Asymmetric engagement: The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish social partnership 9781526110596

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of tables and figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Series editor’s foreword
Introduction
Interpretations of Irish social partnership
Associations, movements, governance and power
A case study: rationale, scope and key concepts
The Community and Voluntary Pillar: an overview
Reversal of fortune: the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed
Community or demos? The Community Workers’ Co­operative
Superior tactics? The Conference of Religious in Ireland (Justice Commission)
Multi­tasking: the National Women’s Council of Ireland
Asymmetric engagement
Appendices
References
Index

Citation preview

Irish Society

Irish Society

Asymmetric engagement Joe Larragy This book focuses on one of the most innovative aspects of Irish social partnership, the Community and Voluntary Pillar. It provides the most thorough account of the dynamics of the Pillar to date. By providing detailed accounts of four of the most significant players in the Pillar, the book brings greater salience to the study than would be achieved by looking at any one of them individually. It tackles the weaknesses in existing perspectives which are either dismissive or excessively optimistic. Through the lens of ‘asymmetric engagement’, Larragy captures the elusive ways in which small organisations may achieve some real change, then suffer setbacks and periods in the doldrums, and still come back for more. He demonstrates how the locus of power and legitimacy shifted about as Ireland moved from crisis to boom, and thus sheds light on key aspects of the social partnership model that operated in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Against the warp and weft of broader political and economic dynamics, and shifts in the political sentiment of the demos, he identifies windows of opportunity for organisations acting as policy entrepreneurs. This volume will address a key gap in the literature on Irish political studies, social institutions, governance and social policy. Written in a clear and lively style, this is a wonderful resource and should be an essential text on students’ reading lists.

Asymmetric engagement The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish social partnership

Larragy

Joe Larragy is Lecturer in Social Policy at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Asymmetric engagement

The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish social partnership

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-7190-8650-2

9 780719 086502

Joe Larragy

Asymmetric engagement

IRISH SOCIETY The Irish Society series provides a ­ critical, interdisciplinary and in-depth analysis of Ireland that reveals the processes and forces shaping social, economic, cultural and political life, and their outcomes for communities and social groups. The books seek to understand the evolution of social, economic and spatial ­relations from a broad range of perspectives, and explore the challenges facing Irish society in the future given present conditions and policy instruments.

SERIES EDITOR Rob Kitchin ALREADY PUBLISHED

Public private partnerships in Ireland: Failed experiment or the way forward for the state?   Rory Hearne Migrations: Ireland in a global world Edited by Mary Gilmartin and Allen White The domestic, moral and political economies of post-Celtic tiger Ireland: What rough beast?  Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling Challenging times, challenging administration: The role of public administration in producing social justice in Ireland Chris McInerney Management and gender in higher education Pat O’Connor

Asymmetric engagement The Community and Voluntary Pillar in Irish social partnership

Joe Larragy

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Joe Larragy 2014 The right of Joe Larragy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8650 2 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of tables and figures page vi Preface vii Acknowledgements ix List of abbreviations x Series editor’s foreword xii  1 Introduction 1   2 Interpretations of Irish social partnership 9   3 Associations, movements, governance and power 31   4 A case study: rationale, scope and key concepts 48   5 The Community and Voluntary Pillar: an overview 61   6 Reversal of fortune: the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed95   7 Community or demos? The Community Workers’ Co-­operative 124   8 Superior tactics? The Conference of Religious in Ireland (Justice Commission)157   9 Multi-­tasking: the National Women’s Council of Ireland 183 10 Asymmetric engagement 209 Appendices 226 References 231 Index 246

Tables and figures

Tables 4.1 Typology of case studies page 52 5.1a Timeline of access to key arenas by selected organisation 64 5.1b Timeline of key political and economic factors 64 5.1c Timeline of windows of opportunity by issue 65 5.2 Social partnership pacts, participants and ‘social’ dimension 82 5.3 CVP structure and representation (in seats) 1996-­2008 89 5.4 Community Platform membership at selected times and dates of establishment 90 6.1 INOU and social partnership landmarks 97 6.2 Labour force, unemployed and long-­term unemployed 98 6.3 Trend in unemployment rate 1994-­2003 116 7.1 Community Workers’ Co-­operative landmarks  125 8.1 CORI Justice landmarks 160 8.2 Index of short-­term social welfare rates, prices and gross average industrial earnings 179 8.3 Single short-­term social welfare rates as percentage of GAIE 1989-­2007 179 9.1 National Women’s Council of Ireland landmarks 188

Figures 5.1 GNP and unemployment rate based on CSO Labour Force Survey and CSO Quarterly National Household Survey 1988 to 200766 8.1 Single short-­term social welfare rates as percentage of GAIE  180 9.1 Female labour force participation rate (%) 1988-­2008 185 9.2 Married women’s labour force rates by age group (%) 1998 and 2007186

Preface

With the unfolding of the international economic contraction since 2008, which has been particularly damaging in Ireland, there has been an understandable focus on grasping the nature and causes of this great calamity. The nature of the crisis in Ireland has been the subject of several contributions from varying perspectives (Kinsella and Leddin 2013; Kirby and Murphy 2011; NESC 2009; Ó Riain 2014). In initial reactions to the crisis some accounts were tempted to include social partnership in the line-­up of blameworthy suspects (Wright 2010) but, on the whole, the brunt of responsibility rests elsewhere (Honohan 2010), and reflective commentaries on social partnership have been relatively benign on this front (Doherty 2011; McDonough and Dundon 2010). The present study, therefore, is concerned with the institutions of social partnership from another perspective. Liberal democratic societies are in an era of transition due to the changed landscape brought about by the collapse of Communism, and global economic integration of national economies. This has thrown up major questions about the role and shape of democracy in the face of the global movement of capital, particularly for democratic polities constituted at the national level. Conventional models of liberal democracy at the national level are threatened by the erosion of the tools – Keynesian demand management – developed to underpin the long post-­war boom. Restructuring of employment and the division of labour internationally undermine the political balance of power between traditional class interests of labour and capital which also underpinned the post-­war welfare state. Crouch (2004) has coined the term post-­democracy to characterise the decline of social-­democratic politics and, with it, the erosion of social citizenship. Several writers (Cohen and Rogers 1995a; Hirst 1994; Mouffe 1993; 2000) have sought to explore new models for the rejuvenation of democracy against the seeming inevitability of neo-­liberalism. Whereas these writers and others have contributed to the re-­elaboration of theory, case studies of innovative models of democratic consultation or

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Preface

participation are hard to come by. What the present study seeks to do, therefore, is present a living example of a form of negotiated and participative governance that emerged in fact before it was satisfactorily theorised. A book dealing with the Community and Voluntary Pillar, a novel aspect of Ireland’s social partnership model, could be viewed simply as esoteric social history. But it is much more than that. It is a long overdue account of a significant part of Irish civil society, and its interactions with the state and policy-­making processes, that has been missing up to now. It is all the more important to provide this analysis now because, in the throes of the crisis, as social partnership is swept away as an inconvenient institution, it is vital that it is evaluated with clarity and assessed in a balanced and concrete way, and as freely as possible from the refracted light of recent events. In view of the rapidity with which social partnership has been dismantled, researchers will inevitably be asking why, when social partnership was resorted to in the context of a fiscal crisis in the 1980s, the opposite is happening now. For some, the answer may seem simply that it is the wrong solution right now because decisive action to restore economic order is of the essence, and once the electorate has provided a mandate, the government should have a free hand. But this misses an important point: in the Irish context, social partnership was instituted not at the outset of a crisis in the 1980s but following many years of political uncertainty and increasing disillusionment with politics within the demos. Currently, there is a determination among the main political parties in Ireland to take decisive action, albeit under the terms set out by the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank. The politics of decisive government is only as sustainable as the popular mandate for the government. If this basis erodes, the choices between ‘mandated government’ and ‘negotiated governance’ might give way to starker choices between ‘coercion’ and consent. All of this makes it important to understand what we can from our recent past, about the modalities of social partnership, and the potential and limitations of such modalities in the face of an uncertain future.

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who in one way or another contributed to this work. Firstly, I am grateful to all of the respondents who gave generously of their time in interviews, and who are listed in the text. I have also benefited from the co-­operation of several organisations which supplied information and documentation. My interest in this topic emerged while I worked at the National Economic and Social Council in the 1990s. I value the experience of working there and the wisdom shared by colleagues on this subject. The book started as a doctoral thesis at University College Dublin. I had the pleasure of working under the supervision of Geoffrey Cook, whose enthusiasm never flagged, even when my own did. In the doctoral phase of the book’s evolution, I enjoyed strong collegial relations at NUI Maynooth where I worked on this project, and appreciate the comments from and conversations with Seamus O’Cinnéide, Anastasia Crickley, Sean Ó Riain and Maurice Devlin, each of whom took the time to read draft chapters of the work as it progressed. Seamus Taylor, in particular, read a full draft and provided perceptive critical feedback. I especially wish to thank Bill Roche of UCD for his prescient comments, advice and encouragement at critical stages of the work; I had very enjoyable and stimulating discussions with Adam Larragy too. I also value the comments and encouragement of Michelle Norris, Lars Mjøset and Freda Donoghue. As the project moved from being a thesis to a book, I have benefited greatly from the very thorough and encouraging assessment of an anonymous reviewer. Also, some of the original respondents and a handful of others have read drafts and offered constructive feedback and encouragement. I hope that the book has become clearer in the process. Most of all, I wish to thank my wife Maura for her love, support and intellectual companionship, my daughters, Anna and Sarah, for their patience and good humour, and my mother Rosanna for all her prayers throughout: I thank you – I thank you all. Needless to say, I take sole responsibility for the views expressed and for any remaining factual errors, blemishes or infelicities.

Abbreviations

ADM / Pobail Area Development Management ALMP Active Labour Market Policies BI Basic income BTWA Back to Work Allowance CAN Community Action Network CE Community Employment CMRS Conference of Major Religious Superiors (Ireland) CORI Conference of Religious in Ireland (formerly CMRS) CORI Justice Conference of Religious in Ireland (Justice Commission) CSO Central Statistics Office CSW Commission on Social Welfare CVP / Pillar Community and Voluntary Pillar CWC Community Workers’ Co-­operative (the Co-­op) DUA Dublin Unemployed Association EAPN European Anti-­Poverty Network (Ireland) EC European Community EES European Employment Strategy ENU European Network of the Unemployed ESRI Economic and Social Research Institute FÁS Foras Áiseanna Saothar (National Training and Employment Authority) FIS Family Income Supplement FPD Forum of People with Disabilities GAIE Gross average industrial earnings GLEN Gay and Lesbian Equality Network IBEC Irish Business and Employers Confederation ICTU Irish Congress of Trade Unions INOU Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed ITM Irish Traveller Movement

Abbreviations

xi

JOCE Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment LES Local Employment Service NAPN National Anti-­Poverty Networks NAPS National Anti-­Poverty Strategy NESC National Economic and Social Council NESF National Economic and Social Forum (the Forum) NWCI National Women’s Council of Ireland NYCI National Youth Council of Ireland OECD Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development OMC Open method of co-­ordination OPEN One Parent Exchange Network P2000  Partnership 2000 – for Inclusion, Employment and Competitiveness (1997-­99) PCW Programme for Competitiveness and Work (1994-­96) PESP Programme for Economic and Social Progress (1991-­93) PNR Programme for National Recovery (1987-­90) PPF Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (2000-­2) RAPID Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (see TIDA) RTÉ Radio Teilifís Éireann (state-­owned broadcasting company) SES Social Employment Scheme SP Sustaining Progress (2003-­5) SVP Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (Ireland) TCD Trinity College Dublin TIDA Targeted Investment in Designated Areas (later RAPID) UCD University College Dublin UPC Unemployment Protest Committee WUT Workers’ Unity Trust

Series editor’s foreword

Over the past twenty years Ireland has undergone enormous social, cultural and economic change. From a poor, peripheral country on the edge of Europe with a conservative culture dominated by tradition and Church, Ireland transformed into a global, cosmopolitan country with a dynamic economy. At the heart of the processes of change was a new kind of political economic model of development that ushered in the so-­called Celtic Tiger years, accompanied by renewed optimism in the wake of the ceasefires in Northern Ireland and the peace dividend of the Good Friday Agreement. As Ireland emerged from decades of economic stagnation and The Troubles came to a peaceful end, the island became the focus of attention for countries seeking to emulate its economic and political miracles. Every other country, it seemed, wanted to be the next Tiger, modelled on Ireland’s successes. And then came the financial collapse of 2008, the bursting of the property bubble, bank bailouts, austerity plans, rising unemployment and a return to emigration. From being the paradigm case of successful economic transformation, Ireland has become an internationally important case study of what happens when an economic model goes disastrously wrong. The Irish Society series provides a critical, interdisciplinary and in-­depth analysis of Ireland that reveals the processes and forces shaping social, economic, cultural and political life, and their outcomes for communities and social groups. The books seek to understand the evolution of social, economic and spatial relations from a broad range of perspectives, and explore the challenges facing Irish society in the future given present conditions and policy instruments. The series examines all aspects of Irish society including, but not limited to: social exclusion, identity, health, welfare, life cycle, family life and structures, labour and work cultures, spatial and sectoral economy, local and regional development, politics and the political system, government and governance, environment, migration and spatial planning. The series is supported by the Irish Social Sciences Platform (ISSP), an all-­island platform of integrated

Series editor’s foreword

xiii

social science research and graduate education focusing on the social, cultural and economic transformations shaping Ireland in the twenty-­first century. Funded by the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, the ISSP brings together leading social science academics from all of Ireland’s universities and other third-­level institutions. Given the marked changes in Ireland’s fortunes over the past two decades it is important that rigorous scholarship is applied to understand the forces at work, how they have affected different people and places in uneven and unequal ways, and what needs to happen to create a fairer and prosperous society. The Irish Society series provides such scholarship. Rob Kitchin

1 Introduction

The Irish model of social partnership, which emerged and evolved from 1987 onwards, was comparatively unusual in that it accommodated the involvement of community and voluntary organisations in a ‘tripartite’ corporatist framework built around centralised wage bargaining. This dimension of social partnership has been regarded as puzzling in a comparative and theoretical context and this in turn has led to divergent views on the nature of the Irish model, and provides the rationale for the present case study. Yet, despite article-­length commentaries, book chapters or passing comments in wider commentaries on social partnership, and a volume comparing governance in Ireland and Malawi (Gaynor 2010), little has yet been published of work specifically intended to examine community and voluntary sector participation in social partnership. This book is therefore intended to explore this important gap in Irish social science research. Using a case study approach, the book explores the unique and problematic entity known as the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP, the Pillar), which brought a range of new actors into a tripartite system of social partnership in Ireland from 1996. This development led to conflicting interpretations of the resultant model and of the implications for the organisations making up the CVP. While some have claimed much for the modified model, and by implication the Pillar, others have been dismissive, or taken a more conventional view of the model as a whole. However, no one has undertaken a close study of the CVP to test such claims.

Research objectives The book seeks to address this gap in knowledge, and clarify the complex dynamics of the Pillar using a case study approach. Through a critical account blending the narratives of actors in four key associations in the Pillar, the study explores the CVP in the institutional context of social partnership and the

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Asymmetric engagement

changing political and economic environment over time. The contribution to knowledge is on several levels comprising: (i) a review of existing theoretical accounts of Irish social pacts with particular reference to the role or significance of the Pillar; (ii) exploration of new theoretical perspectives that might contribute to a better understanding of the Pillar; (iii) detailed empirical investigation of the origins and facets of the Pillar through the study of the most pivotal associations in it; and (iv) the development of a distinct and original account of the dynamics of the Pillar, termed ‘asymmetric engagement’, explaining how small organisations have operated in social partnership, amid the warp and weft of political and economic cycles and shifts in the demos. This chapter sets the scene, the relevant historical context and the rationale for the study, as well as the approach adopted and the empirical focus on key associations, to be expanded on in later chapters.

Background While Ireland shares a formative history of pluralist industrial relations and liberal democratic government with Britain, it also has a more recent history of state engagement with employer and trade union federations since the early 1960s and of bipartite wage bargaining from the 1970s. The National Industrial and Economic Council (NIEC) was established in October 1963 as an advisory body to the government with representation from employers, industry, trade unions and government nominees.1 The NIEC was succeeded in 1973 by the National Economic and Social Council (NESC), which also included farming interests and had a wider remit including social policy. A bipartite system of centralised wage bargaining emerged in 1970 through the independently chaired Employer-­Labour Conference but bargaining broke down in 1981 after seven national wage agreements and two ‘national understandings’ (i.e. agreements of broader scope than pay bargaining). Irish social pacts in the 1970s did not achieve the successes associated with the classical corporatist models applied elsewhere (Hardiman 1988). Instead of the positive sum game that post-­war social corporatism facilitated elsewhere, things never quite gelled in the Irish case. Social reform aspirations were dashed by the oil shocks and stagflation; government deficits followed and centralised bargaining was viewed as part of the problem rather than the solution. Although free collective bargaining resumed in 1981, the NESC continued to function during the 1980s and contributed to the establishment of a tripartite system of bargaining in 1987. Two important aspects can be noted regarding the post-­1987 model in Ireland. First, viewed historically, the new model was more sophisticated in that it embedded traditional actors in a process of negotiated governance with the state, around – to a greater or lesser degree – fiscal, monetary, developmental, productivity and distributional objectives. Wage and related negotiations

Introduction

3

were again centralised but the parameters were set out in deliberative bodies before the critical bargaining talks began, with both stages chaired by government officials. This was in contrast to the 1970s pacts in which pay negotiations operated through the more autonomous Employer-­Labour Conference. Second, viewed comparatively, the post-­1987 pacts belong to what may be regarded as the ‘new social pacts’ which are distinguished from the classical neo-­corporatism of the post-­war period. Whereas the post-­war pacts elsewhere were associated with brisk economic growth, full employment, rising government spending and the deepening of social citizenship embodied in the welfare state, the ‘new’ social pacts are often related to forms of monetary restriction, containment of state spending, and industrial and labour market restructuring (see Chapter 2). In 1987, the incoming government restored social partnership partly as a mechanism to secure support from key social groups (employers, unions and farmers) as it introduced highly unpopular public spending cuts. After an initial period of austerity, in which the social partnership model was questioned in many quarters, the Irish experience over the years 1987 to 2008 was to become one of exceptional growth. This expansion was all the more extraordinary given the circumstances of the late 1980s – the parlous state of government finances, spiralling levels of unemployment, seriously high emigration, widespread poverty and marginalisation of many urban and rural communities.

