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The article presents the author's views on research studies on revolution in Belfast, Ireland from 1846-1848. Various topics discussed include romantic nationalism in the island, participation of intellectual leadership cadre in the revolution, history of Irish Confederation movements and historiography of Belfast politics.

The flag protests that occurred during the tail of 2012 and early 2013 gained international media attention. Much of the media attention focused on the involvement of young people and sought to seek answers to how young people who had grown up in more peaceful times could be involved in violence that belonged in Northern Ireland's past. Research being conducted by the authors during the course of the flag protests on young people's experiences of living in post-conflict Belfast enabled the researchers to gain insight and clarity on the flag protests, why they had occurred and underlying factors that fuelled the riots and violence that followed, giving a snap shot of the strength of feeling and overall mood of the Protestant community at that time. Using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach, 2 focus groups with 14 young people aged between 15 and 24 (M = 17 years) were conducted followed by more in-depth semi-structured interviews with 6 young people from the focus groups and a further 6 interviews with youth and community workers from the East Belfast area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of public health in the United Kingdom is often based around local responses. Historians have noted that political and medical alliances effectively determined the character of public health provision. The importance of this can be measured by the fact that Northern Ireland had traditionally lagged far behind the rest of the United Kingdom in the years following devolution. However, between 1939 and 1944, this began to change and would result in a raft of reforms in health and social care which would culminate in the establishment of the National Health Service in Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores one of the defining aspects of politics and identity in Northern Ireland: the control and utilization of public space, particularly urban public space. Ethnopolitical conflict consistently reveals itself through contestation over public space. The role of ritual events is important in the development of political identity and group cohesion. The symbolic landscape will be constructed through displays of identity by dominant groups and their ability to control that landscape by inhibiting displays by other groups. This will reveal itself through frequent contests over rituals and symbols. This paper looks at the role of ritual events in civic spaces in Belfast but particularly asks what role they might play in conflict transformation. The 1998 agreement offered political structures that provided for shared power after 30 years of violent conflict. At the same time, there was an increase in contestation over public space as political groups within the previously marginalized Catholic community demanded recognition within the public sphere and a rebalancing of the public space through changes to the previously dominant Protestant and Unionist expression of identity. The paper concludes by suggesting that in "shared space" a new civic identity that spans the political and ethnic divisions has started to develop in Belfast and that this might evolve despite an increased residential division throughout the urban area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013 Northern Ireland (NI) witnessed the most protracted period of public-disorder ever seen in the United Kingdom. After Belfast City Council voted to fly the Union flag in-line with the manner adopted in the rest of the United Kingdom, loyalist protestors blocked roads, attacked offices, and held marches through Belfast city center. During what became known as Operation Dulcet, police had to respond to the protests and violence, mindful of existing tensions in NI. This article reports on data collected from interviews conducted with officers involved in the policing of these events. The findings demonstrate that the police response was understood using narratives concerning the primacy of human rights, a focus on perceived proportionality, and ultimately, related to the potential violence linked to historic conceptions of community divisions in NI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, marking the official end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, analysis has mainly focused on compromising politicians and the moves towards normalization. Whilst high-level political resolutions are significant, this article argues that there is a need to explore how the more mundane but insidious materializations of societal abnormality have been ignored by politicians, but are meaningful in understanding the post-conflict context. The continuing material presences of segregation in workingclass communities, which commonly take the form of ethnic enclaves divided by abandoned interfaces and monumental walls, reveals a longstanding lack of engagement with this repercussion of the Troubles. Of particular interest are evolving commemorative and memorialization practices in Nationalist and Loyalist communities that demonstrate the impact of physical segregation on sustaining singular understandings of the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northern Ireland is emerging from violence but still living with conflict. The recent flags protests in Belfast represent a challenge to public administration to transcend the contested politics of local government in Northern Ireland and to navigate a way through a symbolic legacy issue. This article draws on a longitudinal hermeneutic analysis of empirical research conducted on Northern Ireland local government over a decade, where these concerns dominated much debate. Additional analysis of the research findings reveals broader problems applicable to any public administration faced with managing situations in which good governance in public participation and procedural correctness operates alongside fundamental political disagreement and distrust. These conclusions are particularly pertinent for local administrations in societies transitioning from conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emergence of British fascism in the early 1920s was a response to perceived, related external and internal threats to the United Kingdom and its Empire. From 1921, Ireland, in alliance with international communism, was seen to threaten further constitutional upheaval. The literature on British fascism, however, has traditionally accorded relatively little attention to Ireland, though that is now changing. This paper, focusing on Rotha Lintorn-Orman's British Fascists (BF), the first such British movement, seeks to further this process. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, especially newly released materials at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, it points up the influence of the Ulster issue on the BF sense of the crisis the United Kingdom faced and how it should be dealt with; the ideological, class and personal links between the BF and Ulster loyalism; and also how an examination of BF activities in Northern Ireland can provide insights on Ulster Unionism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of the Irish Republican Party (IRA) and their role in the Belfast, Northern Ireland riots of 1969. The author explores the IRA's relationship to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, discusses the history of civil rights movements involving Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland during the 1960s, and analyzes the response of Great Britain. He also examines the political activity of IRA chief of staff Cathal Goulding and Belfast Commander Liam McMillen.

