, smoking, ageing and others, the collection explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish State, and considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies. Bringing together academics from social policy, sociology, political science and public health, the text seeks to develop a dialogue about both the nature of health and health policy in the Ireland, but also how governmentality, as a theoretical approach, can contribute to the development of critical health policy analysis.

1. Analysing health and health policy: introducing the governmentality turn - Claire Edwards and Eluska Fernández
Part I: Constructing health problems and (un)healthy subjects
2. Governing the future: children's health and biosocial power - Kevin Ryan
3. Doing the 'right thing'? Children, families and fatness in Ireland - Michelle Share and Perry Share
4. 32 and 37 inches, the healthy body and the politics of waist circumference: a governmental analysis of the Stop the Spread Campaign - Fiona Dukelow
5. The contemporary self in tobacco control: exploring the introduction of the smoking ban in Ireland - Eluska Fernández
6. When health means illness: analysing mental health discourses and practices in Ireland - Derek Chambers
7. Governing organ donation: the dead body, the individual and the limits of medicine - Órla O'Donovan
Part II: Governing neoliberal healthcare agendas: politics, strategies and practices
8. Neoliberal governmentality and public health policy in Ireland - Joanne Wilson and Lindsay Prior
9. Governing healthcare: the case of Universal Health Insurance - by Competition - Cliona Loughnane
10. Assessment of Need as a technology of government in Ireland's Disability Act 2005 - Claire Edwards
11. Long-term care policy for older people in Ireland: a governmental analysis - Ciara O'Dwyer
12. Conclusion: Governmentality, health policy and the place of critical politics - Eluska Fernández and Claire Edwards
Index

Editors

Claire Edwards is Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies at University College Cork

Eluska Fernández is Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies at University College Cork