Theoretical and empirical rationale for the study This deep crisis, and the attendant crisis of legitimacy in the political establishment, which continued despite the creation of social partnership in 1987, is the primary reason for an important distinct and novel dimension of Ireland’s social pacts: the Community and Voluntary Pillar. The Pillar was a mechanism that allowed associations in the community and voluntary sector to participate in what was originally a tripartite model of co-­ordinated wage-­bargaining. The Pillar was added to the architecture of social partnership in late 1996 during the negotiations for Partnership 2000, the fourth in the series of agreements that began in 1987 with the Programme for National Recovery (PNR). However, the Pillar was several years in the making, and cannot be understood without reference to when its diverse seeds were sown in the 1980s. The creation of the CVP has stimulated animated debates concerning whether it indicated that the basic characteristics of social partnership had changed, or threatened the corporatist integrity of the model, or indeed was anti-­democratic. These debates provide the key to the theoretical rationale for the present study. Essentially, the participation of the CVP in social partnership alongside the traditional interest groups, actors, or ‘social partners’ – i.e. employers, unions and by 1987, farmers – is, from a comparative perspective,

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novel, in some respects anomalous and, to the extent that it has given rise to conflicting interpretations among Irish social scientists and commentators, important from a conceptual and theoretical perspective. The present study is aimed at a concrete exploration of the origins and significance of the CVP in the context of social partnership and in the wider political-­economic context from which social partnership emerged. Through a focus on the genesis, views and experience of the actors who came to make up the CVP, it is hoped, firstly, to address this basic deficit. The motivation for the research is not solely to plug an empirical or descriptive gap but to address the fact that the CVP is not merely novel but also in some theoretical senses anomalous. It is anomalous because the associations involved in the CVP are not functionally related to the economy in the way employers’ and workers’ organisations are related to each other through the labour market and the state. This key difference has in turn stimulated debate on the significance of the Pillar. While some commentators would be dismissive of the Pillar as an epiphenomenon, others are more concerned that it might be indicative of a more general alteration in the dynamics and modalities of social partnership. Within the corporatist analytical framework, the Pillar is anomalous because corporatism involves bargaining by peak organisations as rational actors – and the Pillar is difficult to square with this concept. Alternatively the inception of the CVP has triggered new interpretations of Irish social partnership, with the accent on ‘deliberation’, ‘problem-­solving’ and ‘strategic consensus’. With that has even come a new concept of ‘social partner’, which departs from the rational actor model in favour of an altogether more permeable model whereby interests and even identities are redefined in the negotiation of a strategic, national consensus. This divergence provides an important theoretical starting point for the present study. But it is not the only theoretical starting point. The CVP has also stimulated debate about the place of associations more generally in relation to representative democracy, and this cannot be discussed just in relation to corporatism. Rather it entails some consideration of a wider field of comparative analysis that takes in pluralist as well as corporatist polities, a wider range of possible relationships between the state and civil society, and a consideration of the more general problem of parliamentary democracy and the influence of associations and social movements, particularly when involved in extra-­ parliamentary institutions set up by the state. Various interpretations of the Irish model have touched on the subject of the Pillar and implicitly offered interpretations of its significance, which range from the enthusiastic to the dismissive. Some of these interpretations are rooted in a definite intellectual tradition with a tendency to prejudge the Pillar’s significance – or lack of it – for instance because of prior theoretical positions derived from dependency analysis (O’Hearn 1998) or Marxian class

Introduction

5

analysis (Allen 2000). Indeed these approaches tend to minimise the significance of social partnership itself, regarding it simply as an epiphenomenon of neo-­liberalism. Altogether contrasting interpretations derive from state actors’ and policy-­makers’ concerns, and view the Pillar as evidence of an evolution of social partnership institutions and governance in the Irish model that enhanced democracy (NESF 1997). A variety of mid-­ range approaches have focused on the institutional specificities of the Irish model in terms of a broadly corporatist perspective (Hardiman 2006; Roche 2007). These accounts can be situated in a comparative context explored more generally by others (Baccaro 2003; Fajertag and Pochet 2000; Rhodes 1998; 2001; 2003). Some accounts have sought to address the peculiarity of the CVP in this context (Hardiman 2006; O’Donnell 2008; O’Donnell and O’Reardon 2000; O’Donnell and Thomas 1998; Roche 2007, 2008) but the discussion is unresolved. The present study therefore explores the CVP in greater depth in order to respond to these debates, and attempts to break new ground in analytical terms as a way of resolving some of the divergent interpretations in existing scholarship. Ironically, in this instance, the focus on a narrower empirical field requires a wider theoretical compass. Therefore, the present study also explores some of the wider debates of the 1990s about associative democracy and the critique of liberal democracies soon articulated after the fall of Communism (Cohen and Rogers 1995a; Held 2006; Hirst 1994; Mansbridge 1995). This discussion looks at the logic of associations in the moderation of states and markets (Streeck and Schmitter 1985a) and new challenges for democracy in post-­industrial society (Crouch 2004). Indeed the review necessarily explores classical theory about state–civil society relations (Gramsci 1971; Hegel 1991; Marx 1970) in order to provide a sufficiently encompassing theoretical grounding for the study. This theoretical survey also examines the potential relevance of social mobilisation theory, which has not previously been applied to the Pillar, and theoretical perspectives relating to power and legitimacy, which have also been under-­explored. These debates have a wider cross-­cultural relevance and they apply to pluralist polities as well as polities with institutionalised interest mediation. This wider compass is necessary in the present study because, typically, the corporatist framework of discussion is limited in how thoroughly it can capture the dynamics of what is a more miscellaneous category of associations in the CVP. The exploration of wider theoretical themes is a key element in exploring the more varied types of association that form the focus of this study. However, very little empirical research has been undertaken on the Pillar to date and there is a serious gap in basic knowledge about the Pillar that the present study aims to address. Contributions to the interpretive literature on Irish social partnership and on the Pillar are relatively plentiful, but detailed

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Asymmetric engagement

research on the Pillar, the actors that constitute it, and the course of their experience of the process at national level, are few. Such studies as have been undertaken by authors who are mainly interested in the world of the community and voluntary sector have looked mostly at the involvement of these organisations or activists in the context of local level or area-­based partnership (Craig 1994; Craig and McKeown 1993; Lee 1992; Powell and Geoghegan 2004; Sabel 1996; Teague 2007). Few have focused directly on the sector’s experience of engagement with the state through national level social partnership. Indeed, Powell and Geoghegan (2004) describe the local partnership bodies as ‘social partnership’, as did others, increasingly, over the 1990s. But the present study makes a clear distinction between these local multi-­partite bodies focused on specific social inclusion or local development objectives, on the one hand, and the CVP in strategic national level social partnership, on the other. So far, therefore, others have provided very cursory empirical accounts of the CVP, usually as part of a wider focus on social partnership. Hastings, Sheehan and Yeates (2007), for example, included a detailed chapter on the Pillar in a wider study.

A case study While I have previously set out the historical context, origins and significance of the Pillar (Larragy 2006), with a specific focus on one of its constituent organisations (the INOU), the present study is much more ambitious, both in theoretical and empirical terms, and aims to provide greater detail on the CVP through the lenses of several member organisations. Here I examine the CVP using a case study approach. The CVP as a whole is the ‘case’ but its dynamics are generated by the interplay of some key constituent organisations within it. Therefore, in order to convey its dynamic properties, and do justice to the fact that the Pillar is not a singularity, the book also provides narratives on four of its most prominent member associations. These associations are the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU), the Community Workers’ Co-­operative (CWC, the Co-­op), the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI Justice) and the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI). In the context of each member organisation, the study explores the origins, philosophy, early engagement with the state, the process by which it became a social partner and its pattern of involvement in the Pillar and social partnership. While issues and organisations overlap, the focus here is on the narratives of the individual associations. As it happens, this approach picks up the most important substantive policy questions that were taken up by the Pillar and in many cases a specific association can be identified as having ‘led’ on a given issue.

Introduction

7

This approach is very different from the research strategy often adopted in relation to quantitative measurement of social progress under social partnership during the era of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, but the two approaches should be seen as complementary. Here I seek to capture the process of engagement by these actors with social partnership and the wider political process, and point to the successes and failures of the Pillar and its constituent actors over an extended timeframe. The strong empirical focus is intended to address a deficit that undermines claims regarding the Pillar’s significance that derive largely from aprioristic paradigms. However, in addition to challenging some of the more sweeping perspectives, I have developed a characterisation of the process as I have observed it, which I have dubbed ‘asymmetric engagement’. Thus, I hope to contribute to the way in which we theorise about small organisations as they interact with more powerful forces in state and civil society.

A guide to chapters The question this book asks is: ‘What is the significance of the CVP in Irish social partnership?’ In order to address this question, firstly, at the theoretical level, mainstream interpretations of Irish social partnership, and their limitations in relation to understanding the CVP, are examined in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores some ideas that might provide a fresh perspective and broader basis for understanding some of the unique properties of the Pillar. The use of a case study methodology is briefly outlined in Chapter 4 together with some key concepts used in the study. Chapter 5 provides an account of the Pillar as a whole, its origins and component organisations, and its broad evolution over time. In Chapters 6-­9, the empirical focus then shifts to the origins, development and impact of four associations which were pivotal to the creation the Pillar and its principal driving forces during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, in Chapter 10, the competing interpretations of the significance of the Pillar are appraised and a fresh interpretation, asymmetric engagement, is set out.

Conclusion Without an empirical touchstone to provide a more concrete focus, debates about the CVP and its implications for understanding social partnership in Ireland remain somewhat abstract. From this perspective, the present case study is valuable precisely because the Pillar is anomalous in the context of the comparative study of social pacts and because it is tantalisingly close to situations that have been considered only in hypothetical terms in wider debates on associations and democracy. It is hoped, by investigating the specificity of the origins and significance of the CVP, to tease out the connections between these wider theoretical debates and the more specific debates around new social pacts.

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Asymmetric engagement

As a case study, therefore, the present research sees value not only in reporting the facts but also in exploring the anomalies. It is from anomalies that knowledge often progresses – as Kuhn (1996) famously wrote – not only by linear addition but also by step-­changes that arise from cracking away at anomalies in the received wisdom of existing paradigms. While the present research does not claim to make a landmark paradigm shift, it is evident that different paradigms still compete over the definitive characterisation of the Irish model. By concentrating on a significant and disputed feature of the Irish case, therefore, this research might help to clarify some non-­trivial matters. It is hoped, therefore, that the study of this unusual feature of the Irish model will provide a touchstone for overlapping debates about the significance of more varied non-­governmental organisations participating in new patterns of governance while shedding light on how the Irish model as a whole might be characterised.

Note 1 The remit of the NIEC was narrow: ‘The Council shall have regard to the level and trend of incomes, including wages, salaries, profits, rents and other incomes, with a view to the inclusion in its reports of policy recommendations on these matters.’ For more on the terms of reference see Dáil Éireann 1963.

2 Interpretations of Irish social partnership

Introduction The subject of social partnership has been approached in a number of ways. This chapter provides an overview of these approaches in order to set the scene for examining the more specific topic of the CVP. This discussion covers both historical and comparative perspectives and is tailored to the more recent period, i.e. since 1987. In the first part, the variety of sceptical perspectives on the Irish model of social partnership is explored. Much of this material is pitched at a negative and abstract level, with limited if any empirical investigation. Next, because more concrete interpretations have engaged with neo-­ corporatist literature, the chapter explores this approach in more detail, in historical and comparative perspective. More specifically, this discussion leads on to examining the Irish experience from 1987 as a variant of the ‘new social pacts’ to emerge internationally since the 1980s. Finally, differing interpretations of the significance of the innovation of the CVP are discussed, with the main focus remaining on the extent to which this amends, stretches or even transforms the underlying corporatist paradigm.

Perspectives on Irish social partnership Sceptics – left, right and centre The Irish model of social partnership has been analysed from various perspectives. It has been viewed from the left as a mechanism to subordinate labour and marginalised interests to multinational and native capital or, in more familiar terms, it is an intrinsic part of a neo-­liberal model, whatever way it is dressed up. The two main variants of this approach are O’Hearn (1998) who placed the accent on ‘dependency’ of Irish development on international capitalism, and Allen (2000) who offers a more recognisably Marxian account. While there is little doubt that neo-­liberalism became increasingly prevalent internationally from the 1980s, as a political trend, it does not adequately ­capture

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­ evelopments in the Irish context. One difficulty is that, in contrast to the d 1981-­86 period of free collective bargaining, the period over which social partnership existed (1987-­2007) saw an unprecedented level of economic growth per capita, up-­skilling, growth of average earnings, and dramatic reductions in unemployment. Moreover, the period as a whole was one of peaceful industrial relations deriving not from defeat of labour and trade unions – unlike the UK following the defeat of the miners in 1985 – but from class compromise and collaboration. This is not to deny the rising share of GDP going to profits and capital or the level of relative inequality (although that stabilised in the 2000s, according to the Central Statistics Office), nor indeed the extent to which (due to income tax cuts) net rather than gross wage earnings accounted for much of the rising income of most workers. But, even in Marxian terms, the evidence points to a period of investment-­driven expansion and increasing labour productivity rather than a deepening rate of exploitation of labour through wage depression, which might be expected of neo-­liberalism. Moreover, instead of the panoply of workfare and stigmatisation that was actively touted in the 1980s and 1990s in the US and UK, the decades of the Celtic Tiger (which coincided with social partnership) witnessed a general increase in living standards and labour market policies that were supportive of the unemployed. In terms of dependency theories of development, the period indeed deepened the reliance on foreign investment, and in that sense maintained Ireland’s ‘dependency’, but it also signalled the death knell of ‘undevelopment’, outlined by Crotty (1986) in his classic statement of the dependency thesis in the Irish context. For twenty years, Ireland’s development – dependent though it was – brought increased living standards, doubled the level of employment, raised incomes and living standards and witnessed major improvements in public infrastructure. The political logic of these accounts – pointing either towards a more indigenous type of economic model or mobilisation of the working class against capital – found little to connect with in the actual unfolding of Irish society over the 1987-­2007 years. Kirby (2002) undertook an important survey of economic ‘growth with inequality’ in Ireland. His is an interesting account that explored the specificities of state, market and civil society in a critical account of economic development. He reached a less conclusive view than either Allen or O’Hearn, at one point viewing Irish social partnership as part of an ‘Irish neo-­liberalism’ (2002: 163) but elsewhere as ‘social liberalism’ (2002: 181). Kirby’s argument appeals for a resurgent and less deferential civil society – ‘particularly on the part of those sectors most marginalised by the prevailing socio-­economic order’ (Kirby 2002: 200). This is not posed merely moralistically or wishfully: he refers also to Polanyi’s account of market society, which predicts the spontaneous movement of what would nowadays be called ‘civil society’ towards market-­correction (i.e. the ‘double movement’ as outlined in Polanyi 2001).

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This is an interesting and critical point because it relates to what elements in the CVP of social partnership claim to represent – albeit they have pursued goals through available institutions rather than though protest or from the outside. The Irish social partnership model has been viewed with equal scepticism from representatives of orthodox, neo-­classical economics. Before it was instituted, such critics were generally opposed, but as it survived and even appeared to be part of an economic success story, the critique became more muted. Clinch et al. (2002) for example, said that the ‘bottom line’ for them was that social partnership was helpful only in relation to wage management but that all the extra ‘“social engineering” accretions’ should be ‘scrapped’ (2002: 91-­95). Furthermore they called for greater flexibility in the pay deals to enable wages, and in particular public sector wages, to be adjusted (inversely) with any rise in unemployment. Later, as these ‘accretions’ did not seem to have had any disastrous consequences, another economist, O’Leary (2006), simply argued that industrial relations stability, wage predictability and wage moderation – the channels through which social partnership may be thought to have contributed to Ireland’s economic success – might well have come about anyway without social partnership. Fitz Gerald (2000) had earlier taken the view that social partnership, by stabilising industrial relations, made wage adjustment relatively trouble-­free, though he pointed to signs of wage adjustment from the 1980s that might have continued anyway. He suggested that social partnership validated wage developments but that the market determined them (Fitz Gerald 2000: 42–3). Interestingly, in the wake of the financial crisis, a report for the Department of Finance (Wright 2010) made several references to the Department’s budgetary process being overwhelmed by social partnership. A different type of scepticism about social partnership came from a concern about the relative importance of representative political institutions in a liberal democratic state. O’Cinnéide (1998/9) posed questions about the place of new institutions that operate on the basis of notional mandates and the license to negotiate on behalf of various interests, groups or communities who do not directly vote or make these actors accountable. There are two concerns expressed here: firstly, which has been most often repeated, the danger of unaccountable and self-­serving groups overriding democratically accountable institutions and second, less often recalled, the distraction that such involvement might constitute for organisations that would be more effective in serving communities if able to act and criticise government policy more freely than is allowed once inside the institutions. This critique of social partnership raises many more fundamental issues, particularly concerning the Community Pillar, which will be taken up in the next chapter, and indeed in the course of the book. The role of the Pillar has also been referred to more recently by Adshead

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(2011: 85) whose view is that, far from punching above their weight, the CVP organisations were ‘neither willing nor able to observe the established “rules of the game”’. She cites traditional social partners, according to whom pay was at the centre, and some of them viewed the CVP ‘overly absorbed by the “froth”’ (Adshead 2011: 86). However, the nature of the ‘game’, in relation to the CVP, is of the essence in this study. Suffice to say here, there is logic underlying it, but it is more complex and significant than allowed by formal ‘game theory’. Advocates In contrast to these partnership sceptics coming from different and sometimes opposed perspectives, there are some accounts of the success of the Celtic Tiger economy which attribute some credit for Ireland’s economic success to social partnership, with some accounts playing up the role of politicians (MacSharry 2000) and others the role of the trade unions (Sweeney 1999). These accounts say little of the role of the Community Pillar. Some have stressed the positive impact of social partnership in generating the economic success, while identifying some threats to tripartism itself, particularly at the workplace level, and the related issue of Ireland’s position on the ‘value chain’ of international production and exchange. The creation of a consensus around some key principles and economic decisions by all sides (e.g. fiscal correction, moderation of gross wage growth, non-­accommodating exchange rate policy, protocols for industrial dispute prevention, membership of EMU etc.) did, it is argued, both rescue Ireland from a serious impasse and re-­route it along a sustainable path of economic and social development (Hastings, Sheehan and Yeates 2007).

