For several years he has advised the 47-member state Council of Europe and
helped draft the Council of Europe
White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue published in May 2008. The council’s intercultural dialogue co-ordinator said: ‘Without you and your colleagues we would not have managed to bring this project
to a positive conclusion.
’
He has worked with the two football assocations in Ireland on the battle against
intolerance in the sport. He advises the Irish Football Association on its
Football for All campaign and was principal drafter of the Football Association
of Ireland
’s Intercultural Football Plan, launched in 2007. In 2009, he was commissioned by the NGO Football Against
Racism in Europe, which works in 38 countries, to help it reorganise to build
on the successes of its first decade.
He and his Queen’s colleague, Prof Rick Wilford, honorary senior research fellows of the
Constitution Unit at University College London, led for a decade the Northern
Ireland team in a UK-wide research programme monitoring the outworking of
devolution. This has provided a unique
chronicle of the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’. In 2007 he addressed senior Whitehall officials at the invitation of the head
of the prime minister
’s strategy unit, who described the seminar as ‘excellent’. On the evidence of this and other research, in 2009 he published a paper
making the case for a renewal and realignment of politics in Northern Ireland,
which led to the foundation of a new NGO,
Platform for Change.
At a grassroots level, he has worked closely with the Ballynafeigh Community
Development Association, an NGO which has for a quarter of a century struggled
to preserve the cross-sectarian character of this south Belfast neighbourhood.
In 2007 and 2008 respectively, he carried out research for the association on
what makes this shared neighbourhood function in an otherwise divided city and
how it should manage the area
’s growing cultural diversity.
Robin Wilson
policy analyst