Basic income advocates typically praise the administrative efficiency of universal income maintenance. This article exposes several misconceptions, unwarranted generalisations or careless assumptions that permeate discussion of the administrative properties of basic income. Each of these obscures a significant constraint on the possibility of administrative savings, or else inflates the likely size of such efficiencies where they do exist. Our analysis also reveals a number of important political choices faced by policy makers and advocates intent on implementing an administratively efficient basic income policy. The absence of systematic administrative analysis in the basic income literature has obscured these hard choices.

This article outlines a republican perspective on disability policy. Committed to ensuring the freedom-as-nondomination of disabled citizens, such a republican perspective first offers a particular diagnosis of the injustice of disability disadvantage, both in relation to individuals (dominium) and the state (imperium). Next we argue that a republican perspective may be able to sidestep some perverse implications of social contract approaches to social justice, and capable of offering a robust philosophical foundation for a theory of justice for disabled citizens. Finally, we offer a brief outline of republican remedies, grounded in the twin principles of civic participation and democratic contestation, that ought to guide robust institutional protection of disabled citizens’ republican freedom.

This paper questions the facile manner in which advocates of an unconditional basic income assert the superiority of their scheme because of its capacity to significantly economize on administration. While this claim is not entirely without merit, we argue that basic income scholars need to be more forthcoming in acknowledging that such an assessment requires a more direct and systematic administrative analysis than has hitherto been undertaken. In this paper we first provide an administrative framework that allows us to assess a variety of implementation challenges facing welfare schemes, and then apply the framework to the specific case of an universal, unconditional and individualized basic income scheme. A public administration focus allows us to better appreciate the many hard choices that basic income advocates face when implementing their preferred policy.

The conventional wisdom amongst the organ transplant community is roughly constituted by three important beliefs. First, there is a significant deficit in the overall supply of organs for transplant purposes. Second, this deficit would be substantially affected by an increase in the supply of cadaveric organs. Third, the dramatic impact of an increase in cadaveric organs for those waiting on the transplant lists, both in terms of their survival rates as well as their quality of life, makes finding policy mechanisms that effectively boost supply a key moral imperative. The transplant community is in much less agreement, however, about how to proceed achieving this goal. This article offers a radical alternative to the schemes currently in place or under consideration. We suggest policy-makers adopt a scheme with two key components. To begin with, we propose to disconnect the decision of a donor's next-of-kin to agree or veto the harvesting of organs for transplant purposes from the event of the donor's death through an advance commitment device. We have outlined this device and its main advantages in detail in another article, and will only refer to it here in a cursory fashion. In this paper we instead focus on the second component of our scheme, to wit, a financial incentive mechanism for next-of-kin to agree to the harvesting of donor organs.

This article tackles the current deficit in the supply of cadaveric organs by addressing the family veto in organ donation. The authors believe that the family veto matters ethically as well as practically and that policies that completely disregard the views of the family in this decision are likely to be counterproductive. Instead, this paper proposes to engage directly with the most important reasons why families often object to the removal of the organs of a loved one who has signed up to the donor registry notably a failure to understand fully and deliberate on the information and a reluctance to deal with this sort of decision at an emotionally distressing time. To accommodate these concerns it is proposed to separate radically the process of information, deliberation and agreement about the harvesting of a potential donor’s organs from the event of death and bereavement through a scheme of advance commitment. This paper briefly sets out the proposal and discusses in some detail its design as well as what is believed to be the main advantages compared with the leading alternatives.

This is the introduction to a special issue of Irish Political Studies on "Recognition, Equality, Democracy", to appear in December 2007 as a journal and sometime in 2008 as an edited collection published by Taylor & Francis.

This volume brings together a range of theoretical responses to issues in Irish politics. Its organising ideas: recognition, equality, and democracy set the terms of political debate within both jurisdictions. For some, there are significant tensions between the grammar of recognition, concerned with esteem, respect and the symbolic aspects of social life, and the logic of equality, which is primarily concerned with the distribution of material resources and formal opportunities, while for others, tensions are produced rather by certain interpretations of these ideas while alternative readings may, by contrast, serve as the basis for a systematic account of social and political inequality. The essays in this collection will explore these interconnections with reference to the politics of Northern Ireland and the Republic. The Republic has gone through a period in which its constitution was the focus for a liberal politics aimed at securing personal autonomy, while Northern Ireland’s political landscape has been shaped by the problem of securing political autonomy and democratic legitimacy. While the papers address key questions facing each particular polity, the issues themselves have resonances for politics on each side of the border. Contributors include Dominic Bryan, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Graham Finlay, Ronit Lentin, Cillian McBride, Peter Morriss, Aoife Nolan, Ian O'Flynn, Ciaran O'Kelly, Shane O'Neill and Judy Walsh.