Ireland’s model in comparative and historical perspective When Irish social partnership is more closely analysed, however, it is viewed in comparative and historical perspective as a variety of tripartite corporatism or concertation. Roche (1992) provided an early theoretical grounding in these terms for understanding social partnership as it emerged from 1987, and stressed its potential as an alternative to industrial relations pluralism. Hardiman (1998; 2000) developed her earlier approach (Hardiman 1988) to explore the post-­1987 social partnership model by providing an account that distinguishes between it and the failed model of the 1970s. She also examined innovative aspects such as the CVP. Up to a certain point, too, O’Donnell and O’Reardon (1996) subscribed to the view that in Ireland the trade unions in particular had succeeded in breaking from the ‘liberal pluralist’ UK model, defying predictions of increased trade union fragmentation and sectionalism, to pursue and achieve a level of encompassing unity ‘transcending the immediate priorities of its component groups’. Later, lively debate on the precise nature of the Irish model of social

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partnership was shaped around neo-­ corporatism. Several writers have attempted to locate the Irish pacts in relation to types and subtypes of tripartism, such as competitive corporatism (Hardiman 2000; Rhodes 1998; 2001; Roche 1998), ‘liberal corporatism’ (Turner 2002); ‘flexible network governance’ (Hardiman 2006), ‘extended political exchange’ (Roche 2007); ‘developmental corporatism’ (Teague 1995); and even ‘neo-­ liberal corporatism’ (Boucher and Collins 2003), while O’Donnell and O’Reardon (2000) developed a ‘post-­ corporatist’ account of the evolving model. Before looking at the specific arguments among some of the key contributors on Ireland, it is worthwhile to comment on corporatism and neo-­corporatism as more widely understood. Bipartism in Ireland in a neo-­corporatist perspective The broad theoretical context for Ireland’s first attempt at centralised bargaining in the 1970-­81 period is post-­war corporatism. Social corporatism or neo-­ corporatism was defined by Schmitter as: a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-­competitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports. (Schmitter 1979: 93–94)

The acknowledgement of corporatism as a strategy of the left in the post-­ war world was ironic because, prior to the Second World War, the concept of corporatism was strongly associated with authoritarian regimes such as Mussolini’s Fascist government in Italy. Then, Social Democrats elsewhere, as in Scandinavian countries, sought to control capitalism or effect socialist transformation via politics and parliamentary power. The title of a 1979 paper by Schmitter, asking if the twentieth century was still the ‘century of corporatism’, pointed up this irony, referring as it did to the title of a book by Manoilescu1 who was an admirer of Mussolini and an advocate of authoritarian corporatism. Hence, neo-­corporatism is sometimes referred to as the third ‘ism’ (Wiarda 1997). Schmitter and Lehmbruch (1979) distinguished between authoritarian state corporatism of the pre-­Second World War period and the ‘societal corporatism’ or ‘neo-­corporatism’ of the post-­war decades. The latter was often generated through a pact or partnership between labour and employers through peak organisations in a system of bipartite or tripartite co-­determination involving the state. The focus of analysis of post-­war corporatism was a new type of social pact entered into consensually by the major interests of labour and capital, often with the state, for certain public goods. Neo-­corporatism coincided in time with the era of ‘settlement’ between capital and labour,

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embodied in widely shared commitment to the welfare state and social citizenship in advanced European countries (Flora l986) and the triumph of the Keynesian macro-­economic paradigm over neo-­classical orthodoxies associated with the pre-­war depression and political fallout of the 1930s. But neo-­corporatism, though associated with both, is analytically distinct from the welfare state and Keynesian economics. At heart, neo-­corporatism, or concertation of labour and capital, taking varied forms, was an alternative paradigm to the liberal pluralist wage bargaining model and was designed to address simultaneously the challenges of growth, price stability and full employment. In an imperfect private market system of free collective bargaining, social costs such as inflation and unemployment take the form of externalities because bargaining is narrowly framed between micro-­economic actors. Instead of harking after the utopia of ‘perfect’ competition beloved of neo-­classical economics, the challenge set by neo-­corporatism was to achieve a sufficiently encompassing level of commitment by peak organisations on each side to create an incentive for memberships to minimise social costs (such as inflation or unemployment) by making it very difficult to externalise such costs. The literature on this subject has been explored in depth in the context of a key study of Ireland’s first significant attempt to develop a bipartite corporatist model over the course of 1970-­81 (Hardiman 1988) and is implicitly accepted and therefore only briefly touched on here. Ireland’s neo-­corporatist history diverges from the heartlands of corporatism, whether of the ‘continental’ style of Germany with its longstanding co-­determination laws, the Austrian and Swiss models with their legal or constitutional underpinnings (Katzenstein 1984), the Netherlands with its ‘Polder model’ and consociational politics (Visser and Hemerjick 1997) or the Social Democratic Swedish model (Lewin 1994) with its powerful political left and high level of trade union loyalty. Indeed, Ireland is not a ‘typical’ European economy in several other respects either. From a ‘varieties of capitalism’ perspective Ireland is classed with the liberal market economies as against the ‘organised capitalisms’ of the German or Japanese type (Hall and Soskice 2001). Similarly, from a comparative welfare state perspective, the Irish case again embodies more elements of a liberal than a conservative corporatist or social democratic type of regime (Carey 2007; Cousins 1997; Esping-­Andersen 1990; McCashin 2004), although there are also some accounts emphasising either colonialism (Cousins 1997) or Catholic corporatism (McLaughlin 2001). In some of these countries – where corporatism has deep historical roots and traditions or has been underpinned by political parties of the left – attempts to quench the flame of corporatism have met greater resistance than efforts to fan it – in contrast to the Irish case, where its incarnations have surprised many. Seen in its historic context, Ireland can be regarded as having only a limited basis for corporatism (O’Connor 2002). Von Prondzynski (1998) wrote

Interpretations of Irish social partnership

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that Ireland has a mainly liberal pluralist legacy from British influence despite some corporatist tendencies in the shape of Catholic corporatist thinking in the 1930s and 1940s. He traces the beginnings of central concertation to wartime legislation such as the wages standstill orders. A system of general pay rounds dates from the mid 1940s when the restrictions were lifted and regulatory institutions, such as the Labour Court in 1946, were established. Hardiman (1988) has emphasised the context of opening the economy from 1958 and the creation of new consultative bodies. From the 1960s – in the light of the success of several small, open economies – and with encouragement from the Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development (OECD) – Ireland too attempted to develop income and price control policies. However, apart from a brief interlude in 1964, there was to be no concertation of wage growth in the 1960s, which proved to be a decade of industrial relations upheaval, and it was only in 1970 that a centralised bipartite system of wage bargaining first emerged. The logic behind such proposals was to control wage growth in a context where inflation was largely determined by currency and labour market links with the UK. The concept of incomes and prices policy was also championed by the National Industrial and Economic Council (NIEC), established in 1963 to foster employer and trade union co-­operation with government in the open economy policies adopted at the close of the 1950s. A key focus of the NIEC from the mid 1960s was the issue of inflation and competitiveness and in 1970 it produced a blueprint for tripartite and bipartite institutions to regulate prices and incomes (Hardiman 1988: 47-­52). Ironically, as Von Prondzynski (1998) noted, the trigger for the establishment of the bipartite Employer-­Labour Conference, which voluntarily embarked on centralised wage bargaining in 1970, was the withdrawal of a threatened government bill for the regulation of incomes and prices. The bipartite Employer-­Labour Conference which brought together the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and FUE,2 however, was not locked into a coherent co-­ordinated macro-­economic and supply-­side strategy, and the combined policy inconsistencies between government, employers and unions may well have worsened the problem of stagflation. As Hardiman (1988) has comprehensively shown and others confirm (O’Connor 2002), the bipartite model actually adopted was not a manifest success as a stabilising, let alone recovery, strategy in a small open economy or in protecting employment and stalling price rises in the 1970s. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 proved more than the system could handle and, despite attempting to move to a tripartite system involving the government, centralised bargaining collapsed in 1981. Social partnership in a ‘new social pacts’ perspective Ireland’s renascent corporatism in the late 1980s, therefore, may appear surprising. Moreover, the timing of Irish social partnership, from the late 1980s,

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coincided not with the ‘golden age’ of welfare states but with a period of welfare state adjustments and increased market liberalisation. It happened at a time of a serious fiscal crisis, static employment, large-­scale and long-­term unemployment, and high rates of emigration in a young population. Yet, without a particularly deep historical tradition of corporatism, viewed comparatively, and at a time when social corporatism appeared less resilient in its greatest bastions, Ireland adopted a model of social partnership. But Ireland was not alone. While tripartite or bipartite corporatism were deemed to be in danger in the heartlands in the 1980s, a different cluster of countries began to produce ‘new social pacts’ or ‘second generation’ social pacts (Avdagic et al. 2005; Baccaro 2003; Fajertag and Pochet 2000; Rhodes 1998; 2001). Avdagic et al. (2005) refer to an unlikely collection of sites for the new pacts: Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, in addition to Ireland. Most lacked corporatist traditions, and they differed greatly in terms of industrial relations systems; and they have had quite varied levels of success and failure. In the early 1990s, commentators on European industrial relations institutions took stock of developments since the 1980s, in the UK in particular, and noted impending challenges for European countries with strong corporatist traditions and stresses on tripartism, for example, in Sweden and Belgium. However, even then there were some signs of renascent corporatism – in countries where corporatism had been moribund for some time such as the Netherlands, or even where there was at best only a limited tradition, including Spain, Italy and Portugal. Ireland’s experience too figured in the re-­emergence of academic interest in corporatism (Ferner and Hyman 1992). There is much variation in the new pacts but two things should be noted: firstly, that there are some common features among all social pacts and, secondly, that there is also wide national variation. Important variations existed between individual cases of post-­war corporatism as much as between new social pacts, as Katzenstein showed in a classic study of Austria and Switzerland (1984). While commentators have noted the diversity of the new pacts there has also been much discussion of what distinguishes them from the earlier generation. At the heart of this discussion is a concern with wider developments in capitalist societies since the 1970s, the rise of neo-­liberalism, globalisation, ‘post-­Fordism’, post-­industrial society etc., and whether new social pacts can address a progressive social agenda against such a background. Moreover, specific new challenges such as high unemployment, rising costs of the welfare state, changing family formation, new labour force participation patterns and population ageing, would come to test existing institutional arrangements. In this context, many expected a complete collapse of corporatism in favour of more decentralised bargaining, or even managerial prerogative. However, by the late 1980s, after some departures along these paths, some

Interpretations of Irish social partnership

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observers identified the green shoots of a new corporatism that was in many respects a more effective response to the new economic conditions than neo-­ liberalism. The term ‘competitive corporatism’ was coined in ‘the search for elaborate equity-­based compromises and trade-­offs’ in these circumstances, wrote Rhodes (2001: 165), continuing, ‘Despite important differences between them – due to diverse welfare state models and industrial relations traditions – all social pacts consist of new market-­conforming policy mixes. But they are far from being vehicles for neo-­liberal hegemony or economic nationalism’ (Rhodes 2001: 166). The theoretical underpinnings for competitive corporatism were elaborated by Rhodes (1998; 2001) in a sophisticated analysis, particularly in relation to the impact of ‘external’ influences of globalisation and socio-­economic change. He neither dismissed these factors nor viewed them in catastrophic terms but traced their effect as they interacted with ‘domestic’ factors that had contributed to strains in labour markets and welfare states from the 1970s at least. The context for new social pacts, Rhodes noted, arises from domestic and external pressure for reform within the EU. Global and EU integration, the deepening of trade and increased mobility of capital had to be taken seriously but must be seen in conjunction with other ‘internal’ sources of difficulty for welfare states, including demographic ageing, increased demands on healthcare and pensions systems, and new risks of a post-­industrial economy (Rhodes 1998: 168–9). While it is easy, noted Rhodes, to overstate the power of international capital and multinationals ‘to “arbitrage” diverse national structures’, governments are conscious of the threat of relocation. Also, tax competition might not have overt impacts but it is a reality. While there may not always be a clear connection between welfare state retrenchment and economic integration, Rhodes suggested that traditional approaches to macro-­economic management, such as deficit financing, now carry a premium. Moreover, in the European context, processes of monetary integration in the 1990s intensified the constraints on member states. While, once again, there was no explicit requirement that welfare state reform be undertaken in that context, it would be naive to believe that integration had no effect. The key point, however, is that these pressures of integration and socio-­ economic change did not necessarily lead to the logic of neo-­liberalism, à la the UK during the 1980s. Moreover, the challenges in the field of production and workplaces would not be satisfactorily addressed by de-­regulation of labour markets and greater autonomy for employers (freedom to hire and fire or ‘numerical flexibility’) but necessitated internal flexibility in firms and sectors, which neo-­liberal de-­regulation tends to undermine because it reduces trust. Thus, de-­regulation is simplistic when a sophisticated and calibrated response is required. Similarly, in the context of unemployment, punitive workfare

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measures can undermine objectives of successful activation. Moreover, social pacts can offer a method for steering at the national level or, to put it another way, these pressures can generate new forms of integrated response from states via institutional adaptation and consensus-­building – i.e. new social pacts – rather than fragmentation and market-­led decentralisation. Consequently, in Rhodes’s view, rather than fragmenting political economic structures the new pressures can often create greater co-­ordination. New social pacts were instituted during the late 1980s or 1990s, notably in Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Attempts at social pacts in the 1990s were often more successful in smaller member states of the EU such as Ireland, Finland, and the Netherlands, although Italy was an exception to this. Similarly, Fajertag and Pochet (2000) noted that new social pacts emerged in eight out of fifteen EU member states in the 1990s, in defiance of predictions of a slide towards liberal, US-­style industrial relations bargaining. They referred to an earlier study of the run-­up to European Monetary Union, which they viewed as the catalyst for social pacts in economies traditionally having difficulties with monetary policy, inflation control, currency stability and controlling public budget deficits and debt (2000: 9). Like Rhodes, Fajertag and Pochet (2000) were concerned with the distinction between the typical pacts of the 1960s and 1970s, and those of the 1990s. They pointed to broadly contrasting circumstances in the two periods in relation to the context, labour market situation, focus of wage and social protection policy, and institutional framework. Traditional social pacts took place against a background of nationally regulated economies, at a time of population growth, when production followed ‘Fordist’ lines, and monetary policy was ‘accommodating’. There was ‘full employment’ and high levels of regulation of labour market and working conditions. The focus of wage policy was redistribution of productivity gains while that of social protection policy was for welfare state expansion. The early pacts were centrally institutionalised and orientated to the social partners. Fajertag and Pochet (2000) suggested that the pacts of the 1990s took place amid concerns about ‘globalisation’, population ageing, monetary policy constraints (related to EMU) and the rise of the information society. High levels of unemployment were widespread and issues of security and flexibility were uppermost in labour markets. Wage policy was concerned with wage restraint and competitiveness while welfare state retrenchment policies were typical. The pacts of the 1990s were more co-­ordinated than the earlier ones but often more decentralised and state-­led rather than social partner-­led. While Ireland was not in every respect typical in terms of welfare state crisis (e.g. population growth continued to predominate over population ageing), Fajertag et al. noted that Ireland’s pacts were firmly anchored in qualification for EMU and (besides the reduction of deficits and debt) the problem of large-­ scale unemployment was uppermost in the 1990s. The role of the Irish National

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Economic and Social Council (NESC) is also seen in the context of technical think tanks in other countries with the role of underpinning the alignment of monetary and wage policy. Generally, the pacts of the 1990s were, as compared to those of the 1960s and 1970s, connected with economic, fiscal and monetary policy ‘correction’. Pay bargaining was linked not to growth but to competitiveness and, from 1980 to 1998, the distribution of GDP between labour and capital shifted towards the  latter in most of the EU.3 Fajertag and Pochet (2000: 24) suggested too that  the earlier pacts were not rooted in a shared understanding of macro-­ economic objectives among the social partners but that a shared analysis does typify the process since the 1990s. The labour/trade union side, in particular, typically accepts a longer-­term or more indirect path to gains, and having to accept some pain, in the short run, for the promise of employment growth and reduced unemployment in the longer term. For the unions, ‘the results achieved are by no means comparable with earlier pacts’ (Fajertag and Pochet 2000: 19), and the new social partnership may mean a lowering of expectations, but they have often participated in order to maintain some influence over decision-­making, or to ‘confirm the bargaining method, as well as the minimum conditions of equity and unions’ survival as collective actors’. Employers have favoured the new pacts because co-­ordination and framework agreements at the central level have allowed for interpretation at the local level. It is not difficult to relate the Irish case, from 1987, to these typical features of new social pacts. One of the differences in relation to the new pacts is that, whereas earlier pacts exhibited ‘societal corporatism’ (initially this differentiated them from the pre-­war state corporatism), the new pacts exhibit more leadership by states. The role of states can include incentives and threats to parties designed to get agreement between them. This is acknowledged by Avdagic et al. (2005) when they suggest that a bargaining model of the emergence of new social pacts is a more successful way to explain them than a functionalist one. This leaves the issue of consensus formation and bargaining: it seems that state leadership does lead to attempts to generate a consensus before bargaining proceeds but it does not appear to do away with bargaining. In this respect, the state is playing a leading part but not dominating proceedings.

