Government Of Ireland Research Articles

Physicochemical and microbiological quality of water from a pilot domestic rainwater harvesting facility in Ireland

AbstractDublin Institute of Technology personnel were commissioned in 2005 by the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government in Ireland to assess the feasibility of utilizing harvested rainwater to replace treated mains water, for nonpotable uses. A pilot project was set up. The project involved the design, installation, commissioning and monitoring of rainwater harvesting facilities in a rural housing development. A monitoring programme was carried out to examine the physicochemical and microbiological quality of the harvested rainwater. Harvested rainwater was sampled monthly and tested. Analysis of the harvested rainwater quality showed a consistently high quality of raw water in general compliance with the requirements of the European Communities (Quality of Bathing Water) Regulations for 100% of samples and the European Communities (Drinking Water) Regulations, 2007 for 37% of sampling dates.

Democracy and the Right to Know: 10 Years of Freedom of Information in Ireland

Freedom of information (FOI) is important because it aims to makes government open, transparent and accountable. The legislation is based on the premise that people have the right of access to public documents, save for certain exemptions (Doyle, 1997: 68). The philosophy behind such legislation is that citizens have a ‘right to know’ (Wraith, 1977: 2) how and why decisions are made by government in their name. In that context it is arguable that FOI legislation also has the potential to lead to more accountable government, less corruption and better democratic outcomes for states. Those noble aims were not, it can be argued, foremost in the minds of the founding fathers of the Irish State. Instead the State’s colonial heritage and violent birth contributed to a highly secretive and centralised bureaucracy and government. Successive governments since then have sought to keep the State’s secrets. Exposes of corruption, external influences and cultural change finally lead to Ireland’s first Freedom of Information Act in 1997, and for the first time it allowed citizens a ‘right to know.’ In 2003 significant amendments were introduced in that legislation, which removed a number of key release provisions and introduced fees for requests leaving the principle of the legislation - albeit in a narrower form - still in place. This paper firstly sets out the background to the development of open and accountable government in Ireland, and secondly examines elite attitudes to the introduction, operation and amendment of FOI legislation in the State between 1998 and 2008. It does this by distilling the proceedings of an expert focus group convened to discuss the Act and its legacy.

The Irish Corporate Governance System

This working paper provides a general overview of the corporate governance infrastructure in Ireland. Part I of the paper examines the legal infrastructure. Although corporate governance in Ireland, as in many other jurisdictions, involves a self regulatory code, this code operates in the context of a highly regulated, if not always strictly enforced, statutory environment. The legal infrastructure refers to the relevant laws and regulations which address corporate governance including most importantly company law and securities law. In addition to examining the rights and responsibilities prescribed for stakeholders, this section also involves a review of law enforcement in the event that stakeholder rights are abused. Part II examines Ireland’s regulatory infrastructure which is intertwined with its legal infrastructure and which involves the bodies charged with regulating the marketplace. Although their remit and their regulatory status vary, the objective of these bodies is to ensure compliance with the relevant corporate governance regulations. Part III examines the informational infrastructure in Ireland which allows the disclosure of relevant material to corporate stakeholders in a timely fashion. Finally, part IV examines Ireland’s market infrastructure. This includes a review of ownership structures, the functioning of public markets, approaches to public and private capital markets and the existence of a market for corporate control. In reviewing the corporate governance infrastructures, the paper acknowledges the many corporate governance failings which contributed to the recent banking crisis in Ireland and describes the various reforms which have been proposed as a result.

How do constitutions constitute constitutional identity?

In name of Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our all actions both of men and States must be referred, We, people of Ireland, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our through centuries of trial, Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain rightful independence of our Nation, And seeking to promote common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that dignity and freedom of individual may be assured, true social order attained, unity of our country restored, and concord established with other nations, Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution. —Preamble, Irish Constitution (1937) Who are the people of who have give(n) still-operative 1937 Constitution? The preamble explains origins of a constitution that continues to structure Ireland's government, to provide directive principles of public policy to guide legislation, and to identify fundamental rights guaranteed people of Ireland. Yet one might think that preamble—and by inference Constitution itself—no longer fits Irish social reality. It is obviously a preamble for a people who understand themselves to be Roman Catholic—expressly in its reference to Trinity, implicitly in its use of Thomistic final end, and with its invocation of virtues of prudence, justice, and charity. And it is equally obviously a preamble for a people whose fathers (which, of course, can be both factual and metaphorical) struggled for national liberation. One might think, though, that more than seventy years on people of Ireland no longer take Roman Catholicism to be central to their identify, and that national liberation struggle is far behind them, perhaps even with a mildly

