‘Whatever you say,say nothing’: Teaching public administration in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article is a contribution to a special issue of Teaching Public Administration, which offers teachers with many years’ experience the opportunity to reflect on changes over time. The context for this paper is teaching public administration in Northern Ireland, a region of the UK that has a sizeable public sector but a distinctive and unstable structure of governance. The paper begins by summarizing the pedagogic polemic in teaching public administration, how this played out in a devolved region of the UK that has witnessed political conflict, and the influence of this setting on the provision of higher education for public sector officials. It addresses how a regional university has sought to meet the seemingly parochial demands of its students with the wider demands for global outward-facing teaching and research.

Keywords

Northern Ireland policy community Master of Public Administration pedagogic dilemma curriculum design

Introduction

This article is a reflective contribution to the journal from the experience of the author whose career spanned three decades teaching public administration in Northern Ireland from 1984 onwards. This period witnessed not only significant changes in the nature of the curriculum but also in the market for students interested in pursuing or advancing their careers in the public sector. The context for the article is the University of Ulster (which later changed its name to Ulster University), established following the merger of the (then) New University of Ulster and the Northern Ireland Polytechnic in 1984. The merger was prompted by the fact that the New University of Ulster, based in Coleraine, had not met its student recruitment targets, whereas Ulster College, which became a polytechnic in 1975, ‘succeeded beyond expectations’ (Birley, 1991: 125). The move to merge these two institutions in itself exemplified the politically charged milieu in which higher education operated in Northern Ireland. Nationalists argued that the new university should have been sited at the already established Magee College in (London)derry, and its location in Coleraine was part of a Unionist agenda to consolidate their position in the east of the Province. A part-time BA in Public Sector Studies was one of a number of part-time degrees to be established at Ulster Polytechnic aimed at in-service practitioners primarily working in the Northern Ireland public sector. The paper is structured in four parts. First, we consider the wider pedagogic polemic which challenges teachers of public administration. Second, we examine the development and evolution of the subject in Northern Ireland at a regional university. Third, we outline what is different or distinctive about teaching public administration in this context. Finally, we draw some conclusions.

The pedagogic dilemma

Public administration teachers have grappled with pedagogy for many years. Essentially there are two schools of thought – first, those who hold the view that public administration should retain its academic credentials as a social science subject and teach programmes accordingly. The second view is that public administration has, by the nature of the subject, a vocational orientation and should therefore be taught with this in mind. In other words, the purpose of public administration education is to ‘shine a light on the dark arts of government’ (Knox and McMahon, 2014: 45). In the early 1990s, for example, there was an active debate about the state of the discipline. Prominent American scholars (Lynn and Wildavsky, 1990) offered both optimism and pessimism about public administration, captured by the following quotation.

Where some see a lack of cohesion and focus, others see a rich diversity. While some bemoan a lack of methodological rigour, others celebrate the growing inter-disciplinary approaches. While some see the opportunities for integrated and coherent theory to guide the field, others foresee an incremental progression driven by competition amongst alternative approaches and perspectives. (Wise, 1991: 83)

One of the most respected scholars in the field, Richard Chapman, raised the problem of teaching public administration in a comparative study on the United Kingdom, USA, Canada and Ireland as far back as 1978. In each of these countries he found uncertainty and concern about the nature of the subject: ‘there is no agreement whether it should primarily be concerned with producing new academic theories or with solving the problems of the practical world’ (Chapman, 1978: 48).

Fast forward 25 years later and UK academics are sanguine about the future of public administration.

Public Administration continues to provide a framework to analyse the practice of government and governance, governing institutions and traditions, and their wider sociological context. It can also directly inform policy reform – even if this endeavour can have its own pitfalls and pratfalls for the ‘engaged’ academic. We further suggest that, rather than lacking theoretical rigour, new approaches are developing that recognise the structural and political nature of the determinants of public administration. (Kelly and Dodds, 2012: 199)

Kelly and Dodds went on to highlight the richness of modern comparative work in public administration. This debate continues in the discipline. Barberis (2012: 89–90), for example, claims that ‘many who teach the subject have been unable, even if it were their wish, to resist the clamour to offer programmes of study that are vocationally relevant’. He argues that public administration should rekindle and nurture its traditional academic roots and ‘resist the allure of training or of any attempt to torture its syllabuses to the apparent needs of the workplace’. While he accepts that it can have a vocational dimension, this is not the strength of academia. Public administration training, he suggests, is ‘best left to those inured with the genius of the workplace’ and academics should resist ‘the temptation to have it serve purposes for which it is ill suited’. These pedagogic debates are reflected in how the subject is taught and the nature of the curriculum.

