Property Family And The Irish Welfare State

This book examines the long-term development of the Irish welfare state since the late nineteenth century. It contests the consensus view that Ireland, like other Anglophone countries, has historically operated a liberal welfare regime which forces households to rely mainly on the market to maintain their standard of living. Drawing on case studies and key statistical data, this book argues that the Irish welfare state developed differently from most other Western European countries until recent decades. Norris's original line of argument makes the case that Ireland’s regime was distinctive in terms of both focus and purpose in that Ireland’s welfare state was shaped by the power of small farmers and moral teaching and intended to support a rural, agrarian and familist social order rather than an urban working class and industrialised economy. A well-researched and methodical study, this book will be of great interest to scholars of social policy, sociology and Irish history.

This is a fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital.

This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovatively address the impact of crisis on the welfare state in Northern Ireland. The result is to isolate key drivers of structural welfare reform, and assess how globalisation, financialisation, neo-liberalisation, privatisation, marketisation and new public management have deepened and diversified their impact on the post-crisis Irish welfare state. This in-depth analysis will appeal to sociologists, economists, political scientists and welfare state practitioners interested in the Irish welfare state and more generally in the analysis of welfare state change.

Describes how the modern Irish welfare state, faced with the need to join the open European market, emerged through a conflict among special interests (capital, class, and gender). The author studies the case of Ireland in order to explore the policy options and possibilities in welfare states.

This book analyzes the changing shape of Irish society over the hundred years since the 1916 rising, arguing that there are distinctive master patterns that characterize its development of a welfare state that triangulates among church, state, and capital. Fred Powell charts the influence of social movements that resisted oppressive power structures, including the labor and feminist movements, organizations working for the rights of tenants and the homeless, survivors of institutional abuse, groups of asylum seekers and refugees, and activists for gay rights and minority and ethnic cultural rights. The tension between these groups and the more conservative institutions that have dominated Ireland raises major questions about whether an inclusive welfare state is possible in a quasi-religious society.

This text plots the political and legal evolution and trends of the welfare system in Ireland. It highlights the changes to the appeals structure and impact of the European Union, with particular reference to harmonisation and the elimination of sexual discrimination.

The political economy of the Irish welfare state provides a fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital. Using official estimates, Professor Powell demonstrates that the welfare state is vital for the cohesion of Irish society with half the population at risk of poverty without it. However, the reality is of a residual welfare system dominated by means tests, with a two-tier health service, a dysfunctional housing system driven by an acquisitive dynamic of home-ownership at the expense of social housing, and an education system that is socially and religiously segregated. Using the evolution of the Irish welfare state as a narrative example of the incompatibility of political conservatism, free market capitalism and social justice, the book offers a new and challenging view on the interface between structure and agency in the formation and democratic purpose of welfare states, as they increasingly come under critical review and restructuring by elites.

​This book offers an analysis of social security in Ireland from 1981 to 2016 - a period of immense economic and social change during which social provisions such as pensions and family benefits were downsized or diluted in many countries. It considers whether this important area of welfare state provision in Ireland changed, and the extent and pattern of change. In the first in-depth account of this aspect of social policy In Ireland, the book sets the welfare state in a historical and comparative context and reviews the impact of globalisation, politics and the financial crash on the scope and generosity of social security. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of welfare state politics and comparative social policy as well as to students of Irish social policy.