Suicide is a major cause of medical, social and political concern in most countries. According to the WHO, “suicide is a huge but largely preventable public health problem, causing almost half of all violent deaths and resulting in almost one million fatalities every year, as well as economic costs in the billions of dollars”. There is widespread agreement that suicide prevention ought to take centre stage in public health policy, yet debates about suicide are still largely informed by medical or religious doctrines that are only partially suitable for informing a robust policy. Against this background the purpose of this paper is threefold. First I want to make a general case for a broader public policy perspective on the regulation of suicide and attempted suicide. The reference to “regulation” explicitly denies that prevention is the optimal strategy in all cases, and that policy should cater for such complexity. Second, I want to engage with the main ethical arguments for and against suicide and assess how they might inform a policy perspective. Where traditional debates focus on the stalemate between “sanctity of life” vs. “right to die” arguments, I propose that a genuine policy perspective has to appreciate the salience of various types of negative externalities when considering its preferred strategy. Third, the paper briefly assesses existing strategies – such as the WHO worldwide initiative for the prevention of suicide (SUPRE) – from this revised policy perspective. In particular I focus on the drawbacks of a recommendation almost universally accepted – to wit, that action against suicide requires restricting access to the means for committing suicide – and suggest an alternative approach.

This paper discusses the debate leading up to the workplace smoking ban, instituted in Ireland on 29 March 2004. The first comprehensive ban of its nature, the Irish case is considered an important test for radical tobacco control policy. Building on the pioneering work of Jon Elster on “the strategic use of argument”, we claim that the single-mindedly focus on equally securing public health in the workplace for all workers contributed to the successful legislation and implementation of the controversial measure in Ireland. By expanding the concept of the workplace to include restaurants, pubs and other establishments in the hospitality sector, the proposed legislation produces public health benefits well beyond the strict remit of the workplace. We argue that the strategic use of the equal health argument serves a number of important purposes, and merits closer scrutiny. This paper outlines the main findings of a computer-based analysis of the debates as reported in two main Irish newspapers, and discusses the results of our empirical analysis in the light of our main hypothesis.

Recent debates on tobacco control illustrate how contemporary political argument abuses rights discourse, substituting claims of rights to reasoned argument in the policy process. The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which this strategy is successful. I suggest first that although smokers may be said to have certain entitlements that could fit the paradigm conception of a moral right, this paradoxically does not include a right to smoke as argued by the pro-smoking lobby. Next I want to argue that a similar problem affects the rights discourse of the anti-smoking lobby: the right to breathe clean air too faces considerable conceptual and normative challenges. Consequently I believe that the tobacco control debate cannot properly be conducted in terms of rights. In fact, perhaps both advocates and critics of tobacco control would do well to leave political rhetoric where it works best – in the political domain – without allowing such claims to corrupt the systematic ethical assessment of competing values and policies.

Following recent legislation in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere, radical smoking restrictions have become a controversial topic in political and public health circles. Despite wide support for anti-smoking legislation it remains a matter of considerable contention whether a conclusive argument in favour of prohibiting smoking in public places has been offered, or indeed can be offered. This paper investigates an intriguing paradox that arises in the debate between public health advocates of radical smoking bans and their civil liberty/libertarian adversaries. The paradox is the following. If smoking is considered a voluntary act, as maintained by libertarians, smokers are effectively responsible for the harm they cause, and comprehensive smoking restrictions appear justified. If smoking is not a rational act but an addiction-induced habit, a view held by the public health lobby, smokers cannot be held fully responsible and radical restrictions are unjustified because unfairly burdensome to smokers. The “paradox” then suggests that both public health advocates and libertarian anti-ban lobbyists are caught in defending arguments by insisting on behavioural assumptions (free choice vs. addiction) that cannot possibly lead to their preferred policy outcome. This paper investigates the background considerations leading up to this paradox, and briefly discusses several strategies that might offer a way out for tobacco control advocates.