Teaching, learning and curriculum design

Public administration as a subject has become subsumed into a mix of structural reconfigurations, in part driven by the research assessment/excellence exercises. This has seen the subject absorbed within politics, business studies, and management departments. Public administration has become a postgraduate area of scholarship aimed increasingly at in-service professionals. Moreover, debates continue about its status as a discipline, subject and field of academic enquiry. One very positive trend is that research-informed teaching in the field of public administration has coincided with the need to demonstrate research impact. These developments are mutually reinforcing and students benefit as a result. Classroom materials, case studies, simulations and role playing take on a relevance that is rooted in tutors’ research. Students as in-service practitioners can provide critical feedback on developing research or act as a sounding board for embryonic ideas of academics.

Like other areas of education, technology has resulted in significant changes, not always positive. Students now expect readings, lecture notes, lesson plans and discussion groups to be an integral part of the modern teaching and learning offer. This, however, can lead to the commodification of learning – unless the readings are on Moodle, Blackboard Learn or a similar platform, students do not feel the need to read more widely. The serendipity of learning has all but disappeared – browsing through current and back issues of hard copy journals has gone in the modern era of digital searching. Tuition fees also add to this commodification – students can be more demanding of a ‘product’ and ‘outcome’ because they are paying. This also links to the modalities of provision. Busy in-service professionals need academic courses to fit in with their work commitments. Day-release, evening and weekend, block-release, on-site, custom-designed programmes have challenged providers to find the ‘right’ mix for their students.

The international market for students has waxed and waned. Again, this may not be specific to public administration as a subject area, but international markets have become much more competitive. Questions are asked about the extent to which a significant influx of international students ‘kills’ the local market and whether there is a very different public administration curriculum needed for developing countries. Ulster as a destination for international students on the periphery of Western Europe and a plane journey from the mainland also faced a bigger challenge competing in this market. The drive towards internationalization has also prompted UK universities, and Ulster is no different in this regard, towards accreditation. However, given the quality assurance systems in place more generally in higher education in the UK, accreditation, typically by bodies such as the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation or the US equivalent, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, did not attract providers in large numbers.

Public sector officials want to see a clear pathway between taught courses and career development; hence skills development and core competencies are demanded in curriculum content, teaching methods and student-learning modalities. That said, the more far-sighted practitioners often welcome the opportunity to stand back from their daily responsibilities and reflect on their work practices through a body of theory that makes sense of what they are doing and why. This makes it incumbent on academics to develop the learning bridge between theory and practice. The experience of this author is that there has been a resurgence of interest in public administration theories, perhaps regarded as the refuge of academics when faced with an audience of experienced practitioners from a diversity of public service backgrounds.

Curriculum design of Master of Public Administration (MPA) programmes allows for different approaches and is often informed by the teaching and research skills of academic staff. There is, however, a large difference emerging between North American and latterly Chinese programmes with a heavy emphasis on econometrics and quantitative skills. This is at odds with many of the European programmes, which tend to have a stronger theoretical and qualitative orientation. This trend was captured in an anecdotal remark at a recent public administration conference in the USA when a participant questioned a young scholar who had presented a sophisticated econometric analysis of public sector reform in China. She asked whether services for citizens had improved, only to be informed that ‘I had not tested for that in my multiple regression’! An over-emphasis on quantitative methods can cause a loss of focus on what is important in public administration as a subject or discipline.

While public administration in the UK has not gone down the route of Quality Assurance benchmarking, three key stakeholder bodies: the Public Administration Committee of the Joint University Council, the Public Management and Policy Association, and the Public Administration Specialist Group of the UK’s Political Studies Association issued guidance for designing and delivering MPAs. Their guidance was driven by two factors: the (academic) disciplinary considerations of public administration, and the requirements of employers. These two drivers, they argued, ‘are entirely compatible since the discipline of public administration while grounded in political science theory with input from the business schools, is nothing if not practical and therefore of use to public sector employers’ (Coxhead et al., 2010).

