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CONTEXT The Abortion Law in Northern Ireland - professional attitudes to change. OBJECTIVE To elicit the attitudes of doctors in Northern Ireland, practicing obstetrics and gynaecology or family planning. METHOD Questionnaires (n = 155) were sent to all grades of doctors working in obstetrics and gynaecology or family planning in Northern Ireland during 1996. RESULTS One hundred and two (...

Northern Ireland, like Wales and Scotland, is part of the United Kingdom. The total population in 1997 was 1,577,835. The health care structure is similar to the rest of the UK and Northern Ireland constitutes a complete health care region within the UK. It is divided into four area health and social services boards, each providing health and social care and responsible to the Northern Ireland ...

Questions of identity and difference appear to be ubiquitous in the landscape of contemporary political theory. Debates among egalitarian liberals, libertarians, socialists, and Marxists about the appropriate distributive arrangements in modern societies have, for better or worse, been overshadowed of late by the challenge of a politics of identity.1 The impulse for this form of politics has be...

The article presents a normative principle of constitutional justice that acknowledges ethnocultural and ethnonational diversity by addressing the injustice of political alienation. It is suggested that this principle could be the subject of a methodological overlapping consensus among several comprehensive normative-theoretical frameworks that are influential in current debates. The main impli...

There can be little doubt that Rational Choice Theory (RCT) with its emphasis on the 'instrumentally rational' individual as the foundation of the political process has significantly enhanced the scope of political science. This paper details many of the areas of political science in which our understanding of events has been significantly enhanced by the application of RCT. But, in the end, RC...

CROSS-BORDER AND LOCAL COOPERATION ON THE ISLAND OF IRELAND: AN ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE Cross-border and local cooperation can foster local learning and contribute positively to business performance and social cohesion. This paper considers firms’ economic motivation for both types of cooperation around the Irish border. This area, while inevitably impacted by civil unrest in Northern Ireland, sha...

STUDY OBJECTIVE Northern Ireland has the highest standardised mortality ratios for colon cancer in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland has some of the highest mortality rates for cancer in the world. The aim of the study therefore was to investigate trends in colorectal cancer in the north and south of Ireland over the period 1950 to 1984. DESIGN The study was a cohort analysis of ...

For several hundred years, rival factions within the religious communities of Ireland have had their differences. The division of Ireland in 1920 into a predominantly Protestant North and Catholic South emphasised the geographic, political and ethnic polarisation of the island. Violence, however, had been sporadic and relatively short-lived until the current civil disturbance in Northern Irelan...