Social Housing Management, Governance and Delivery in Ireland: Ten Years of Reform on Seven Estates

This paper examines developments in social housing management, governance and delivery in the Republic of Ireland during the last decade, using evidence from two rounds of research conducted in 1997 and 2007 on seven social rented estates, located in a variety of regions. Among the three most significant developments in this regard, the reconceptualisation of the housing management function has had the most positive impact on the views of tenants. Some aspects of the externalisation of social housing provision, such as the growth of the housing association sector and the use of PPP arrangements for social housing regeneration, have also been positive, but the future of this externalisation agenda is uncertain. The impact of the various reforms to the management of the social housing service, such as advent of strategic policy making and performance monitoring, has been uneven in some cases and uniformly low in others.

“Unapproved Road”: Poetic Roadblocks and Animal Traffic in Paul Muldoon

I. Cross-border Traffic and Roads Paul Muldoon's Unapproved lifts its title from the official word on Irish border traffic. Four years after partition created a land border between the newly formed Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1922, and three years after the 1923 customs barrier instituted a parallel economic partition (Nash and Reid 272), the Free State's 1926 Statutory Rules on Road Signs and Traffic Signals Regulations declared that Where a road crosses the frontier the approach to the frontier shall be indicated by a direction sign to be erected ... at a point one quarter of a mile from the frontier. Whether traffic is or is not permitted to cross the frontier on the road shall be indicated ... by the words road, or unapproved road, the case may require. (Government of Ireland) The repetition of specific words in these rules and regulations is already complicit with material circulation, given their apparent power to make the border itself visible (from a distance of one-quarter mile) and to permit or prevent cross-border traffic, whether human, automobile, or other. (1) By importing its title across the border's troubled history, Muldoon's Unapproved itself smuggles into lyric poetry the persistent political tensions and capital motivations of border traffic and so presents the two crossover critical opportunities that I take up in this paper. The first is generic; the second topical. At least since John Stuart Mill's definitive and defensive What is Poetry? (1833) and culminating in New Criticism a century later, the genre has been defined habitually and read lyrically if separate and separable from any historical, material, and economic contingency. (2) But rather than remove Muldoon's border poem (among others) from circulation by reading it an autonomous or even autopoietic lyric (Jackson 56), I will read it to reveal the genre's inevitable traffic in a larger economy, approved or not. (3) Correlated to this generic traffic, Unapproved also pre-empts any immobilization of the Irish border if exclusively political or statically symbolic. In their recent Border Crossings, Catherine Nash and Bryonie Reid address the border's changing cultural, material, and economic significance throughout the twentieth century and encourage a reading of its double meaning as material and imagined, literal and (267). I add a literary and theoretical register to their call by focusing on the ways in which poetic and capital traffic in words and goods--especially of the illicit or invisible kind--crosses or remains stalled at the Irish and Muldoonian borders. Besides redirecting genre and border studies, crossing poetic with capital traffic at the border can reveal the inevitable accidents and effects of their shared but ironically inverse logic: a desire for automobile circulation if natural and perpetual (without borders), yet perpetually foiled by its own vehicle made visible. I examine this cross-border traffic particularly through the vehicle of the animal, which figures doubly in the logics of poetic and capital circulation: in the movement of animal figures or alongside vehicles within Muldoon's poems (4) and against the background of smuggling material animals and goods--from cows and cigarettes to electronics and guns--across the Irish border (also in and vehicles). The animal and animals appear a common and largely invisible means to poetic and capital ends, otherwise imagined to be self-starting and self-perpetuating (that is, automobile). (5) In the same way that material animals grease the wheels of capital's cross-border circulation, so their figurative counterparts seem to ease linguistic traffic, specifically vehicles through which to render their poetry in motion natural or primal. Critically and poetically, each of Muldoon's poems dramatizes the tensions (and collisions) within this fantasy of perpetual and autonomous motion by literalizing it in the otherwise allegorical vehicle, be it animal, automobile, or both. …

What future lies ahead for the Irish welfare state?

Beginning by outlining the pre-recession aspirations for an active Irish social policy, the article then examines the recent political economy of social policy and the cumulative impact of the National Asset Management Agency, the Report of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes (McCarthy, 2009), the Commission on Taxation (Government of Ireland, 2009) and Budget 2010 on unemployment, social expenditure, poverty and inequality. Assuming a Developmental Welfare State is still the aspiration of Irish social policy, it explores three different models of activation; flexicurity, mutual obligations and active inclusion for all. Arguing for a flexicurity model strengthened by incorporating principles from Active Inclusion for All (EAPN, 2008) that promote a less punitive approach to activation; the article ends by considering how to gender the life cycle approach and concludes strong political leadership is required to move in this direction.