A year before the much celebrated 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Belfast electorate returned a hung Council to govern their city. The following years facilitated a transition from hegemonic or domination mechanisms of conflict management towards the traditionally more acceptable approach of power-sharing. Such a change provides an opportunity to understand the nature of public policy within an emerging power-sharing environment. Drawing on evidence from interviews with Belfast's bureaucratic elite, this article investigates how power-sharing changes the nature of elite-level bureaucrat responsibilities within a contested society. If consociational power-sharing is to be the conflict management model of choice, it is necessary that the role of the supporting institutions in driving its success is understood. Existing public administration research would lead to the expectation of greater bureaucrat involvement in the traditionally more mundane aspects of policy formulation, while in areas of greater public and political interest greater political involvement in the decision-making process would be expected. Converse to these expectations, however, evidence from Belfast suggests that the bureaucratic elite are found to play a pivotal role in the day-to-day management of power-sharing. For this reason, developing administrative capacity is a necessary condition not only for good governance but also for conflict management. Conflict management research must therefore pay closer attention to the role of the bureaucrat in the conflict management process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper outlines a longitudinal study of struggles to control the public space of Belfast City Centre, the capital of Northern Ireland and a city divided by the competing political aspirations of British unionists and Irish nationalists. While the City Centre was once proscribed to nationalist groups, since 1993 nationalist groups have claimed equal use of this ‘sacred space’, once the spatial preserve of unionism. I examine this opening access of the City Centre in terms a shift from an ‘ethnocratic’ form of citizenship to one inflected by liberal multiculturalism, from one of ethnic exclusion to one informed by forms of power-sharing between nationalists and unionists. While many commentators have critiqued this form of conflict management for institutionalizing sectarianism and facilitating zero-sum conceptions of space, I argue that current strategies of creating a ‘shared space’ can be critically viewed as a successful form of liberal multiculturalism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper illuminates two forms of street politics - 'ban-the-bomb' and housing tenants' protests - prevalent in Belfast in the 1960s prior to the civil rights movement (CRM). This is done to highlight the role they played in developing forms of non-violent direct action which directly contributed to the repertoires of protest utilised by the CRM. This has hitherto been downplayed in existing literature on the development of CRM. The paper also contextualises the ambivalent position that these street politics occupied regarding the question of Northern Ireland's constitutional status, which meant that they could be co-opted by the metanarratives of groups representing nationalism and unionism. Finally, the extent to which such grassroots collective action can be viewed as part of 'right to the city' struggles is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Northern Ireland Troubles some Protestant communities suffered more than others. The loyalist Shankill area of West Belfast is one such place. Geographically situated between the republican strongholds of the Ardoyne and Falls, it was regularly exposed to violent attack. The area witnessed a series of republican bombings that included children in the death toll as well as many deadly shootings. Violence of this kind has left an indelible mark on the Shankill community. However, more than other loyalist areas, it was prepared to respond to republican violence with violence. But the community has not emerged from the Troubles with confidence. Unanticipated post-conflict factors of a political, cultural, and territorial nature are undermining efforts to promote community confidence and encourage paramilitary groups to decommission their weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no abstract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban planners can partially direct conflict, toward either resolution or escalation. The British-controlled Northern Ireland Executive (NIE) has enacted urban policies intended to be impartial and inoffensive to either community. But, in doing so, urban planning has surrendered potential in helping create urban conditions conducive to peace. This paper examines how NIE policy has impacted intergroup tensions in Belfast. The history of Belfast urban policy attitudes is explored, focusing on the period between 1972 and 1999, when London assumed direct control of urban governance. As the peace process in Northern Ireland has today reached a new crossroads, this study seeks to identify important issues of Belfast urban policymaking in need of revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the political history of Northern Ireland. The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 had held out the hope that the cultural complexities of Northern Ireland would figure in, and maybe even dictate, the shape of the future. But, by the time of the Good Friday Agreement, a different political imperative had taken hold. Culture had been reduced to the issues of minority languages and the need to curtail the display of sectarian symbols. In leaving aside the recurrent debate on whether Northern Irish culture was reflective of sectarian politics or could be an ameliorative force for liberal change, this switch in strategy gambled on consigning the past to the rubbish-bin of history.

Relates psychoanalytic insights on political changes in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Implication of negotiation for the re-establishment of parliamentary assembly; Influence of paramilitaries and ex-prisoner in the changing political structure; Psychological impact of political changes.

Details how the cities of Belfast in Northern Ireland and Berlin in East Germany are dealing with the issue of local identity in urban planning. Importance of group identification for European cities; Role of place visioning in the economic development of Belfast; Political significance of replacing a historical building with the Palast der Republik in Berlin.

Based largely on in-depth interviews with the majority of women local councillors in Northern Ireland, this article addresses two substantive issues: the reasons for the numerical underrepresentation of women and the issue of gender difference. The authors illustrate and explore these questions within the context of both the councillors' own responses and that supplied by a concurrent survey of the general population. While the councillors and the general population favour the increased representation of women in public office, evidence of a gender cleavage - while present - is perceived to be more potential than actual, given the dominance of the mutually reinforcing cleavages of nationality and religion. This research was financed primarily by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation and secondarily by one from the Lockheed Foundation, administered by Queen's University, Belfast. The results cited from the wider probability survey are derived from an ESRC-funded project (‘The Political Participation, Interests and Attitudes of Women in Northern Ireland’ - ROOO 23 2726) currently being undertaken by the authors. The authors benefitted from the comments of members of the ‘Gender and Power’ workshop at the 1992 session of the European Consortium for Political Research held at the University of Limerick, at which an earlier version of the paper was first presented, and from the comments of two referees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the different alternatives to the punishment shootings and beatings in a Loyalist community in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It says that including the views of the local community in the discussions is important in discussing the alternatives to punishment beatings. According to the author, negotiations with the different parties involved are necessary in order to solve the problems caused by the presence of paramilitary organizations in working-class communities. The categories of the punishment beatings in the Loyalist community in Belfast, the terms of the community-service work program and the difficulties in dealing with extra-legal bodies in negotiating for the stoppage of particular beatings are also discussed.