The origins of the Irish hospitals' sweepstake

This article examines the two main reasons for the setting up of the Irish sweepstakes in 1930; the financial crisis facing voluntary hospitals and the tradition of using sweepstake gambling to raise funds for charitable purposes. Such gambling, although technically illegal, was prevalent and widely tolerated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The change of government that accompanied Irish independence in 1921 led to much confusion surrounding the law on gambling and large-scale sweepstakes proliferated during the early 1920s, many of them selling tickets illegally in Britain. At the same time the Irish voluntary hospitals faced a financial crisis that threatened their future, brought about by the adverse impact of war-time inflation on the value of their endowments, the emigration of supporters of the Protestant voluntary hospitals after independence, the political upheaval of the revolutionary period, the decline in fees from medical students and the increasing cost of and demand for hospital treatment. This article provides a detailed account of the enactment of the sweepstake legislation and of the first sweepstake on the 1930 Manchester November Handicap.

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using words as Data

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We “export” the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our “language-blind” word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.

From 'Good as Gold' to 'Gold Diggers': Farming Women and the Survival of British Family Farming

The survival of family farming in British agriculture has long been a topic of interest for rural researchers and is undergoing something of a current renewal of interest. However, insights from feminist approaches remain underutilised despite the crucial role farming women continue to play in family farming. This paper addresses the unity of farm, family and business by interpreting it as a patriarchal â??way of lifeâ??. An ethnographic-informed repeated life history methodology is employed to study in detail the family members of seven farms in rural mid-Wales. Findings show that the recent survival of the family farms investigated has been heavily dependent upon compliance with a patriarchal ideology that demands women be â??as good as goldâ??. However, it is discovered that a new view of women is emerging in the world of British family farming, that of â??gold diggerâ??. Women entering relationships with farming men are increasingly being considered a threat to farm survival by virtue of their entitlements if the relationship breaks down. The necessity to study the intricacies of personal relationships in family farming has important implications for most future research into this form of agricultural business arrangement.

An Investigation into the Link between UK Credit Union Characterisitics, Location and their Success

The unique characteristics of credit unions reduces the information asymmetry that is prevalent in credit making decisions, enabling them to provide loans where other financial institutions cannot. This makes them a potential tool in the fight against financial exclusion. Yet, the UK credit union movement is not regarded as being successful, even though there is evidence of much financial exclusion. This study is cross sectional in form, and evaluates characteristics that may contribute to the success of the UK credit union movement at national and regional level, in 2000. The findings are used to consider the impact of recent regulatory changes on the movement. The key findings are that there is a significant relationship between the success of a credit union, its size and the deprivation of the ward from which it sources its members. More specifically, larger credit unions and those located in more affluent wards, are more successful. Affiliation to the Irish League of Credit Unions and having a common bond of occupation, are also found to be contributing factors to credit union success. These results are taken as providing support for the recent changes implemented by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which is likely to result in the emergence of larger credit unions (through mergers), run by appropriately qualified persons, serving a more mixed-income membership base. It is, however, noted that the history of the UK movement is one of missed opportunities and only time will tell whether credit unions have the wherewithal to accept current opportunities.

Ethnic Nationalism and Adaptation in Cyprus

Both ethnic communities in Cyprus have maintained strong political and cultural ties with Greece and Turkey, respectively, and at some point of their twentieth century history, each has aspired to become part of either the former or the latter. Yet the way this relationship has been imagined has differed across time, space, and class. Both communities have adapted their identities to prevailing ideological waves as well as political opportunities, domestic alliances, and interests. The article evaluates different responses to ethnic nationalism, highlighting important intra-ethnic differentiations within each Cypriot community usually expressed in the positions of political parties, intellectuals, and the press. While the current literature identifies two major poles of identity in the island, "motherland nationalism" and "Cypriotism," the article suggests that the major focus of identity of Cypriots is identification with their respective ethnic communities in the form of Greek Cypriotism or Turkish Cypriotism. In fact, contentious politics in Cyprus from the ENOSIS/TAKSIM struggle to the April 2004 referendum demonstrate the interplay of external constraints and collective self-identification processes leading to the formation of these identities. The article concludes by identifying the implications of identity shifts for deeply divided societies and conflict resolution in general.

Devolving Housing Policy and Practice in Northern Ireland 1998 - 2002

This paper reviews the effect of devolution on housing policy and practice in Northern Ireland. It outlines the history and context of devolution and housing policy in Northern Ireland, including the legacy and persistence of intense social conflict. Current devolution arrangements are reviewed, including the implications of enforced coalition for policy governance. The paper focuses on three dimensions of housing and housing-related policy development and implementation: social housing, especially the distinctive history and changing organisation of social housing provision; policies affecting the housing market, including the changing regime for spatial planning; and, regeneration and tenant participation. The paper argues that housing policy has tended to converge with policies in England, rather than moving towards a distinctively local agenda. Local political agendas remain dominated by disagreements over constitutional status, thus policy formulation is determined more by officials than by elected politicians.

Consociationalism and the evolution of political cleavages in Northern Ireland, 1989-2004

Political cleavages are often understood as deriving from either deep-rooted social divisions or institutional incentives. Contemporary Northern Ireland provides a test of the mutability of apparently entrenched cleavages to institutional change. Research undertaken before the ceasefire in the 1990s found noticeable asymmetries in the patterns of cleavage within the unionist and nationalist blocs. Within the unionist bloc, economic 'left-right' issues formed the main ideological division between the two major unionist parties. This contrasted with an ethno-national source of ideological division between the two nationalist parties. The emergence of a consociational form of government structure since then has demonstrated the ability of institutional incentives to swiftly reform some aspects of party competition however. As evidence of this, we show that between 1989 and 2004 there was little change in the sources of support for Sinn F�©in relative to the SDLP, but the influence of left-right ideology within the unionist bloc was negated as the influence of ethno-nationalism dramatically increased.

Vision and reality: community involvement in Irish urban regeneration

This article examines the processes and outcomes of community involvement in six Irish urban regeneration case studies, three in Dublin and three in Belfast. The findings are part of a wider study using a Complex Adaptive Systems perspective to analyse public sector decision making. Key points included: (1) the community ‘vision’ of the regeneration as an emergent property, which converged towards the vision held by the implementing agencies in the four most successful programmes; and (2) the identification of three features that contribute to non-linear (unpredictable) behaviour: a history of community involvement; the availability of resources; and the intervention of key individuals at crisis points.

The construction of images of people and place: Labelling Liverpool and stereotyping Scousers.

On 28th August 1207, King John created the Borough of Liverpool by granting its first charter. During the ensuing 800 years Liverpool has experienced a complex and changing social, economic and political history resulting in powerful images of the city and its people. This paper examines the labelling of Liverpool and stereotypes of Scousers. It explains how historical and contemporary events, and their coverage in various arms of the media, construct social and spatial imaginations of the city. This involves a more systematic contribution to the how and why dimensions of negative place imagery and social stereotypes, and enhances our understanding of the processes and issues affecting our interpretations of people and place. The analysis is both historical and contemporaneous in teasing out how previous and current events shape the perceptions of insiders and outsiders. This paper reveals that despite concerted efforts to re-brand Liverpool the city continues to face difficult challenges with ongoing bad publicity and negative place imagery.