Elaine Byrne, 25 March 2014 The traditional attitude to scandal in Ireland is to politicise and personalise. We move on once the head-on-the-plate has been delivered. Or we just move on without it. The third anniversary of the Moriarty Tribunal fell last weekend – but let’s not go there (the hot weather in exile is some compensation). Let’s…
Posted on behalf of John Coakley This blog presents the arguments from a paper in the special issue of IPS ‘Breaking Patterns of Conflict in Northern Ireland’ . Available here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2013.874999 The last years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first were marked by a steady but little noticed redefinition of the…
Posted on behalf of Paul Gillespie This blog presents the arguments from a paper in the special issue of IPS ‘Breaking Patterns of Conflict in Northern Ireland’, available here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2013.875001 The transformation of British-Irish relations from dependence to interdependence from the 1960s to the 2000s occurred in an international setting dominated by both states’ membership of the…
Adrian Kavanagh, 1st March 2014 March had come in like a lion for the three largest parties in the state but definitely did not go out like a lamb. The latest Sunday Independent-Millward Brown poll saw Fianna Fail, Labour and Fine Gael all losing significant levels of support relative to the previous such poll while Sinn Fein and…
Posted on behalf of Katy Hayward and Eoin Magennis Blog from the Special Issue of Irish Political Studies: Breaking patterns of conflict in Northern Ireland: the British and Irish states http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07907184.2013.875896#.UxCl3IXn_o4 When asked to conjure up an image of a typical ‘peacemaker’, people in Ireland, north and south, may think of a wildly diverse range…
Posted on behalf of Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd Blog from the Special Issue of Irish Political Studies: Breaking patterns of conflict in Northern Ireland: the British and Irish states What was the Good Friday Agreement? A final settlement, to be sold abroad as a success story and model for other peace processes? Or a wrong…
Posted on behalf of John Coakley and Jennifer Todd Blog from the Special Issue of Irish Political Studies: Breaking patterns of conflict in Northern Ireland: the British and Irish states The British and Irish governments were central to the move to peace in Northern Ireland. Their negotiations and mutual agreements, their cooperation and coordinated stances…
*Declaration of interest: I am the research director of the Convention (in a voluntary capacity). Last weekend, the Constitutional Convention completed its work. At its closing dinner last Saturday, the snappy slogan on the menu summed things up well: ‘100 members, 10 meetings, 1 constitution’. With a budget of some €900,000 and a deadline of…
The first annual report of the highly influential Electoral Integrity Project has just been published (see here). Professor Pippa Norris and her colleagues have carried out an extensive survey of the electoral process across the world’s democracies over the past few years. Ireland’s last election (2011) preceded this project so it was not included on…
After the Irish people chose to retain the Seanad last year, the focus has now shifted to the question of reform. The government has announced its intention to reform the University franchise as allowed by the 1978 amendment to the Constitution. The main campaigning platform for Seanad retention, Democracy Matters, has embarked on a new…
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