The results indicate that there is no single approach to enhancing resilience among family carers of people with dementia. Resilience is a multifaceted response to the caregiving role, and is influenced by a multitude of interrelated factors. However, the factors and resources outlined have been addressed, with limited success in some cases, by psychosocial interventions in the field. While the work conducted to date to develop resilience-enhancing interventions has been marked with some success, the next wave of carer research could usefully examine ecological perspectives on carer outcomes, including carer resilience.

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In using mentoring, coaching and action learning interventions, the focus should be on each participant's current role and everyday practice and on helping the participant to develop and demonstrate clinical leadership skills in these contexts.

This paper reports a study of the risk factors for social and emotional loneliness among older people in Ireland. Using the ' Social and Emotional Scale for Adults ', the social and emotional dimensions of loneliness were measured. Emotional loneliness was conceptualised as having elements of both family loneliness and romantic loneliness. The data were collected through a national telephone survey of loneliness in older people conducted in 2004 that completed interviews with 683 people aged 65 or more years. It was found that levels of social and family loneliness were low, but that romantic loneliness was relatively high. Predictors for social loneliness were identified as greater age, poorer health, living in a rural area, and lack of contact with friends. Living in a rural setting, gender (male), having a lower income, being widowed, no access to transport, infrequent contact with children and relatives and caring for a spouse or relative at home were significant predictors of family loneliness. Romantic loneliness was predicted by marital status, in particular being widowed. Never having married or being divorced or separated were also significant predictors for romantic loneliness. The findings indicate that loneliness for older people is variable, multi-dimensional and experienced differently according to life events, with, for example, the death of a partner being followed by the experience of emotional loneliness, or the loss of friends or declining health leading to social loneliness.KEY WORDS -social loneliness, emotional loneliness, Republic of Ireland.

Public discourses concerning older people are available in a variety of texts, including popular media, and these discourses position older people with particular age identities. This study examined discursive formations of ageing and age identities in print media in Ireland. Constituting a single media event, newspaper texts concerned with revised welfare provision for older people were subjected to critical discourse analysis and revealed particular ways of naming and referencing older people and distinct constructions of ageing and age identities. The use of nouns and phrases to name and reference older people positioned them as a distinct demographic group and a latent ageism was discernible in texts that deployed collective names like ‘grannies and grandads’ and ‘little old ladies’. Five distinct identity types were available in the texts, variously constructing older people as ‘victims’; ‘frail, infirm and vulnerable’; ‘radicalised citizens’; ‘deserving old’ and ‘undeserving old’. The discourses made available subject positions that collectively produced identities of implied dependency and otherness, thereby placing older people outside mainstream Irish society. The proposition that older people might be healthy, self-reliant and capable of autonomous living was largely absent in the discourses. Newspaper discourses betray taken-for-granted assumptions and reveal dominant social constructions of ageing and age identity that have consequences for older people's behaviour and for the way that society behaves towards them.