ABSTRACT
One way of getting to grips with the topic of new patterns of leadership and local power in the contemporary Irish countryside is to try to establish some baseline or baselines against which change can be measured. Such a search would in fact appear to be essential if we are to place some of the change that has been occurring recently in its proper perspective. This chapter discusses two parts. The first of these nvolves us in a search for baselines of leadership and local power in pre-1990s rural Ireland. It looks at how the 'power to' capacities that characterised certain patterns of local leadership came to be founded on a range of power over relationships of domination and subordination. The second part examines the appearance of an emerging new pattern of leadership and local power that is tied to the proliferation of area-based partnership activity in 1990s Ireland.
