Assessing the role of the international financial services centre in Irish regional development

This paper examines the manner and extent to which the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) in Dublin contributes to regional development in Ireland. Since its 1987 launch, the IFSC created over 10,000 jobs and promoted urban renewal in a previously derelict section of Dublin. Although it stands as one of Ireland's most prominent development projects, empirical examination of the IFSC remains limited. This study looks specifically at issues such as the kinds of activities and employment created at the IFSC, as well as local linkage formation. Based on published data and research interviews, this paper shows that the IFSC contributed to Ireland's economic development at a time when industrial policy focused primarily on employment creation. To date the IFSC has proven to be a successful policy intervention, the routine nature of many IFSC-related activities raises questions about the IFSC's ability to become something more than a centre for back-office financial services.     

The Darkest Corner: documenting institutional abuse and its consequences at the Abbey Theatre

Documentary theatre, as a theatrical genre, has not maintained a continuous presence in Irish theatre. The Darkest Corner series, produced in 2010 by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland's National Theatre is, therefore, one of the first examples of Irish theatre using the genre to address political and social issues. Presenting three plays, Gerard Mannix Flynn's James X, Richard Johnson's The Evidence I Shall Give and Mary Raftery's No Escape, the series examines the widespread abuse of children in state institutions. Before analysing the documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Raftery's No Escape, this article will begin with an exploration of documentary theatre in Ireland. It will then examine the material used for the play, the Ryan Report, published following the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, something of great political and social interest to contemporary Ireland and, finally, the play itself.     

Examining the Olympics: heritage,identity and performance

A major aspect of Ireland's history is the continual problems of a sectarian nature, yet the issue of 'the troubles' gets scant consideration in the permanent exhibitions mounted in Northern Ireland's museums, and is only beginning to emerge in more temporary exhibitions and statements about museums. In addition, the belief that cultural heritage plays a significant part in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland has long been expressed in statements on education policy and local government programmes. However, the concept of using museums for exploring this history for a positive outcome has not, despite the scale of the political problem, been a high-profile issue in Northern Ireland's museums nor has it had a great deal of academic attention. This paper is a contribution to this gap. It assesses the role that Northern Ireland's museums play in the current political context. It evaluates the reasons why, since their foundation, museums in Northern Ireland have largely chosen to avoid controversial issues in their displays. It considers how attitudes are changing and how museum professionals are tentatively beginning to engage with political issues and enter into dialogue on subjects such as cultural and political identities in Northern Ireland.     

Northern Ireland Representation at Westminster: Constitutional Conundrums and Political Manœuvres

This article focuses on the issue of Northern Ireland's representation at Westminster. It investigates the political context of the decision to increase Northern Ireland's representation in the house of commons at Westminster from 12 members to 17 in 1978–9. Exploring this episode in more detail, it is argued, provides a more informed overall understanding of the history of devolution in the UK and of the way issues concerning Northern Ireland often overlapped with questions of constitutional change in Scotland and Wales. The article also throws light on the matter of Northern Ireland MPs and their voting rights at Westminster during Northern Ireland's experience of devolution prior to 1972.     

Ecocriticism,Joyce, and the politics of trees in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses

This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.     

Local Childcare Cultures: Moral geographies of mothering and the social organisation of pre-school education

Child-rearing has not been a major focus of research in geography despite the fact that its organisation is both spatially and temporally variable. Geographical work on pre-school childcare provision in the 1970s and 1980s tended to focus on the implementation and implications of government policy; more recently there has been a growth of feminist work on child-rearing which has employed a diversity of approaches. These studies have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how mothers organise the care of their children, often whilst undertaking paid employment; nevertheless they can not always explain how a wide range of mothers negotiate specific aspects of 'maternal responsibility'. This article draws on an empirical investigation of pre-school childcare cultures in two areas of Sheffield, UK, in order to analyse the ways in which mothers' attitudes to their children's educational development and their strategies for accessing non-parental educational care are jointly shaped within the context of different local childcare cultures. The importance of two key components of these local childcare cultures, the moral geographies of mothering and the local social organisation of non-parental educational care, is emphasised.     

