Martin Meenagh blog

  The Cabinet Secretary in the twentieth century.   Walking down Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square down to the House of Parliament, an outside visitor might be forgiven for thinking that the central offices of the domestic UK state are adjuncts of the Cabinet Office. In fact, the Office, which is responsible to the Prime Minister as Minister for the Civil Service, has been since 1963 the base of the Cabinet Secretary, an extraordinarily powerful position within the civil service. Between 1916 and 2002, for instance, four of the six men who were Cabinet Secretary bar two (Sir Burke Trend and Sir John Hunt between 1963 and 1979) were Heads of the Home Civil Service. Several were also Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, one was Clerk to the Privy Council, and all were co-ordinators of the Intelligence services.   Officially anonymous, objective, independent, and non-partisan, the Cabinet Secretary of the day advised each of the twenty prime ministers of the twentieth c...

  The European Union is a mixture of the organic and artificial, reflecting the cultures and people who have built it and who sustain it and operate it. It has a set of legal and political institutions and mechanisms which have a history, which deserves to be remembered in discussions about the EU’s institutions and culture.   David Olosuga, in his 2014 work about the insertion of colonial armies into the Great War of 1914-18, makes the point that the culture and image of Imperial Europe was presented almost in terms of a separate and exceptional realm. Despite the huge damage wrought upon the peoples and civilisations of every other continent, European life and values were considered an apex of human existence, and this model in turn defined the world. This process had multiple ‘dark sides.’ One involved the deprioritisation of the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean basin, the shared Eurasian and Christian heritage of neighbouring cultures, and the develo...

  The Irish Parliament 1297-1800 There was a semi-autonomous Irish parliament between 1297 and 1800. From 1537, this body was divided into an Irish House of Lords and House of Commons on an highly restricted franchise, and whereas it purported to a national authority, it should not be misinterpreted as a national assembly. From 1495, its laws had to be cleared by the Irish and British Privy Councils, for instance, as ‘Ponying’s Law’ subordinated the Irish parliament to the English one. [1] From 1607, in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, until 1778, Catholics in Ireland were excluded at various times from public office, voting, the army, many forms of ownership, and effectively from public worship and burial. This process was from time to time interrupted, and was not systematic at first, leaving some Irish catholic lords and MPs until the late seventeenth century, for instance. From the early seventeenth century, however, constituencies were changed to give the Irish House of...

  As often in the past three years, I am compiling my briefing notes for students in the intention of putting them online as a book. These are draft notes for one of this term's courses, copied from my main blog. Ireland is an old island which currently contains a young republic and a culturally divided area of British jurisdiction. Consequently, there is a great deal of ‘term shifting’ which goes on in descriptions of the place. Some people feel comfortable thinking in terms of counties, some in provinces, and some in geographical descriptions. Given the historic and current disputatiousness of the Irish, otherwise innocuous terms carry meanings; to call the country ‘Eire’ rather than ‘the Republic,’ to use the terms ‘the State’ or ‘The North’ is to make a conscious decision of which those outside of Ireland’s internal debates are often unaware. Some cities have three names, all of which, in the right circumstances, could start a fight. Paradoxically, however, the association of...