J Coakley
Biographic Data
| ID | 14819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Coakley |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Coakley |
| SIGNATURE | COAKLEY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1442-9169 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 117 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 440 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 116 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Irish Unity: Some Societal Consequences
Counting problems: The rights of nations in the island of Ireland
Northern Ireland and the British dimension
The chapter traces the emergence of Northern Ireland as a political entity in 1921 and the polarised form of politics that has been dominant there since then. It examines the impact of partition upon three sets of relations: those between Ireland and Britain, those between north and south within Ireland, and those between Protestants and Catholics within Northern Ireland. It analyses conflict-resolution mechanisms since the 1970s, discussing the …
Policy and administration
The cabinet and Taoiseach (prime minister) are the legal and political apex of public decision-making in Ireland. While in theory they might be expected simply to execute decisions made by the Houses of the Oireachtas (parliament), in reality the government is more powerful than that. This chapter explores how government in Ireland operates and considers a number of different models describing the distribution of power in the political executive …
The context of Irish politics
The chapter outlines the historical background to contemporary Irish politics. It focuses in particular on the emergence of the modern state, tracing the impact of British rule upon a mode of government many of whose features (including its administrative system and many of its political cultural values) were inherited or adopted by the newly independent Irish state after 1922. The pre-independence party system is analysed in depth, as is the per…
Society and political culture
The chapter defines the concept of political culture and identifies its central components in Ireland. These include nationalism and in particular a near universal agreement on the need for a separate Irish state, a commitment to democratic values, an increasingly secular world-view, support for extensive state intervention in economic matters rooted in centrist values and a keen interest, especially among younger cohorts, in international public…
The foundations of statehood
The chapter outlines the historical background to contemporary Irish politics. It focuses in particular on the emergence of the modern state, tracing the impact of British rule upon a mode of government many of whose features (including its administrative system and many of its political cultural values) were inherited or adopted by the newly independent Irish state after 1922. The pre-independence party system is analysed in depth, as is the per…
Politics in the Republic of Ireland
A Farewell to Northern Ireland? Constitutional Options for Irish Unity
A combination of unintended consequences of Brexit and demographic change in Northern Ireland has brought the issue of Irish unity forcefully onto the political agenda. The meaning and implications of ‘unity’, however, remain unclear. The comparative politics literature offers several models of territorial statehood that are of theoretical interest, but only two potentially enjoy substantial political recognition in Ireland. The first is a unitar…
The Perception of the Legitimacy of Citizens’ Assemblies in Deeply Divided Places? Evidence of Public and Elite Opinion from Consociational Northern Ireland
How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support …
What Kind of Ireland?
Modern Ireland is a relatively wealthy and politically stable democracy, but it bears the deep marks of its route to this point. This introductory chapter draws together some key themes that run through this volume and profiles the core contributions of each of its chapters. The overall story is one of contradictory influences. The political institutions of the state, notwithstanding much innovation over time, retain a bias toward a remarkably st…
The Politics of the Presidency
This chapter assesses the political role of the President of Ireland, exploring the tension between the authority implied by direct election and the limited powers explicitly granted to the President in the constitution. It outlines the changing role of the President since the creation of the office in 1938, drawing attention in particular to the manner in which incumbents have pushed out the perceived boundaries of the office since 1990. It begi…
Geographical retreat and symbolic advance: Language policy in Ireland
Language policy in the Republic of Ireland has an unusual starting point: the geographical base of the Irish language is very weak and territorially dispersed, yet the constitutional status of the language is extremely strong. The article explores this paradox. It sets Irish language policy in two contexts: that of successful nationalist movements mainly in Central and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, and that of the struggling Celt…
Linguistic territoriality under stress: European perspectives
This article revisits a well-known dichotomy (the ‘territorial’ and ‘personal’ principles) and develops a four-element classification of state approaches (from the most generous to the most menacing, from the perspective of speakers of minority languages). The article examines the implications for language policy of geographically dispersed or spatially concentrated patterns of distribution of speakers of particular languages. We begin by explori…
Is a middle force emerging in Northern Ireland