‘Slightly Constitutional’ Politics: Fianna Fáil's Tortuous Entry to the Irish Parliament, 1926–7

Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party since 1932, and has been in office for almost 60 years, mostly as a single-party government. Despite this impressive electoral and parliamentary history, the party's constitutional origins are fraught with ambivalence towards Irish state institutions. Fianna Fáil's early years, perhaps eclipsed by subsequent electoral successes, have received relatively little attention from historians and most general works content themselves with a couple of lines about the oath of allegiance with an underlying assumption that entry to the Irish parliament was inevitable. The aim of this article is to show how the process that brought Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics was haphazard and unpredictable. Through extensive use of party literature and parliamentary party minutes from the 1920s, this article presents a detailed account of Fianna Fáil's evolving attitude towards the oath of allegiance and how it succeeded in overcoming ideological reservations to take its seats in the Irish Free State legislature.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

The association between maternal employment and child survival in India, 1998–99 and 2005–06

While many studies contend that a mother's economic activity may generate positive outcomes for both mother and children, empirical results from less developed countries actually indicate higher mortality rates among children of working mothers. This article examines the association between maternal employment and child survival using India's National Family Health Survey. Using propensity score matching, the study compares working with matched nonworking mothers in child's risk of death. To address the heterogeneous nature of working mothers, the employment-survival relationship is analysed across various occupational categories. A supplementary analysis examines gaps between children of working and nonworking mothers in nutritional status and low birth weight (LBW). Our results show that high risk of mortality and low nutritional status are more pronounced among children of mothers working in low-status occupations. The results indicate insignificant differences in LBW, a finding that favours the explanation that the mortality disadvantage of children of working mothers emerges primarily after birth most likely because of inadequate childcare. The article discusses these findings in relation to various potential mechanisms mediating the negative association between maternal employment and child survival.     

Structures and Members: An Overview of The Cumann na nGaedheal Party Organisation, 1923–33

This article re‐examines Cumann na nGaedheal's approach to party organisation. Cumann na nGaedheal has been portrayed as a badly organised, ‘top‐down’ party that suffered electorally for its reluctance to match the structure and organisation of its main anti‐Treaty rival, Fianna Fáil. Moreover, the party has been caricatured as a conservative organisation with little affinity for the ideology of the Irish revolution. While recent studies have reappraised Cumann na nGaedheal's engagement with the revolutionary inheritance, while highlighting underappreciated aspects of the party's electoral innovations, its organisational structures require further scholarly attention. Closer scrutiny of Cumann na nGaedheal's organisational structures sheds further light on its fate as nationalist Ireland's first party of government and ultimately its demise as a distinct party in 1933.     

Information Age Ireland: The Attraction,the Reality and Never Ending Geography

This paper is an attempt to probe deeper behind the well-documented success story of the Irish economy over the 1990s. Over the decade, the country experienced unparalleled levels of economic growth that saw unemployment levels plummet, inflation levels stabilize and inward investment rise at a substantial rate. Growth rates of gross national product (GNP) best surmise the Irish case, the tigerish performance brought the country from one with a per capita GNP two-thirds of the European Union (EU) average in 1987, to one which exceeded the average 10 years later. An exposition of Ireland's pursuit of a foreign direct investment (FDI) development model forms a major part of this work. Recognizing the importance of FDI in Ireland, and FDI in the software sector in particular, this paper shows how and why investors flocked into the country over the golden era of the 1990s. Exogenously, Ireland's place on the outskirts of one of the world's biggest markets made it an alluring option for outside investors. Endogenously, the rationale behind the pursuit of high-tech FDI policy, beyond employment creation was the expected spill-over effects of multinational companies (MNCs) on the local economy. Questions are asked about the nature of positive externalities both in terms of the growth of an indigenous sector alongside a foreign-owned one as well as the sustainability of this type of investment. Changes in the organizational structures of MNCs over the 1990s, through decentralization of activities and outsourcing are integral to the Irish success story. Organizational transformation resulting in networks of global production have helped Ireland, as a peripheral region, to reposition itself as an access point to the lucrative European market. The geographic alteration on the national level however, has not been recreated on the sub-national scale. Contrary to the writings of many technology determinists, Ireland's pursuit of an information economy has had a very real impact in terms of regional economic divergence within the country. The lack of coherent regional or spatial planning is to blame along with a telecommunications infrastructure that has exacerbated the regional woes of an economy with an explicit focus on high-technology industries.     