The Joint University Council Public Administration Committee (2010) issued guidance on what an MPA should comprise by way of design and content. This includes the following.

An MPA should contribute to the development of greater professionalism in public services leadership and management.

It should include opportunities to explore key concepts across institutional boundaries within the public sector.

It should use student-centred teaching and learning activities.

It should explore the relationship between theory and practice and do this, where appropriate, through the use of action learning methods.

An MPA is designed and evaluated with the involvement of public service employers and is supported in its delivery by employers through the provision of guest speakers, access to organizations for purposes of work-based learning, and visits to public services organizations. In some circumstances teaching and assessment on the course will be organized and provided by a team comprising university academics and public services practitioners.

There seems to be little room for equivocation here as to the vocational or applied dimension of teaching public administration. This pedagogical debate provides the context for examining the evolution of teaching public administration in Northern Ireland, to which we now turn.

Early beginnings

The wider political context was dominated by the prorogation of the Northern Ireland Parliament (Stormont) in March 1972 and imposition of direct rule from Westminster. Richard Rose labelled Northern Ireland as ‘a place apart’ (Rose, 1971: 42) and Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, former head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS), described the political context as a state of ‘permanent impermanence’ (Bloomfield, 1998: 28). Officials, in the absence of a political settlement, were therefore at the vanguard of sustaining public services to two highly segregated communities ravaged by violence.

Public administration as an academic subject at university level was introduced with the launch of the Northern Ireland Polytechnic under the immensely gifted and visionary leadership of Professor Michael Connolly. He introduced the first undergraduate degree entitled BA Public Sector Studies as a dedicated programme aimed at the part-time in-service market for experienced officials already holding positions in a range of sectors (health, local government, civil service, non-departmental public bodies). As an institution, Ulster Polytechnic had spotted a market niche in part-time education, an area largely ignored by its competitor, the Queen’s University Belfast, which catered for the traditional post-A-level students reading degrees in full-time mode.

As Ulster Polytechnic merged into the University of Ulster it consolidated its position as the major provider of part-time degrees. The part-time Business Studies degree, in particular, was hugely popular and one of the first from a suite of social science courses that allowed students to retain their jobs and study part time. The demand for an equivalent degree aimed at public sector employees became clear when government staff targeted business studies in the absence of a dedicated degree. This was the era when the number of people entering higher education was relatively low and hence many in-service practitioners, some in very senior positions, did not hold a first degree.

Figure 1 shows that the public sector has always represented a significant percentage of the overall employment market in Northern Ireland and hence a ready source of students for higher education. Table 1 also shows the size of the public sector in Northern Ireland compared with Great Britain.

Figure 1.

Public sector employment in Northern Ireland.

Table 1.

Regional comparison – size of public sector.

	Northern Ireland	Great Britain
Public sector employment (n)	207,305	5,741,000
Total employment (n)	844,000	31,551,000
Employment in public sector (%) of overall workforce	24.6%	18.2%

Source: Calculated from Office for National Statistics regional labour market reports.

Table 2 shows the spread of public sector employment across central government departments, bodies under their aegis, and local government. It is worth noting that, even following the reorganization of local government, councils remain a small stakeholder within the wider Northern Ireland public sector (Knox, 2012).

Table 2.

Spread of public sector employment in Northern Ireland.

	Total employment (n)
Northern Ireland central government	107,438
Bodies under aegis of Northern Ireland central government	74,861
UK central government bodies in Northern Ireland	3620
Local government (district councils)	11,843
Public corporations	9543
GRAND TOTAL	207,305

Source: Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.

Through initial marketing and the goodwill of foresighted employers, the Public Sector Studies part-time degree became hugely popular. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) (up until it was superseded by the Police Service of Northern Ireland in 2001) and the health service were amongst the first employers to offer generous support to their employees. This included payment (or part payment) of fees, day-release, subsistence and a book purchase allowance. It was particularly surprising, given the daily pressures on policing in times of major civil disorder, that the RUC valued investment in their personnel. Other employers followed suit, albeit with less generous financial support, but nonetheless payment of fees tended to be the norm.

