Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him contextualise some of most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely Great Hunger secular clashes between Protestants Catholics. pays special attention problems originating out...

Developments in the late 1990s, including paramilitary cease-fires and the advent (albeit, short-lived) of devolved Government, offered a new dispensation from which to appraise the community relations problem in Northern Ireland and advocate policy action. This paper considers an emergent policy framework entitled A Shared Future. Drawing on the experience of delivering better relations throug...

They include the treatment of the issues of self-determination, consent, and the status of Northern Ireland in the Irish Constitution and in British constitutional legislation; the establishment of new democratic institutions in Northern Ireland on a partnership basis; the creation of formal new links between the two jurisdictions in Ireland through a North/South Ministerial Council and a numbe...

Health Services Act (Northern Ireland), 1948 National Assistance Act (Northern Ireland), 1948 National Insurance Act (Northern Ireland), 1946 National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act (Northern Ireland), 1946 Disabled Persons (Employment) Act (Northern Ireland), 1945. Centrally several branches operate on much the same lines as in the British Service. These include the National Insurance and...

Segregation measures have been applied in the study of many societies and traditionally such measures have been used to assess the degree of division between social and cultural groups across national or regional areas. The degree of segregation can vary substantially from place to place even within cities. In this paper, the concern is with religious/political segregation – particularly the pr...