The British–Irish Council and Devolution

1999 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor

THE BRITISH-IRISH COUNCIL SPRINGS FROM AND IS PROVIDED FOR IN the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998. Its coming into force depends upon the implementation of the Agreement. The Council is established, however, not by the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, which gives legislative expression to the bulk of this Agreement, but by an international treaty, the British–Irish Agreement, attached to the Belfast Agreement.The Belfast Agreement together with the legislation providing for devolution to Scotland and Wales establishes a new constitutional settlement, both among the nations which form the United Kingdom, and also between those nations and the other nation in these islands, the Irish nation. The United Kingdom itself is, as a result of the Scotland Act and the Government of Wales Act, in the process of becoming a new union of nations, each with its own identity and institutions – a multi-national state, rather than, as many of the English have traditionally seen it, a homogeneous British nation containing a variety of different people.

Author(s):  
Milena Komarova ◽  
Katy Hayward

The emergence, development, and transformation of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland reveals much about the changing nature of nation-statehood over the century that followed its creation. In its own way, it is also a subject of innovation. The three interrelated strands of relationships safeguarded by the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998 in many ways define the border. These relationships run within and between the two islands of Ireland and Britain, and also between the two political traditions in Northern Ireland. Nationalists and Unionists have come to define much of their ethos in relation to the symbolic meaning of the Irish border: The former want the border removed and the latter see the border as necessary to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. This helps to understand the prominence given to the Irish border in the context of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), as well as the controversy around the terms of the U.K.–EU Withdrawal Agreement, which changed the nature of the relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom as well as between Northern Ireland and Ireland. As a consequence of Brexit, the future of borders in and around Ireland—their openness and their governance—will be inevitably shaped by the vicissitudes of the EU–U.K. relationship.


1995 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-216
Author(s):  
Jacomijn J. van Haersolte-von Hof

This arbitration arose under the Air Services Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (hereinafter: HMG) and the Government of the United States (hereinafter: USG) concluded at Bermuda, 23 July 1977, as subsequently amended. This Agreement, which is generally referred to as Bermuda 2, provides, inter alia, that airport charges should not discriminate between a state's domestic carriers and those of the other party, and that theparties should use their best efforts to ensure that charges should be based on certain principles.


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