My
name is Nicholas Whyte, and I was born in Belfast in 1967. I was active
in the Alliance Party of
Northern
Ireland particularly between 1993 and 1996 as their Director of
Elections/Party
Organiser, and stood for election in North
Belfast. Since January 2007 I have been the Brussels representative of Independent Diplomat,
an NGO devoted to giving diplomatic assistance to marginalised actors
in international politics. I had already lived in Belgium for eight
years, working as the Europe Program Director at
the International Crisis Group, from 2002 and previously as a Research Fellow at the Centre
for European Policy Studies from February 1999 (and their
Communications Manager from December 2001). I am also
a Visiting Senior Research Fellow of the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Workat the Queen's
University of Belfast. I live in Oud-Heverlee, just south of the
university city of Leuven to the east of Brussels.
About this site
In
1996 I designed a web-site about that year's Forum elections in
Northern Ireland,
which lived at http://www.niweb.com/nielection/ .
However, it existed simply at the goodwill of the service provider,
which eventually expired. In the run-up to the June 1998 Assembly
elections I set up a new site at http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/ which was
the original version of this site. In March 2002 I transferred the
entire election content of the site to the Northern Ireland
Social and Political Archive (ARK) which is supprted by
the Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research at
Queen's, at the suggestion of Professor Elizabeth Meehan, the
Institute's Director, and of Lord Alderdice, the then Speaker of the
Northern Ireland Assembly.
I
set up the pages at least partly as a reaction against the ill-informed
debates that were prevalent at the time on the Internet, particularly
on
the newsgroup soc.culture
irish. I
felt that at least if the results of recent elections were available
on-line,
the debate might become better informed if not better-mannered. I
cannot
claim that I was totally successful.
However
I am conscious that these pages are seen as an essential resource by
many in the scholarly and political communities, and delighted to get
many emails from those who find it a useful resource. Among
practitioners, I'd like to particularly acknowledge David Ford and Peter Robinson as
providers of helpful comments over the years.
Disclaimer
This
site benefited from a project grant from the New Initiatives Fund of
the Electoral Commission made in early 2003, and Tineke Vaes and Ivo
Damkat were hired as research assistants to add more material. Some
later material was added by Becky Vanasek and Simon Smyth. Any views
expressed on this page or, in particular, other pages of this website
are mine and not necessarily shared by my co-authors or by the
Electoral Commission. Although I have been an activist in the Alliance
Party, that organisation
bears no responsibility for the content of this site; neither do my
past
or present employers.
Your
comments, please! Send an email to me at nicholas.whyte@gmail.com.
This page last modified 28 February 2007.