Governance Blog Archive
Here you will find an archive of Governance Blog articles published before 1 May 2022, divided into their relevant categories.
Brexit
This article updates a previous article on the negotiations around the Gibraltar Protocol. Gibraltar provides an interesting point of comparison with Northern Ireland in terms of arrangements following the…
John Locke once wrote, ‘we should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, signs of our ideas only,…
The Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol (‘the Protocol’) was the subject of a judicial review challenge at the High Court of Justice in Belfast. The hearing, which stretched over several days,…
Democracy and Government
Please note that more up-to-date statistics on gender representation can be found in the RaISe research paper Who Runs Northern Ireland? A Summary of Statistics Relating to Gender and…
A high profile consequence of the continuing failure to establish an Executive and fully functioning Assembly was the legislative passage this week of the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and…
This week is Libraries Week so we thought we would provide an insight into the Northern Ireland Assembly Library, its work and the collection that it manages. The Assembly…
Justice
In September 2021, Clare Bailey MLA introduced the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Bill to the Assembly. The Bill passed Second Stage on 12 October 2021 and would require…
In 2016 a man called Lance Hart shot his wife Claire and daughter Charlotte outside a swimming pool in Lincolnshire, England, before turning his shotgun on himself. Some of…
Last month, a new law came into force in England and Wales making upskirting a criminal offence. Upskirting involves taking a photo or video under a person’s…
Planning
This article explores the temporary planning measures introduced as a response to COVID-19 across the UK and Republic of Ireland (ROI). Some of these measures have, and will, require…
This blog article examines the similarities and differences between the planning systems north and south of the border on the island of Ireland. It is based on a more…
The planning system has undergone much change recently, so what are the new structures and how has the balance of responsibility shifted between central and local government?…
Statistics and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
It is difficult to grasp the full extent of what is portrayed by road traffic collision statistics. Each statistic represents a human being and, in the case of those…
Please note that the Constituency Profiles have been updated with a new layout and are available on a new page here. The Research and Information Service (RaISe) has just…
Please note: we have posted a new version of this blog article using the most recent data, see here. This article presents a brief demographic profile of Northern Ireland,…