The Irish Welfare State in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The financial crisis which hit the global economy in 2008 and, more specifically, the responses to it in the industrialised rich world, led not just to a re-moulding of capitalism, but to increased clarity about both the lack of global democracy and what Pilger (2002) has termed ‘the new rulers of the world’. Neo-liberal minimalist state regulation of financial institutions, and the economy in general, was replaced by high state interventionist ‘austerity’ measures, aimed at protecting capitalist financial structures. In the EU, Governments nationalised private debt, spreading the costs across their local communities, largely to ensure that capitalism as an economic structure and ideology was maintained. The ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983) of the EU and the concept of ‘European-ness’ (Calligaro, 2013) - used to promote the idea of a greater social and economic union from the 1970s (Armstrong and Anderson, 2007; Sjursen, 2007) - gave way to single state nationalism and cross-national capitalist solidarity as the bigger economies banded together to protect their national interests and in particular the interests of their banks and their bondholders (Fligstein, 2014). Smaller EU states, having progressively relinquished sovereignty to the larger states, from Maastricht (1992) to Lisbon (2007) to the Euro (2002), in the interests of ‘Europeanisation’, realised that they no longer controlled their own economies, budgets or fiscal arrangements. Ideological choices appeared limited in smaller states – either accept the new ‘austerity’ measures, enthusiastically, as the only solution to a global crisis, or accept them, reluctantly. What Greece’s former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was to call financial ‘terrorism’ was in town (Varoufakis, 2015). In this atmosphere, the two parts of Ireland, North and South , were to have different experiences of austerity and of the global crisis, reflecting different social, economic, and political contexts and influences, different forms of democratic control, and different financial arrangements within the EU. This chapter looks at some of these differences focusing first on the South and then on the North.