The Northern Ireland Civil Service under Direct Rule and Devolution

2003 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Carmichael ◽  
Robert Osborne
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The Public ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Asymmetrical Pattern ◽  
Key Characteristics

Although the United Kingdom is usually regarded as a unitary state in the mould of the Westminster model, in reality, complete political integration and administrative standardization have never existed. Recent political devolution consolidates an increasingly diverse and asymmetrical pattern of territorial governance. Frequently, however, notwithstanding some notable exceptions, this differentiation within the UK's governmental arrangements is overlooked in much of the literature. To help correct this oversight, this article reports on the longstanding differences in the public administration arrangements of one of the UK's smaller component countries, Northern Ireland. Specifically, the article focuses on the role of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and charts some of the key characteristics and trends that have emerged under both the period of Direct Rule from London (since the end of the Stormont devolution in 1972) and in the newly-restored devolved settlement that was introduced in 1999, following the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.

Administrative elites and the crisis: what lies ahead for the senior civil service in Greece?

2014 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 709-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calliope Spanou
Keyword(s):  
Public Administration ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Civil Service Reform ◽  
The Public ◽  
Administrative Elites ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The nature of the relationship between the public administration and politics and the subsequent role of the administration appear to be incompatible with the emergence of an administrative elite. After analysing the reasons for this incompatibility, the article explores the impact of the measures taken in the wake of the economic crisis on the civil service and its reform, and also the prospects for the development of a senior civil service. The key, and also the challenge, to any change in this direction remains the rebalancing of the relationship between the public administration and politics. Points for practitioners What might interest practitioners is the issue of the conditions of effectiveness of civil service reform in times of economic crisis and significant pressure.

A Problem Shared? The Role of the Public in the Legitimation of Policy: A Case Study of Gendered Welfare Change in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Richards-Gray
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Disadvantaged Women ◽  
Welfare Change

Abstract This article argues that shared problematizations—shared political and public ways of thinking—legitimize policies and their outcomes. To support this argument, it examines the legitimation of gendered welfare reform in the recent U.K. context. Drawing on focus groups with the public, it provides evidence that the public’s problematization of welfare, specifically that reform was necessary to “make work pay” and “restore fairness”, aligned with that of politicians. It argues that the assumptions and silences underpinning this shared problematization, especially silences relating to the value and necessity of care, have allowed for welfare policies that have disadvantaged women.

The Duchy of Lancaster Records

1947 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Somerville
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
County Council ◽  
Component Part ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
Public Record ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Government

Two hundred and fifty years ago a record-keeper sat amid the boxes, the cupboards and the shelves which housed his charges, compiling ‘an account of all or most of the records in the Duchy office and how to find them’. The result was invaluable for searchers in the Duchy of Lancaster records, but lacking order and arrangement, as its author was the first to admit, it is not a systematic description of these records and it says very little about their history. There is therefore some justification for attempting a comprehensive view of these records. The rich diversity of interest which the Duchy bears is fully reflected in the range of its records. It has indeed been said that ‘what the records of the United Kingdom are at large, these records of the Duchy are in miniature’. That is a bold assertion, difficult to sustain. For one thing, the Duchy never knew the complicated processes of the royal exchequer, and it must be obvious that the Duchy could not repeat in parvo the whole pattern of the nation's life. Yet the analogy gives a hint of the records' scope, and it becomes closer if we take the Duchy records to include those of the Palatinate of Lancaster. It is true that in the Public Record Office, which contains most of the records under discussion, the two series are treated separately, and the Guide, repeating a distinction drawn in 1868 in the Deputy Keeper's Report, says that the Duchy records ‘are entirely distinct from the records of the County palatine, which, although public, are purely local, whilst the Duchy Records, though private, concern the government and jurisdiction of the entire dominion of the Duchy and embrace the County Palatine as a subordinate regality’. This statement, which the grammarian finds imperfect as an example of the chiastic construction, is equally unsatisfactory to the archivist or historian if we understand it to refer to the palatinate, and not to the administration of the modern county council. We ought no more to segregate the palatinate simply because it was an organ of public administration than we should, say, a private hundred, and the description itself recognises the county palatine as a component part of the Duchy. How the judicial records of the court of Duchy chamber were any less public than those of the chancery court in Lancashire, is not explained. The distinction, in fine, is fallacious.

The British–Irish Council and Devolution

1999 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Other ◽  
National State ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
The Government

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.

THE POLITICAL FUTURE OF SCOTLAND AND NORTHERN IRELAND. TWO WAYS – ONE CHOICE?

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
M. A. Mosora
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Political ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Current State ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Future

The article analyzes the features of the politicization of the Scotland and Northern Ireland at the present stage. The basic identifiers for the com­munities in these regions are revealed. The important role of devolution pol­icy in the political relations of the Center with regions in the United Kingdom is justified. Emphasis is placed on the exceptional importance of Brexit in the context of strengthening the separation of the Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is marked common and distinctive features of both regions in the vision of the political future. The current state of the factors contributing to separatism in both regions is compared. Estimates of the likelihood of increased separa­tion movements in the Scotland and Northern Ireland in the future are given.

‘Positive direct rule’: economic policy

No Solution ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.C. Aveyard
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
The Public ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Positive Direct

This chapter looks at economic policy in Northern Ireland in the context of severe economic difficulties experienced by the UK as a whole. It shows how the Labour government sought to shield Northern Ireland from economic realities because of the conflict, increasing public expenditure and desperately seeking industrial investment. The level of desperation in this endeavour is illustrated through examples such as Harland & Wolff’s shipyards and the DeLorean Motor Company. The experience of the 1970s, and particularly under the Labour government, set the pattern for the following decades with a steadily increasing subvention from the rest of the United Kingdom and a growing dependence on the public sector, all at a time when the opposite trend took place in Great Britain.

The Irish Border

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milena Komarova ◽  
Katy Hayward
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Belfast Agreement ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

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.

scholarly journals Equality and Devolution in the United Kingdom: A Story in Three Acts and a Sequel

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Paula Devine ◽  
Grace Kelly ◽  
Martina McAuley
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Way

Within the United Kingdom (UK), many of the arguments driving devolution and Brexit focused on equality. This article assesses how notions of equality have been shaped over the past two decades. Using a chronology of theoretical, political and public interpretations of equality between 1998 and 2018, the article highlights the shifting positions of Northern Ireland (NI) and the rest of the UK. NI once led the way in relation to equality legislation, and equality was the cornerstone of the Good Friday/Belfast peace agreement. However, the Equality Act 2010 in Great Britain meant that NI was left behind. The nature of future UK/EU relationships and how these might influence the direction and extent of the equality debate in the UK is unclear. While this article focuses on the UK, the questions that it raises have global application, due to the international influences on equality discourse and legislation.

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