Young people leaving care in England,Northern Ireland,and Ireland

This paper explores the transitions of young people, aged 16-18, leaving state care in England, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. It is based substantially upon the findings from collaborative research which developed in stages between 1991 and 1999 - and is still ongoing. Four substantive areas are discussed. First, the legal framework of the three jurisdictions: the Children Act 1989, the Children (Northern Ireland) Order 1995 and the Child Care Act 1991; second, the research context within the three child care systems; third, the findings from the three related projects; and, finally, the key themes and issues arising from the research studies.     

Talking to Strangers: an Overview of an Independent Representation Project in Northern Ireland

SUMMARY: In 1990 the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NIACRO) launched a new initiative designed to complement the various support mechanisms currently available to those young people involved in the juvenile justice and child care systems in Northern Ireland. The Independent Representation Project involves young people in secure accommodation ‘talking to strangers’, that is, people who are independent of the institution, about any concerns they may have. This article describes this initiative and in particular reflects on its development since the appointment of the author as Project Coordinator.     

Foster Parents and Long-Term Placements: Key Findings from a Northern Ireland Study

SUMMARY: This article draws on the findings of a recent Northern Ireland Study on planned long-term foster care placements which it sets in both an all Ireland and a UK context. The article focuses on the aspirations and experiences of what the study found to be a very traditional group of foster parents. The article also identifies and discusses the implications of this type of foster carer for the development of the service.     

Negotiating Identity and Belonging: Migration Narratives of Protestants from Northern Ireland

This article draws on the migration narratives of Protestants from Northern Ireland, examining the impact of migration on issues of identity and belonging, particularly in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict. The life narratives were collected during the course of two studies relating to contemporary migration from Northern Ireland (2004-2007). The author concludes that the insecurity of Protestant identity continues to influence the significant migration rate of young middle class Protestants, most of whom are unlikely to return to live in Northern Ireland.     

Explaining the Emergence Process of the Civil Rights Protest in Northern Ireland (1945–1968): Insights from a Relational Social Movement Approach1

Abstract This article explains how the contingent of complex interactions among pre-existing structural settings, institutional constraints, processes of regional and international transformative events, and uniquely combined developments within and between different contenders in the aftermath of the Second World War shaped Northern Ireland socio and political relations and thus instigated the Civil Rights Movement mobilization process. By re-introducing the time-space context into our studies of collective action, through a relational reading, my intent first is to advance our understanding of those episodes and complex patterns of interaction that give rise to social movements, and second to move beyond the static movement-centric approach explanation and away from the a-historical nature of much of the social movement literature. My historical-sociological research, into the longitudinal case study of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement mobilization, involves secondary and new empirical primary sources, such as archival analysis, qualitative examination of Northern Ireland daily newspapers during the 1960s, and the collection of 35 semi-structured interviews with key players from the Civil Rights Movement.     

‘It's their word against mine’: young people's attitudes to the police complaints procedure in Northern Ireland

One of the central aims of the police reform process in Northern Ireland has been to increase the legitimacy of the policing structures and police officers amongst those who are served and policed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). To meet this aim, structures have been created to ensure that the PSNI is accountable to all sections of the community for its strategy and performance, and in monitoring the attitudes and behaviour of its officers. To that end, the Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI), the Northern Ireland Policing Board and 26 District Policing Partnerships have been created. This paper aims to break ground by looking in some detail at young people's attitudes to and experiences of the workings of one of those new bodies, the Police Ombudsman, and to explore issues related to young people's willingness to engage with the PONI.     

Assessing the local need for family and child care services: a small area utilization analysis

This article reports the findings of a study to develop a new method for allocating resources to family and child care services within Northern Ireland. Downloads from financial and client databases, together with a survey of social worker case activity, were used to estimate utilization costs across 500 local areas. Regression techniques were then used to account for variations in these costs in terms of local socioeconomic conditions. The resultant needs index represents a fair and equitable means of allocating central family and child care budgets to local units of management and service delivery.     

‘Left to Fend for Themselves’: Immigration,Race Relations and the State in Twentieth Century Northern Ireland

Race relations legislation was only introduced to Northern Ireland in 1997, 31 years later than in Britain. This article examines the obstacles and challenges faced by minorities there during the twentieth century. By providing a case study of Northern Ireland, the article shifts the focus away from British inner cities, emphasising that outlying regions – so often overlooked within the context of UK race relations historiography – also had to grapple with issues surrounding race and immigration. The article challenges the notion that Northern Ireland was exclusively white, showing how ethnic minorities there were repeatedly overlooked and excluded.     

Patterns of Catholic-Protestant intermarriage in Northern Ireland

"Some of the social factors governing the incidence of religious intermarriage in Northern Ireland are reviewed before setting out data from a special tabulation of the 1971 census of Northern Ireland. According to the tabulation only some 2% of married couples enumerated declared themselves to be in Catholic-Protestant marriages....The tabulation suggests that the likelihood of marriage across the Catholic-Protestant divide is no greater for manual workers than for nonmanual workers when controls are introduced for relative group size.... There are indications that the incidence of Catholic-Protestant marriage was rising in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s."     

