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This chapter focuses on scenes of hematological activism. These scenes constitute a historically significant genre of political performance, in relation to the ebbs and flows of other modes of activist signification. Specifically, the chapter suggests that blood donation spectacles act as rituals of verification, in contrast to other modes of political protest such as the fast that are increasingly open to accusations of insincerity and dissembling. Blood extracted on political occasions holds an elusive promise of political transparency: it is promissory matter. Yet as this chapter shows, blood also exposes itself to accusations of dissembling and deception: when used by politicians perceived as corrupt, the communicative medium is drained of its material intimacy with sincerity.

This chapter examines the role that lobbyists play in the political communication process and argues that lobbying is central to our understanding of Ireland’s building boom and the bank guarantee that followed. The dramatic rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger indicated that Ireland’s economic miracle of the 2000s was built on rather shaky foundations. But these were foundations that had been built under the urgings of lobbyists. In 2008 the government bailed out the private banking sector and lobbyists were again a crucial part of this decision. The chapter concludes by assessing whether lobbying as a form of political communication has resulted in a politics that is dominated by a small elite that has access to the avenues and levers of power within the Irish body politic.

Amid considerable debate within modern societies about whether or not there ought to be limits to freedom of speech, this introductory chapter argues that historical perspectives have been all too lacking, and all too simplistic. This chapter sets the book in its modern context – in terms of the challenges that have emerged to Western liberalism as a result of religious pluralism and the challenge of hate speech – and highlights the rather simplistic ways in which freedom of speech has conventionally been anchored in ideas and developments that emerged in early modern Britain. It surveys the historiographical debates that have seen this ‘Whiggish’ narrative subjected to critical scrutiny, and sets up the volume by demonstrating both continuity and change across the early modern world. This means recognising the centrality of religious issues as well as secular concerns, and the complex ways in which contemporaries grappled with the theory and practice of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It means acknowledging the complex relationship that existed between regulation, restraint and liberty, and the dynamic interplay that can be observed between rights and duties, truth and error, genre and audience.