Analysis of the flow of demographic trends and the evolution of political forces in Northern Ireland has long had a predominantly binary focus. The many studies of the fall and rise of nationalism, and of the rise and fall of unionism, are based on a sometimes explicit but more often unspoken narrative of competition between two communities. This article considers an issue in relation to which a much smaller literature has appeared: the steady gr…
The Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1985
The decisive collapse of the Sunningdale initiative delivered a severe blow to the prospects for settlement in Northern Ireland, setting the negotiation process back for almost a decade. The stand-off between the parties was accompanied by continuing violence. Efforts to relaunch a political initiative began in the early 1980s, this time centred on a direct government-to-government axis. The outcome was the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which es…
The Good Friday Agreement, 1998: Negotiation
This chapter discusses the process by which the Northern Ireland parties finally engaged in comprehensive negotiations that included Sinn Féin. The Framework Documents offered a blueprint for these discussions. The chapter notes the difficulties of securing Sinn Féin participation, which came only with the advent of a new (Labour) government in 1997, and at the cost of the withdrawal of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party in protest at this. …
The Good Friday Agreement, 1998: Implementation
Although the Good Friday Agreement dates from April 1998, its implementation was beset by crises over the formation of an executive, decommissioning of paramilitary arms, and policing reform. It was not until December 1999 that the institutions for which it made provision came into being. Even after that, the Assembly and executive continued to be subject to destabilizing pressures, and ultimately collapsed in 2002. It was only following the St A…
Conclusion: Benchmarks from the British–Irish Process
Analysis of the process by which a stable peace was secured in Northern Ireland after decades of low-level war and civil unrest suggests a number of features that account for this development. First, policy paradigms and the modes of thought in which they were embedded have evolved: debates about sovereignty, democracy, and equality have followed a distinctive path, from being wedded to specific cultural understandings to becoming broad concepts …
Note on Documents
In selecting documents for inclusion in this book, we have in each case sought to use the most authoritative or the most appropriate version of the text (there are commonly minor differences between versions). We have retained spelling, punctuation and capitalization as in the original, except where there was an obvious and serious misprint, punctuation error or inconsistency in capitalization. Dashes, quotation marks and bulleted and numbered li…
Introduction: Defining Moments in the British-Irish Relationship
This chapter traces the history of the relationship between the two communities in Northern Ireland and the tension between the British and Irish governments within which it was traditionally embedded. It documents the process of incremental—and sometimes radical—societal change that has transformed the nature of the conflict, as the overwhelmingly dominant position of the unionist community has been replaced by a more evenly balanced relationshi…
The Downing Street Declaration and Framework Documents, 1993–1995
The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 and the Framework Documents of 1995 mark a new direction in British–Irish policy. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, the Irish government had gained a formal voice in the internal affairs of Northern Ireland, but the IRA campaign continued. At the end of the 1980s, a new initiative was launched: an effort to persuade Sinn Féin and the IRA to move to a purely political path. Spearheaded by nationalist l…
The Sunningdale Agreement, 1973
In an early ambitious attempt to resolve the Northern Ireland conflict in 1973–4, there emerged two key proposals that would radically change the form of Northern Ireland political institutions: power-sharing (rather than majority rule), and institutionalized links with the Republic of Ireland (rather than a ‘hard’ border). This chapter, centred on a witness seminar where several of those involved recorded their memories and interpretations, expl…
‘The Piracies of Some Little Privateers’: Language, Law and Maritime Violence in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
Prior to the eighteenth century, the words ‘pirate’ and ‘privateer’ had no comprehensive English legal meanings. Scholars today who attempt to determine who in history was a ‘pirate’ run afoul of this language problem; this article aims to clarify it by tracing the etymology of ‘privateer’ in late seventeenth-century English Jamaica, where the word saw a great deal of use. Seeing Jamaica as a laboratory for language use and legal development, rat…
Introduction: Piracy and occasional state power
States exert their power over maritime predation only occasionally depending on prevalent circumstances. Historically, when states have perceived and attempted to address a problem of piracy, they have encountered severe limits on their abilities to manage private maritime enterprise in waters under their purported control. Despite the popular conception that piracy falls into the legal category of ‘universal jurisdiction’, such jurisdiction has …
Ethnic competition and the logic of party system transformation
This article adapts and expands a recent model of ethnic competition by exploring its implications over a long period spanning crucial stages in the modernisation of the political system. It illustrates the model by reference to developments in Northern Ireland since its modern party system was launched in the 1880s. This offers an exceptionally clear example of the interaction of central elements of the model: the initial bedding down of a syste…
