Ireland: From Boom to Bust

Ireland’s hybrid welfare state always faced significant underlying challenges; these challenges are exacerbated by the recent and continuing crises—economic, financial, and fiscal. In the context of its populist politics, these challenges and crises have prompted austerity measures. The Irish experience will show whether small, vulnerable welfare states invariably adopt path-departing policy changes. On the one hand, the chapter records evidence of a crisis-driven shift towards a decisively liberal welfare regime, and on the other it notes the hybrid nature of the Irish welfare regime and hence the multiple and varied pressures for change. Therefore, as the chapter argues, it may be that the drift towards a social investment state in European states will also take root in Ireland.

The chapter suggests that the current crises in some European welfare states reveal the similarities between Ireland and so-called ‘southern European’ states. In turn, these similarities imply that the ‘peripheral’ welfare states in Ireland and southern Europe are underpinned by deep-seated structural attributes that generate both economic vulnerability and social underdevelopment.