New social pacts in Ireland (1987-­2008) Against this background a number of lines of thought or types of interpretation of the last two decades of Irish social partnership have been put forward. Most of these take some account of the unusual features of the Irish model as it has evolved, and some of them take a view regarding the significance of the CVP within this model. Following a number of years in which free collective bargaining prevailed,

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there was a return to a corporatist approach in 1987. The new pacts were more co-­ordinated and underpinned by a prior analysis and strategy conducted by the NESC. In the context of the post-­1987 pacts, which had a more robust analytical underpinning in the NESC strategic reports, the concept of social partnership took centre stage, not only in industrial relations debate but in relation to the model of governance more widely. Some of this debate revolved around the view that social partnership is a form of political exchange and the debate has been taken up in greater detail by a number of other Irish contributors (Hardiman 1998; 2000; 2006; NESF 1997; O’Donnell 2008; O’Donnell and O’Reardon 1996; 2000; O’Donnell and Thomas 1998; Roche 1992; 1993; 2007; Teague 1995). Roche (1992) provided an early theoretical grounding for understanding social partnership as it emerged from 1987. His perspective emerged from an overview of the development of industrial relations in Ireland in which he noted the possibility of an alternative scenario to a liberal pluralist industrial relations model predicated on liberal patterns of industrialism, essentially based on the UK experience. At a time when scepticism was still widespread, this alternative scenario could, he suggested, involve a stabilisation of the interconnection between politics and industrial relations in the form of corporatist ‘political exchange’ as an ongoing pattern. At that stage, the first tripartite agreement of the current generation – the Programme for National Recovery (PNR) (1987-­90) between employers, unions, farmers and government – had given heart after several years of economic malaise, and, though commitment was still shaky after the recession of 1991/2, the ‘social partners’ had signed a second agreement – the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP) – ­covering 1991 to 1993. Such an alternative scenario based on sustaining this model was possible, Roche argued, in part because of its viability in a country with ‘catch-­all party politics’ (albeit dependent on an ‘unstable political amalgam’). Ironically, some of the original sites of corporatism had strong social democratic parties but the key point would seem to be the absence of a hegemonic neo-­liberal party backed by a solid parliamentary majority, in contrast to the UK of the 1980s and early 1990s. Corporatism seems to be a possibility in many other party political constellations. Roche suggested that, in such a context, the choices made by the unions in particular could be of ‘major significance to the political economy of Irish society’. He continued: The future is open. Political realignment to the liberal right could undermine tripartism, as, in the short term, could economic circumstances. At the same time, underlying trends in industrial relations could lead to the institutionalisation and stabilisation of political exchange. (Roche 1992: 325–326)

During the first decade of the launch of Ireland’s new social partnership model, O’Donnell and O’Reardon (1996) similarly argued that Ireland was

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capable of developing a system of social partnership, despite the absence of a strong corporatist bargaining tradition and a legacy of pluralist industrial relations. They argued that in Ireland the trade unions in particular had succeeded in breaking from the ‘liberal pluralist’ UK model and defied predictions of increased trade union fragmentation and sectionalism to pursue and achieve a level of encompassing unity ‘transcending the immediate priorities of its component groups’. The areas of shared analysis between the social partners were quite specific, including commitment to a non-­accommodating exchange rate policy (amid scepticism among economists) first, under the Exchange Rate Mechanism up to its collapse in 1993 and later, on the basis of qualifying criteria set out in the Maastricht Treaty for membership of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Hence, they concluded: Ireland’s experiment, since 1987 has, for the first time in its history, partly inoculated it from the unsuccessful combination of macro policy and income determination pursued in Britain. Ireland has finally escaped the most negative aspects of Britain’s political business cycle and also, in the process, rejected the neo-­liberal approach to social policy and regulation adopted since 1979. (O’Donnell and O’Reardon 1996: 37–38)

In relation to a non-­accommodating exchange rate policy, O’Donnell and O’Reardon (1996) pinpointed a significant feature of social partnership in the 1990s that coincides with the logic of the ‘new social pacts’, namely that the partners subscribed to state strategy that was designed to avoid the ‘low road’ to economic adjustment, at least as it is implied by downwardly flexible exchange rate policy. Teague (1995) took a somewhat different view, sounding a sceptical note in his account of the new social pacts, based on the experience of the PNR (Government of Ireland 1987) and PESP (Government of Ireland 1990), and describing the model as ‘developmental corporatism’, differentiating it from the ‘social corporatism’ of the 1960s and 1970s in west European countries. However, he added that developmental corporatism centred on tying ‘wage formation to a wider all-­inclusive governance structure to either defend or promote a national development strategy’ (Teague 1995: 264) originating in 1958.4 He also suggested there was common ground between Ireland and developing economies or transition economies in Eastern Europe, where negotiated governance could operate amid varied configurations of civil society shaped as much by church and religion, philanthropy, mutualism or NGOs as by labour and employer organisations. The new pacts in Ireland, nevertheless, continued to be studied in terms of ongoing international debate on neo-­corporatism such as the concepts of distributional and productivity coalitions.5 Some of the concerns of Teague concerning distributional and productivity coalitions are similar to those also discussed in the context of ‘competitive corporatism’, so perhaps Ireland was

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not so exceptional, when viewed in the context of new social pacts. Rhodes (2001) noted in his account of the new social pacts that their competitive corporatist character stemmed from the fact that they sought to combine the characteristics of both distributional and productivity coalitions in varying degrees. The complicated nature of the new social pacts is conveyed by the following: Underpinning these pacts are varying degrees of associational cohesion and development to one extent or another of two types of coalition – seeking distributional deals and productivity gains – with complex linkages and overlaps between them. In ideal-­typical terms, it can be suggested that competitive corporatism is successfully achieved if underpinned by a close but flexible interlocking of the two. (Rhodes, 2001: 166)

The new pacts have been analysed in terms of their success as ­distributional and productivity coalitions. Following the adoption of painful macro-­economic measures from 1987 as part of the new tripartism, the evolution of the Irish model was perceived as a new type of social pact but still having limited ­effectiveness in the interlocking of distribution and productivity dimensions. Roche (1998) had argued that the Irish social partnership experiment involved a substantial distributional coalition – i.e. a coalition of employers and unions, and from 1996 other interests – primarily centred on adjustments to wage, taxation and social welfare levels. Rhodes (1998), consistent with Roche (1998), concluded that, in comparison to other countries with new social pacts, the Irish model was ‘moderate’ as a distributional coalition and ‘weak’ as a productivity coalition, in contrast with the Dutch model while Spain, Portugal and Italy had moderate productivity coalitions. The ‘moderate’ character of the distributional coalition suggests that Irish social partnership did not constitute a great barrier to inequality either. The ‘weak’ character of the ‘productivity coalition’ implicit in social partnership in the Irish case is more clearly captured by Roche (1998). The weakness he identified was due to the lack of a productivity coalition at firm, industry or sector level, based on ‘high road’ flexibility – i.e. innovative management with high trust relationships in workplaces. Therefore, it was a real challenge to take social partnership beyond a distributional coalition to a productivity coalition. The mention of a productivity coalition touches on a key question at the heart of Ireland’s developmental path and the difficulty of shifting from a dependence on externally driven growth (foreign direct investment) towards internal capacity for sustained growth is part of a much wider discussion that has been explored in innovative ways by others. The ‘Telesis Report’ (NESC 1982) sought to address this issue in a phase of high turnover in the foreign sector and, in a key comparative study, Mjøset (1993) located Ireland’s difficulty in the need to generate a ‘national system of innovation’ to break the vicious cycle that dogged economic development for most of the twentieth

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century. Ó Riain (2004) explored the subsequent success of Ireland’s high-­tech economic sector and suggested that the key was not a simple matter of passive reliance on foreign investment but a combination of active state agencies and the creation of networks designed to bed down such investment in what he described as a ‘developmental network state’. Moreover, internationally, the high-­tech boom was underpinned by flexible institutional networks that provided for a countervailing logic to the neo-­liberal orthodoxy often viewed as the principal source of success. These factors are important enough to be mentioned here because they need to be taken into account in any complete exploration of productivity coalitions in Ireland, but they cannot be further explored in the present study. While the Irish case can be viewed in comparison to other new social pacts using the concepts outlined above, the issue of national variation and institutional innovation poses an analytical challenge of a different order. The Irish model, while under-­achieving in terms of certain corporatist criteria, evolved into something much broader than a bargain over shares in the benefits of growth between capital and labour. The next section turns, therefore, to the specific ways in which commentators of the corporatist paradigm have responded to the innovation of the CVP after 1996.

Institutional innovation: the CVP The Irish model of social partnership is comparatively unusual in the way that it accommodates not only the conventional pillars – state, employers, unions and farmers – but also a ‘community and voluntary’ pillar, established in 1996 (Larragy 2006). How should the extension of social partnership rights to such a grouping be viewed? What is the official justification for it? Are these new actors representative of significant social interests, and if so, are they in any position to bargain, as in having something real to exchange? Or is the new Pillar of much less significance – ‘merely’ a moral force? Or on the contrary, does the advent of the Pillar signal a change in the character of the governance model itself or changes in the nature of what the term ‘social partners’ means today? Is the new model an enhancement of democracy, or a threat to it? Does it confer procedural equality on materially unequal and less powerful social groups? While these are aspects of the question that need to be addressed empirically and through a detailed teasing out of different strands in the CVP, which is a key purpose of the present study, nevertheless, the creation of the Pillar has given rise to reappraisals, and been incorporated into pre-­existing interpretations, of social partnership. Some of the discussion on the CVP has thrown up wider questions, going well beyond the type of discussion that usually takes place in the context of comparing corporatism. Some of this wider discussion

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will be left until the next chapter, in which a framework for analysis is developed. Here the main task is to follow through the logic of previous debate and the alternative perspectives on the CVP that emerged from it. Four principal perspectives will be explored. The first of these is a distinctly negative view: incorporation, i.e. that the CVP is essentially a means of incorporating and quelling dissent related to issues unresolved by social partnership. The second perspective is much more optimistic, and views the innovation of the CVP as betokening a shift from bargaining to deliberation and consensus. The third view is flexible network governance, which offers a more nuanced view of the innovations and the fourth hypothesis identifies a role for the new pillar in defending the social wage as part of a system of extended of political exchange. Incorporation? Initial responses from the academic community sympathetic to the new social pacts expressed concern regarding the danger of unwieldiness of administrative overload in the social partnership model, which was designed primarily to address a specific set of talks. Hardiman was swift to express concern that the Pillar, with representation in the NESC, could ‘make that body more diffuse in composition’ and to caution that ‘a more inclusive process is also a more unwieldy process’ (2000: 303). Moreover, she noted that social partnership was not the ‘principal forum within which social policy initiatives are actually developed’ and might become something of a Greek chorus for policy decided in the political process (2000: 303). She concluded that participation of a voice for the socially excluded in social partnership ‘cannot be seen as a “functional substitute” for redistributive government policy decisions’ (2000: 304). Over time, with the survival of the new Pillar, different interpretations emerged, particularly from the left, expressed in the view that the Pillar was simply a case of incorporation of neophytes by the state along traditional populist lines – a tactic of which the hegemonic Fianna Fáil Party were past masters. One such account dismisses the possibility of the community sector effecting change within the institutions of social partnership, while fundamental areas of reform, such as weaknesses in local government and in policy to tackle inequality, remain unaddressed (Kirby 2002: 179). In another account (Allen 2000) it is not only the community sector that cannot effect fundamental changes through social partnership, but also the unions. The Marxist alternative seeks a clean break from social partnership by the unions as a first step to regrouping of forces for a socialist transformation of society. Allen’s account detected a ‘revival of working class confidence’ in the late 1990s, which in turn was ‘creating the basis for the emergence of stronger socialist forces’ (Allen 2000: 174). While the identity of the ‘dog that didn’t bark’ is clear in Allen’s analysis, the silent culprit outlined by Kirby is less clear-­cut in class terms, for his critique focuses on the community sector

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and calls for ‘an active determined civil society to challenge the state to take its responsibilities seriously’ (2002: 204). In other words, he seeks a movement of social forces ‘of civil society’ – to which he gives the status of agency – to shift the direction of the state back to its ‘responsibilities’. While his view is clearly that the struggle against inequality is best fought outside the mechanism of social partnership, there is no clear identification of the material basis or social forces within civil society that will act as the agency for change. Kirby’s account was published in the 2002 economic slowdown – a time when a section of the CVP – the Community Platform – was in fact very restive, and rejected the next social partnership agreement (Sustaining Progress) agreed in February 2003 (which is taken up in the present study). The exclusion of this group from the Pillar subsequently inspired a caustic interpretation of the effects of social partnership on the Community Platform (Meade 2005). Entitled ‘We hate it here – please let us stay!’ the article said that the platform was all at sea since its exclusion from the process. The implication, consistent with Kirby’s, was not that the platform should have avoided exclusion from social partnership but never should have been in it in the first place because this grievously undermined the independence of civil society. Essentially the choice was between incorporation and dissent. Post-­corporatist deliberative politics? A radically different interpretation of the significance of the Pillar suggested that the Irish social partnership model was evolving away from a tripartite bargaining arrangement towards a form of deliberative democracy. The theory first applied only to the Irish case (NESF 1997) but was later posited as having general relevance (O’Donnell 2008; O’Donnell and O’Reardon 2000; O’Donnell and Thomas 1998) to understanding social partnership internationally. As seen above, some of these contributors previously had a ‘conventional’ corporatist view, but developed a new account that, in certain fundamental respects, pointed towards a model that was termed ‘post-­corporatist’. O’Donnell6 first provided the innovative analysis in A Framework for Partnership, published by the NESF (NESF 1997) and restated it in a variety of collaborations. The initial NESF paper redefined the concept of a social partner and the partnership process. The entry of the CVP implied a broader definition of the concept of ‘social partner’. In other words the set of social partners could include not only bargaining bodies based on functional roles in the economy, as traditionally was the case, but also more loosely based independent groups and associations that largely subsisted outside the field of production relations. The way that social partnership talks have evolved to accommodate the new pillar by treating them somewhat differently is indicative of such a distinction. However, rather than differentiating between two types of social partner, with a distinction between the community/voluntary groups and the employer/union

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groups, the new approach suggested that all should be viewed as a new type of social partner in a new type of social partnership. The new analysis distinguished therefore between a ‘traditional idea of a social partner’ (organised hierarchically with a central discipline and participating on the basis of functional relationships with another partner, based on bargaining) and ‘new characteristics of a social partner’. New-­type social partners would be operating in a more fluid context of co-­ordination with other civil society actors, where information and analysis are resources, and where dialogue and shared understanding supplant bargaining. That fluidity was not restricted to the new entrants to the process but extended to the traditional social partners: While partnership involves a significant amount of bargaining and deal making – reflecting the functional interdependence between the partners – this is not the whole story. Partnership also involves the players in a process of deliberation that has the potential to shape and reshape their understanding, identity and preferences. (O’Donnell 2001: 3)

The innovative account sees all organisations as associations in more ­contingent patterns of interaction based on dialogue and deliberation with one another – with the state providing ‘concertation’. It is the concertation dimension that seemingly differentiates the new model from both corporatism and liberal pluralism and creates the space for deliberation involving a range of non-­governmental associations. The role of the central government too is redefined in terms of a shift from central allocation, direction, administration and underwriting monopoly representation towards ‘policy entrepreneurship, monitoring, facilitating deliberation, protection of non-­statutory organisations and supporting interest group formation’ (NESF 1997: 40). O’Donnell and Thomas (1998) referred, for example, to the concept of a ‘negotiated economy’ in Denmark as described by Amin and Thomas (1996) and suggested that the advent of the ‘social pillar’ (i.e. the CVP) implies that ‘the conceptualisation of social partnership concertation as a model of tripartite functional interdependence is increasingly insufficient’ and ‘there is a nascent “corporate pluralism” emerging, in which there is regularised, compartmentalised and structured co-­option into the public policy process for a diverse network of interest groups’ (O’Donnell and Thomas 1998: 137). Significantly, they also referred to the emergence of local area-­based partnerships and suggested that the combination of local and national level changes was leading to a reconfiguration of the ‘… relationships between representative and participative democracy which are fostering a new form of deliberative democracy’ (O’Donnell and Thomas 1998: 137). O’Donnell and O’Reardon (2000) also suggest that this issue is of relevance ‘not only to Ireland but also across the European Union’ and ‘concerns the very nature of social partnership, and its implications for politics and democracy’ (O’Donnell and O’Reardon 2000:

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239). All in all, this interpretation pushes the conception of what lies at the heart of social partnership to a new level, in the sense that social partners begin to subordinate rational logic and organisational self-­interest to a more fluid interaction with other actors that redefines the common good. Flexible network governance One of the difficulties with post-­corporatist deliberation is that as social partnership moves from bargaining to deliberation, and widens its scope, it comes up against other aspects of the state, not least its elected parliamentary chamber, which is also engaged in a deliberative process and has arguably a more fundamental source of legitimacy. Hardiman (2006) addresses this in her assessment of the evolution of social partnership. She maintains that Ireland came to feature among ‘countries that had not previously been thought to have the organisational or institutional conditions to support traditional neo-­corporatism’ but could be numbered among others, including Spain, Italy, Finland and Belgium, with pacts that can be validly compared in terms of the concept of ‘competitive corporatism’. At the same time, however, she notes that the Irish model of governance was more than a bargaining system and facilitated policy networks that were ‘not strongly differentiated by policy area, but are linked into a dynamic process of political deliberation’ and these networks allow political leaders to be more effective in formulating and implementing policies (2006: 347) While this might carry the risk, originally stressed by O’Cinnéide (1998/9), of social collectivities – in particular the CVP – exerting influence which does not comply with legitimate electoral mandates, Hardiman implied that the social partners cannot punch above their weight: Social partnership as ‘flexible network governance’ is envisaged as a two-­way but multi-­stranded communication system between government and organised economic and social interests. But the origin of the process is political and the ultimate decisions in ‘flexible network governance’ rest with government. (Hardiman 2006: 348)

Hardiman went on to highlight specificities regarding the type of political exchange taking place in Ireland’s social pacts. The unions, while clearly influential, often pushed more effectively on the net take-­home wage front than the ‘social wage’ front. The implication would seem to be that while the unions might have been expected to include elements of a social wage agenda they often went with the path of least resistance. This narrowness of focus may have facilitated accommodation with government and employers but at the expense of addressing marginalisation and inequality – something that could lead to conflicted relationships with elements in the CVP, and open opportunities for the latter. In the final analysis, however, the political system prevails in so far as the Department of the Taoiseach (the Prime Minister) holds the ring when

