About me

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 Work at 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.



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Disclaimer:© Nicholas Whyte 1998-2004 Last Updated on Wednesday, 12-Jan-2005 12:12