Politicians, elections and catastrophe: the general election of 1847

Over the last decade, much new research has appeared on the subject of the Great Irish Famine but, remarkably, a major political event during the famine - the 1847 general election - has received virtually no mention. Recent work on politics in this period has tended to concentrate on political reaction in Britain rather than Ireland. The aim of this article is to examine the response of Irish politicians to the famine during the general election of 1847. The main source has been the political addresses and nomination speeches of most of the 140 candidates. The evidence from this material shows that, although the famine was an important matter in many constituencies, it was not the dominant issue countrywide. Various proposals to deal with the famine emerged, but there was an absence of agreed, practical measures to deal with immediate problems. The parties in Ireland failed to create a common platform to challenge the government over its efforts. Ideological constraints played an important part in these failures. The general election of 1847 represents a lost opportunity to tackle some of the effects of the famine.

Is the General Public Licence a Rational Choice?

Open source projects are networks of developers, distributors and end-users of non-proprietary created knowledge goods. It has been argued that this form of organization has some advantages over the firm or market coordination. I show that for sufficiently convex and modular projects proprietary licences are not able to sustain sequential knowledge production which, however, can be carried out if the project is run on the open source basis.

The general and specific effects of educational programmes aimed at promoting awareness of and respect for diversity among young children

This article reports the findings of a mixed-method evaluation of a pilot educational programme undertaken with 6-7 year olds in a sample of primary schools in England with the aim of increasing their awareness of and respect for diversity through theatre, workshops and related teacher-led classroom activities. The qualitative feedback from the teachers involved was extremely positive and encouraging and an analysis of the actual impact of the pilot programme on the children’s attitudes and awareness, using an experimental design, demonstrated some positive effects. In particular, the programme was found to increase the children’s general awareness of diversity and their ability to recognise instances of exclusion. While not a planned objective of the pilot programme, the evaluation also examined whether it had any effects on the children’s attitudes to specific differences, in this particular case racial differences. Interestingly, however, no evidence was found of any change in the children’s racial attitudes. With this in mind the article suggests that there is a need to distinguish between the general and specific effects of such educational programmes. The article considers the implications of this for future work in the area and also stresses the need to undertake more thorough and rigorous evaluations of such initiatives.