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it comes to balancing the general source of (electoral) legitimacy and the influence of collectivities. The networking does not elevate ‘deliberative democracy’ above parliament, and politics ‘trumps’ partnership. The concept of flexible network governance continues to place the Irish case in the competitive corporatist family while placing the state more pivotally at the centre of all networks, with strategic political control based on the electoral mandate in the final analysis. This paradigm is wide enough to accommodate the separate elements of tripartism, networks of local partnership, policy working groups etc. It may be elaborate but it is still recognisable without redefining social partnership in qualitatively new terms. Extended political exchange Roche (2007) also developed his analysis to deal with the emergence of the CVP and a wider policy agenda in social partnership in the 1990s. In the complexity of the evolving model, he identified the concatenation of four key elements: centralised wage bargaining; networking subsystems; regulatory and trouble-­ shooting mechanisms; and social buffering. This extended political exchange thesis views social partnership as a tripartite bargaining model of competitive corporatism built around a coalition of social interests who negotiate on distributional and productivity issues. Remaining firmly at the heart of this account is the tripartite structure of pay bargaining, on which all other dimensions of social partnership are functionally dependent. In this context, the CVP is not an equal partner in a new type of ‘deliberative’ social partnership but a vehicle for social buffering embedded in a complex system of trade-­offs. Unlike other approaches, the concept of social buffering places the CVP in a rational system, rather than a deliberative one, while acknowledging its limited position as compared to other players. While this has some common ground with Hardiman’s account (2006) it stresses a hierarchy of social partnership in which the employer/union level is – compared to the CVP – on a different plane. Also, in extended political exchange the issue of parliamentary prerogative versus social partnership is far from being cut and dried, with social partners often exercising considerable influence, at the possible expense of parliament. This poses the question as to whether the CVP ever has ‘leverage’. Previously, I have sought to locate the creation of the CVP in a crisis of legitimacy and motivation within the political elite in the late 1980s, which – given the extent of unemployment and social marginalisation – the new model of social partnership was insufficient to bridge (Larragy 2006). In certain circumstances, I argued, the CVP could exert leverage due to the legitimation crisis of the political elite, but circumstances change so as to reinstate the prerogative of government and the hierarchy of social partners. Roche (2008) has also acknowledged the specific political logic behind creating the Pillar, as

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a mechanism to address a gap in legitimacy, adding a cautionary note about persistent dissatisfaction of the main opposition centre-­right party (Fine Gael) regarding the implications of this type of mechanism for democratic accountability through parliament (Roche 2008). Thus, a real tension can arise between the parliamentary and the corporatist institutions – at least in principle.

Conclusions This chapter has located the recent Irish pacts in a historical and comparative perspective that highlights elements it shares with other cases, and compares and contrasts the post-­ 1987 model with previous bipartite bargaining in Ireland. It has sought to survey the wider historical and comparative context for examining the CVP in social partnership. The survey suggests that concepts of corporatism have maintained a central relevance for understanding the evolution of the Irish model, albeit in embedding a strongly liberal economy. A number of interpretations were reviewed, some of which are unsympathetic to the institutionalisation of bargaining or to systems of network governance and exchange – from the right and left. Within the group of contributors who view the corporatist framework as valid and viable, moreover, there is some variation as to the precise logic of the Irish model – whether it is democratic, sustainable, a form of institutionalised arm-­wrestling or a system for deliberative problem-­solving by a new elite of ‘private publics’ – either in conformity with the democratically mandated government or in such ways as to countervail against the parliamentary prerogative. The chapter has identified the limitations of various approaches when it comes to the innovation of the CVP. The next chapter will therefore look at alternative ways to explore this type of entity or the organisations that make it up.

Notes 1 Le Siècle Du Corporatisme (1934). Manoilescu was an influential figure for a time in his native Romania and his ideas were taken up by South American regimes. 2 The Federated Union of Employers, founded in 1941 to unite fragmented employer groups, was renamed Federation of Irish Employers (FIE) in 1990 before merging with the Confederation of Irish Industry (CII) in 1993 to form the present-­day Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation (IBEC). 3 Ireland was an extreme instance of this shift, in part reflecting the fact that in Ireland’s accounts net factor income from abroad tends to be negative and therefore GDP exceeds GNP by a significant margin. 4 The concept of ‘Developmental Welfare State’ (NESC 2005) – though it does not link up explicitly with Teague – could, perhaps, be refined by reference to it. 5 The concept of a distributional coalition owes much of its origin to Mançur Olson (1965/71). While neo-­ classical economists view any coalition as counterproductive, neo-­corporatists suggest that a sufficiently encompassing coalition – as a polar alternative to the pursuit of free-­market competition – can lead participants to generate

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positive ­externalities (such as efficiency, growth and equity, and latterly environmental ­sustainability) – the challenge is not to be caught ‘in the middle’. 6 O’Donnell’s analysis would be significant enough for the fact that he has played a key part through the NESC in developing social partnership, but the analysis is worthy of attention in its own right.

3 Associations, movements, governance and power

Introduction Given the limits of mainstream debates rooted in paradigms derived from accounts of tripartite relations between employers, state and unions, it is clear that the question of the significance of the CVP in social partnership requires a further type of theoretical exploration. The Pillar is somewhat anomalous from the perspective of theoretical accounts of social partnership so far, even where attempts have been made to encompass it. Therefore, any addition to empirical research may require being located within a wider theoretical compass. This chapter develops the wider theoretical discussion as a complement to an empirical examination. The theoretical discussion is not a set of conclusions on the nature of the Pillar but is intended to underpin the empirical analysis of the CVP in subsequent chapters. The sections of this chapter explore these broader theoretical issues, and consider the efficacy of associations and social mobilisation in a wider context of power.

Wider theoretical compass Essentially, the necessity to connect wider theory to a deeper detailed examination of the Pillar arises because traditional discourse on neo-­corporatism and indeed industrial relations pluralism has focused specifically on organisations that are functionally connected through relations of production – principally as employer bodies and organised labour. The issue is whether the adaptation of the model to accommodate other types of association – in particular community and voluntary sector associations without any equivalent functional interdependence to that of employers and unions – leads to a qualitative change in the underlying logic of the model, or new theoretical questions. This section begins with a brief recapitulation of recent Irish interpretations. This is followed by a subsection reviewing the way ‘civil society’ and associations have been conceived in political philosophy. This overview of the ‘classics’ leads on

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to a consideration of contemporary concepts for a new architecture of associative democracy. Next, the concept of social movements and resource mobilisation is reviewed as a further source of enlightenment on the Pillar. Finally, in view of their centrality to the understanding of the significance of the CVP the issues of power and legitimacy are briefly examined.

A re-­recapitulation of existing interpretations So far, we have seen several alternative perspectives on the Irish case of social partnership, principally: ‘post-­corporatist pluralism/concertation’ (O’Donnell 2008; O’Donnell and O’Reardon 2000; O’Donnell and Thomas 1998); ‘flexible network governance’ around a core of competitive corporatism (Hardiman 2006); ‘extended political exchange’ (Roche 2007); ‘developmental corporatism’ (Teague 1995). Each of these grants social partnership and the Pillar some independent influence on political and economic policy, albeit with different emphases and approaches. A second group broadly subscribe to a neo-­liberal incorporation view, effectively denying any such influence and viewing the unions and community and voluntary associations as incorporated in the service of capital. O’Hearn (1998) emphasises foreign capital, Allen (2000) includes native and foreign capital. Kirby (2002) sees a hybrid neo-­liberal project tempered by limited social protection while Boucher and Collins (2003) refer to ‘neo-­liberal corporatism’ shaped by a combination of US investment and European integration. Meade (2005) refers to direct incorporation of the community and voluntary organisations by the state. The use of the present case study approach should shed light on each of these interpretations. In addition, it will make it possible to explore some more dynamic features by providing a closer examination of the experience of four key actor organisations in the Pillar. However, besides more detailed empirical investigation of the Pillar, a wider theoretical focus on, and a wider concept of, associations is essential to the study of the more specific field of community and voluntary associations in Irish social partnership – for two broad reasons. Firstly, in conceptual terms, these associations fall outside the ‘functional’ or ‘social’ relations of production from which trade unions and employer associations emerged historically to regulate employment contracts or achieve wage bargaining settlements. This poses questions as to what role they have in relation to other social partners in a tripartite system. Secondly, the introduction of these organisations into social partnership raises wider theoretical issues about the place of associations in ‘liberal democratic’ systems in relation to the electorate, or demos. The locus of legitimacy in liberal or capitalist democracies is unstable because it is a product of asymmetric distribution of resources and power in a system of production that

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is prone to cyclical instability and crisis. But as long as democracy operates, legitimacy matters, and that means that organisations representing sections of society, which may be lacking in material resources or organisational power, can be effective. Their effectiveness is not a given but it should not be dismissed. Small associations without any obvious economic clout are not analogous to employer associations or unions, but they may act as catalysts for change in so far as they can tap into important questions of the day, and shifts in the demos, and articulate the demands for equality and inclusion that might otherwise be subordinated to other dictates. In order to understand this potential, and its relevance to the study of the CVP organisations, it is necessary to theorise about associations in a way that goes beyond more conventional thinking that applies more to labour, farming and employer bodies than to smaller groups and associations representing marginalised social groups.

Associations, democracy and class inequality The collapse of Communism at the end of the 1980s served, among other things, to bring into greater relief questions as to the efficacy, and in particular the fairness, of what might be described as the liberal, representative-­democratic model of government in the West. Many political scientists expressed concern about declining interest in politics and participation in the democratic process, and about the increasing dominance of the ‘new right’ in politics. In the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher had spearheaded attempts to realise the ideas articulated in the work of a raft of libertarian political philosophers such as Hayek (1976) and Nozick (1974), which were propounded in the 1970s against concepts of distributive justice, particularly as expressed by Rawls (1971); see Held 2006 for an engaging treatment of these debates. A striking illustration of the critical spirit of the 1990s – aimed at redefining the challenges of democratic governance in opposition to the liberal democratic model – is Hirst’s Associative Democracy (1994). This is a fascinating, forthright and unapologetically utopian tract calling for the rebirth of co-­operative associations as an alternative to the hierarchies of market and state in the liberal democratic world, albeit while preserving the underlying fabric of representative democracy too (Hirst 1994: 16). Hirst proposed radical decentralisation of the state and the transcendence of the modern firm by self-­ governing co-­operative enterprises or associations, and set out the architecture of the new ‘associationalist’ commonwealth in some detail (1994: 187).1 Hirst’s approach sought to displace both state collectivism and the laissez-­faire market by expanding co-­operation. Hirst’s strategy contrasts with more mainstream approaches, in which the issue of democratic hollowing out is addressed by means of promoting the role of associations in moderating rather than

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displacing states and markets – sometimes by building on existing institutional arrangements including neo-­corporatist models. Streeck and Schmitter earlier (1985a) set out a very different, non-­utopian and sophisticated view of the potential role of associational logic when they highlighted the specificity of associational logic as one of the key underpinnings of actually existing social order alongside and in contradistinction to the more commonly acknowledged logics of order embodied in states, communities and markets. That contribution can be interpreted as a theoretical bridge between the debates within the specific concerns of corporatism on the one side and wider comparative politics on the other because it allows the associational order to have its own specificity. Streeck and Schmitter did not reduce social order to associations but, after acknowledging the logic of state, market and community, re-­inserted the domain of associations, reflexively, into the wider context of these domains. This bridge between corporatism and democratic social order consists in the recognition that associations may have a moderating role in markets and the state and a socialising role – as well as an instrumental role – in relation to their memberships. That is, as well as operating on the basis of members’ defined interests (sometimes derived directly from the market), associations also subsist in the wider normative context of a set of values and discourses – in the ‘public sphere’ of civil society – where they articulate various communities of interest and identities (e.g. gender, disability, ethnicity, poor localities etc.). Therefore, a wider theoretical focus on associations (than is debated in the context of corporatism alone) is relevant to study of the more specific field of community and voluntary associations in general, and in Irish social partnership in particular. Moreover, apart from its importance in the labour/capital context, the concept of associations has a long vintage in relation to any consideration of democracy and the state. Alexis de Tocqueville actually defined democracy in terms of the extent of associational life, based on his studies of New England, which struck him for its apparent contrast with his native France with its centralised ‘aristocracy’ (de Tocqueville 1970). However, de Tocqueville’s view does not map adequately onto the kind of societies we have today because associations are mostly viewed as part of a secondary domain in relation to both market and state (Cohen and Arato 1992).2 The study of associations and democracy does not end with the enabling right to form associations – which is a key civil right in most democratic ­societies – but extends to the role of associations in constituting a key dimension of civil society and the ‘public sphere’ that operates on a day-­to-­day basis (between elections) in contributing to the political life and the shape of democratic government. The exploration of the concept of ‘association’ today should include its Hegelian provenance. The concept of association is in many respects related to that of ‘corporation’, a critical ‘moment’ in Hegel’s concept of civil

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society which was a central feature of the Hegelian account of the interrelationship between the ‘commercial class’ (market existence and the rationality of the individual) on the one hand, and the state (or locus of collective rationality) on the other (Hegel 1991). It is noteworthy that Hegel’s class of reference was the ‘commercial class’ and that associations operated in a social structure of a hierarchical nature, with civil servants, commercial classes and agrarian classes in particular. Hegel’s view of the subordinate urban classes was summarised in the term ‘Pöbel’ or rabble, which he deemed to be an inevitable source of cheap labour but sadly lacking in what is required to be part of civil society, and which posed a problem of containment. Furthermore, Hegel’s account of the relationship of civil society and the state ultimately denied the autonomy of the public sphere as a domain of associations between market and state, and instead asserted the rationality of the state itself. Moreover, the critique of the Hegelian position was to have as profound an effect as its assertion for a long time. Marx, in his critique of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie distilled a new type of class created by ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ but unacknowledged by Hegel – the proletariat. This, for Marx, was a class in and of itself and the agency of a social transformation requiring the overturn of bourgeois society altogether, and the establishment of a new social order without classes (Marx 1970). Marx’s predictions aside, the establishment of the industrial working class, and the rise of trade unions and mass working-­class political parties in an increasingly enfranchised society, radically changed the way in which associations were theorised. The original concept of civil society itself gave way to paradigms of capitalism, bourgeois society, the contradictions of citizenship and social class, and the struggle over political power and resource distribution. In the West, this eventuated in parliamentary contestation of the direction of state power in relation to different class interests – by Social Democracy in ­particular – for almost a century and a half. Until the rise of neo-­corporatism after the Second World War the associations of workers operated in the economic field while political parties operated in the political sphere. Neo-­ corporatism brought about a new type of political – economic exchange and the intertwining of the state and market domains. In a further twist, after the successes of the Bolsheviks and the defeat of revolutions in Western Europe, Communists in the West sought new formulae. The imprisoned Gramsci in particular concluded that the frontal assault on the state would not materialise before the party of the working class engaged in the struggle for hegemony – for hearts and minds – in ‘civil society’. In so doing he redefined ‘civil society’ differently from how Marx had, locating it in the cultural and sociological superstructures rather than the economic base, and distinguishing associations from businesses. Instead of the ‘war of manoeuvre’ or frontal assault on the state, Gramsci argued that a ‘war of position’ or trench warfare was unavoidable in the West due to the importance of associational

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life or ‘civil society’ in legitimising the state. Consequently, the need was for a struggle for ‘hegemony’, or leadership in that domain of civil society, before the party could contemplate leading a working-­class revolution against the institutions of the state (Anderson 1976; Gramsci 1971). The Gramscian approach was to lie moribund and it was only in the context of the ending of the post-­war boom that the issue of a struggle for hegemony in civil society re-­emerged. However, by the 1970s, when Gramsci was rediscovered, the issue of ‘hegemony’ had begun to become detached from working-­class revolution against the state – and became an end in itself. Or rather, as the prospect receded of the working class forming the pole for such an assault, challenging the hegemony of the dominant class in state and society replaced challenging the political apparatus of the state itself and the foundations of capitalist society. In this context, neo-­corporatism can be viewed as one of the mechanisms of hegemonic engagement – through which the balance of class power was evened up in the post-­war decades. Another mechanism was the post-­war welfare state. While the capacity of the working class for mobilisation has frequently been prematurely written off, the tide turned significantly in the West in recent decades. As Crouch (2004) put it, the ‘parabola’ described by the industrial working class has returned to the horizontal axis from which it set out. In other words, the numerical growth and organisational strength of the industrial working class has given way to numerical decline, as new classes in service employment increase. As a consequence, advanced societies have reached a stage of what he calls ‘post-­democracy’. While, he notes, ‘forms of democracy remain fully in place – and today in some respects are actually strengthened – politics and the government are increasingly slipping back into the control of privileged elites in the manner characteristic of pre-­democratic times’ and ‘one major consequence of this process is the growing impotence of egalitarian causes’ (Crouch 2004: 6). Concepts of social citizenship, which were brought to the forefront at the height of industrial capitalism, have been eroded under post-­industrial capitalism and, he argues, ‘almost everywhere the content of the citizenship package has come under attack’ (Crouch 2004: 83). This new context has also begun to undermine the effectiveness of traditional corporatist and other trade union strategies. German unions are, he suggests, in danger of being too effective on behalf of male workers in manufacturing industry, but at the cost of not adequately representing female and atypical workers in other sectors (Crouch 2004: 114–5). Nevertheless, and this is a critical point for Crouch, the mobilisation of new identities is real and inevitable. He sees the possibility of constructively mobilising these around egalitarian agendas, although he also warns that there are dangers in what could become the mindless expression of glee every time ‘the political class has its feathers badly ruffled’ (2004: 117). In other

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words, far from all of the associations making up civil society are progressive (as several authoritarian and reactionary movements have also emerged) and Crouch’s position is implicitly for the renewal of democratic social movements and associational life. He taps into progressive wellsprings of opposition to the many negative aspects of contemporary capitalism – new social movements, new communities of interest and associations in their diversity. One of the questions this poses is how to link such groups with the operation of the system of representative government in ways that revitalise the latter and renew social citizenship by bringing the critical ideas to the top of the agenda.

