This title offers a fresh and sustained scrutiny of the Irish system of national government. It examines the cabinet, the departments of finance and the Taoiseach, ministerial relationships with civil servants, the growth and decline of agencies and the courts.

And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing.

This is a magisterial narrative of the most turbulent decade in Anglo-Irish history: a decade of unleashed passions that came close to destroying the parliamentary system and to causing civil war in the United Kingdom. It was also the decade of the cataclysmic Great War, of an officers' mutiny in an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army and of Irish armed rebellion. It was a time, argues Ronan Fanning, when violence and the threat of violence trumped democratic politics. This is a contentious view. Historians have wished to see the events of that decade as an aberration, as an eruption of irrational bloodletting. And they have have been reluctant to write about the triumph of physical force. Fanning argues that in fact violence worked, however much this offends our contemporary moral instincts. Without resistance from the Ulster Unionists and its very real threat of violence the state of Northern Ireland would never have come into being. The Home Rule party of constitutionalist nationalists failed, and were pushed aside by the revolutionary nationalists Sinn Fein. Bleakly realistic, ruthlessly analytical of the vacillation and indecision displayed by democratic politicians at Westminster faced with such revolutionary intransigence, Fatal Path is history as it was, not as we would wish it to be.

This book provides an unprecedented analysis of the politics underlying the appointment of judges in Ireland, enlivened by a wealth of interview material, and putting the Irish experience into a broad comparative framework. It tells the inside story of the process by which judges are chosen both in cabinet and in the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board over the past three decades and charts a path for future reform of judicial appointment processes in Ireland. The research is based on a large number of interviews with senior judges, current and former politicians, Attorneys-General and members of the Judicial Appointments AdvisoryBoard. The circumstances surrounding decisions about institutional design and institutional change are reconstructed in meticulous detail, giving us an excellent insight into the significance of a complex series of events that govern the way in which judges in Ireland are chosen today. Author Jennifer Carroll MacNeill is both an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Scholar and the winner of the Basil Chubb Prize 2015 for the best politics PhD in Ireland. [Subject: Legal History, Legal Studies, Politics, Ireland]

The Ireland-Northern Ireland Protocol, part of the Withdrawal Agreement concluded between the European Union and the United Kingdom, is intended to address the difficult and complex impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland, North and South, and between Ireland and Great Britain. It has become an exceptionally important, if controversial, part of the new architecture that governs the relationship between the UK and the EU more generally, covering issues that range from trade flows to free movement, from North-South Co-operation to the protection of human rights, from customs arrangements to democratic oversight by the Northern Ireland Assembly. This edited collection offers insights from a wide array of academic experts and practitioners in each of the various areas of legal practice that the Protocol affects, providing a comprehensive examination of the Protocol in all its legal dimensions, drawing on international law, European Union Law, and domestic constitutional and public law. This title is also available as Open Access.

Ireland has enjoyed continuous democratic government for almost a century, an unusual experience among countries that gained their independence in the 20th century. But the way this works in practice has changed dramatically over time. Ireland's colonial past had an enduring influence over political life for much of the time since independence, enabling stable institutions of democratic accountability, while also shaping a dismal record of economic under-development and persistent emigration. More recently, membership of the EU has brought about far-reaching transformation across almost all aspects of Irish life. But if anything, the paradoxes have only intensified. Now one of the most open economies in the world, Ireland has experienced both rapid growth and one of the most severe crashes in the wake of the Great Recession. On some measures Ireland is among the most affluent countries in the world, yet this is not the lived experience for many of its citizens. Ireland is an unequivocally modern state, yet public life continues to be marked by formative ideas and values in which tradition and modernity are held in often uneasy embrace. It is a small state that has ambitions to leverage its distinctive place in the Atlantic and European worlds to carry more weight on the world stage. Ireland continues to be deeply connected to Britain through ties of culture and trade, now matters of deep concern in the context of Brexit. And the old fault-lines between North and South, between Ireland and Britain, which had been at the core of one of Europe's longest and bloodiest civil conflicts, risk being reopened by Britain's new hard-edged approach to national and European identities. These key issues are teased out in the 41 chapters of this book, making this the most comprehensive volume on Irish politics to date.

Building on the success of the first two editions, Politics in the Republic of Ireland continues to provide an authoritative introduction to all aspects of politics in the Irish Republic.

To what extent did Europeanisation contribute to Ireland’s transformation from ‘poor relation’ to ‘peer idol’? This book examines how Europeanisation affected Irish policy-making and implementation and how Ireland maximised the policy opportunities arising from membership of the EU while preserving embedded patterns of political behaviour. It focuses on the complex interplay of European, domestic and global factors as the explanation for the changing character of the ‘Celtic Tiger’. The authors demonstrate that, although Europeanisation spurred significant institutional and policy change, domestic forces filtered those consequences while global factors induced further adaptation. By identifying and assessing the adaptational pressures in a range of policy areas the book establishes that, in tandem with the European dimension, domestic features and global developments were key determinants of change and harbingers of new patterns of governance.