Given the diversity of backgrounds of students entering the programme, the curriculum tended to comprise basic building blocks in public sector economics, law, statistics, finance and public administration, with a final project that addressed a work-based issue of relevance to the student. The normal completion time for the part-time degree was five years but the system was flexible to allow students to extend should work circumstances dictate the need for a longer period of time.

Progression

As time progressed and the needs of the part-time market changed, with more public employees entering the profession having first degrees, the nature of the education offer changed. The University of Ulster moved to provide part-time postgraduate education in public administration. Such was the proximity of the academic and policy communities as a result of providing the public sector degree, it seemed like a very natural progression to pilot test a postgraduate programme. This came in the form of the MSc in Policy Analysis (Erridge and Connolly, 1986). Senior officials of wisdom and standing collaborated with the University of Ulster to co-design a master’s programme aimed at the most talented and upcoming future public sector leaders. Students were selected across a range of providers (civil service, health, local government, police, housing) and delivery took the form of intensive blocks of teaching interspersed with work commitments, culminating in an employer-led issue, addressed through the lens of Kingdon’s policy problem, policies and politics framework (Kingdon, 1984). What was novel (at the time) about the latter was that it involved employers sitting on the assessment panel, alongside academics, as students presented and defended their findings. Although employers were non-voting members they could interrogate students on the practical relevance of their work. The Master of Policy Analysis morphed into the Master of Public Administration (MPA) and became available to a wider market.

The present

The MPA continues to have a strong foothold in the public sector, largely because of the support of senior officials in NICS (Knox and McMahon, 2014). The first year of the two-year part-time programme is co-designed and co-taught by academics and senior officials from a range of departments in the civil service. Each of the nine executive departments sponsors two students to attend the postgraduate certificate element of the programme, who may progress to the master’s at their own cost. This has ensured stability in student supply and a curriculum that combines academic theory and practice. Civil servants deliver several teaching slots on the programme and bring a high degree of topicality and relevance to the postgraduate offer. This partnership has been forged through the NICS Centre for Applied Learning, which provides a range of professional development courses for in-service practitioners. The centre takes an active interest in the MPA, sitting in on modules, which are delivered over a four-day period, and monitoring the progression of programme graduates to ensure the civil service maximizes its human resource potential. In addition, the programme has a long-standing collaboration with the health sector, which delivers the first year in-house under a partnership agreement with the health and social care trusts, beyond which the students complete their master’s programme at Ulster University. This first-year outsourced health services element of the programme comes under the same quality assurance arrangements as the MPA – common external examiner, curriculum design approved by Ulster University and marking/moderation arrangements that comply with university standards. Where the existing programme has been less successful is attracting local government and voluntary and community sector participants. Local government in Northern Ireland has a limited public services role relative to other parts of the United Kingdom, although some of the MPA alumni are prominent in the new reorganized councils. The third sector is currently downsizing with the loss of European and philanthropic funding which had generously supported conflict and post-conflict-related activities.

What is/was different?

So what is/was different about teaching public administration in Northern Ireland relative to other parts of the UK over a 30-year period?

Politics

It is hardly surprising that political context played an important part in the teaching and delivery of public administration in a number of ways. First, in the early days security concerns were paramount. Teaching pedagogy lent itself to applied policy work as a way of explicating and enlivening theoretical concepts in public administration. This usually involved students being asked to identify their employing organizations in simulations, case studies, role playing etc. However, teachers were instructed not to ask students who their employers were, best captured by the Irish Republican idiom ‘whatever you say, say nothing’, an expression coined during the conflict for those subject to investigation by the police or army. Given the number of RUC personnel attending the course, asking students who their employers were posed a security risk. Sadly, this risk proved real. On 4 November 1983 the Irish Republican Army planted a bomb in the false ceiling of the then Ulster Polytechnic at Jordanstown. The specific target of the attack was police officers attending classes. The bomb killed two officers and injured 33 students and staff. Another officer died from his injuries in August 1984 (CAIN, 2018).

Politics manifests itself in other ways. The role of the public sector may be seemingly innocuous in other parts of the UK, but in Northern Ireland public services are fraught with political overtures (discrimination in housing allocation, gerrymandering in local government, duplication of schools, leisure facilities in separate communities) and must be taught with sensitivity lest tutors are accused of political bias in favour of or against the state.