Beyond neo-­corporatism: demos and groups Crouch’s panorama may be viewed in the Irish case as part of a wider intellectual context for examining the ‘new’ social groups and identities ­ which have become actively engaged in political processes and policy change. What significance has the modification of Irish social partnership for the new organisations, those they represent, the institutions of social partnership and the wider political process? How have theorists on democracy and associations more generally sought to understand new types of associational influence in the ‘post-­democratic’ era? For many critical commentators in the 1990s, the principal concern was the decline of associations and the dominance of market logic over both society and the state. The link between laissez-­faire and the growth of inequality in the USA in particular led to a new critique of the system of liberal democracy as failing to address social inequality due to the veritable capture of government by plutocratic elites. In other words, the industrial working class ceased to define the content of democratic citizenship – particularly its social content – and the status of the working class as a bargaining association is in question with the renascence of laissez-­faire civil society. Against that backdrop, questions have been raised regarding the relationship between the wishes of the demos, as expressed at the polls, and the content of policy as decided by government administrations. Cohen and Rogers (1995b) identified the issue of inequality of interest representation in contemporary pluralist models of government, and sought to explore the possibilities of re-­balancing this. They concluded that ‘the problem is not to design an appropriate form for already existing groups, regulate their interaction and curb their power and influence wherever it is deemed inappropriate, but to go one step beyond and design the structural conditions for the formation of groups – as opposed to individual action and to other forms of interest aggregation’ (Cohen and Rogers 1995b: 130 – original emphasis). They proceeded to outline steps whereby the electoral system might be more accurately viewed not as the ‘empirical will of the many isolated individuals’ but an expression of

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a popular mandate or legitimacy for ‘a refined, deliberated and “laundered” set of preferences which are brought about through institutional arrangements’ (Cohen and Rogers 1995b: 130). They added that this admittedly controversial idea involves two further assumptions: firstly, that the people are sufficiently alert to the fact that election outcomes are open to political manipulation (­leading to an ‘unwilled will’); and secondly, that the people trust that institutions designed to refine and deliberate through the inclusion of associations, are not manipulative but designed to ‘enlighten and make more reasonable, the will of the people’ (Cohen and Rogers 1995b: 131) Exploring this further, Mansbridge (1995) noted how the political left in the USA long remained suspicious of corporatism due to its pre-­war fascist overtones. Yet the problem of political inequality in a pluralist system, as posed by Cohen and Rogers (1995b), remains. Mansbridge (1995) explored the potential of neo-­corporatism in addressing this problem. But she added that the real challenge today is to widen the scope of interest representation beyond ‘traditional economic and sectoral interests’ and she suggested that ‘European corporatism is still heavily tied to an era when only two great interests, capital and labour, dominated the interest agenda’ (Mansbridge 1995: 137). In order to expand the mechanisms to less concentrated and less easily organised interests, she argued that there was a need for ‘new institutions and theories’. The neo-­corporatist model, she added, was one pathway to such a potential model. In the USA, however, the elements of a new model would not duplicate the European example but operate on a more ‘tentative, experimental and incremental’ deployment of associational logic in the laissez-­faire system of pluralist interest representation. More generally, Mansbridge referred to debate emerging from neo-­ corporatism itself concerning the issue of whether the preferences and even the identities of corporate interest groups are determined directly and solely by their membership or are subject to definition and redefinition arising from interaction and deliberative exchange with other corporate actors and the state (1995: 142). However, Mansbridge, following Cohen and Rogers (1995b) and referring to Streeck and Schmitter (1985b), examined the question with a view to the formation of new associations to bring in groups that are usually marginal to the neo-­corporate process. This brief scoping of the range of theorisations of associations shows the importance of associations and associational logic before and since the eras of class war and neo-­corporatist bargaining. Associational logic has been at the heart of the work of key political philosophers and classical social theorists from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and provides an important source of inspiration for considering contemporary challenges of democratic governance and participation. Widening the lens in this way may enable a better grasp of the full range of associations involved in governance systems as

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exhibited in Irish social partnership. Instead of merely viewing these organisations as residual or ill-­fitting, we can view them as inevitable and central, and meriting closer scrutiny.

Social movements and social mobilisation theory Another perspective on the CVP can be derived from theories of social movements, particularly new social movements. Whereas the concept of associations has a ‘generic’ quality, new social movements are often viewed as responses to the complexities of post-­industrial societies, ‘post-­modernisation’, globalisation and new risks, as expressed in the politics of environmentalism, and of difference and identity around gender, disability, ethnicity, youth or old age, sexual orientation etc. (Della Porta and Diani 1999; Diani 1992; Melucci 1980; Touraine 1981). Whereas earlier social movements, such as labour or suffrage movements, can be viewed as part of broad narratives on modernisation, new social ­movements lack this coherence. Indeed, the fragmentation of new social movements is itself regarded as a facet of post-­modernity while traditional social movements are often regarded as being trapped in seemingly passé grand-­historical narratives of liberalism, nationalism, imperialism, socialism etc. Not surprisingly, the diversity of new social movements can lead to loss of coherence, and has led to attempts to forge a new politics of equality and diversity that is both substantively comprehensive and theoretically integrated (e.g. Baker et al. 2004). The issues addressed by the diverse organisations that eventually made up the CVP – poverty, unemployment, gender equality, community empowerment, youth, disability and children’s rights – have been the focus of some type of social movement internationally as much as in Ireland. Social movement theory may also provide a possible way of linking the new participants in social partnership to at least one of the more conventional social partners (the trade unions) which have roots in social movements too. Obviously, the history of any one of the strands represented in the CVP could be explored and theorised in relation to new social movements. In this context, Connolly (2006) edited a collection of papers on new social movements in Ireland. In this collection she and colleagues sought to apply social mobilisation theory to the women’s movement, gay rights movement, the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, the Irish language rights movement, environmentalist movements and anti-­racism. However, it is interesting that there is no contribution in the volume applying a social mobilisation perspective to the CVP. These studies hardly touch on the subject of social partnership, even critically, possibly implying that social partnership was off the radar as far as real social movements are concerned.

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While some accounts of social partnership (e.g. Carney et al. 2012; Murphy 2002) have made the case for linking action within social partnership institutions to action outside, critics of social partnership, from the left, have expressed the view that participation in these institutions is an alternative to and a diversion from social mobilisation (Meade 2005). Social movement theory, in fact, is a broad church with some contrasting paradigms. Resource mobilisation theory, for example, is a long way from earlier American functionalist or psychological concepts of ‘strain’ and ‘breakdown’ underpinning early theories of social movements (e.g. Kornhauser 1959; Smelser 1963). These ‘traditional’ theories viewed social movements as the temporary igniting of mass emotions or psychological responses to episodic strains in the social system, which often evaporated in ‘normalised’ conditions. These early theories gave way to more innovative theories in the 1970s which more readily acknowledged the conscious dimension in social movements, as distinct from the quasi-­irrational and ‘psychological’ dimensions in the social strain models. Beginning with a focus on the centrality of purposeful change through raising awareness and the ongoing marshalling of conscious collective action and organisation for change, new social movement theory also branched into forms of engagement with the state and institutions, expressed eventually in ‘resource mobilisation theory’ (Jenkins 1983; McCarthy and Zald 1977). Against social strain theorists, McCarthy and Zald emphasised conscious organisation as a feature of social movements, and allowed for the mobilisation of resources via the media, authorities and other parties, and ‘the interaction among social movement organizations’ (McCarthy and Zald 1977: 1212). Jenkins (1983) allowed for the development from the politics of discontent to more strategic types of engagement, including the possibility of making gains via institutions such as neo-­corporatism. That said, the new social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, for example around civil rights or the anti-­war movement in the USA, while clearly involving resource mobilisation and organisation, were also widely underpinned by transformations in political attitudes and active disillusionment with the political establishment, often resulting in large-­scale protest action and even violence. So, even allowing for the importance of resource mobilisation in the success of actual social movements, they have usually been accompanied by some significant degree of participative mobilisation or threat thereof. In the Irish context, Connolly et al. (2006) took a broad view of social mobilisation theory, and examined the various approaches in the literature, so it is not due to narrowness in how social mobilisation theory is defined by Connolly that the CVP actors fell outside this collection, and the potential still exists to apply this approach to actors in the CVP. Still, these approaches, in

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particular resource mobilisation theory (RMT), have not been much deployed in Ireland. It is at this end of the spectrum of new social movement theory, perhaps, that the CVP might be most readily explored. New social movement and RMT could potentially shed light on at least some of the diverse strands the Pillar comprises – in particular, movements of the unemployed, anti-­poverty movements or more specifically social welfare movements and local community groups – more obviously in the period prior to when these constituencies engaged with social partnership through the CVP. Of course, the fact that the CVP has operated mainly as an institutional mechanism for these elements within social partnership might lead to the view that the only relevance it has for new social movement theory is that it limits and channels the potential of genuine social movements, and ultimately incorporates them, as Meade (2005) noted. In effect social partnership may be a trap for activists who should be devoting their energies to more oppositional tactics. In this perspective, new social movement theory is an alternative paradigm for activists in opposition to social partnership rather than the basis of an account of the CVP within it. At any rate, a case might be made for the relevance of RMT, as developed by McCarthy and Zald in the 1970s and Jenkins (1983), as a distinct facet of social movement theory, because of the emphasis it places on policy entrepreneurship and the role of organisation and institutional engagement. Policy entrepreneurship and organisation were, as will be seen, key dimensions of the CVP; the Pillar was clearly reliant on a capacity for resource mobilisation, and shares this reliance with social movements. However, we need to ask what was missing from the CVP and also what scope existed in the limiting context of social partnership with its narrowly defined channels of negotiation and lobbying and limited toleration of protest or the threat of it. This is ultimately an empirical question and we will be better able to address it after examining the series of organisations involved in the CVP and social partnership. To some extent the diversity of new social movements is expressed in the elements of the CVP. However, the focus of the action within social partnership and the Pillar is more closely mapped by a socio-­economic agenda around poverty, local community marginalisation and a selective focus on certain dimensions of inequality, especially gender, disability and Traveller status. The elements in the CVP comprised high-­profile champions against poverty (CORI Justice) and unemployment (INOU) and proponents of the empowerment of marginalised local communities (CWC), women in working class communities (NWCI) etc. Some of the Pillar elements are effectively ‘social welfare ­movements’ – a distinct phenomenon with a more explicit connection to the evolution of the welfare state (Annetts et al. 2009). Therefore, new social movements and resource mobilisation should be kept in mind in sifting the empirical evidence and will be returned to in the conclusions to this study.

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Locus of power and legitimacy: parliament, partners or people? The broader review of associations, democracy and social movements provides a useful starting point for the empirical exploration of the CVP in this study. In one way or another, however, this review points to the need to examine the concept of power. Does power come from the democratic wishes of the people expressed through the ballot box? Or does its logic flow from dominance by deeply embedded plutocratic interests and major asymmetries of resources and control in the market, and correspondingly in the state? Does associative life and civil society in non-­market spheres and in the polity simply reflect the inequality of power in the market? Or can social movements shift the balance of power permanently? Some understanding of the concept of power is essential before we can explore its significance in the context of institutional mechanisms such as social partnership and the CVP. The view that power in liberal democracies operates as the simple expression of the general electoral will is widely contested. Dahl (1962) suggested that rather than expressing the ‘general will’, or indeed the power of elite over society, the state should be seen as a type of mediator between contesting interest groups in society, i.e. pluralism. Power, therefore, is located throughout society and expressed via groups that vie with each other to get the ear of political decision-­makers. Bachrach and Baratz (1962) challenged this, observing that the decision-­making process is not simply a site of flux amid permanent contestation of power by different interests, but that there is some stability and a discernible pattern in policy decisions. And they posited that such patterning comes from the concentration of agenda-­setting functions in a few hands – power-­brokers and administrations – around which a ‘mobilisation of bias’ underpins a pattern of agenda-­setting and decision-­making and more often ‘non-­decision-­making’. This in turn led Bachrach and Baratz to suggest that we can really only identify where power lies by reference to who benefits from the decisions that are made. Ultimately, the hidden but researchable phenomenon of bias is a crucial part of how policy-­making power operates to conserve the status quo. Unless subaltern groups can access the agenda-­setting arenas, which are upstream from where visible tussles take place, they will be unsuccessful in affecting policy outcomes. Conceivably, social partnership is therefore an arena that allows weaker players to gain access to the ‘inner sanctum’ where agenda-­setting takes place. The bargaining over each new agreement is a semi-­public process but is downstream from the agenda-­setting process, located in the government. But there are layers within the institutionalisation of social partnership. The NESC, for example, would typically spend six months on a strategic process before any ‘talks’ began. To arrive in the process only when the bargaining phase starts would leave any group at a distinct disadvantage. The case study analysis will provide a more concrete sense of this.

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Lukes (2005), however, suggested that in addition to the two concepts of power identified by Dahl (1962) and Bachrach and Baratz (1962) there is a much less observable ‘third face of power’, namely power that is often not even perceived as such because the rules by means of which some groups are subordinated to others are internalised and unquestioned by the subordinated groups themselves. The third face of power, as noted by Cerny (1990), is related to the concept of legitimacy. Authority is regarded as legitimate and appears to prevail by discourse alone because ‘the people’ or ‘the public’ believe in its fairness and transparency. The third face of power is similar to the Gramscian concept of hegemony, or the rule of a dominant group ‘by consent’. However, a crisis of legitimacy can emerge when enough of the public question or challenge the discursive basis for a given authority or policies. In this view, even participating in processes of negotiation and particularly deliberation upstream leave subordinate groups vulnerable if they buy into the discourse in terms of which agendas are set. The very language through which these groups communicate with dominant groups is distorted and, while appearing as common sense knowledge, is deeply ideological. Certain concepts are prioritised and can become sacrosanct and presented as though they were rooted in science – the national interest, the economy, etc. Other concepts – welfare, equality etc. – are subordinated and regarded as subject to any number of definitions. Thus, despite diversity of views between social groups, associations or movements at a superficial level and on matters of particular fact or norms, a deep grammar may continue to shape underlying discourse at the level of basic ideas about the inevitability of property, the market and class, commercial and public spheres of interest. Only in a period of crisis – from which a crisis of legitimacy can arise (Habermas 1976) – do these axioms come under strain. These ideas about power and legitimacy may help to frame the different standpoints of commentators from the right or left, or indeed the centre, in relation to social partnership, and more particularly the potential and limitations on involvement in social partnership by community and voluntary groups. However, in the context of an empirical study, it would be erroneous to adopt one of these perspectives to the exclusion of others. Case studies have a habit of not fitting into preconceived theories, and this is probably a key part of their value. Furthermore, none of these theories of power and legitimacy is entirely satisfactory or complete in itself. Each presents a facet or perspective on power and legitimacy, but in reality power and legitimacy are difficult to define, although usually palpable. As Schmitter noted of legitimacy, ‘I may not be able to define (or measure) it, but I know it when it is not there’ (2001: 1). Possession of power and legitimacy is more often taken for granted than explicitly recognised. However, when, as often happens in discussions of the CVP, small organisations, movements or associations are dismissed as lacking

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power, this is too static, where the reality is more contingent. Loss of legitimacy can happen quite quickly, and take various forms. Situations can turn around and make seemingly powerful actors vulnerable while enabling smaller actors to gain ground rapidly. The more dynamic features of social partnership and systems of governance generally can only readily be captured in concrete case analysis; hence the importance of the present account. David Held (2006) set out a number of modalities of power and legitimacy that can be useful in studies of the play of institutions of governance, such as representative structures, executive power, bargaining institutions, social movements, etc. He noted, for example, that the maintenance of control by democratic governments in society is not predicated entirely on achieving consent, at least not for all the public. Generally, it is the middle and upper echelons who usually assent to government on the basis of normative agreement, i.e. they more readily afford it legitimacy. For the rest of society Held (2006) suggested that much of the time the maintenance of governmental authority depends not only on consent but on several additional modalities. These can range across bargaining – with the state and other groups – pragmatic acquiescence to rule, apathy (possibly due to a sense of powerlessness), the weight of tradition, and finally, overt use of power or coercion. To some extent a mix of these modalities may be operating simultaneously in actual societies. In effect, therefore, a crisis of legitimacy deepens to the extent that the assenting (middle and upper) classes lose faith in the authority of the administration or when other modalities are increasingly over-­extended and break down. Somewhere in all of this, the locus of legitimacy may be found, but it does shift. I draw on Held’s (2006) insights to view social partnership, alongside the mechanisms of the state, as a complex of modalities of governance, including representative democratic channels, traditions, coercive apparatuses, structures for redistribution of resources, institutions for bargaining, deliberation and dissenting etc. The point is that situations can be fluid, in relation to the impact of economic fluctuations, political shifts, social crises etc. The present study of the CVP tries to be cognisant of these factors – growth and inequality, the dynamic effects of crisis and recovery on governments, the role of the demos, the mediating effect of governance institutions, the credibility of the political establishment and the level of popular support for its decisions. A key idea is that while power asymmetries, differential market positioning and resource inequalities entail a hierarchy, as between associations, possibilities can arise for weaker groups to gain from intervention in institutions that provide for forms of social partnership. Moreover, the creation of Ireland’s model of social partnership in 1987, and, more important from the perspective of the present study, the extension of membership to the community and voluntary sector, might not have happened except for the crisis of legitimacy that beset the political elite in the 1980s. Or, to put it an extreme way, the crisis

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might have been resolved by adopting a non-­consensual approach or a simplistic form of majority government resorting to modalities of coercion. There was, in the 1980s, a crisis of political motivation and deep confusion of the demos and, consequently, a gap in legitimacy opened up. Social partnership became a vehicle for effecting economic recovery together with austerity measures in the short term. It also served a clear political purpose in seeking to marshal the support of key collectivities (or private publics) behind government policies in the face of threatened electoral rejection. The present study seeks to explore Irish social partnership from the perspective of this crisis and, cognisant of these power asymmetries, does so by looking through the lens of the new actors who emerged and began to engage with social partnership from the outside, and who were eventually admitted to the social partnership process, in 1996. Interpretations of the CVP regard it variously as ‘deliberator’, moral voice, or as complementary to the labour side with a focus on the social wage in a broadened bargain or ‘extended exchange’. These accounts stress, respectively, the visible levels of bargaining and/or deliberation, problem-­solving and committee work. Others see the Pillar as a prisoner of social partnership, ultimately providing cover for a neo-­liberal project, and doomed to failure. They stress the asymmetry of power and posit the incorporation of the weaker parties. The present thesis, however, tries to describe the various dynamics at work in relation to the Pillar. So, for example, at times when stronger players, such as government or the political elite, are incapable of addressing a major question, such as unemployment, the potential impact of those articulating the concerns of vulnerable and affected interests is increased. The creation of partnership arrangements for deliberation or bargaining in the first instance points to the political vulnerability of the elected government. The extension of social partnership to the community and voluntary sector is possibly indicative of several dimensions of a crisis of government – rationality, motivation and legitimacy – as these groups do not have any functional role in the economy that equates with the traditional social partners but mainly seek to represent sections and categories in society who are typically marginalised from neo-­corporatist processes. Once in social partnership, and when the triggering crisis eases off, the focus shifts to the play of different forces and interests, and the challenge shifts to the new actors to make or take such opportunities as might arise in the growing economy, and select goals around which to muster. In such changed circumstances, without a major issue on which the political elite are vulnerable, smaller players are at risk and need to be astute and focused.