Approaches to the Resolution of Ethnic Conflict: The Strategy of Non-territorial Autonomy
Given the essentially territorial nature of the state, it has sometimes been assumed that attempts to resolve ethnic conflict by devolving power to ethnic groups must follow territorial lines. The present article assesses an alternative, "non-territorial," approach that has had some limited success as a device for the resolution of ethnic conflict. The origins of this approach may be traced back to the traditions of certain pre-modern states. A m…
National identity in Northern Ireland: Stability or Change
This article addresses a set of fundamental, long‐term factors associated with the Northern Ireland conflict: the pattern of underlying values and attitudes, especially those related to identity, that have helped to shape the nature of intercommunal competition. Using all generally available public opinion data, the article explores in particular the nature of national identity and of related forms of belonging for political behaviour. It notes t…
The Perception of the Legitimacy of Citizens’ Assemblies in Deeply Divided Places? Evidence of Public and Elite Opinion from Consociational Northern Ireland
How much public and elite support is there for the use of a citizens’ assembly – a random selection of citizens brought together to consider a policy issue – to tackle major, deadlock-inducing disagreements in deeply divided places with consociational political institutions? We focus on Northern Ireland and use evidence from a cross-sectional attitude survey, a survey-based experiment and elite interviews. We find that the general public support …
Mobilizing the Past: Nationalist Images of History
There is an obvious sense in which nationalist mobilization has an important basis in images of the past—images which are typically embellished to produce a tendentious image of the community's own history. This article first examines the mechanisms by which myths of history are created and disseminated, making an important distinction between circumstances where those engaged in this process control a state structure and those where they do not.…
Politics in the Republic of Ireland
Primordialism' in nationalism studies: Theory or Ideology
For several decades, the field of nationalism studies has seen an extended debate about explanations of nationalism and about the process of nation formation. An impressive set of labels has been coined to describe alternative approaches. One of the theories that has enjoyed unusual longevity is the approach known as primordialism, which stresses the deep historical and cultural roots of nations and nationalism and assumes their quasi-objective c…
The Strange Revival of Bicameralism
The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a surprising reversal of the long-observed trend towards the disappearance of second chambers in unitary states, with 28 countries – all but one of them unitary – adopting the bicameral system. This article explores this development by first setting it in the context of the historical evolution of second chambers and the arguments that support bicameralism, and then exploring the characteristics that…
Religion, National Identity and Political Change in Modern Ireland
This article presents a speculative account of the long-term impact of religion and ethnic identity, as mediated through electoral behaviour, on the political evolution of modern Ireland. As a social boundary marker, religion has a categorical character within the individual, modified by a 'fuzzy' character within spatial groupings. In the context of the island of Ireland, this is related to two politically significant phenomena: a continuing and…
Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland, 1969-2019: From Sunningdale to St Andrews
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended a protracted violent conflict in Northern Ireland and became an international reference point for peace-building. Negotiating a Settlement In Northern Ireland, 1969–2019 traces the roots and outworkings of the Agreement, focussing on the British and Irish governments, their changing policy paradigms and their extended negotiations from the Sunningdale conference of 1973 to the St Andrews Agreement of 2006. …
The Resolution of Ethnic Conflict: Towards a Typology
The set of policies adopted by states to deal with their ethnic minorities, ranging from genocide, population transfer, and boundary alteration to assimilation and accommodation, is presented in a typology. The nature of the policies adopted depends on such characteristics as the source of differentiation of the minority, its relationship to other groups in the state in demographic terms, the nature of the cultural division of labour, the traditi…
Public attitudes to different possible models of a United Ireland: Evidence from a citizens’ assembly in Northern Ireland
We empirically identify the considered views of the Northern Ireland public on the relative merits of two possible models of a united Ireland: an integrated united Ireland in which Northern Ireland is absorbed into an all-island polity, and a united Ireland in which Northern Ireland continues to exist as a devolved entity. We use data from a specially designed one-day citizens’ assembly. We report analyses based on quantitative examination of pre…
Breaking Patterns of Conflict in Northern Ireland: New Perspectives
Central to reaching peace and settlement in Northern Ireland was a sequence of British--Irish intergovernmental discussions and negotiations, dating from the beginning of the 1980s. British and Irish state cooperation and intervention has remained central to the stability of the settlement reached in 1998. The motives of state actors, however, have been unclear, and the role of the state in the political process has been the subject of some schol…
