The Industrial Relations Act 1990 was the most significant piece of collective labour legislation to be introduced in Ireland since the La­ bour Court was set up under the Industrial Relations Act 1946. The 1990 Act contained trade disputes legislation, which repealed the Trade Disputes Act 1906, while retaining the immunities-based ap­ proach of the 1906 Act. This was significant, as a discussion document issued by Ruairi Quinn TD, Minister for Labour, in 1986, had proposed the introduction of "positive rights" and claimed that such an ap­ proach would be more in tune with the general treatment of trade disputes legislation in continental Europe (see Department of Labour, 1986). This part of the 1990 Act has proved controversial with anum­ ber of high profile cases arising from it. These include the Westman Holdings Ltd. v McCormack and Irish National Union of Vintners, Gro­ cers and Allied Trades Assistants (/NUVGATA) (the judge Roy Bean) case (1991) and the Nolan Transport v Halligan and Others (1994 and 1998) cases. Within a number of member unions of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTIJ), there have been sporadic calls for amend­ ments to the trade disputes provisions, but this has never amounted to a full-scale campaign for change. Much of the activity seems to have subsided with the successful appeal by the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU) in the Nolan Transport v Halligan and Others case (1998). Within academic circles, there has been some divergence on how to view the Act. Kerr (1991) has seen it as deriving from a consensus-based approach to industrial relations, while Wil­ kinson (1991) and Wallace and Delany (1997) have questioned the extent to which the trade disputes provisions have served to strengthen voluntarism, which was a stated intention outlined for the Act by the then Minister for Labour, Bertie Ahem TD. While the trade disputes provisions of the 1990 Act have given rise to some controversy and debate, the institutional provisions have not been the subject of similar scrutiny. These were generally accepted by employers and trade unions when introduced and this has re­mained the case since then. That these provisions were generally accepted by both trade un­ ions and employers' representatives is best accounted for by the fact that they were firmly grounded in the voluntarist tradition, which es­ chews legal intervention in industrial relations.