Complementarity in Practice: Northern Ireland

Abstract

Complementarity between the two practical approaches in Northern Ireland is more than merely a hypothesis advanced in an academic study. Practitioners from within the approaches themselves make implicit or explicit acknowledgement of an underlying complementarity. The review in Chapters 2 and 3 of the history of these approaches may give the impression of two largely discrete processes in independent operation, which Chapter 5’s analysis of the Brooke Initiative in the main does little to contradict. Chapter 6’s examination of recent development trends in community relations, however, contains a significant thread of argument which challenges that view. The consequent argument to be proposed here is that such a view is — and will be increasingly — challenged by the movement from within the cultural approach to address constituencies and/or issues which were formerly the preserve of the structural approach. It should be pointed out that this challenge is to the structural approach, rather than to the structures themselves; that is, it is directed towards the policy areas in which the structural approach operates.