Conclusions This chapter sought to go outside the conventional debates on social partnership to examine the specific analytical challenges posed by the creation of

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the CVP, and to provide a wider review of associations, social movements and democracy. This review was situated in a critical consideration of ‘post-­ industrial’ capitalist democracy, or even ‘post-­democratic’ society, where the efficacy of the policy choices made by elected governments can be questioned to the extent that, between the election by the demos of a political administration and the determination of that administration’s political programme, there is a threat of plutocratic capture by powerful vested interests. Two remedies to this problem have been articulated: either attempting to suppress the ‘mischief of faction’ coming from powerful non-­parliamentary elite associations or to constructively embrace associations of the marginalised, placing them alongside the existing power networks as insiders, as a part of the architecture of state-­led associative governance. Associative democracy in this form entails moderating governmental action and powerful interest groups by sifting and filtering the conflicting messages of the demos and moderating the trade-­offs between different social groups. Associative democratic forms can in principle operate in neo-­corporatist or other types of architecture. From this perspective, the emergence of the CVP can be construed as a form of interest group formation from above, with the state facilitating the emergence of associations of and for oppressed or ‘disenfranchised’ groups and interests. What is interesting about this is that, although it has been put forward as a theoretical possibility in debates on associative democracy in the literature, it emerged in fact in Ireland without any prior theorisation. While the emergence of the CVP can be viewed in terms of formation of associational representation from above, it can also be viewed from the perspective of social mobilisation from below. The chapter has also examined this perspective and pointed out the extent to which this approach might be relevant. While social movements have gained increasing attention and been identified as central to social change, it was also acknowledged that the concept of social mobilisation covers a range of possibilities from more spontaneous anti-­establishment protest to more deliberate patterns of tactical engagement, and the CVP might be placed on the institutionalised end of this continuum, at a stretch. Finally, this chapter looked at the concepts of power and legitimacy. While the CVP might be considered as lacking leverage, as compared to the state or the other social partners, who have real bargaining power, this could be too static a view. Small associations with even limited roots in social movements can, in the context of the dynamics of economic and political change, make a difference. The creation of a place for such small associations within the architecture of social partnership is an experiment that is worthy of exploration.

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Notes 1 Hirst’s vision harked back to the notion of a co-­operative commonwealth but looked forward to a commonwealth based on elective participation by citizens in associations to deal with practically every description of economic and social contingency imaginable, and he envisaged the state taking the role of facilitator rather than provider. Associations could, he believed, subvert the negative side of markets and states and create a new basis for liberty, equality and fraternity. 2 Ironically de Tocqueville is not referenced as an influence by Hirst (1994), though the latter could be viewed as a neo-­Tocquevillean.

4 A case study: rationale, scope and key concepts R

Introduction In this book, the CVP as a whole is the focus of a case study. This chapter sets out the reasons for undertaking a case study of the CVP, the key decisions regarding what the study should cover and the central concepts used to open up the underlying logic and significance of the Pillar to scrutiny. The theoretical justification for the research flows from the many gaps in our current understanding, as evident from the previous chapters. These gaps are theoretical, conceptual and empirical and all three facets need to be addressed. The study of the CVP provides a focus for examining one of the most innovative elements in the Irish social pacts that emerged from 1987. Therefore, the Pillar, rather than the social partnership model as a whole, is the focus of this book. It is this element that differentiates the Irish case from the wider international experience of new social pacts over the recent period, and which has provided the stimulus for much recent theoretical debate about the nature of the ‘Irish model’ as an experiment in participative governance. At the same time, the approach is to view the CVP neither simply as a singularity nor as a passive structure through which the demands of several diverse small organisations are aggregated and filtered. Rather it is viewed as a very uneven entity in which organisations become dynamically interrelated with each other in a process of engagement with the state, through mechanisms developed originally along more conventional tripartite lines. Thus, to capture what is important in the context of the Pillar, a strategic approach to the research was necessary and, in addition to providing an overview of the CVP, there is a purposive focus on four key players in the Pillar, around which much of the interesting action, and much of the Pillar’s significance, revolves. Important conceptual gaps were identified in the previous chapters in the logic of our existing understanding of the Irish model. The concepts developed and used in this study go beyond those which have typified debates about social partnership so far. In particular, existing discussion of the CVP has

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focused on certain modalities such as exchange, deliberation, networking or i­ncorporation  – and contributors have sought to shoehorn the CVP into a paradigm where one of these modalities predominates. This study is different in seeking to capture what is sui generis in respect of the Pillar. New conceptual tools are needed to capture the distinctive character of the Pillar and the different modalities in effect. Some key concepts related to this challenge are set out in the final section of this chapter.

Rationale and approach to this case study Why undertake a case study of the CVP? In brief, existing claims as to its significance are not yet based on satisfactory theoretical, conceptual and empirical ground. The empirical argument is the most obvious: while several interpretations of the Pillar’s significance have been offered, which draw creatively on conventional paradigms and recent debates, the corpus of published empirical work as a whole, confined as it is to Larragy (2006), Hastings et al. (2007), Carney et al. (2012) and Gaynor (2010), provides as yet only limited detailed analysis of the Pillar itself. While these studies provide insights into aspects of the Pillar, it is necessary to go much further in order to provide a basis for engagement with wider theoretical debates. The main focus of existing studies has been social partnership as a whole, its effects on industrial relations, wage bargaining, the economy and politics (Fitz Gerald 2000; Hardiman 1998; 2000; 2006; Roche 1998; 2007; 2008). Various characterisations of the Pillar have been generated to fit it in with established paradigms in the political economy and industrial relations literature. Thus, the role of the Pillar tends to be set out in terms that are compatible with a prior view of social partnership – whether by supplementing social partners in a mechanism of extended political exchange (Hastings et al. 2007; Roche 2007; 2008), or via more diffuse governance networks with civil society (Hardiman 2006). Some of the more innovative claims are in stark contrast to each other. On the one hand, O’Donnell et al. (various years) argued that that the Pillar betokened a new modality – ‘deliberation’ – within social partnership, setting the model on a higher plane than bargaining and exchange, thereby deepening democracy, while Allen (2000) viewed the Pillar as an epiphenomenon ­destined – ultimately along with the trade unions – to be assimilated or seen off the field by stronger forces through social partnership, while O’Cinnéide (1998/9) argued that the CVP members act as self-­appointed spokespersons reliant on moral suasion. Without detailed empirical knowledge, these perspectives remain speculative. There is thus an obvious empirical lacuna in relation to the Pillar itself and a lack of connection, a gap, between existing empirical studies on the one hand and theoretical debates on social partnership on the other. Without addressing

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the empirical deficits and also the lack of connection with mainstream debates on politics, economy and social partnership, commentators will continue to arrive at opposite conclusions as to the significance of the Pillar. A focus on the CVP serves to highlight what is specifically innovative in the model as a whole. Thus, while the study is empirically grounded, the approach is not purely empirical. While it is hoped that this book will help to generate new theory, as advocated by Glaser and Strauss (1967), it aims to do so within the context of an existing stream of theoretical conceptions and preconceptions (Thomas and James 2006). In this way, there is an engagement with existing debates and an acknowledgement of what has gone before. The methodological arguments for a case study of the Pillar are compelling. Case studies are particularly suited to exploratory analysis of seemingly unique and unknown terrain, which applies to the Pillar. In the absence of other detailed studies on the phenomenon of the Pillar, there is a genuine need for an exploratory approach. Specifically, a case study of the Pillar will allow for the discovery of factors that might contribute to conceptual clarification, engagement with, and development of existing theory about negotiated governance more generally. A close-­up case study of the CVP also provides a basis for exploring and developing better explanations of its origins, logic and significance because, as Yin (2003: 1) notes, ‘case studies are the preferred strategy when “how” or “why” questions are being posed, when the investigator has little control over events, when the focus is on contemporary phenomena within some real-­life context’. A case study is therefore justified since the CVP is not a usual feature in tripartite systems, and because it has been seen as indicative of a new type of governance paradigm, for which no obvious template was in existence before it emerged. Closer scrutiny of the dynamics of the Pillar in action will shed light on more speculative theoretical perspectives. Because case studies are seen as particularly suitable for the study of ‘complex social phenomena’ at the level of an ‘individual, organisation, industry, or government’ (Yin 2003: 2) it is almost inevitable that every case study is different and posed with specific challenges. It is the complexity of the Pillar that has been glossed over or has defied detailed efforts at empirical analysis, and yet this is the crucial issue. For example, there is a tendency to treat the CVP as a singularity, without examining the individual associations which shaped it. Thus it is possible to put a particular gloss on the Pillar – for example by looking only at one or possibly two prominent components, such as CORI Justice or the INOU or individuals (Hastings et al. 2007) – without a clear selection rationale. A more deliberate approach to the whole of the Pillar and to the careful selection of key elements within it is required to grasp the complexity of the CVP as a whole, and its dynamics, amid the interplay of wider political and economic events.

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51

While the CVP is not a singularity, neither is it merely a peak organisation with a mandate for representing numerous small but equal member organisations. In this regard the Pillar differs from the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), the ICTU or the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA). Some component groups within the Pillar have been of more strategic importance than others. A few have led the way in certain policy areas, and there have been significant disagreements between a few strategic players in the Pillar over time. The philosophical tenets and values of key member associations in the Pillar can diverge, and very different conceptions of the social partnership process as a whole are evident in their respective thinking. The fate of member organisations too has diverged over time. Thus, a key challenge in this study has been to establish the distinctive chemistry and the dynamics of the Pillar. This is addressed by developing several distinct narratives based on key organisations in the CVP. In this way, the case study also provides scope to discover the different factors at play, both within the Pillar and in the wider context of social partnership, economic and political life. The CVP, in bringing together different actors in a dynamic societal context, points to a more central type of challenge related to different conceptions of social science. This is not the place to rehearse debates on the nature of social science itself, and the alternative positions of positivism, Verstehen, etc. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the dilemmas of investigating a social world that will inevitably be constructed differently by different actors. In the book this matter is approached in a pragmatic way. There is a strong focus on the narratives of social partnership provided by several key organisational players, through a number of voices. These narratives, however, are situated against an account of the economic, social and political context, which is studied independently, and an engagement with existing theoretical perspectives. It is inevitable that an author’s personal interpretation also plays a part in social research of the kind presented here. In relation to the broader questions of social science methodology, therefore, I neither eschew existing theory in favour of empirical observation nor proceed from theory, in purely deductive terms, with hypothesis testing. Rather I try to formulate judgements based on a blend of different types of evidence, perspectives and argument. In relation to personal experience and possible bias, what is important is to acknowledge this and be as explicit as possible about it (Burawoy 1998; Gouldner 2004: 383r). That is, the approach to this study is reflexive – influenced by my personal experience and prior engagement with the subject. For example, I was a social policy analyst at the National Economic and Social Council, during a number of key years in the mid to late 1990s, where I gained much insight into the context and process of social partnership and some acquaintance with key actors. I hope to blend my own subjectivity into a theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded and insightful account.

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Asymmetric engagement

Scope of the study Formal discussion of case study methodology breaks down into whether a study is a single-­case or a multiple-­case design on the one hand, and whether the study treats the unit of analysis holistically or as an embedded unit of the case on the other. Yin (2003: 39-­55) outlines four broad types of study design based on this approach comprising: a) single-­case holistic design; b) single-­ case embedded design; c) multiple-­case holistic design; and d) multiple-­case embedded design. Table 4.1  Typology of case studies Holistic (single unit of analysis) Embedded (multiple units of analysis)

Single-­case designs

Multiple-­case designs

a) single-­case holistic design (one case in its context) b) single-­case embedded design (several units in a shared case context)

c) multiple-­case holistic design (several cases each in its own context) d) multiple-­case embedded design (several contexts each with multiple units)

In these terms, the present study is closest to type (b) single-­case embedded design, because the focus is on the CVP as a whole (the case) but it is necessary to examine some key member organisations within it (the units of analysis) to convey its logic. While the Pillar has comprised numerous constituent organisations, the approach in the study was to select associations identified as pivotal to the understanding of the Pillar as a whole, rather than to cover all the organisations in the CVP or indeed a ‘random sample’ of all member organisations. Each of the selected component organisations has its own distinct origins and philosophy and, as will emerge, each has a unique narrative; their importance is not confined to providing illustrative examples but is due to their pivotal role in the emergence and evolution of the Pillar, and its significance in social partnership. Because the CVP has comprised numerous organisations whose composition has changed over time, it was obvious from an early stage that the challenge was to provide a meaningful account of the Pillar over an extended timeframe. Flowing from this approach, it was evident that not every affiliate of the Pillar needed to be described in equal detail, and a decision was taken to focus principally on member organisations that contributed significantly to the origins, dynamics and evolution of the Pillar in social partnership, and in the wider political context, over time. It was evident from an early stage that some organisations were more important players than others, and constituted part of the ‘engine-­room’ of the CVP. Four groups in particular became the focus of the research. The Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) was a driving force from the late 1980s which was clearly in the forefront. The INOU came to

Rationale, scope and key concepts

53

prominence quite early on, both as a campaigning body and as a source of analysis of broad questions such as unemployment policy. By the early 1990s, the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI Justice) had been lobbying on the basis of its social policy analysis for the best part of a decade and had gained a national profile for its critiques of poverty. CORI Justice’s prominence also increased markedly over the course of its years in social partnership. Another reason for focusing on CORI is its Catholic provenance and the added significance that this gives to the CVP in a time of great societal change. A third association that appeared to be interesting from early on was the Community Workers’ Co-­operative (CWC) because it provided a type of intellectual focus and analysis for other groups, organisations and activists and was involved with a range of equality and community-­based causes. Also, because of its early grasp of the potential of European Structural Funds, the Co-­op played a very influential role in the emergence of local area-­based development policy and local partnerships in Ireland, which was in its turn interlaced with national tripartite social partnership, and which gave the Irish model a distinctively hybrid character. The Co-­op was also a leading force in creating the ‘Community Platform’ which was for a time the nucleus of the CVP. The fourth organisation included, in view of the dynamics in the economy and the massive rise in female labour force participation over the 1990s, was the National Women’s Council of Ireland. Although it was often overshadowed by the other three, particularly in the early stages when the focus was on unemployment, the NWCI had, by the early 1990s, become more closely concerned with poverty and local community level issues as they impacted on women. Then, with rapidly growing labour force participation by married women in the burgeoning economy of the late 1990s, the NWCI had a more central role. These organisations leaped to the fore – even in the germ-­phase of this study – on the basis of what seemed most interesting about the Pillar, from a broad policy and theoretical perspective. The initial selection was probably facilitated by prior familiarity with actors in the Pillar due to having worked within the NESC in the 1990s. While other organisations represented areas of substantive policy (such as the National Youth Council) or were larger and better known in the community (such as the Society of St Vincent de Paul – SVP) they did not have the same core focus on policy change as the INOU, CORI Justice, CWC and the NWCI. These four bodies kept coming to the surface in the context of any discussion of the CVP, and ultimately became the focus of more detailed study. The organisations selected are also quite prolific and each one of them has published a good deal about social partnership and the more important substantive social questions it has addressed. These were the associations most actively engaged with the political process as a whole, taking a stance on

54

Asymmetric engagement

crosscutting policy questions and not merely in specialist areas of policy. In relation to the theoretical context reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3, each of the organisations included in the case study was judged to add value to the study by revealing separate and specific facets of the Pillar, different dynamics in operation within the Pillar and between the Pillar and the wider context of social partnership. Between the four selected associations studied in detail, it was felt that the main plot lines of the story of the Pillar were covered and there were – apart from obvious areas of more specialised policy – no major gaps in terms of the important issues of the day. Each of the selected organisations could shed light on an aspect of the theoretical perspectives set out in earlier chapters in the sense that these organisations really wanted to be involved in partnership with the state and with other actors – and had pushed hard to get access and to be involved. Each was capable of utilising opportunities to make ground on key social objectives, when opportunities arose. At times too, each was vulnerable to exclusion or other sanctions. At key moments in the life of the Pillar, these were the organisations that made a difference. In relation to the timeframe, it was necessary to limit the period covered by the study but difficult to fix an exact cut-­off point for all organisations. Broadly speaking, this study concentrates on the actors that originally led the creation of the Pillar in 1996 and continued to be part of the Pillar (or were only temporarily excluded from it) until around 2010. However, in the case of each of the four organisations examined, their origins and development predate the Pillar and their prior history of engagement was critical to its creation. Thus it is necessary to go back many years before the Pillar was formed and even prior to the inception of social partnership in 1987 in order to get to grips with the CVP. Some latitude is also needed around the ending of the active life of the CVP as a component in social partnership, which was dismantled gradually as the economic crisis unfolded after 2008. A number of organisations were excluded from the Pillar by government in 2003, for rejecting the Sustaining Progress pact (Government of Ireland 2003). However, because the excluded bodies remained engaged from outside, and were re-­admitted in 2007 after the signing of the 2006 agreement (Towards 2016), it seemed logical to maintain the focus on them over the longer term. Secondary sources A case study of this sort necessarily includes a wide range of secondary source materials and documentary as well as interview data. A major trawl of all relevant documents from key organisations was undertaken. While the main focus was on the four selected organisations, the review extended in principle to all affiliates of the Pillar, including publications and ‘grey’ literature in hard copy format from the earlier period and increasingly, in more recent years,