Contract, Charity, and Honorable Entitlement: Social Citizenship and the 1967 Abortion Act in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement

This article investigates the extent to which women’spolitical, civil, and social citizenship rights in the post–Good Friday Agreement (1998)period in Northern Ireland can be expanded. It argues that theGood Friday Agreement, as a framework document, offers someopportunity for the expansion of women’s political andcivil citizenship rights. Legislative attempts to extend the1967 Abortion Act (United Kingdom) to Northern Ireland and recentefforts to have the existing law governing abortion in NorthernIreland clarified through the judiciary are examined to demonstratethe continued denial of women’s social citizenship rights.Various routes to address Northern Irish women’s accessto abortion services are assessed, and it is argued that extendingthe 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, a long-standing demandof pro-choice women’s groups, will insufficiently facilitatewomen’s access to social citizenship rights. Consistentwith recent directions in social policy scholarship, this articleargues that a recognition of agency as an outcome of individualand collective social action is necessary to access abortionand women’s social citizenship rights in the post–GoodFriday Agreement period in Northern Ireland.     

Political Transformation and the Reinvention of the Ulster-Scots Identity and Culture

In the 1990s, Ulster-Scots language and culture was mobilized by some Ulster unionists in Northern Ireland as a badge of their cultural identity. The Ulster-Scots language and culture had its eighteenth century, premodern heyday in the north-eastern counties of the north of Ireland where it expressed distinctiveness from English and Englishness. However, in common with many regional dialects elsewhere in Europe, the processes of modernization signalled the demise of Ulster-Scots. The contemporary reinvention of an Ulster-Scots identity was precipitated by the 1990s political transformation of Northern Ireland. This reinvention has multiple manifestations. It is, variously, a myth of origin, a language and culture, a communal consciousness, a reaction against Irish nationalist cultural assertiveness in Northern Ireland, an embryonic nationalism, and a component part of the British identity. Ultimately, the reinvention of the Ulster-Scots cultural narrative appears designed to offset advances made by Irish nationalists in the assertion of their culture in Northern Ireland. Ulster-Scots has also been reinvented in an attempt to provide the Ulster unionist identity with the cultural booster required to deliver security and continuity to an identity experiencing chronic insecurity and doubt during a period of political transformation. However, the ability of Ulster-Scots to deliver on these aims is questionable.     

‘All feasible measures’—Children's Rights and Violent Conflict in Northern Ireland

SUMMARY: The UK, having ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is bound to take ‘all feasible measures' to protect children in armed conflicts; yet in its First Report on progress on the Convention, the Government barely acknowledged the impact on children and young people of violence in Northern Ireland. By contrast the Children's Rights Development Unit in its ‘alternative’ report, the ‘UK Agenda for Children’, examined in detail children's rights in Northern Ireland, and how the Government could comply with the Convention. This article describes the consultation process informing CRDU's report, and highlights the need for children's rights to be addressed as part of both healing the past and shaping the future of Northern Ireland.     

Official conceptualizations of person-centered care: Which person counts?

Numerous studies have indicated that a “psycho-social” person-centered care approach, involving the delivery of a compassionate, respectful model of care, leads to a high quality of life, particularly for older people living in residential care. This has prompted policy-makers to endorse this approach. Yet, some commentators have argued that the model of person-centered care in official government policies equates to a “consumer-based” rather than a psycho-social approach, as it focuses solely on offering service-users more choice and on promoting independence. However, as such arguments are made in the absence of any empirical analysis, it is unclear both whether such a distinction exists in practice, and, if so, how this alternative model developed. This study explores the development of minimum standards for residential care settings for older people in Ireland in order to address this gap in our understanding of person-centered care. Findings confirm that a consumer-driven model of person-centered care underpins the Irish Standards; residential care is portrayed as a hotel-like service and residents as discerning consumers, which may be unsuitable for older people in residential care with limited capacity to make key choices. Analysis indicates that this model can be seen both as an extension of consumer-driven policies endorsed by many neo-liberal governments, and also of policy-makers' fears of losing their autonomy when they reach the “Fourth Age”. This study is particularly illuminating, given the similarities between the Irish care system with England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Australia.     

Public Attitudes toward Partisan and Neutral Symbols in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland

Using original data from the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey, this article assesses public attitudes toward key issues of symbolism intimately connected with the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. It uses public attitudes toward the symbolic expressions of Northern Ireland's politico-religious blocs as indicators of the extent of intercommunity tolerance in the delicate post-Belfast Agreement period. Survey questions on attitudes toward flags, including the idea of a new flag for Northern Ireland; loyalist and republican murals; and memorials to the dead of the conflict, including the idea of a memorial for all of the victims of the conflict, reveal that partisan attitudes toward communal symbols of identity and commemoration persist, despite macro-level political changes heralded by the 1998 peace accord. It is argued that the consociational design of the Belfast Agreement facilitates the perpetuation of the single-identity politics of Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. In this context, public attachment to partisan symbols remains strong.     

