The Northern Ireland Labour Party's (NILP) Constitutional Convention manifesto made clear the party's belief in the British connection. It advocated a strong local Executive presiding over departmental committees in which Protestants and Catholics would ‘share responsibility’. The relations between the NILP and British Labour Party (BLP) deteriorated to an all-time low in the years immediately following the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) strike. By the mid-1970s the NILP's political fortunes had taken a dramatic downswing. The Campaign for Labour Representation (CLR) consistently lobbied the BLP to organise in Northern Ireland. The final years of NILP are elaborated. Even though the NILP did not officially wind up its operations until as late as 1987, it had effectively ceased to exist with every new plume of smoke that bellowed over the Belfast skyline in the 1970s.

Throughout societies such as Northern Ireland that have experienced the deleterious effects of political violence, the creation of fitting memorials should be integral to the efforts of transitional policymakers to combat widespread ambivalence towards the suffering of victims and the legacy of conflict. In the context of a discussion of the important interface between public narrative remembering and the memorialisation of the past, this chapter presents unique conceptual suggestions in relation to the forms that memorials in transitional Northern Ireland might take. It also offers an examination of the complexities of confronting and mastering uncomfortable public political and social memory as a necessary part of post-conflict transition and democratic reconstruction.

This chapter summarises Charles Dickens's view of the ghost story. It presents some close readings of A Christmas Carol, ‘The Signalman’ and ‘A December Vision’. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses ghosts to critique the economic system and to pardon capitalism. In ‘A December Vision’, Dickens tries to represent the ghost of the industrial economy as it spreads poverty throughout the country. Finally, it shows that Dickens's fascination with the allegorical mode of the ghost story and the ways such allegories can be read are addressed in ‘The Signalman’.

This chapter describes the conflict between the opposed visions of the relationship between history and identity. It argues that it was the appearance of new forms of religious narrative and theological argument in early nineteenth-century Europe which made possible the emergence of the modern understanding of history, authority, narrative and identity. Over the past three decades, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and literary theorists have all produced fine works making competing claims for the origin of this new form of deep subjectivity. This chapter also explores how new forms of historical enquiry has opened up new ways of imagining the self. The rise of historical criticism moved in tandem with a new theological understanding of the nature of Christ and man, making selfhood move from being simply oppositional to be seen as somehow unnatural or pathological.

This chapter deals with the cross-national experience of the measurement of better regulation policies. The focus is on countries with experience in the development and management of tools aimed at assessing regulatory quality. It examines three non-EU countries, namely the USA, Canada and Australia. These are countries with a relatively long history of attempts to forge a quality assurance culture in regulation. The chapter then examines Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA have a robust network of quality assurance actors and also look at impact assessment beyond the issue of red tape. By contrast, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands focus on administrative burdens and are characterised by a simpler system of monitoring.

This chapter studies images of spectrality that can be found in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Haunted Hotel. It determines that Collins believed that money immorally or illegally acquired makes the self ghostly and visible to the amorality of the economic system. It then introduces ‘The Ghost in the Bank of England’, where Collins addresses the relationship between paper money and the ghostly.

The 1830 Beer Act triggered the most intense period of public debate on alcohol since the 1750s and radicalised the temperance movement in Britain. The appearance of prohibitionism would split the temperance movement, but it would also bring to a head the questions of liberty and State regulation. For all its fiery rhetoric, British teetotalism made little impact on actual levels of alcohol consumption. Moderate drinking threatened to undermine the whole temperance project by showing that alcohol was not inherently destructive. The Maine Law of 1851 sidestepped the limitations of moral suasionism by identifying the source of the problem not in drinkers, but in the drinks trade itself. There was the optimistic notion that, freed from the undue influence of the State, individuals will automatically choose to indulge their ‘higher’ faculties — something which, in the context of the debates over prohibition, presupposed a reasonable level of sobriety. However, what was left out of the equation on all sides was the possibility that drunkenness might sometimes be — to put it simply — a good thing.

This chapter turns to Elephant, Gus Van Sant's film about the Columbine killings, which may be regarded as interactive and which provokes consideration of non-linearity as a new form of composition, rather than as a form of decomposition or simple disruption. This opens the way to a broader consideration of the cultural forms and practices of everyday life within informational culture. The logic of narrative as an ongoing response to information may be generalized: there is an elephant called narrative in the room.

The twentieth-century Pentecost, the Welsh Revival of 1904–5, was the last flourish of mass resistance to the triumph of the historicist perspective. For a brief moment, the new rules of historical and psychological discourse were rent asunder. Their core assumptions, the narrative exclusion of the supernatural and the containment of the sacred within the field of memory, were challenged as miraculous events tore apart the fabric of everyday life. The movement began on the edge of industrial Wales, in 1904. It was characterised by charismatic worship and its converts were credited with the establishment of the Pentecostal Churches. The movement's emergence is attributed variously to the power of secret prayers, a conservative reaction to the decline of Welsh culture, and the psychological frustration of the disenfranchised.