Workers,Unions and the State: Migrant Workers in China's Labour‐intensive Foreign Enterprises

Migrant workers present a new challenge both to China's increasingly diversified industrial relations and to its state–society relationship, especially vis‐à‐vis China's developmental state. Through an examination of the situation of migrant workers in the country's labour‐intensive foreign investment enterprises, this article argues that it is difficult to establish tripartite industrial relations in China and that pluralistic labour organizations will not easily develop into civil society type labour entities. China's developmental state is in an ambiguous process in redefining its role. Its ability to micro‐manage society is weakening substantially. However, its developmental character at the macro‐level largely remains strong, allowing it to continue to restrict progress towards civil society. The future will ultimately depend on a collective determination by key players — the workers, unions and the state — to find a compromise.     

The last refuge of a scoundrel: patriotism,militarism and the Russian national idea*

In a nation‐state, where ethnic and territorial borders coincide, patriotism may easily have an exclusivist‐nationalist component, and be used to serve the goals of politicians hoping to mobilise the population for destructive goals. In a multinational state like Russia, the militaristic patriotism that Yeltsin's and Putin's administrations promote can also carry that risk. The Russian state leadership's use of a militaristic patriotism as a means to generate popular support risks unleashing ethnic chauvinism and the military domination of civilian institutions. Such phenomena cast doubt on the prospects for Russia's state‐building process to proceed along liberal democratic lines. Non‐governmental organisations, such as Russia's Committee of Soldiers' Mothers , however, have devised an alternative vision of patriotism, relying on rule of law and the observance of civil rights, and thereby hold out a slim hope for reframing Russian patriotism and building a peaceful democracy.     

Reframing the “Irish Question”: the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the formation of Irish nationalism, 1900–22

This article examines the role of the Irish co-operative movement in the early twentieth century and argues that it played a crucial role in shaping a popular understanding of the “Irish Question”. This mass-membership movement impacted upon the development of the Irish state and population. By taking this rural, social movement as a lens to analyse Irish society in the early twentieth century, social and economic issues re-emerge as central components to a contemporary understanding of Ireland's increasingly contested position within the Union. As the expectation of some kind of political resolution to demands for political independence grew during the First World War, radical nationalism absorbed a social and economic discourse that originated within the co-operative movement in its critique of the British state as it operated in Ireland. Irish co-operation represented a sophisticated form of political economy that provided an influential ideological platform for Irish nationalists as they anticipated some form of political independence.     

STATE COMPLIANCE WITH WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION RECOMMENDATIONS

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 established the National Commission on State Workmen's Compensation Laws. The National Commission was directed to “undertake a comprehensive study and evaluation of State workmen's compensation laws in order to determine if such laws provide an adequate, prompt, and equitable system of compensation”. In 1972 the Commission issued its report, and “criticized many aspects of state workmen's compensation programs”. In its report the Commission made eighty–four recommendations for a “moder” workmen's compensation program and designated nineteen of these as “essential”. This research traces state progress in complying with each of these nineteen essential recommendations. Between 1972 and 1977 many states made significant improvements in their workmen's compensation programs and overall there was a 34 percent increase in compliance during this period. Higher levels of compliance were found to be related to two factors: changes in industrial diversification and the involvement and activity of vitally concerned interest groups.     