Editorial

It is a great pleasure to introduce this special issue of the British Journal of Learning Disabilities which has a dual focus: research in Ireland and the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The idea for a specific Irish issue began with the recognition of the paucity of peer-reviewed journals in the area of disabilities in the Republic of Ireland. The purpose of this edition is therefore to enable researchers working with people with intellectual disabilities to publish their work and engage with other international researchers. We knew that Irish researchers were undertaking useful and relevant research which deserved publication recognition. It seemed timely to provide an opportunity for new research occurring in the Republic to be published and discussed. We hoped, too, that this issue would provide people with intellectual disabilities, service providers and advocates with a resource with which to further develop research activity. The second focus of this issue is the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This has been signed (though at the time of publication it had not been ratified) by the Government in Ireland. It has important implications for ways in which people with intellectual disabilities are perceived and how they live their lives. While positive changes in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities are happening there is still a great deal to do. For example a recent National Study of the Needs of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Ireland revealed that they wanted to have control, choice and support in a variety of areas such as being a paid employee, a decision maker, a self advocate, a partner in a relationship, a house owner, a respected citizen, a money manager, and a good communicator (Retrieved on 28th September, 2009 from http://www.tcd.ie/niid/research/projects/Allwewanttosay.php). These findings are interrelated to the provisions of the Convention, like discrimination, lack of inclusion in the community, lack of choice and the need to remove social barriers to people leading fulfilling lives. The Convention presents a positive step forwards in that it affirms the rights of disabled people. In asking contributors to this issue to refer to the Convention and the issues of rights we hoped to bring it into sharp focus and to begin to explore how its provisions may begin to be put into practice. We were very pleased that Professor Gerard Quinn, at the University of Galway, who was heavily involved in the drafting of the UN Convention was able to provide a leading article for this issue. The first section of the journal is concerned with an introduction to the Convention and to inclusive research as one means of supporting inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in their communities. It then follows a broadly life course approach with articles which are concerned with families and childhood, education and adult issues of quality of life and sexuality. It concludes with an account of a life history project with older people in Ireland. With the permission of the editor, in editing this issue of the journal, we have used the term intellectual disabilities rather than learning disabilities as this is the current term used in the Republic. During our times as editors our working lives changed significantly. When the project began we were all part of the National Institute for Intellectual Disabilities at Trinity College. During its development Kelley moved to the UK and Carol returned to New Zealand. However all of us continue to have strong links to the Republic. We hope that the papers in this issue will provide a stimulating and exciting statement about research and change in Ireland.

Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A. J. Otwayruthven and James Lydon. Edited by Peter Crooks. Pp 407. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2008. £45.

Government, war and society in medieval Ireland: essays by Edmund Curtis, A. J. Otwayruthven and James Lydon. Edited by Peter Crooks. Pp 407. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2008. £45.

The Foxite Whigs, Irish legislative independence and the Act of Union, 1785–1806

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.

Promoting learning transfer in post registration education: A collaborative approach

Pre-registration nurse education in Ireland became a four year undergraduate honors degree programme in 2002 (Government of Ireland, 2000. The Nursing Education Forum Report. Dublin, Dublin Stationary Office.). Consequently, the Irish Government invested significant resources in post registration nursing education in order to align certificate and diploma trained nurses with the qualification levels of new graduates. However, a general concern amongst academic and clinical staff in the South East of Ireland was that there was limited impact of this initiative on practice. These concerns were addressed through a collaborative approach to the development and implementation of a new part-time post registration degree that incorporated an enquiry and practice based learning philosophy. The principles of learning transfer (Ford, K., 1994. Defining transfer of learning the meaning is in the answers. Adult Learning 5 (4), p. 2214.) underpinned the curriculum development and implementation process with the goal of reducing the theory practice gap. This paper reports on all four stages of the curriculum development process: exploration, design, implementation and evaluation (Quinn, F.M., 2002. Principles and Practices of Nurse Education, fourth ed. Nelson Thornes, Cheltenham), and the subsequent impact of learning transfer on practice development. Eclectic approaches of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques were utilised in the evaluation. The evaluation of this project to date supports our view that this practice based enquiry curriculum promotes the transfer of learning in the application of knowledge to practice, impacting both student and service development.

Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (review)

Reviewed by: Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 Sean Farrell Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006, by Paul Bew, 632 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. $75.00 Burke is back. One of the hallmarks of recent scholarship on late eighteenth -and nineteenth-century Ireland has been a renewed appreciation for the subtlety and significance of Edmund Burke’s thought. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Paul Bew’s important and thoughtful new study of modern Irish politics. Bew’s overarching argument centers on Burke’s notion that Anglo-Irish relations would only work if there were a real and substantive union between Britain and Ireland, and specifically, one that featured Catholic emancipation and political integration. While Bew details a wide and often surprising range of advocates for such an approach—the portrayals of Castlereagh and Pitt are particularly memorable—it is the consistent failure to act along Burkean lines that dominates British governance in Ireland across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Henry Grattan famously argued, this was a legislative union rather than the true identification of two nations, a point made most clearly by British policy failures during the horrors of the Great Famine. Bew is at his caustic best when describing the yawning gap between British and Irish sentiment: “For Trevelyan, contemplating his role in feeding of hundreds of thousands, this could only be a benign development; Ireland now knew how much England cared. For many in Ireland, however, that was precisely the problem.” Although Bew’s narrative starts with this searching critique of the British political class’s lack of generosity and creativity, Irish nationalism does not escape unscathed. For all of the rhetorical celebration of Tone and Davis, Bew finds that Irish nationalism has rarely risen above its essentially sectarian core. Throughout the book Bew’s argument underlines nationalists’ and Unionists’ trenchant consistency in failing to construct a workable via media. Among many poignant examples, Daniel O’Connell’s remarkable inability to make even the smallest gestures of inclusivity to William Sharman Crawford and potentially sympathetic Ulster Presbyterian reformers remains the most illustrative of this failure of imagination. There is nothing particularly novel about writing an historical narrative around the British failure to construct humane and generous relationships with Ireland and the Irish failure to bridge sectarian enmities; in lesser hands, this challenging book would have run the risk of caricature. That it does not do so testifies to Bew’s skill as an historian and his unrivaled knowledge of this complex terrain. He weaves together portraits of well-known leaders (among whom Parnell, predictably, stands out) with unheralded figures like Cooke Taylor and [End Page 145] William Cusack Smith. Moreover, Bew manages to acknowledge sectarianism’s central place in modern Irish history without sacrificing the nuance and complexity that the best modern scholarship has infused into our understanding of the modern Irish experience. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws. It is much stronger on the nineteenth century than on the twentieth, particularly after 1914. In part this is a simple matter of space; Bew’s book devotes seven-and-a-half chapters to the nineteenth century and a mere three-and-a-half to the twentieth. Given Bew’s expertise on the latter century, one wonders whether this was a decision made in the offices of the publisher. If so, it does real damage: much of the richness and nuance that marks Bew’s handling of nineteenth-century material is simply not there in later chapters. Given the recent work on de Valéra, his treatment here seems particularly undeveloped. But the problem is not just brevity. The Burkean framework that gives the nineteenth-century material power and coherence does not work as well for the twentieth century, except in Bew’s treatment of Northern Ireland, where it gives rise to some creative and provocative comparisons. And the abbreviated focus on political enmity gives short shrift to such crucial developments as the Republic’s entry into the European Community. But it would be wrong to end on such a negative note. This is significant and humane work, a “must read” for anyone interested in modern...

Local Government Reform and Sustainable Development in Wales and Ireland

The system of local government in both Ireland and Wales has recently been subject to major reform. This study considers the extent to which the recent changes to the remit, powers and institutional structures of local government in these two countries have facilitated local councils' efforts to meet the objectives of sustainable development.

"Surrender and Regrant" in the Historiography of Sixteenth-Century Ireland

Early modern historians tend to concentrate on the violent interaction between the Tudor state and the inhabitants of Ireland. And with good reason: the extension of Tudor rule there saw brutality and warfare reach unprecedented levels, resulting in the destruction of the Gaelic political order. But the sixteenth century’s grim outcome has obscured the conciliatory policy pursued by Henry VIII’s government in Ireland. The most conspicuous feature of this policy was the submissions of dozens of Gaelic chiefs and English lords to the crown. Known to historians as “surrender and regrant,” this policy sought to integrate individual Irish lords, both politically and culturally, into the Tudor state. This essay traces interpretations of surrender and regrant, and the wider conciliatory policy of which it was a part, from the sixteenth century to the present, and suggests that this Tudor policy should occupy a more prominent position in the historiography of Ireland and England.