Ascertaining the Perspectives of Young Children in Care: Case Studies in the Use of Reality Boxes

This article describes the use of an innovative method, reality boxes, to elicit the perspectives of children, ages four to seven years, in state care. Using examples from a broader research project based on children in Northern Ireland, which was concerned with their participation rights, the article considers how the children used the boxes to express their views. Informed by a child rights‐based approach, the article highlights the processes and practices involved and concludes by stressing the potential importance of this method, used in the context of this framework, in social work practice with young children.     

Risks and Responsibilities: Creating Dialogical Spaces in Northern Ireland

The idea that open dialogue is the key to transformative politics sounds straightforward. However, in a polity such as Northern Ireland where deep discord has intricate roots, an openness to difference is complex. I argue that dialogical spaces are created when people are prepared to engage in a risk-taking that conjoins self-disclosure with the vulnerability of being truly open to others; and are willing to bear the responsibility of mutually speaking with and listening to the plural other. First, I explain the relationship between identity, difference and political participation of women in Northern Ireland, examining alliance politics and solidarity. I offer suggestions for how difference, multiplicity and justice can be accommodated. Second, I extend beyond the specific context of Northern Ireland to evaluate the ability of feminist theories of deliberative democracy to facilitate dialogue across difference. I examine the importance of normative notions of deliberation, communication, narrative and competing needs. Third, I extrapolate from these theories the idea that the dynamic between listening and speaking creates a space to include diversity and commonality.     

Social mobility and constitutional and political preferences in Northern Ireland

During the past thirty years Catholics in Northern Ireland have experienced unprecedented upward social mobility. Some commentators have suggested that this has led Catholics not merely to adopt the lifestyles of the middle class but also to modify their constitutional preferences, leading to a decline in nationalism. In this paper I examine the relationship between social mobility, on the one hand, and, on the other, both constitutional preferences and political (left or right wing) preferences among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, using survey data collected in 1996. There is no evidence that Catholics' constitutional preferences are related to their mobility experiences.     

Peace, reconciliation and a shared future: a policy shift or more of the same?

Developments in the late 1990s, including paramilitary cease-firesand the advent (albeit, short-lived) of devolved Government,offered a new dispensation from which to appraise the communityrelations problem in Northern Ireland and advocate policy action.This paper considers an emergent policy framework entitled AShared Future. Drawing on the experience of delivering betterrelations through education in Northern Ireland, it argues thatwhilst A Shared Future reflects progress in how the problemof community relations is defined, many uncritical assumptionsare made about the potential of suggested actions to addressproblems of intergroup fear, mistrust and hostility.     

Child welfare in the United Kingdom

This paper sets the context for the subsequent papers by giving an overview of recent changes in legislation and social policy with respect to child welfare in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In England, services for children have been radically affected by the implementation of the Children Act 1989, which has introduced a unifying service to promote the welfare of children at risk, although it leaves a significant gap in supportive provision by excluding child offenders. By contrast, Scotland incorporates juvenile justice within its social work services and has developed a service unique in Europe. As in England and Wales, Scottish services for children are substantially concerned with child protection and the paper gives an exposition of recent developments and proposals for legislative change in this area. The emphasis in Northern Ireland is contained within the context of the ongoing violence which is a day-to-day occurrence within the province. The Irish experience is differently organised from that in other parts of the UK, giving a unique emphasis on voluntary services and a more pronounced use of residential child care. Moves are afoot to introduce amendments to the law which will emphasise working in partnership with parents and separate the disposal of juvenile offenders from other children. The paper ends with a resume of the following papers, linking them to the recent changes in policy and law.     

Mental health social work in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: challenges and opportunities for developing practice

Drawing on their experience of mental health social work in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the authors examine the impact of current legislative and policy change in both jurisdictions. The paper applies Lorenz's theoretical framework to develop a comparative analysis of how global and country specific variables have interacted in shaping mental health social work. The analysis identifies linkages between factors and indicates similarities and differences in mental health social work practice. The paper highlights emerging discourses in this field and explores the impact on practice of developments such as de-institutionalisation, community care, and ‘user rights’ versus ‘public protection’. The article concludes with a review of key challenges facing social workers in both jurisdictions and identifies opportunities for developing mental health social work in ways that can positively respond to change and effectively address the needs of mental health service users and their carers. The analysis provides an opportunity to evaluate Lorenz's theoretical framework and the paper includes a brief critical commentary on its utility as a conceptual tool in comparative social work.