The Role of Telematics in Integrating Ireland into Europe's Information Society

This article is an evaluation of Ireland's participation in the Telematics Applications Programme (TAP), which was part of the European Commission's Fourth Framework Programme for the period 1994-1998. TAP was primarily concerned with public sector bodies and their ability to adapt to the Information Society. The article explores Irish participation in the programme and examines the contribution of this participation to the clustering of telematics experimentation within Ireland and to the increasing integration with other European regions arising from project networks. The role of the TAP programme in furthering Europe's information society in Ireland is assessed.     

Reforming the Italian constitution

Abstract

The third parliamentary Bicameral Committee established to reform the Italian constitution conducted its business from January to June 1997. The results have been controversial and have attracted a great deal of criticism. The Committee's recommendations are subject to amendment by parliament and must then be approved (or rejected) in a general referendum. The Committee ended up recommending what is essentially a French‐style semi‐presidential system. It is accompanied by an electoral law that offers a premium of an additional 20 per cent of the seats to the majority, 55 per cent to be elected in simple majority electoral districts, and 25 per cent to be distributed nationally on a proportional basis. PDS leader Massimo D'Alema, chair of the Committee, has claimed victory since the Commitee produced a positive outcome, yet in fact he has certainly lost since he preferred a strong ‘premier’ model and a majority runoff electoral system. The Committee demonstrated that small parties, especially the former Christian Democrats, can exert influence over larger ones, that the parries retain firm control over the process of institutional reform, that the three major party leaders — D'Alema, Berlusconi and Fini — preferred their own reciprocal legitimization over the attainment of any major reform, and that Italy's political‐institutional transition is not yet over. Indeed, the proposed reforms are likely to prove neither sufficient nor adequate.     

Mothers and others in Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls

This essay responds to critical assertions that the absence of functional maternity in Edna O'Brien's famous 1960 novel The Country Girls reflects O'Brien's frustration with the cloying myth of ‘Ireland-as-motherland’. While I agree that O'Brien centrally considers the imbrication of femininity with nationality in a culturally conservative post-independence Ireland and enumerates the devastating lived effects of this discourse on Irish women, I argue that The Country Girls offers a potentially productive step beyond lamentation or complaint: namely, a nascent transnational poetics. I contend that the novel hinges on a character heretofore neglected by the criticism – Caithleen Brady's Austrian landlady, Joanna – and suggest that O'Brien slyly positions Joanna as Caithleen's potential surrogate mother, framing a ‘foreigner’ as a source of subversive family ties. Joanna's presence, I believe, indicates an effort on O'Brien's part to negotiate a political response to both gendered oppression and literary parochialism (the much-remarked climate of censorship that marked the newly independent Ireland's intellectual culture): the notion that community and security might be transformatively relocated in strategic ‘translocal’ networks rather than within the confines of the nation-state. Joanna signifies O'Brien's look beyond Mother Ireland – a desire to open the country to both global feminisms and transnational textualities.     

An Experiment in Political Communication: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform

The British Columbian Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform comprised a representative group of 160 randomly selected voters who were empowered to review the Province's electoral system and to decide if change was needed. It first met in January 2004 and issued its final report in December of that year. The Assembly has since been hailed as a democratic invention and attracted worldwide interest as a remarkable experiment in deliberative democracy. Its Terms of Reference required that it consult British Columbians. It did so via a series of public hearings held across the Province, and by establishing a website to publicise its purpose and to obtain public input. Hence, the Citizens' Assembly provides a case study or natural experiment that permits the comparative assessment of two very different forms of political communication – one traditional and the other a form of ‘e-consultation’, relying on newer information and communications technology. Based on published sources, as well as interviews with former members of the Assembly, this paper investigates the public input the Assembly obtained, and considers whether ‘e-consultation’– as is often claimed – does allow citizens to genuinely contribute to the making of public policy.