The Northern Ireland Act 1998 (c.47) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which established a devolved legislature for Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Assembly, after decades of direct rule from Westminster.
It repealed the Government of Ireland Act 1920, parts of the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973, and established new rules in line with the European Union and the Northern Ireland peace process, subsequent to the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
The Act allows for a devolved Northern Ireland Assembly of 108 members. Membership of the assembly is subject to a pledge of office, which subjects the member to certain requirements with regard to standards and responsibilities. Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom until or unless a majority vote in a referendum determines otherwise. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland holds the power to call for the referendum if appears likely to him that a majority of the voters would express their desire to become part of a United Ireland. The Assembly has the power of modifying any Act of the British Parliament as far as it "is part of the law of Northern Ireland". They cannot deal, however, with reserved or excepted matters, which are of exclusive competence of the government of the United Kingdom, in consultation with the Republic of Ireland through the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. The Assembly has been suspended a number of times since 1998, and was re-established on Tuesday 8 May 2007, subsequent to the St Andrews Agreement of 2006.
Election to the Assembly is by single transferable vote (STV), a form of proportional representation.
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“... in Northern Ireland, if you don’t have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)
“Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.”
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“Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)