On a lighter note, a rather amusing story of an early career public administration teacher illustrates how politics played out in practice. The teacher’s records showed that one course participant, in particular, had missed several classes and not submitted in-course assessment. The teacher asked the class if anyone knew the student and, if so, to remind him that he was on the brink of a warning for lack of commitment to the programme. No student openly claimed knowledge of the person in question but immediately following the class a small group of his colleagues identified the aberrant student as the (then) Chief Constable of the RUC, who had been dealing with a serious breakdown in civil disorder over the previous weeks!

Policy community

The Northern Ireland policy community is small. This is both a good and bad thing. It is good in the sense that it provides academics with great access to senior officials and data for research purposes. In an era of demonstrating research impact, public administration academics can be called on to advise statutory committees of the Northern Ireland Assembly, offer comments on draft legislation and conduct policy evaluations, all of which may have a significant impact on public policies in Northern Ireland. Senior officials also tend to be very generous with their time in giving student talks on issues of topical relevance. It is less good in that senior officials may take constructive academic criticism of their department’s work as personal, damaging to their careers, and insensitive to the delicate, and sometimes sectarian, political balance they must operate within.

Devolution and direct rule

The period of time covered in this paper has seen many changes in the nature of governance arrangements in Northern Ireland and hence the skills and competencies required of public officials. The current system of devolved government, in the form of the Northern Ireland Assembly, was first elected on 25 June 1998 and met on 1 July 1998. However, it only existed in ‘shadow’ form until 2 December 1999 when full powers were devolved to the Assembly. Since then, the Assembly has operated intermittently and has been suspended on five occasions: 11 February–30 May 2000; 10 August 2001 (24-hour suspension); 22 September 2001 (24-hour suspension); 14 October 2002–7 May 2007; and 9 January 2017–present.

During direct rule periods, officials were often accused of running Northern Ireland and hence the skills they required were quite different from those during periods of devolution (Knox and Carmichael, 2010). Direct rule often meant simply ‘reading across’ UK legislation and policies with little or no adaptation. This resulted in the loss of policy-making skills amongst public officials. Even the demands of public accountability were much lower. Civil servants rarely attended the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster and, when they did, it was a significant (usually negative) experience in their careers (Foster, 2015).

During spells of devolved government, however, civil servants complained about the level of engagement they had to have with the Northern Ireland Assembly, including the local public accounts committee. These new arrangements demanded a very different skill set, which had to be reflected in curriculum design in the MPA (greater emphasis on public accountability, serving politicians, and tackling difficult issues within short political cycles). A competency framework was developed for civil servants by the Centre for Applied Learning, which looked for skills development as an integral part of the co-designed MPA programme.

Competencies

NICS, one of the key markets for the MPA, operated within the Professional Skills for Government competency framework, which was superseded in 2014 by the Northern Ireland Civil Service Competency Framework. While the MPA curriculum design paid attention to these frameworks, it was not designed around them on the grounds that a higher degree tries to achieve a balance of skills and knowledge. Yet, given the fact that competencies now inform recruitment and promotion, performance management and development decisions, it would be foolish to ignore this context as being too practitioner-focused, not least because competencies can be incorporated in the design, delivery and assessment of MPA modules. The competencies framework is set out in Figure 2 and expanded in Table 3.

Figure 2.

NICS competencies framework.

Table 3.

NICS competencies – detailed.

Setting the direction	Seeing the big picture	Having an in-depth understanding and knowledge of how your role fits with, and supports, organisational objectives and the wider public needs.
	Changing and improving	Being open to change, suggesting ideas for improvements to the way things are done, and working in ‘smarter’, more focused ways.
	Making effective decisions	Showing clarity of thought, setting priorities, analysing and using evidence to evaluate options before arriving at well reasoned, justifiable decisions.
Engaging people	Leading and communicating	Leading from the front and communicating with clarity, conviction and enthusiasm.
	Collaborating and partnering	Create and maintain positive, professional and trusting working relationships with a wide range of people within and outside the NICS, to help to achieve business objectives and goals.
	Building capability for all	Having a strong focus on continuous learning for oneself, others and the organisation.
Delivering results	Delivering value for money	The efficient, effective and economic use of taxpayers’ money in the delivery of public services.
	Managing a quality service	Being organised to deliver service objectives and striving to improve the quality of service, taking account of diverse customer needs and requirements.
	Delivering at pace	Focusing on delivering timely performance with energy and taking responsibility and accountability for quality outcomes.
	Achieving outcomes through delivery partners	Having a commercial, financial and sustainable mindset to ensure all activities and services are delivering added value and working to stimulate economic growth.

