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Eberhard Bort
Eberhard ‘Paddy’ Bort was the Convener and Director of Studies of the Academy of Government’s Parliamentary Internship Programme. His teaching at Edinburgh University included Scottish Society and ...view moreEberhard ‘Paddy’ Bort was the Convener and Director of Studies of the Academy of Government’s Parliamentary Internship Programme. His teaching at Edinburgh University included Scottish Society and Culture, Contemporary Irish Politics, The Politics of Borders, and British Studies. He was also Book Reviews Editor of Scottish Affairs. He came to Edinburgh from Tübingen in 1995 on a research contract – to study the borders of the European Union – which included the peculiar arrangement in place at that time at the Finnish-Russian border. His interest in the Nordic countries had already been kindled when he attended a four-day conference in Trondheim in the early 1990s. At Edinburgh University, he helped to coordinate a series of visits by Danish English 140 teachers to Scotland, and was invited to be a guest teacher at a Gymnasium in Copenhagen. Before coming to Edinburgh in 1995, Paddy worked at Tübingen University in British and Irish Studies with Professor Christopher Harvie and taught German Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington, USA. He also served for 15 years as a town councillor in Baden-Württemberg in the south of Germany and was thus keenly interested in questions of local democracy, where the Nordic countries offer a sharp contrast to the Scottish situation. When he once explained the Scottish system of local governance to a Finnish colleague, he nearly fell off his char in disbelief. While Scotland has 1,223 elected councillors covering the whole of Scotland in 32 ‘local’ councils, Finland has 311 councils with over 10,000 elected councillors. As a committed ‘folkie’, Paddy published four volumes on Hamish Henderson, the ‘father of the Scottish folk revival’ – and there is another yet to be published. He also published books and articles in learned journals on Irish and Scottish politics, society and culture and on uk devolution and European regionalism. Paddy died suddenly in Edinburgh in February 2017 while completing this book. We miss him hugely.view less