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Notes the weakness of tourism in Northern Ireland prior to the cease‐fire of 1994 and the increased interest in Northern Ireland as a tourist destination which followed the cease‐fire. Considers the role of the Department of Economic Development and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. Brings together the relevant findings from most of the published material on Northern Ireland tourism from the start of the troubles to the cease‐fire from academic, consultancy and government sources. Incorporates the results of two post‐cease‐fire studies carried out by the authors.

The reawakening of the Northern Ireland tourism industry, in 1994, has developed a growing business confidence that international tourist levels will increase. Unfortunately, there is not a range of suitable accommodation either in standards or in number to cater for an influx of visitors. Examines the development of the accommodation sector in relation to the tourism industry of Northern Ireland. Highlights problems of the Northern Ireland accommodation sector and documents recommendations for future developments.

The chapter deals with social inequalities in post-conflict and post-2007/2008 financial crisis Northern Ireland. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, Northern Ireland was characterised by a Catholic/Protestant sectarian conflict and affected by marked political, economic and social discrepancies disadvantaging the Catholic minority.

The combined effects of the economic boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and of the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, improved the social and economic living conditions of Northern Ireland citizens and diversified the ethnic composition of the population, as immigrants were attracted by new opportunities offered in the booming Northern Ireland labour market. The 2007/2008 financial crisis was to curb these positive trends, although Northern Ireland’s economy has now recovered as its unemployment rate indicates.

In the light of this specific context, this chapter first examines key indicators of social inequalities in Northern Ireland: wealth, employment and housing. It then focuses on traditional indicators of Catholic/Protestant inequalities: education employment and housing. It finally examines to what extent the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the 2006 St Andrew’s Agreement and the 2014 Stormont House Agreement have tackled the issue of social inequalities.

In 2010, 12 years after the signing and popular ratification of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (BGFA), the decommissioning of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weapons, and a significant decline in political violence, paramilitary public symbolic displays (PSDs) remained as prominent features of the landscape of Northern Ireland. Their contents and locations constituted an important, contradictory, and contested part of the peace process. We argue that paramilitary murals and other symbolic sites, such as memorial gardens and plaques, continue to tap into ethno-national collective identities forged in conflict but also exhibit a range of reframing strategies that we refer to as historicization, articulation, and suppression. We further argue that contextual factors affect the likelihood of these displays appearing within a given geographic area. To assess these hypotheses, we conduct content and geospatial analyses of all identified PSDs in West Belfast in 2010. The results lend support to a context-sensitive approach to predicting the contents and locations of paramilitary PSDs in Northern Ireland.

Theories of ethnic conflict often assume that the cause of political violence is the same across actors and constant over time. I propose that causes differ, depending upon the identity, grievances, and strategy of the perpetrator as influenced by the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they operate. Together with Granger causality tests, multivariate time‐series analyses of political deaths in Northern Ireland support a multi‐causal perspective. Reflecting identity differences, Loyalist violence but not Republican violence was likely to increase during months when high levels of protest coincided with annual commemorations. By deepening grievances related to ethnic stratification, rising unemployment contributed to Republican violence, but not to Loyalist violence. Repression of Nationalists increased Republican violence but decreased Loyalist violence, supporting a see‐saw conceptualization of political opportunities in divided societies. The findings highlight the need for sensitivity in both conflict research and management to differences between actors and across social contexts.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was the explicit base for the politically shared, though tenuous, internal government of Northern Ireland. This ensuing process has highlighted the centrality of the national police, as a country or state attempts to shift towards a contemporary, pluralistic democracy. To clarify, the police force, which was previously an instrument of control, must now become an organization that strives for the consent and support of the public. Using Mawby’s models of policing as an organizational framework, this article focuses attention on the policing paradigms of Northern Ireland over the course of its social history. It puts forth the argument that, despite some strategic changes, it is only upon the heels of the Good Friday Agreement and the consequent governmental change that the police force has begun to shift its operational paradigm away from the colonial model toward an Anglo‐Saxon paradigm.

Northern Ireland is a society divided by political, national and religious identities. Between 1968 and 1998, there was a violent political conflict in which 3,700 people died. Throughout the conflict, many looked to schools to work to improve community relations, even though the school system itself was divided on largely religious grounds. This chapter looks at education interventions in Northern Ireland aimed at promoting conflict transformation, with a particular focus on the shared education work of the 2000s which is based on collaborative networks of schools from the different communities. The collaboration involved in the shared education initiative is based on a participatory approach which emphasises teacher-led innovation and locally tailored school partnerships. This is in contrast to the defining features of the Northern Ireland school system which has always had a hierarchist character, even when education reforms in the 1990s introduced market principles and school competition. This chapter analyzes education policy and practice in light of these frameworks and considers the potential tension between the shared education approach given the prevailing ethos of the Northern Ireland education system. It suggests that the consequences of this potential tension remain unclear.

This chapter explores the topic of supporting young people to become innovators for societal change in terms of equity and renewal from the perspective of school principals in Northern Ireland, a post-conflict society. We examine how school principals can be empowered in their role in providing this support and the challenges and turbulence that they face in their work. The chapter provides contextual information about education in what is still largely a divided society in Northern Ireland. The principals who were interviewed as part of this research were working within school partnerships as part of ‘shared education’ projects. In Northern Ireland, the Shared Education Act (2016) provides a legislative basis for two or more local schools from different educational sectors to work in partnership to provide an opportunity for sustained shared learning activities with the aim of improving both educational and reconciliation outcomes for young people. The challenges for school leadership of working in partnership in societies emerging from conflict has not been given the attention it deserves in the literature, so this work is significant in that it brings together a focus on school leadership in a ‘shared education’ context, drawing on theories of collaboration and turbulence to examine how principals can best be empowered to be agents of change, so that pupils in Northern Ireland can also become empowered to make society there more equitable and peaceful. While the focus is on Northern Ireland, the learnings from this study will be of wider interest and significance as similar challenges are faced by school leaders internationally.

This article provides an overview of the literature on the impact of ‘the Troubles’ on mental health in Northern Ireland. It identifies three main phases of professional and policy response from concerns about the effects of the violence in the early 1970s, through many years of collective denial and neglect, until acknowledgment, following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 (Northern Ireland Office, 1998), of high levels of trauma and unmet need. The issues of inequality and stigma are also considered and it is argued that peace is necessary but insufficient for promoting mental health. The development of mental health services in Northern Ireland and the relatively recent focus on promoting mental health are also outlined and examined. It is suggested that attempts to address the needs arising as a result of ‘the Troubles’ and more general mental health promotion strategies have, to some extent, developed in parallel and that it may be important to integrate these efforts. The relative under‐development of mental health services, the comprehensive Bamford Review (2005; 2006) and the positive approach of the Public Health Agency mean that, even in the current economic climate, there are great opportunities for progress. Routine screening, in primary care and mental health services for trauma, including Troubles‐related trauma, is recommended to identify and address these issues on an individual level. It is also argued, however, that more substantial political change is needed to effectively address societal division, inequality and stigma to the benefit of all.