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"Dukelow, Fiona"
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Defining events : power, resistance and identity in twenty-first-century Ireland
This book re-visits and re-thinks some recent defining events in Irish society. Each chapter focuses on an event that has occurred since the start of the twenty first century. Some were high profile, some were \"fringe\" events, others were widely discussed in popular culture at the time. A number of chapters focus on key moments of protest and popular mobilisation. All of the events covered provide rich insights into the dynamics of Irish society; exposing underlying and complex issues of identity, power and resistance that animate public debate. The book ultimately encourages readers to question the sources of, limits and obstacles to change in contemporary Ireland. The book brings together critical commentators from a diverse range of social science disciplines. These writers make important contributions to intellectual life and discourse about social, economic and cultural issues in today's Ireland. This makes for an original, timely and genuinely inter-disciplinary text.
Book
Ireland’s Well-being Framework: Going beyond growth?
This article situates and critiques Ireland’s Well-being Framework (WBF) within the discourse and developments on the well-being economy as a means of transitioning to sustainable welfare and a post-growth society. This refers to the reform of welfare states and introduction of eco-social policies based on achieving well-being by meeting basic human needs for all within planetary boundaries. The article engages with the question of whether the well-being economy is an effective paradigm to mainstream post-growth policies. By applying this question to the case of Ireland, the article considers the transformative potential of the Irish WBF adopted in 2021. By examining its evolution, it looks at the degree to which the adoption of a well-being narrative and policy framework demonstrates an opening, in the Irish context, to address the challenges of going beyond the growth dependence of the welfare state and the increasing urgency of the contradictions of green growth. It concludes that Ireland’s WBF does not, in its current form, disturb the dominant policy priority of economic growth and any transformative potential it might have is curbed by its overly ambiguous nature.
Journal Article
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy
This article provides a critical commentary on Irish activation policy. It is framed with reference to the point made in
that a key purpose of activation is ‘to help ensure a supply of labour at competitive rates’. It looks at how a tougher work-first activation regime can be situated within the wider landscape of reform and retrenchment in the social protection system following the 2008 financial crisis. Broadly utilising Pierson’s concepts of programmatic and systemic retrenchment, it situates the roll-out of activation within shifts toward greater reliance on means-tested benefits for the unemployed, and toward work first, with varying degrees of compulsion, for other working-age adults in the social protection system. Suggesting that this results in a hierarchy of ‘welfare sacrifice’ for the sake of the competitiveness of the Irish economy, it also looks briefly at how some of these ‘sacrifices’ are experienced by different groups both in and out of the labour market. The article concludes by noting that the Covid-19 pandemic has temporarily transformed state–market relations such as these; however, whether this offers the opportunity to forge a more supportive turn in activation policy post-pandemic remains an open question.
Journal Article
What Role for Activation in Eco-Social Policy?
This article aims to bring labour market activation policy into the orbit of eco-social policy, which we can understand as sustainable welfare without growth. Activation is extensively addressed from economic and social policy perspectives; however, environmental sustainability concerns are absent. Typically, each domain, activation and sustainability, is seen as mutually exclusive. Growing debate about sustainable welfare without growth features much discussion about the effects of productivism and about re-orienting and re-valuing work and how we use our time; however, such discussion tends to leave activation and unemployment untouched. One could ask whether there is any role for activation in eco-social policy: why focus on employment and employability, or even push people into work, if postgrowth requires a downsizing of paid employment and working time in everyone’s lives? The purpose of this article is to explore this question and to consider how activation could be re-valued and re-thought as a policy tool for eco-social policy.
Journal Article
Recommodification and the Welfare State in Re/Financialised Austerity Capitalism: Further Eroding Social Citizenship?
This article reviews the recommodification of social policy in the context of financialised austerity capitalism and post-crisis welfare states. It sets out an understanding of recommodification as a multiple set of processes that involve the state in labour market-making, by shaping labour’s ‘saleability’. Under conditions of finance-dominated austerity capitalism, the article argues that recent dynamics of recommodification complicate the long established Piersonian observations. For Pierson, recommodification signifies how elements of the welfare state that shelter individuals from market pressures are dismantled and replaced with measures which buffer their labour market participation. This article examines ways in which recent policy trends in recommodification, whether by incentivising or coercive means, increase exposure to labour market risks and connect with the growing inequalities between capital and labour under post-crisis re/financialised austerity capitalism. This analysis is paired with a synoptic review of recent labour market trends and reforms across the European Union. As recommodification evolves, the insecurity it institutes raises fundamental questions about the underlying nature of social citizenship which are also addressed.
Journal Article
‘Pushing against an open door’: Reinforcing the neo-liberal policy paradigm in Ireland and the impact of EU intrusion
Neo-liberalism’s resilience since the financial crisis has by now become a common-place observation. In the case of Ireland, however, it might be more apt to speak not just of neo-liberalism’s resilience but its active reinforcement. By re-visiting Hall’s essay on paradigm change and paying particular attention to the adaptive quality of what he calls first and second order paradigm change, and by reading his work against more recent scholarship on the relationship between ideas and power, this article details how Ireland’s response to its crisis has reinforced its dominant neo-liberal policy paradigm. It demonstrates how neo-liberal ideas, despite provoking controversy, remained powerful in domestic debate in the aftermath of the crisis. Moreover it argues that by the time financial support was acquired, EU and IMF actors were, for the most part, ‘pushing against an open door’ with Irish political elites in relation to deficit reduction, how to achieve it and its role in economic recovery. Focusing upon changes to taxation and social protection in particular, the article analyses how the reinforcement of the neo-liberal paradigm is evident in efforts made to limit tax increases, whereas more radical retrenchment and reform of social protection is taking place to ensure its closer compatibility with the perceived needs of a globalised neo-liberal economic paradigm.
Journal Article
Mobilising Classics
Revisiting classic texts by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, James Connolly and Paulo Freire, this book provides a series of rich reflections on the interaction between radical ideas and political action in Ireland.
eBook
