Northern Irish Politics and Abortion

The Social Union after the Coalition: Devolution, Divergence and Convergence

“…Welfare unionism and nationalism have a complicated history in Northern Ireland, the UK's ‘most intractable territorial problem’ (Carmichael, 1996: 413). While social security parity has been explicitly linked with unionism (Lundy, 1996), unionist parties have also driven social policy divergence (Gosling, 2008; Thomson, 2013). Interviewees there made little attempt to portray positions on the maintenance of parity as shaped by national aspirations.…”