No description available.

Irish local authorities and their insurer have experienced increasing liability losses during the past ten years. To combat this situation their insurer requested the local authorities to implement a risk management programme. Risk management is aimed at reducing the cost of risk by identifying, evaluating and handling risk by both physical and financial means. As a management function risk management should form part of the formulation of the strategy of the organisation, strategy being a means of setting direction in the long term. Once formulated a strategy must be implemented. This dissertation reviews the methods used by the insurer and the local authorities to implement a risk management programme and establishes the barriers that were faced during the course of implementation and the attempts made to overcome them. It considers the integration of risk management into strategy and recommends a tentative means of overcoming the problems of implementation. / Economics / M. Com. (Business Economics)

The theory of constitutional pluralism suggests that interacting legal orders that are (or claim to be) constitutional in nature need not—and should not—necessarily be regarded as being hierarchically arranged, with one ‘on top of’ the others. Rather, the relationships between the orders can be conceived of heterarchically. However, there is an assumption in much of the literature that the ‘interface norms’ that regulate the relationships within such a heterarchy are universal by nature, capable of undifferentiated application across differing constitutional orders. This thesis examines whether interface norms are in fact universal by nature, or whether they are relationship- and context-dependent, taking as its field of study three interacting legal orders—those of Ireland, the European Union, and the European Convention on Human Rights. It uses an established model of constitutional pluralism based on ‘coordinate constitutionalism’ to test the assumption of universality across three constitutional frames: the ‘vertical’ relationship between Ireland and the European orders, the ‘horizontal’ relationship between the European orders, and the ‘triangular’ panoply of state, Union and Convention. Having analysed the interface norms at work in these relationships, both in isolation and in the round, the thesis concludes that these norms are not in fact universal, and that different conceptions of constitutional pluralism need to pay much greater attention to the specific nature of any given constitutional order and its relationship with other orders in the constitutional heterarchy.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis explores the relevance of the Bildungsroman genre to a selection of Northern Irish writing from the 1960s through to the late 1990s. Synthesizing a range of critical approaches it shows how six novels by Leitch, Duffaud, Patterson, Deane, Madden and Molloy challenge the traditional Bildungsroman. It brings the thwarted Bildungsroman into correspondence with the key elements of ‘minority discourse’ as defined by Mohamed and Lloyd (1990), focusing on subjectivity and identity position. Using Jameson’s concept of the ‘political unconscious’ the thesis demonstrates how fragmented and hybridised subjectivities challenge the two main Northern Irish identarian discourses, Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. It argues that all six counter-Bildungsromane feature some of the characteristics of ‘minority discourse’ with one even providing an example of ‘minor writing’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1975).

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.