This chapter provides an overview of the achievements and failures of direct rule in Northern Ireland in relation to substantive policies, policy formulation, administrative delivery systems, public participation and accountability. The positive features of direct rule include its role in ensuring the continuation of governance in Northern Ireland whenever the local political parties disagree on certain issues, promotion of cross-border cooperation and the introduction of radical measures to assist in the peace process. Some of the limitations and failings of direct rule in practice include democratic deficit, limited government accountability and divided time of ministers between Northern Ireland and Westminster. This chapter also compares the contribution of direct rule and devolution to the better governance of Northern Ireland.

This chapter recounts the reception of Irigaray's work by feminist scholars in its different phases. It evaluates the impact of the principal elements of Irigaray's work that are concerned with women and religion. It undertakes a survey of the way that Irigaray has influenced certain women philosophers, both religious and secular, and their responses to her work. Irigaray's work, particularly those explorations concerned with sexual difference, has been the subject of diverse reactions—both complimentary and unsympathetic. In religious studies, it also prompted women to develop their own critical analyses and creative experimentations, especially in reaction to the traditional formulas of the philosophy of religion. The chapter concludes by offering insight into the significance of Irigaray's contributions, particularly for scholars in the study of religion.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins by demonstrating the prevalence of the binary hierarchies of high/low culture, philosophy/film and word/image in much of the philosophical writing on The Matrix Trilogy. These had the effect of ensuring that the films could not make a contribution to philosophy. The book shows that the films depart from the singularity that characterises Jean Baudrillard's conception of the hyperreal and the code, offering a series of multiple, different, hyperreal worlds and codes. It then offers a summary of the author's methodology and a brief commentary on its utilisation in the preceding analysis of The Matrix Trilogy. This will be followed by an assessment of the differences between the author's methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film and the other approaches that have been delineated by Stephen Mulhall and Thomas Wartenberg.

The French revolutionaries may have been keen to suggest that they were creating a completely new era and starting afresh, but they inevitably drew on earlier precedents and ideas both to make sense of the changes taking place around them and to help them to construct workable models for the future. Among the various models and ideas on which they drew, those from across the Channel were particularly important. In the early months of the Revolution, the existing British constitution and the example of the Glorious Revolution were cited, but as events moved on, it was 1640–60 that offered the most obvious precedent. Due to citations of English republican works that had appeared since the beginning of the eighteenth century, the key works and ideas of that tradition were both available and familiar to the French revolutionaries as they set out to recover their own liberty.

This chapter provides a thematic background to the present five nation states and three Home Rule territories, in the Nordic region, using the concepts of nation-building, and state-building. Nation-building in nineteenth-century Finland concentrated on the promotion of the Finnish language, a task facilitated by the non-obstructive stance of the Russian imperial power for the bulk of the second half of the century. The Swedish-speaking Åland islands have long-standing links with Sweden. The officials in Norway were often educated in Copenhagen and were in the employ of the Swedish crown. Similarly, the civil servants in Helsinki were Swedish-not Finnish-speaking and worked for the Russian czar. Iceland was geographically distant from the European cultural mainstream and also, unlike Finland and Norway, physically removed from the imperial power, Denmark. In that respect it had much in common with the Faeroes and Greenland, along with Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides.

The ‘ungovernable passions’ which characterised the habitual drinker took on a new resonance as sensibility mutated into full-blown Romanticism. Whereas habitual drinkers had previously been described, diagnosed, defined, and dissected from the outside — by sober preachers, doctors and moralists — they were about to start speaking for themselves. The first example of this appeared in a book called Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors, published in 1814 by Basil Montagu. Charles Lamb's use of Miltonic allusion both aggrandises the experience of addiction, and creates an analogy between intoxication and the Fall of Man. Intoxication has always had a special relationship with art. Symposiastic poetry, which praised alcohol for both its conviviality and its ability to inspire, was popular from the Renaissance onwards. Robert Burns revitalised the tradition of symposiastic verse in poems such as ‘Scotch drink’, as well as incorporating them into ‘Tam O'Shanter’: a poem which celebrated the pleasures of convivial drinking in the warmest terms, while using drunkenness as the occasion for the wildly hallucinogenic imagery of the denouement.

This chapter explores the tension between different ways of knowing the past and the conflicting understandings of selfhood entailed in them. It is a conflict, which is sustained by different conceptualisations of death. These different conceptualisations determined both the form of the historical object and the imagined shape of the historian's insight. Christ emerged as a historical character in the Christologies of the nineteenth century through reference to his carnal limitation. His being and consciousness were portrayed as entities bounded in the kenosis by death. Similarly, the authority of the historical text was itself dependent on an implicit understanding of the limits of the historian's self. Within the new professional discipline of history, interpretations only became acceptable if they could demonstrate that the interpreted object was somehow insulated from the infective or partisan concerns of the interpreter.

This chapter examines an important event in the lengthy dispute between Basque, the central government and several EU bodies on the scope of politically sensitive Basque taxation powers. It studies the distinct features of the Basque taxation regime and its political significance in modern Basque politics. It then studies the development of EU challenges to Basque taxation measures and the arguments formed by the European Commission. This chapter also discusses defensive Basque government strategies that protect taxation powers against EU challenges.

This chapter reconsiders the Britishness of England given that the United Kingdom is still the political location for the continuing legends and anxieties of Englishness. It suggests that the notion of Britishness as a way of life implied sentiments of loyalty much deeper than legalistic arrangements, and explains that conversational tension between citizenship and patriotism is one of the dominant themes of British public discourse. The chapter also discusses the argument which suggests an increasing sense of English self-consciousness and highlights the claim that while the other nations within the United Kingdom had retained their distinctive identities, the English had found it more difficult to do so.

In 2000, almost every state in the world (all except Cuba, India, Israel and Pakistan) publicly subscribed once again to the principle that the spread of nuclear weapons to states not already possessing them is dangerous to international security and that it should therefore be energetically discouraged. The occasion was the latest review conference of the 30-year-old Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, the chief international instrument for restricting nuclear proliferation, and for reversing such proliferation as has occurred, if its Article 6 is taken seriously. But the correctness of this principle is not self-evident. An important intellectual challenge comes from Kenneth Waltz, writing most recently in 2003. The basis of his challenge is a generalisation of what he regards as a significant lesson of the Cold War years. This chapter deals with nuclear weapons and international security, starting with Barry Buzan's concept of a ‘security complex’. It concludes by looking at two broad approaches to securing the mutually beneficial outcome of non-proliferation: the centralised approach and the decentralised approach.