Governing Ireland:From Cabinet Government to Delegated Governance

The structures of Irish government were once considered reliably stable, professional and efficient. The economic crash of 2008 swept away all such sureties. How did we fail to foresee the challenges and avert a crisis that has undermined the state in every respect? Initial explanations have focused on the absence of robust mechanisms to challenge policy, a lack of imagination and expertise in policy design, and inadequacies in policy implementation and evaluation. Others still have pointed to the inability of traditional structures of decision-making and oversight to manage the multidimensional nature of modern policy problems, as well as an increasingly complex administrative system.

This new book offers a fresh and sustained scrutiny of the Irish system of national government. It examines the cabinet, the departments of Finance and the Taoiseach, ministerial relationships with civil servants, the growth and decline of agencies, the executive's relationship with Dáil Éireann and other monitoring agencies, the impact of the European Union, the courts, the media and social partnership. Distinguished academics are brought together in this volume to reassess Irish governance structures in the context of much greater diversity in policy processes and delegation in government. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Irish state is governed, including practitioners and students of Irish politics.

Design and analysis of dual-rail circuits for security applications

Dual-rail encoding, return-to-spacer protocol, and hazard-free logic can be used to resist power analysis attacks by making energy consumed per clock cycle independent of processed data. Standard dual-rail logic uses a protocol with a single spacer, e.g., all-zeros, which gives rise to energy balancing problems. We address these problems by incorporating two spacers; the spacers alternate between adjacent clock cycles. This guarantees that all gates switch in every clock cycle regardless of the transmitted data values. To generate these dual-rail circuits, an automated tool has been developed. It is capable of converting synchronous netlists into dual-rail circuits and it is interfaced to industry CAD tools. Dual-rail and single-rail benchmarks based upon the advanced encryption standard (AES) have been simulated and compared in order to evaluate the method and the tool.

Maternal Religiosity, Family Resources and Stressors, and Parent-Child Attachment Security in Northern Ireland

This study explores the associations between mothers' religiosity, and families' and children's functioning in a stratified random sample of 695 Catholic and Protestant motherchild dyads in socially deprived areas in Belfast, Northern Ireland, a region which has experienced centuries of sectarian conflict between Protestant Unionists and Catholics Nationalists. Findings based on mother and child surveys indicated that even in this context of historical political violence associated with religious affiliation, mothers' religiosity played a consistently positive role, including associations with multiple indicators of better family functioning (i.e., more cohesion and behavioral control and less conflict, psychological distress, and adjustment problems) and greater parentchild attachment security. Mothers' religiosity also moderated the association between parentchild attachment security and family resources and family stressors, enhancing positive effects of cohesion and mother behavioral control on motherchild attachment security, and providing protection against risks associated with mothers' psychological distress. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for understanding the role of religiosity in serving as a protective or risk factor for children and families.

Frontline Leisure::Securitizing tourism in the War on Terror

This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses that brought the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, within the orbit of a global security apparatus waging a ‘war on terror’. Drawing on critical work in international relations and geography, this article understands the securitization of tourism as part of a much wider logic in which the liberal order enacts pernicious modes of governance by producing a terrorist threat that is exceptional. It explores how this logic is reproduced through a cosmopolitan community symbolized by global travellers, and examines the measures taken by the tourism industry to secure this community (e.g. the physical transformations of hotel infrastructure and the provision of counter-terrorism training).

Corporate Governance as a School of Social Reform

In this paper, I present a vision of the corporation as a moral person. I point to “the separation of ownership and control” as a moment when the corporation broke away from the moral lives of ownermanagers. I then draw out the manner in which we can speak of the company as a moral person. Finally, through a discussion of social reporting in two British banks, I point to a shift in how this moral personhood is articulated, with the rise of corporate governance—or doing business well—as its own foundation of corporate responsibility. I propose a view of corporate responsibility as a “transmission mechanism” for the company’s role in moral life, situated in the broader social conception of “moral economy.” This viewpoint sets out landscapes of legitimation and justification through which the ties that underpin economic life are founded

Corporate Governance in Canadian and US Credit Unions

This report, a collaborative effort between the Filene Research Institute and the Credit Union Central of Canada, with participation from the Desjardins Group, follows on two recent governance projects: Tracking the Relationship Between Credit Union Governance and Performance and a three-part series by Professor Robert Hoel about how boards can add more value. Beyond these, the academic literature of corporate governance is well developed, so this study includes an in-depth review of financial institution governance research and calls out the differences between credit unions and other firms. Also, because surveys can only go so far in teasing out insights, the authors followed up with a dozen interviews with credit unions of all sizes across all three major North American credit union systems.

Because the report is survey-based, large swaths of the findings compare major and minor details of different (and often not-so-different) approaches to governance in the three systems and among differently sized credit unions. From those comparisons, some interesting differences emerge. For example, as a federated system, Desjardins excels at some aspects of board development and system governance in ways that the more atomized US and Canadian credit union systems do not.

Equal Security: Europe and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, 1968-1976

SALT threatened to institutionalize a bipolar world order. NWS and NNWS alike feared that the US and SU will prioritize global security principles such as systemic stability and conflict stability to Atlantic and European security. Endangered was Europe’s security and position in the future world order. Parity in strategic weapons invalidated the US nuclear umbrella. An ABM deployment and a non-transfer regime threatened Europe’s nuclear defence options. The danger of a Limited War or a denuclearization of Central Europe led to a European co-ordination on nuclear arms control to assure the preservation of the West and the future of Europe.

Swarm scheduling approaches for work-flow applications with security constraints in distributed data-intensive computing environments

The scheduling problem in distributed data-intensive computing environments has become an active research topic due to the tremendous growth in grid and cloud computing environments. As an innovative distributed intelligent paradigm, swarm intelligence provides a novel approach to solving these potentially intractable problems. In this paper, we formulate the scheduling problem for work-flow applications with security constraints in distributed data-intensive computing environments and present a novel security constraint model. Several meta-heuristic adaptations to the particle swarm optimization algorithm are introduced to deal with the formulation of efficient schedules. A variable neighborhood particle swarm optimization algorithm is compared with a multi-start particle swarm optimization and multi-start genetic algorithm. Experimental results illustrate that population based meta-heuristics approaches usually provide a good balance between global exploration and local exploitation and their feasibility and effectiveness for scheduling work-flow applications. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.