At least in theory, the Sunningdale agreement of 1973 represented a high point, if not the high point, in institutionalising the relationship between the two parts of Ireland that had been ruptured in 1921. The planned Council of Ireland, incorporating a Council of Ministers and a Consultative Assembly, represented both an echo of the first Council of Ireland of the 1920s and a precursor of the North-South Ministerial Council of 1998. There were important respects in which the image of the Council represented the Achilles heel of the 1973 agreement: it provided a focal point for unionist anger, which was mobilised effectively to bring the whole agreement down. This paper looks at the significance of the Council of Ireland as a mechanism for reducing the negative consequences of the partition of Ireland, setting it in historical context. It explores changing attitudes towards institutions of this kind, viewed as a threat to their position in the United Kingdom by many unionists, as a “sell-out” that recognises partition by traditional nationalists, and as a sensible functional compromise by pragmatists on both sides.

This chapter examines the broad legal framework governing sexual offences by examining the selected offences of rape and sexual assault, which provide a foundation for understanding other sexual offences. This chapter will also briefly discuss sexual offences against vulnerable individuals such as children. Finally, the chapter considers the challenge that technology increasingly poses in the area of sexual offences and considers how technology may facilitate traditional forms of offending or create new forms of offending.

A person’s interest in real or personal property is protected by the law of trespass. Trespass is one of the oldest of the common law actions, and most of the core principles arise from common law. Trespass was used for various claims, the common element of which was that the interference was direct – where the interference was indirect the ‘action on the case’ was more appropriate, and this action evolved into the modern law of negligence. Trespass is actionable per se – that is, there is no need for the plaintiff to prove that they suffered damage. Trespass can also be a crime; however, the principles should be kept distinct.As we saw in Chapter 6, the trespass action is also used to protect the plaintiff’s interest in their bodily integrity – trespass to the person can be assault, battery or false imprisonment. In this chapter we are dealing with trespass to land and to personal property. Land is defined in the same way as it is in the general law of property, and personal property is, in essence, any property other than land. ‘Personal property’ as a term is often used interchangeably with the terms ‘goods’ or ‘chattels’.

This chapter introduces summary offences, sometimes referred to as ‘simple offences’, or matters laid ‘on complaint’. In Chapter 2, we observed how criminal matters are determined in different ways, including jury trials, before a magistrate sitting alone, and infringement notices. We also observed that summary matters carry with them a spectrum of penalties, ranging from (limited) terms of imprisonment, fines, and administrative sanctions. Here, we move to a consideration of actual offence provisions.The term ‘summary offence’ is a reference to the procedure through which an offence is determined. Matters that are ‘disposed of summarily’ are processed in a Local or Magistrate’s Court by a Magistrate sitting alone in the absence of a jury. We begin this chapter by considering the nature of summary offences, before turning to explore the concept of public peace and its associated relationship with procedure and powers. We then consider the major categories of summary offences relating to public order, before concluding with traffic offences.

Once a duty of care has been established, the plaintiff must then establish that there was a failure to comply with that duty – that the defendant fell below the standard required. There are two steps to this: establishing the standard required and determining whether the defendant fell below that standard. This area of law was developed in case law, which has been affected by statute in most jurisdictions. However, the statutes use many of the concepts, and much of the wording, from common law.

As Minister of State in Northern Ireland 1974-1976, Stanley Orme MP (1923-2005) worked at the heart of British government policies that attempted to ameliorate and politicise the membership of those loyalist groups that had successfully brought down the power sharing executive in 1974. Orme followed and extended a government policy of often secret engagement of those outside the mainstream of Northern Ireland politics; a policy that successfully brought about the Provisional IRA’s 1975 ceasefire, but which failed to bring the UVF into electoral politics with the dismal performance of the Volunteer Political Party in the 1974 general elections. Orme’s approach, outlined in the 1975 pamphlet ‘Industrial Democracy’ encouraged workers’ participation in the newly nationalised Harland and Wolff shipyard and was a direct attempt to politicise the Protestant working classes of Belfast. Orme attempted to redirect their support away from both existing militant and right-wing groups that at this time included the UDA, UVF and Ulster Vanguard. Orme’s view was that skilled industrial workers belonged within the fold of progressive social democracy and that the extension of government-backed syndicalist activity in the ship yard would empower the workers and help shift Northern Ireland as a whole from sectarian models of political activity to a class based system similar to the rest of the UK. For Orme, ‘Industrial Democracy’ was the ‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland’ and a potential solution to the province’s ills, ‘If the working-class people of Northern Ireland can be convinced that, whatever their religious denominations, they have economic interests in common, they will be able to approach the constitutional problem… with open minds.’ (‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland?’, [undated] c. 1975 LSE Orme 1/3). Using a combination of Orme’s official and private papers, this chapter seeks to explore and critique Orme’s motivation, his policy, and its effect.