INTRODUCTION

The Henry Cromwell correspondence 1Henry Cromwell and his governance of Ireland 9

The primary mathematics curriculum: enhancing its potential for developing young children's number sense in the early years at school

A sense of number is now generally recognised as a central factor in learning, and later applying, mathematics. Consequently, number sense is increasingly emphasised in curriculum documentation related to mathematics. The Primary School Curriculum: Mathematics, published by the Government of Ireland in 1999, is no exception. It implicitly stresses the importance of number sense and draws teachers’ attention to a range of key aspects. This article examines how numbers sense is defined generally, how it is explicated in the curriculum for the youngest children at primary school, and the nature of the guidance that curriculum documentation provides to teachers in relation to developing young children's number sense. The curriculum documentation is examined in terms of a socio-culturally related framework which the author developed for considering number sense as it pertains to young children. This framework has four aspects: pleasure and interest in number; understandings of the purposes of number; quantitative thinking; and awareness/understanding of numerals. A number of areas of omission were identified in the teacher guidelines that accompany the curriculum documents. Implications are drawn with respect to a review of the current documents related to early years mathematics, and areas for potential development are outlined.

Strengthening Policy Coherence for Development in Agricultural Policy: Policy Recommendations to Irish Aid

The recent White Paper on Irish Aid made coherence one of the guiding principles of Ireland's development cooperation policy (Government of Ireland, 2006). Agriculture is at the heart of much of the debate about possible incoherence between trade and development policy. This paper presents the policy recommendations made to the Advisory Board for Irish Aid arising from a research project it supported to examine the impact which the EU's Common Agricultural Policy has on developing countries, and the impact which CAP reform would have on global poverty, and which was undertaken by a team based at the IIIS, Trinity College Dublin. Concluding the Doha Round with an ambitious reduction in agricultural trade barriers should remain the priority objective from a policy coherence perspective. However, the research recognised that Ireland's partner countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are not likely to benefit, if at all, from further reductions in OECD country agricultural trade barriers, largely because of their preferential access to these markets. We recommend that Irish Aid should increase its efforts to strengthen the supply-side capacity of these countries to take advantage of existing market opportunities, through increased assistance for agricultural and rural development and as well as trade-related assistance. The paper also discusses how a framework for policy coherence might be established within Irish public administration.

Sir Geoffrey Fenton and the office of secretary of state for Ireland, 1580–1608

In May 1560 a new office was established in the Irish administration, the first to be introduced in almost twenty years. It was that strange creation, the office of secretary of state for Ireland. The chief inspiration behind its foundation was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and it is clear from his writings on the subject that he believed some special office of this kind was needed if the policy of reestablishing English government in Ireland was to be implemented successfully.

Institutionalizing Participation and Governance? New Participative Structures in Local Government in Ireland

Public service providers and elected levels of government around the world are continually being encouraged to involve citizens in decision-making. Various means of achieving this have been employed by local authorities in different countries. These include local referenda, customer surveys, online discussion forums and citizens’ juries. This article draws on the example of new participative committee structures within Irish local government. These seek to involve identified stakeholders (including business, trade unions, the community/voluntary sector and environmental interests) in local government decision-making. These structures were inspired both by international trends towards participatory democracy and Ireland's experience of neo-corporatist ‘social partnership’ at the national level. This article considers the new committee structures and their composition and examines some of the problems encountered. It demonstrates that recent research into these new structures supports many of the concerns that have been raised in the literature on varying participative mechanisms practiced in other countries.

A university response to the Irish national strategy to sustain graduate employment

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue of the Journal of European Industrial Training. A brief commentary on each of the articles is provided and the whole issue is set in the context of national policy and research methodology from which the Programme for University Industry Interface derives its impetus. The paper highlights the potential and the problems of active engagement of government, industry and education in addressing issues of sustaining national economic competitiveness in a global economy.Design/methodology/approachThe discussion in this paper is predominantly desk‐based, using a combination of primary and secondary sources to generate an analysis of policy discourse and its realisation in practice.FindingsIn addition to commenting on the findings from each of the papers in the special issue, this paper draws positive attention to the partnership model used by the government of Ireland in policy formation. It also indicates that the partnership model in general, and the methodology for enhancing it in particular, are well‐regarded in industry but that their full acceptance in higher education has not yet been fully tested.Originality/valueThe paper allows the reader of the special issue to set each of the other papers in a context and to interpret them against a national agenda for sustainability in graduate employment.