Recent research in comparative policy has drawn attention to the importance of path-dependency and stickiness in relation to the study of political efficiency of welfare policies. This paper builds on this literature by discussing the political resilience of basic income schemes, defined as the capacity to resist political change once adopted. The main argument is that in addition to contingent political mechanisms that produce path-dependency certain design properties of an unconditional basic income scheme contribute to its political resilience. The paper employs a variety of sources in cognitive psychology, political science and sociology to demonstrate how the specific design features of basic income outperform more selective welfare policies. Research in political resilience is important to understand the dynamic properties of policies, but moreover has important, if ambivalent, implications for the more general question of political efficiency.

This article critically examines the Disability Act 2005 which regulates access to public services for disabled people in Ireland. We examine the competing conceptions of disability rights advanced by the government and the disability sector during the debate on the legislation and offer an interpretation of disability rights as the justiciable right to challenge. The Disability Act 2005 is then evaluated in light of the proposed framework. We outline a number of ways in which the absence of a justiciable right to challenge fails to safeguard the dignity, empowerment and participation of disabled people. We contend that, despite protestations to the contrary, the Act fails to meet the requirements of a rights-based approach, thus amounting to a missed opportunity for genuinely advancing the cause of disabled citizens in the Republic of Ireland.

This paper explores the role and justification of rights-based models of service delivery for disabled service-users. The arguments focusses in particular on strong justificiable rights, where service users have access to substantive legal remedies in order to further their claims. The paper first defends the idea of justiciable disability rights against some common (though often misunderstood) criticism. Next the paper introduces three properties of rights that, jointly, offer a strong case in favour of a rights-based approach to disability services: the dignity of rights, the empowering nature of dignity, and the public nature of rights. Each of these properties is explored in some detail and its relevance to disability rights established. We conclude that, if we accept these properties as desirable, a rights-based approach is vastly superiour to administrative or political mechanisms for ensuring service delivery to disabled people.

In the ongoing debate on reforming the welfare state, a marginal but notable position is advanced by a number of theorists who propose the introduction of a universal basic income scheme as a solution to the current problems. A basic income is a grant to which all individuals/citizens are entitled, irrespective of family situation or income, without past, present or future work requirement. Basic income is heavily criticized for a number of reasons. One is that it frustrates the norm of reciprocity. According to this critique, basic income's focus on unconditional grants makes it possible for people to relinquish their basic social obligations and free-ride on the productive effort of fellow citizens. This paper first critically assesses the reciprocity objection against basic income, and finds it wanting. Second, the paper argues that it is possible to integrate basic income in a reciprocity-sensitive framework. To achieve this I argue that we must radically rethink the idea of property rights within employment, which underlie the views of both the proponents and adversaries of basic income.

Philippe Van Parijs’s ethical justification of basic income is based on the argument that job resources must be shared equally. Underlying this idea are two important claims: (1) all individuals in society hold an ex ante entitlement in job resources and (2) job resources are tradable. First, I present the real-libertarian argument for sharing job resources. Next, I identify and critically review three different objections against this view: the liability objection, the cooperation objection and the parasitism objection. I believe the parasitism objection poses a serious challenge to basic income, and argue that Van Parijs’s most plausible response - based on the idea that job resources are socially owned - is flawed. I provide the outline of an alternative normative basis for grounding a person’s ex ante entitlement to job resources using an institutionalist approach.

This brief note explores the continuing rise of the Flemish Blok, the extreme right-wing party in Belgium. We briefly challenge the most common explanations and propose that part of the explanation might be due to the specific electoral context of Belgium and Flanders. The combination of compulsory voting, a multi-party coalition politics, and the absence of a genuine opportunity to cast a protest vote, we surmise, significantly explains the vote share of the Flemish Blok. If this diagnosis is correct, the solution to the problem is to ensure that genuine protest voters have an alternative avenue to register discontent with the current government, or even politics more generally, instead of a vote for the Extreme Right.

I have authored three entries in this multi-volume Encyclopediae on social policy.