Source: Department of Finance and Personnel, Northern Ireland (2014).

While the MPA curriculum did not structure itself on this framework, it was nonetheless cognizant of ways in which the skills involved could be reflected in the teaching, learning and assessment elements of the programme.

Regional versus global

There were tensions as an academic provider in balancing regional needs against the demands of outward-facing public policy research. Teaching largely regional public officials demanded a detailed knowledge of the local (Northern Ireland) policy agenda with which they were preoccupied in their working lives. Often the level of detail became incredibly parochial. This author remembers a senior education official being consumed with timetabling buses in a rural area of Northern Ireland to improve efficiencies. The student subsequently became the chief executive of an education and library board. Teachers were therefore conflicted between this level of detail and a need to engage in research of global relevance. Academic journals were largely uninterested in (small) regional studies, which had limited potential for extrapolation. While ready access to the policy lab that was/is the Northern Ireland public sector offered good sources of data, the wider relevance, beyond the region being a contested space, was more challenging. In part public administration academics were creative in their work, often publishing in niche conflict studies journals or being the Northern Ireland part of wider UK devolution studies (Carmichael et al., 2007).

International markets

Like other public administration schools, and with system-wide pressures to increase income, the University of Ulster made forays into international markets. These international experiences were more by accident than design. A local (Northern Ireland) consultancy company (Helm International Consultants) won a very large public sector reform project in Bangladesh, one element of which was capacity building amongst its senior officials. They approached the University of Ulster to provide a master’s programme for their civil servants. The design was based on intensive modules taken in Ulster and some in-country (Bangladesh) work on their final dissertations. This was our first experience of teaching international students and it raised a host of challenging issues. Could these students be taught with the local market or would their background and pace of learning ‘slow down’ locals? How would we cope with the demands for local policy-relevant content and a public administration agenda to fit the needs of a developing country? There were also challenges in securing female participants from Bangladesh on the programme given its patriarchal society.

There followed further contracts to teach Chinese officials from Liaoning Province (Shenyang), who were seconded from their work to take a full-time MPA programme at Ulster, and officials from Kazakhstan who took a mix of short-term professional development courses and a smaller group who completed the MPA degree. Ulster’s experience of this international market is probably no different from other universities. It was driven by the need to raise external funds. It offered academics exposure to the international market, but it also raised many pedagogic challenges, most commonly the extent to which these students could successfully integrate with locals while offering public administration relevance to both student cohorts.

Conclusions

Teaching public administration in Northern Ireland may resonate with experiences elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but there are a few discernible differences from the perspective of this author. The politics of Northern Ireland were pervasive, and this impacted and continues to influence the role of public officials: duplicate public services; delegated authority under direct rule; read-across policy making from Westminster; sectarian politics; and working to address poor public services in a post-conflict society. These posed unique challenges for public officials. Yet in the face of these challenges many public sector organizations recognized the importance of higher education. Exemplary organizations at the sharp end of the conflict such as the RUC, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, and health and social care trusts were visionary in releasing staff for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in public administration. It would have been easier to claim daily working pressures as a reason not to grant staff day-release. The durability of public administration at postgraduate level is testament to the active practitioner–academic nexus which continues to flourish. This speaks volumes for the role played by a regional university in response to a protracted period of conflict where building capacity in the public sector was valued as a way to sustain essential public services. The challenge going forward in Northern Ireland is to embrace global trends such as public value when the political imperative continues to falter. The wider pedagogic debate rehearsed at the beginning of this paper has been largely ‘resolved’ at Ulster University. Public administration taught in a regional university must have a practical orientation of direct relevance for local officials. That does not preclude a teaching agenda that is research-informed and an active global research orientation for those who teach public administration. These two strands have become mutually reinforcing.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Colin Knox

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