The Ethnic Implications of Preferential Voting
Around the turn of the century, political developments in Northern Ireland, Fiji and Papua New Guinea encouraged claims that preferential voting systems could steer polities in the direction of ‘moderate’ multi-ethnic government. Sixteen years later, we have a longer time period and larger volume of data to reassess these verdicts. This article investigates ballot transfer and party vote–seat share patterns in the seven deeply divided polities wi…
National identity and the “Kohn dichotomy”
This article assesses the analytical value of the "Kohn dichotomy" – the notion that there are two types of nationalism, resting on civic values in the West and on ethnic values outside the West. It begins by outlining the intellectual history of this dichotomy since its origin in the 1860s and by analyzing its main features. It contrasts the state traditions of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe in three areas: the geopolitical evolut…
Introduction: Dispersed Minorities and Non-Territorial Autonomy
The concept of non-territorial autonomy gives rise to at least two important questions: the range of functional areas over which autonomy extends, and the extent to which this autonomy is indeed non-territorial. A widely used early description significantly labelled this 'national cultural autonomy', implying that its focus is mainly on cultural matters, such as language, religion, education and family law. In many of the cases that are commonly …
The Rise and Fall of Minor Parties in Ireland
Minor parties (defined as those outside the three‐party core of the party system) have been a distinctive feature of Irish political life since independence in 1922. Of the approximately 50 such parties to appear since then, though, only a few have become politically relevant, and even these parties have tended to go through a short life cycle. This paper describes the profile of parties of this kind, seeking to place Irish minor parties in categ…
The transformation of the Irish border
Resolving international border disputes: The Irish experience
This article explores the value of a specific model of norm replacement in accounting for the circumstances leading to Ireland’s Good Friday agreement (1998), which formally and finally settled the long-running territorial dispute between Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK). Drawing on the theoretical literature, it identifies three phases in this process. First, from the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until the civil unrest in Northern…
British Irish Institutional Structures: Towards a New Relationship
Growing institutional cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and the UK, initially directed explicitly at resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict, has taken the form of three parallel institutional structures. First, an Anglo-Irish (later, British–Irish) Intergovernmental Conference has dealt with matters relating to the government of Northern Ireland in areas to which power is not devolved, and with certain other ‘sovereign’ matters. Se…
The Political Consequences of the Electoral System in Northern Ireland
The role of electoral law in assisting political accommodation in divided societies has been the subject of vigorous recent debate, with advocates of consociational government arguing for proportional representation and proponents of inter‐communal bridge building defending the merits of the alternative vote system. This article explores the implications of electoral law in Northern Ireland for the shape of the party system there, and thus for an…
National minorities and the government of divided societies: A comparative analysis of some European evidence
Based on evidence drawn from six case studies, this article examines the manner in which the political elites of the new ethnically heterogeneous states which appeared in Europe after the First World War responded to the challenge of dealing with minorities whose attitudes towards the new regimes ranged from the suspicious to the uncompromisingly hostile. Despite the variety of policies pursued and the varying international contexts of the six ca…
Conclusion: Patterns of Non-Territorial Autonomy
This article seeks to generalise about the significance of non-territorial autonomy as a mechanism for the management of ethnic conflict on the basis of a set of case studies covering the Ottoman empire and its successor states, the Habsburg monarchy, the Jewish minorities of Europe, interwar Estonia, contemporary Belgium, and two indigenous peoples, the Sámi in Norway and Maori in New Zealand. It begins by assessing the extent to which the spati…
The Challenge of Consociation in Northern Ireland
This article assesses the role played by the principle of consociational government in promoting Northern Ireland's peace agreement. It reviews the central concept of consociation as it has evolved in recent comparative studies of the politics of divided societies. It describes the stages by which this concept moved to the centre of the political agenda in Northern Ireland, resting on contributions by policy-makers, academics, journalists and oth…
A political profile of Protestant minorities in Europe
This article uses a large volume of data – in particular, surveys – to explore the character of Protestant identity in contemporary European states. It distinguishes three contexts. First, in the Nordic and certain adjacent states, the dominance of Protestantism was complete, but more recent secularisation has provoked a reaction from Christian parties, which enjoy strong support from active Protestants. Second, in certain states that in the past…
The Significance of Names: The Evolution of Irish Party Labels
Independence Movements and National Minorities: Some Parallels in the European Experience