Depending on the construction of a particular crime, criminal responsibility is generally analysed in terms of an individual carrying out proscribed acts with a culpable state of mind. The framework of criminal responsibility can be extended in various ways and those extended forms will be synthesised and discussed in this chapter.The first extension category encompasses the inchoate crimes of attempt, conspiracy and incitement. The term ‘inchoate’ comes from the Latin past participle of ‘incohare’ meaning ‘to begin’ or ‘start work on’. These are substantive crimes which extend liability back in time and to other people so that conduct is criminalised, which arguably is not directly harmful but which is regarded as culpable for policy reasons and allows earlier intervention of law enforcement authorities to prevent the completed offence.The second category is complicity, which is a concept allowing for the extension of criminal liability to people other than the accused person who carries out the conduct with the requisite mental element constituting the offence. There are various forms of principal and accessorial criminal liability within the concept of complicity.

Chapters 6 and 7 dealt with the substantive requirements of the torts of trespass to the person and trespass to property and goods. This chapter deals with the defences and remedies available to those actions.Defences to trespass based on self-help include the defences of self-defence or defence of another, defence of property, necessity or abatement. Defences based on justification are consent and the exercise of disciplinary powers. There is a fault-based defence of inevitable accident. Provocation, mistake, contributory negligence and the incapacity of the defendant are not defences to trespass.The remedies available for trespass to the person include damages (nominal, compensatory, aggravated and exemplary) and injunctions.

This chapter will address the two nuisance torts: private nuisance and public nuisance. Both torts concern interferences with the plaintiff’s ability to use and enjoy their land, with the extent of the interference the key determinant of which tort is applicable. Private nuisance involves an interference with the plaintiff’s use and enjoyment of their individual property rights, whereas public nuisance involves an interference with the health safety, comfort and convenience of the public at large, but where the plaintiff has suffered special or particular damage over and above other members of the public.The nuisance torts play an important role in providing a cause of action for environmental pollutants, such as noise, smell, smoke and fumes. The torts are adaptive to contemporary twenty-first century issues – for instance, it is possible that these torts can be utilised to obtain remedies from operators of facilities that emit greenhouse gas emissions for harm caused by global warming and rising sea levels.

Democracy is seen to exert a globalizing force upon the international community; yet its most enthusiastic proponents argue that it must be a localized, grassroots phenomenon to be of any value. Modern democracy appeared originally within the context of a sovereign state system and required state autonomy in order to preserve democratic institutions. The increasing unwillingness to challenge normative claims made in the political arena, especially within disparate cultural contexts, was a disservice perpetuated by the discipline. The long-standing debate in international relations theory between 'realists' and 'idealists' filtered into the democratic transformation debate. The complexity of the debate was compounded insofar, as the objective commonly accepted by most participants in the debate was itself a manifestly normative construct. The current fascination of international relations theorists in the spread of democratic regimes seems to be more intensely fixed upon the relationship between democracy and peace than upon democracy and wealth.

This chapter looks at many of the issues involved in theorizing civil society. A focus on 'civil society' has permitted institutions such as the World Bank to emphasize the principles as the accountability of the state to its citizens, and the desirability of due process and transparency in all government activity. Civil society was indistinguishable from political society because social life was by its very nature political. The chapter discusses a number of conceptual objections to the term. The current enthusiasm for 'civil society' both as an analytical device to understand why things happen and, more commonly, as an ideal model of political life, leaves much unsaid. The problem with 'civil society' as an analytical concept, or as even as a political ideal, is not that it is undertheorized, but that it is overtheorized.

A market system is conducive to democratic politics for two predominant reasons: a well-functioning market requires a certain scope for the free activity of individuals within a framework of stable and predictable laws. The causal link between the market and democratic government is relatively forceful to the extent that 'democracy' is understood as the establishment and protection of private property rights. The assertion that a strong market prevents the concentration of political power is hardly a novel observation; it was the theme throughout most of Friedrich Hayek's works. The perception of a close relationship between democracy and state autonomy is becoming increasingly common: intriguingly, Jean-Marie Guéhenno's French publication The End of Democracy was translated into English as The End of the Nation State. A domestic marketplace independent of state control is conducive to the establishment of democracy, because it diffuses power away from the state.

As we have seen, to establish that a defendant is liable in the tort of negligence, the plaintiff has to prove, on the balance of probabilities, that (1) a duty was owed by the defendant to the plaintiff; (2) the duty was breached; and (3) the breach caused compensable damage within the scope of liability. The first of these requirements, the duty of care, was the key innovation established by the case of Donoghue v Stevenson and the concepts of ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘reasonable foreseeability’ are central to the reasoning in that case. However, although these concepts are easy to describe and have theoretical elegance, they are much more difficult to apply to a given relationship. This chapter shows the attempt by Australian courts to find a unifying principle or single approach by which to answer the question of duty in a novel case, and then a resolution of sorts, occurring around 2000–01, that any such test is likely to be problematic. The current approach in a novel case is the ‘multi-factorial’ or ‘salient features’ approach.