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8 Finance and public expenditure Prior to direct rule, Northern Ireland operated with financial arrangements laid down in the original Government of Ireland Act, 1920 and in a number of subsequent special agreements. All major items of taxation including income tax were levied and collected by the United Kingdom Government with Northern Ireland’s share of tax revenue then ‘handed back’ to the Stormont Government for devolved services. Originally an ‘Imperial Contribution’ was deducted, as Northern Ireland’s contribution to the cost of defence and foreign
This is a comprehensive study of direct rule as the system of governance that operated in Northern Ireland for most of the period between 1972 and 2007. The major institutions of governance are described and examined in detail, including the often-neglected sectors of the role of the Westminster parliament, the civil service, local government, quangos, ombudsmen offices, cross-border structures and the public expenditure process. The book explains how the complex system covering transferred, reserved and excepted functions worked and provided viable governance despite political violence, constitutional conflict and political party disagreements. In addition, a comparison is drawn between direct rule and devolution, analysing both the positive and negative impacts of direct rule, as well as identifying where there has been minimal divergence in processes and outcomes.
West. A new political economy of humanitarian aid developed, reinforcing the symbiosis between humanitarianism and the state. The sufficiency of a humanitarian minimum became justification for cuts in public expenditure, particularly as NGOs offered themselves as subcontractors for the provision of essential services at home and abroad. Western governments placed pressure on NGOs to carry out neomanagerial reforms that would promote cultural synergies with their own overseas aid departments, now reorganised according to the business
Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
6 The ‘frontiers of social democracy’: public expenditure, redistribution and divisions of social democratic political economy Introduction Two abiding themes of British politics in the 1960s and 1970s were the European membership debate and British economic decline. Both played crucial roles in the dialogue and uneven progress of Labour Governments of the period, and in the wider debates of the Labour Party and British politics. These critical aspects of political debate also reveal the inherent complexity and emerging divisions of Labour’s post-war revisionist
of loans, amounted to roughly 45% of Northern Ireland’s public expenditure.20 A month later Rees’s plan was rendered redundant by a new forecast of Harland & Wolff ’s financial position. In February 1974 the company had estimated it would lose £5.7 million but it now estimated the loss would be £32.8 million. Rees warned that it would be best to assume an even worse outcome. If they dealt with the problem on a purely commercial ‘positive direct rule’: economic policy 177 basis this would mean closing the yard but, he argued, to put 10,000 people out of work
and retail sector had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, equating to a loss of 30,300 jobs. Both the Fianna Fáil/Green government and the Fine Gael/Labour coalition which followed placed a heavy emphasis on public expenditure cutbacks as a means of reducing Ireland’s deficit. Public spending cuts have a disproportionately negative impact upon women, who depend more on public services and social welfare payments. In particular, social welfare payments fought for by the women’s movement – such as Child Benefit and the One Parent Family Payment – have been targeted for cuts
away in theory but not in reality. Different treatment . The fact that Scottish denizens received 22% more public expenditure per head and Welsh 13% more than English ones (2006 figures) has fuelled resentment in England against the devolved settlement (see Barnett formula, below). English nationalism Many English people like to delude themselves that they are immune from anything so vulgar as nationalism but the facts suggest otherwise. Throughout earlier centuries, England was the motor for ‘British’ imperialism, absorbing the Celtic periphery before taking
cuts in public expenditure that helped emasculate the social contract from its broader conception to a mechanism for stringent wage restraint. As former Cabinet minister Barbara Castle declared: ‘It was not the unions that broke the Social Contract but the government, as it carried through the deflationary policy Denis Healey had convinced himself was necessary, with further spending cuts, cash limits and all the conventional measures to reduce demand’.35 Alternative interpretations have been advanced that challenge some widely held misconceptions that the industrial
collection explore, such measures have resulted in a spiralling of national debt coupled with never-ending cuts to public expenditure. So, as the plight of Ireland and Greece attests, austerity measures have proved a recipe for social disaster that has nonetheless reinscribed neoliberal economic models at the very heart of the State. 15 If one’s goal is growth, in other words, neoliberal austerity programmes are entirely