In the case of several successful nationalist movements in Europe the path to independence has followed a common pattern. In Ireland, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, the progress of a tripartite struggle may be charted: between the metropolitan governing power, the local centre and the local periphery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the local centre (Irish Protestants, Swede‐Finns and Baltic Germans) comprised a minority population group…
The Irish Senate Election of 1977: Voting in a Small Electorate
THE IRISH SENATE ELECTION OF 1977: VOTING IN A SMALL ELECTORATE Get access John Coakley John Coakley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 33, Issue 1, 1980, Pages 322–331, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a051843 Published: 01 January 1980
National territories and cultural frontiers: Conflicts of principle in the formation of states in Europe
European elections: Ireland
Selecting a Prime Minister: The Irish Experience
Journal Article Selecting a Prime Minister: The Irish Experience Get access John Coakley John Coakley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 37, Issue 4, 1984, Pages 403–417, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/37.4.403 Published: 01 October 1984
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1985
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1985." Irish Political Studies, 1(1), pp. 147–154
Political succession and regime change in new states in inter‐war Europe: Ireland, Finland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Republics
Problems of political succession are particularly acute when new regimes experience not merely the shock of the sudden introduction of democracy but also the challenge of consolidating a new territorial identity. The six North European states examined here, all of which became independent after the first world war, succeeded in establishing their legitimacy against threats from both left and right. The orderly political succession process was bro…
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1986
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1986." Irish Political Studies, 2(1), pp. 161–170
Moral consensus in a secularising society: The Irish divorce referendum of 1986
1987). Moral consensus in a secularising society: The Irish divorce referendum of 1986. West European Politics: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 291-296
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1987
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1987." Irish Political Studies, 3(1), pp. 145–155
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1988
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1988." Irish Political Studies, 4(1), pp. 163–172
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1989
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1989." Irish Political Studies, 5(1), pp. 161–172
National minorities and the government of divided societies: A comparative analysis of some European evidence
Based on evidence drawn from six case studies, this article examines the manner in which the political elites of the new ethnically heterogeneous states which appeared in Europe after the First World War responded to the challenge of dealing with minorities whose attitudes towards the new regimes ranged from the suspicious to the uncompromisingly hostile. Despite the variety of policies pursued and the varying international contexts of the six ca…
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1990
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1990." Irish Political Studies, 6(1), pp. 151–164
Political science in Ireland: Development and diffusion in a European periphery
The single transferable vote in Ireland an historical assessment
Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans
As some recent historians have argued, the phenomenon of "gender," that is, the way in which a society or group perceives and articulates difference between the sexes, can provide that society or group with fundamental terms in which to understand itself and explain or justify its actions. Consequently, historical evidence of the way groups or societies have perceived and articulated sexual difference-have constructed gender-may therefore take us…
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1991∗
Abstracts/Résumés La recherche de solutions aux conflits interethniques
The Resolution of Ethnic Conflict: Towards a Typology
The set of policies adopted by states to deal with their ethnic minorities, ranging from genocide, population transfer, and boundary alteration to assimilation and accommodation, is presented in a typology. The nature of the policies adopted depends on such characteristics as the source of differentiation of the minority, its relationship to other groups in the state in demographic terms, the nature of the cultural division of labour, the traditi…
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1992∗
Epistolarium, 1: I-XC. Hildegardis Bingensis , L. Van Acker
Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance
Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy is a collection of essays on the flowering of women's participation in the religious and artistic life of Italy from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It brings together scholars of religious studies, history, literature, music, fine arts, and philosophy from both Italy and the United States. Several essays document and discuss new discoveries, such as the extraordinary collection of mu…
Select bibliography of publications on Irish politics during 1993∗
Political science (102 works) · Law (86 works) · Politics (78 works) · Irish and British Studies (73 works) · Sociology (70 works) · Law (69 works) · Irish (42 works) · Philosophy (40 works) · Political economy (40 works) · Linguistics (32 works)