The Social and Economic Mobility of Ethnic Minority Communities in Northern Ireland

This report provides evidence of the degree, nature and drivers of poverty across the different ethnic minority groups in Northern Ireland. The 2011 Census highlighted some very different outcomes for ethnic minority groups in Northern Ireland across various indicators related to poverty. Through focus groups and interviews with employees and employers, this study further reveals how far the labour market is segmented among different ethnic minority communities. It also reviews government legislation and strategies relevant to Northern Ireland and the impact of these on poverty among ethnic minority groups. The report: • highlights employees’ difficulties in accessing relevant employment; • investigates employers’ procedures for recruitment, staff retention and development; • outlines government initiatives and programmes to support employees; and • reviews the level of uptake and success of government support for ethnic minority groups seeking employment or setting up a business.

The EU Constitution of Social Governance in an Economic Crisis: in Defence of a Transnational Dimension to Social Europe

Conventional wisdom has it that the EU is unable to promote viable social integration, which contrasts with its commitments to improving working and living conditions and to social values and goals such as solidarity, social protection and social inclusion. This
article challenges two diff erent standpoints: on the one hand, competitive neoliberalism demands that the EU focuses on economic integration through legally binding internal market and competition rules even if Member States can only maintain a limited commitment to social inclusion, while authors defending the social models unique to the continent of Europe demand that the EU rescinds some of its established legal principles in order to make breathing space for Member States to maintain market correcting social policies. Both positions convene that there should be no genuine social policy at EU level.
This article uses scenarios of widely discussed rulings by the Court of Justice to illustrate that legally enforceable economic integration would prevent most Member States from achieving sustainable health services, labour relations and free university education on the basis of national closure. Since the EU has limited legislative competences to create EU level institutions to balance inequalities, it derives a Constitution of Social Governance from the EU’s values, proposing that the Court of Justice develops its urisprudence into an instrument for challenging European disunion induced by new EU economic governance

London 2012 and Climate Change. Examining the potential impact of the current economic crisis in the environmental legacy of the Games

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) declares environmental protection to be the third dimension of the Olympic movement. That, in effect, means that nations wishing to host the Games have to present themselves as reliable practitioners of environmental sustainability (ES) in their applications. The greening of sports mega-events, and the hosting of Olympic Games in particular, is now reasonably well established. Yet evidence from the first decade of environmentally-conscious Olympics points to diverging patterns of achievement in the operationalisation of the IOC’s ‘third pillar’. As is now common knowledge, for example, Sydney 2000 was the first ‘Green Olympics’ in the history of the Games; yet four years later, Athens provided a stark contrast, and was the subject of highly critical assessment reports by environmental organisations. Yet Athens has not stopped the Bid Committee for the Beijing 2008 Games claiming that it would ‘leave the greatest Olympic Games environmental legacy ever’ (UNEP 2007: 26), while the London 2012 promotes the concept of the ‘One Planet Olympics’.

In this context and in light of the current global economic crisis, can we claim that London 2012 has the capacity to fulfil its environmental ambitions? This question is adopted in continuity with similar framed questions that have been posed in relation to the most recent Olympics and it is tackled by adopting an investigative model that is placed within discourses of ‘reflexive modernisation’.