Rationale, scope and key concepts

55

web-­based resources. Documentation from the major social partners outside the CVP was also identified and collected where feasible as a resource. Also, detailed studies of the published documentation of key organisations were carried out. These studies on the background and publications of key organisations are integrated into Chapters 5-­9 on the CVP and selected organisations. Visits to premises of each of the key organisations took place, usually in the context of conducting interviews. Attendance at conferences or events of some key organisations was another valuable method employed in the research. On two occasions I was invited to speak at events organised by associations, and this was valued as an opportunity to meet and establish trust and understanding with respondents and their organisations. In addition, files of press cuttings on social partnership and in particular the CVP were accumulated and, as the search technologies for press research improved, trawls of news and newspaper archives, particularly the online Irish Times archive, were undertaken. Some CVP member organisations – ­particularly CORI Justice – have made a fine art of accessing media coverage, which is an interesting aspect of the Pillar, as well as a valuable source of evidence on its public profile over the years. Parliamentary debates were another valuable source of supplementary narrative, providing validation of accounts of respondents, particularly when respondents were reporting events that happened many years previously and which were also referred to in parliamentary debates. Several trawls of parliamentary debates relating to social partnership issues were carried out and are drawn on in the text. Understanding the significance of the CVP is impossible without taking account of the economic and political context in which it was forged and operated. Official statistics on economic and social trends, including employment and unemployment patterns and trends, and social welfare developments, were collated, as were data on political developments, such as local and general election outcomes, public opinion polls, government formation and government policy direction. Taking these factors into account is essential in order to provide a dynamic account of the Pillar – and the warp and weft of its influence over time. These data are drawn on throughout the analysis in order to identify key economic and political crises and conjunctures, and the effect of economic and political cycles on the context of social partnership negotiations. Interviews The core of the narratives on each of the organisations in the study is built upon interviews with selected respondents from the four key organisations. These respondents were selected in order to cover the whole period of each organisation’s existence, or at least its existence in relation to social partnership. In addition, a senior official in the Department of the Taoiseach and the Director

56

Asymmetric engagement

of the NESC were interviewed. The total number of these formal, recorded interviews was 25 but this covered a total of 22 respondents. The interviews ranged in duration from 60 to 90 minutes. The respondents are listed in the Appendix and when quoted in the text, are referred to by initials. However, I have benefited greatly from many informal conversations with people from right across the CVP and the other social partners, and civil servants who have been involved in the partnership process over the years. Follow-­up interviews were carried out with some of the initial respondents in 2012, in the context of the ongoing economic crisis.

Key concepts used in the study There are a number of terms and concepts that may be unfamiliar or require some comment in relation to how they are defined and used in the course of the book. Four of these terms in particular stand out: 1 2 3 4

Community and voluntary sector organisations The demos Modalities of governance Asymmetric engagement

Here a brief definition of each of these is set out in order to provide guidance through the empirical chapters. Community and voluntary sector organisations For the purpose of this study, community and voluntary organisations, sometimes referred to as small organisations, are associations or groups found in the Pillar. Typically, these are very small organisations with limited resources and diverse missions. In the context of the book, the term refers to groups that have a strong focus on campaigning for policy change, rather than on service provision, although some of them also have important service roles or are connected to specific service organisations. They are different from more ‘conventional’ interest groups like trade unions, employer associations or farmer organisations in that they have weaker or non-­existent representational mandates from the constituencies they hope to champion, and generally lack involvement in the negotiation of prices, wages or other critical factors in production, distribution and exchange. They are not analogous to conventional social partners in that they are not typified by bargaining in their dealings with other social partners or with the state. They are diverse in tradition, origins and ideology. Although many of these groups originate in the traditional voluntary sector, mostly they emphasise a community focus and a ‘bottom-­up’ approach as against philanthropic orientations of a more traditional kind.

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57

The demos In the course of the book, frequent references are made to the demos. Deriving from the Greek word for the common people of the state, in its simplest form the demos refers to the electorate. However, it is not only a reality during elections but forms part of the context in which the action of social partnership takes place in an ongoing way. In a democracy, shifts in the mood of the demos – in sentiment against or for the government – can play an influential part in shaping the outcomes for community and voluntary sector organisations in the context of social partnership. In the book the significance of the demos will emerge. Often it impacts on politicians in the posture they will adopt in negotiations with social partners. This shifting of the demos – which becomes apparent in opinion polls, local, national and European elections and referenda – and its consequences for shifts in the positions of political leaders may be of more significance for the community and voluntary sector than for the conventional social partners. At the same time, the connection between the demos and the community and voluntary sector groups is not direct, and awareness in the demos of these groups and their involvement in social partnership is limited and will vary a lot between different groups. Modalities of governance The concept of modalities of governance is important in this book because there are many ways in which governments secure support for their policies and decisions. Held (2006) identified different modalities of governance, ranging through coercion, tradition, apathy, pragmatic acquiescence, instrumental acceptance, normative agreement and ideal–normative agreement (2006: 197). Democracies, by definition, seek to shift away from coercion towards consent, but may continue to rely on forms of authoritarianism or influential traditions and institutions to achieve their objectives. Apathy and pragmatic compliance refer to the degree to which government is allowed to carry on by a relatively passive, pragmatic or adaptable public. The modality of instrumental acceptance, or bargaining, is central to the emergence of interest group associations such as trade unions, employers etc., which can contribute to a more active form of political engagement by the groups they represent. At a higher level stands the modality of normative agreement and ideal–normative agreement. Here, various interest groups and actors rise above instrumental bargaining to deliberation, to address the greater good. This modality is close to the classical concept of republicanism or active civic engagement with the public good by citizens or groups. In this book, terms like governance, negotiated governance, participative governance etc., refer to the creation of institutions that involve interest groups and organisations in processes of policy-­making beyond the conventional relationship between the government and the demos in liberal democracies.

58

Asymmetric engagement

Here the focus on modalities of governance is applied to participants in social partnership, specifically the CVP organisations. In this book, the concept of modalities of governance is used to convey the different ways in which community and voluntary groups, specifically, become engaged with the governance process through social partnership. Whereas some commentators have viewed the creation of the CVP in social partnership as indicative of a shift to the higher modality of normative agreement, others view the engagement as a species of supplementary bargaining, which the institution of social ­partnership – once established – enables them to engage in. Others take the view that the state holds the ring due to its inherent power, or acting in the interests of capital, and that weaker partners are destined to accommodate or comply. Another variant is that elected government, due to its democratic mandate, always trumps institutions of governance, so that the weaker social partners, and even at times the stronger ones, operate subject to the dictates of the political elite. Social partnership needs to be seen in a wider context of several modalities. What distinguishes the approach in this book is that where others have centred mainly on one modality in social partnership to explain the CVP, I allow for the possibility of several modalities within the social partnership process, ranging from consensual to coercive. Asymmetric engagement The central concept of asymmetric engagement was developed for the purpose of capturing the logic of how the small organisations of the CVP interact with the state and other social partners through the institutions of social partnership. In the study of tripartite institutions the concept of a game is often used to convey the dynamics of bargaining and other interactions between ‘players’. The simplest game is based on the assumption of ‘rational’ or ‘maximising’ behaviour by bargaining counterparts. This type of game is often applied in the context of decentralised wage bargaining or other private bargaining situations. Tripartite bargaining games usually incorporate some shared objectives, or attempt to address externalities, that might be ignored in decentralised bargaining. The engagement of social partners in a centrally co-­ordinated process can bring negotiating players beyond bargaining into a process fringing on deliberation; indeed some have argued that in the Irish case this process developed to a quite advanced level. However, for the same reason as I have not been restricted to a focus on one modality of governance, I have gone beyond the usual limits of ‘game’ analogies conventionally used in discussing tripartism. The concept of ­asymmetric engagement is meant to capture the different dynamics involved, particularly as the CVP and its component groups are affected. The CVP groups are not strict rational actors maximising their own gains. They are private not-­for-­ profit, value-­based organisations pitching for objectives that they identify as

Rationale, scope and key concepts

59

a public good – poverty reduction, gender equality, full employment, greater participation by communities in local development, increased participation for disabled people, the rights of older people and youth etc. Asymmetric engagement describes the ‘game’ in which they find themselves. In this game, the CVP participants are small organisations who must act as campaigners and policy entrepreneurs. They are too small to operate in a form of symmetric engagement, or bargaining, as the trade unions and employers often do. While they do play a part in short-­term bargaining around year-­to-­year budgetary movements, they engage principally in a longer-­term strategy built around the policies they develop and have adopted by government. While these organisations lack the direct clout of more conventional bargaining associations, they have attributes to compensate and they can – over the longer run, and depending on shifts in the economy, political life and the demos – achieve genuine successes. Key opportunities occur for the small organisations of the Pillar in the context of the negotiation of social pacts which, over the period from 1987, typically covered a period of three years each. Intrinsic aspects of these organisations – their mission, material resources, roots in the social struggles of marginalised or disadvantaged groups, the quality of their knowledge base and analysis, their tactical flexibility – interact with a changing external environment to ensure that their fortunes will wax and wane over time. Amid the dynamics of economic, political and social exchange, small organisations can go through phases of the doldrums, punctuated by moments of opportunity. In one phase, an issue such as high unemployment may give a campaigning organisation a strong basis from which to argue, while a drop in unemployment confers a credit effect on the government and denies small organisations the attention and influence they formerly had. Clear examples of this fluctuating fate of small associations emerge from this study. Small campaigning organisations, such as make up the Pillar, may also have possibilities that can elude more conventional interest groups. The latter can be driven by their membership base and may pursue a limited and short-­ term agenda. For example, trade unions may concentrate narrowly on the short-­term objective of take-­home wages in times of economic growth, even if the tax base is eroded and the basis of collective provision, in the form of a social wage, is weakened over time. Smaller organisations, adopting a perspective based on a deeper analysis may, oddly enough, be in a better position to advance positions with longer-­term merit because they do not have the active pressure of a membership that is focused on the short term. The power of community and voluntary organisations is limited. To that extent it is very difficult to be convinced that they would be conferred with equal status in a social partnership process. They can be, as will be demonstrated, ejected from social partnership without much of a ripple outside of

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Asymmetric engagement

the Pillar itself. That is not to say that they have no power or influence. Rather, it is that their influence is not necessarily related to the bargaining dynamics intrinsic to neo-­corporatist exchange. While other ‘social partner’ organisations largely operate through the bargaining process within the tripartite system, even when they are pilloried by the media or actors within the parliamentary arena, the position of the community and voluntary organisations is somewhat different. The fate of the CVP is tied up more directly with shifts in the political arena, political opinion and public discourse, regardless of what is happening within social partnership. The term asymmetric engagement is, coincidentally, a military one, used to describe situations where smaller forces engage with more powerful forces in ‘guerrilla’ scale engagement. While analogies need to be treated with caution, they have some heuristic value too. A point of comparison between asymmetric engagement as conceived here and the military version is that small and seemingly powerless groups can, over time, be catalysts for change. They may also come close to being extinguished. What often restores their fortunes, however, is some tacit legitimacy in the demos. Despite often seeming to be out of kilter with popular opinion, their capacity for policy entrepreneurship, persistence and willingness to suffer the coercion that is part of the governance process, or the opprobrium that goes with speaking out or being a thorn in the side of powerful minorities, real gains can be achieved.

Conclusion The choice of a case study has now been outlined, and the form of this case study has been set out with a view to addressing theoretical and empirical challenges. Some central concepts have been defined in order to assist with navigation of the empirical material. Whereas earlier views of the Pillar have been shaped by more conventional concepts, or social partnership has been viewed as something of a closed system, the approach in this book, by identifying specific traits of community and voluntary organisations, the influence of the demos, the operation of different modalities of governance, seeks to go beyond social partnership. A key concept at the heart of this way of getting to grips with the CVP, asymmetric engagement, has been laid out. In so far as the action of the CVP can be viewed as involved in a game, this chapter has sought to set out the nature of the game in appropriate terms. In the next five chapters, this approach is applied to the Pillar.

5 The Community and Voluntary Pillar: an overview The CVP: an Overview

Introduction This chapter presents an overview of the circumstances and steps leading to the emergence of the CVP. It sets out how, from the late 1980s, new elements of civil society began to engage with parts of government and then pull together around key questions which government and the principal collective interests – employers, unions and farmers – had failed to address satisfactorily through the social partnership model established in 1987. It identifies the key political and economic circumstances and institutional developments in relation to which the new elements, which became the CVP, emerged. The chapter describes the composition of the CVP and a significant component of the CVP – the Community Platform – and presents a brief overview of how Pillar and Platform evolved over time. It shows that, although there were numerous groups involved in the creation of the Platform and Pillar, a degree of coherence was achieved for a time in the run-­up to Partnership 2000 (1996) and in subsequent years. Against accounts that dismiss the Pillar as a mechanism of incorporation by the state, this overview of the CVP reveals phases in which the CVP’s influence increased or diminished; the chapter relates these phases to political and economic circumstances on the one hand, and to the internal composition and dynamics of the Pillar on the other. What the chapter reveals is that small organisations with serious policy ideas, expertise and roots in communities or less powerful sections of society can be effective, up to a point. This effectiveness is not essentially attributable to bargaining power, or the status afforded by being a ‘social partner’, as some accounts of the Pillar might imply. Rather, such groups work as policy entrepreneurs rooted implicitly in the demos. While the merit of small organisations’ policy proposals and objectives may at times be ignored or rejected by the elected government, or by more ensconced and powerful interest groups, legitimacy crises and shifts in the demos can bring about new windows of opportunity for them. The CVP, in the context of an

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Asymmetric engagement

established system of tripartite corporatism, became a vehicle for a range of organisations which came to operate in this space. Only a certain amount of the experience of the CVP can be captured at the aggregate level. In subsequent chapters, therefore, each of four central players in the Pillar forms the focus of separate treatment, as each one provides its own distinct narrative on the origins, experience and significance of the Pillar, from which a meaningful account can be derived. Together, these chapters provide an account that captures how these groups sought to articulate, protect and advance the interests of economically subordinated and socially marginalised groups in the context of a broader project for economic recovery defined by the state and dominant economic interests and social forces. These five chapters are an exploration of how an alliance of small organisations fared in the course of ‘partnership’ with more powerful ones. The five chapters explore the origins and experience of the community and voluntary actors in social partnership and the goals they pursued, and provide an estimation of the CVP as a case study in a process that is characterised as ‘asymmetric engagement’.

Origins of the CVP The issue of extending participation in social partnership to wider sections of society was raised in the Dáil (the lower house of parliament in Ireland) as early as March 1990. Referring to a document issued by the Conference of Major Religions Superiors (CMRS; later CORI) which estimated that 31% of the population were below the poverty line, Jim Higgins, a Fine Gael TD (member of parliament), suggested: These people are largely voiceless but … they have as much right to be at the conference table as the farmers, unions and employers … As they are a major segment of the population and a social partner, will the Taoiseach agree that they should be involved in any Programme for National Recovery negotiations? (Dáil Éireann 1990)

The Taoiseach, Mr. Haughey, rejected the figures on poverty and replied: It is ridiculous to think that whatever number of people the Deputy is talking about are not represented through different organisations. They are represented by trade unions, farmers’ organisations or otherwise and the social partners’ structure which we have operated up to now have given comprehensive representation. (Dáil Éireann 1990)

It was to be some time before this view was finally overturned and separate representation given to these excluded interests. At the time of the creation of the CVP it was both criticised as potentially harmful to democracy because of the absence of any direct mandate from the groups concerned and hailed as

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a breakthrough in state–civil society relations. This chapter therefore situates the CVP against the wider political backdrop, which suggests that sentiment among the electorate expressed in the political system may have obliquely legitimised the impetus behind the elaboration of new mechanisms for state– civil society engagement within social partnership. Windows of opportunity: a timeline for the Pillar In view of the long period over which this study reflects on the emergence and significance of the CVP, it was felt necessary to include a timeline showing the main economic and political circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Pillar, and to provide a schematic overview of the periods in which the Pillar – or organisations within the Pillar – managed to secure some influence over policy developments. This information is set out in Tables 5.1a, 5.1b and 5.1c. Table 5.1a presents the timeline for the entry of the four key organisations into some important national institutions (ADM, NESF and NESC) related to social partnership, and then into the social partnership negotiating process. The CVP was created in 1996 as the structure through which the new organisations were to engage with social partnership. All of the CVP organisations signed up to the agreements referred to as P2000, and PPF. The CVP split in 2002-­3 on Sustaining Progress (SP) after which a coalition within the Pillar (Community Platform), and with it the CWC and NWCI, was expelled from the process. They were all re-­admitted, following the next social pact, Towards 2016, signed in 2007. Table 5.1b sets out a summary of political events and economic trends which formed an important part of the context for the CVP members. This includes significant dates such as general and local elections, changes of government, periods of crisis for the Fianna Fáil-­led government, and periods of centre-­left and centre-­right government. Not all elections led to changes of government and not all changes of government came from elections. Also, while local government does not feature much in this study, local elections played an important role as early warnings to the incumbent government of the political effects of current policies, particularly in 2004. Table 5.1b also includes trends in economic growth, unemployment and periods of fiscal crisis. Developments in political and economic circumstances created what became windows of opportunity for the actors who formed the core of the CVP. Table 5.1c presents a guide to windows of opportunity which opened in relation to different issues of concern to associations in the Pillar. These windows of opportunity varied from one issue to another. Early windows of opportunity arose in relation to promoting innovative policies to address unemployment, consistent poverty, local community development and equality. Later, windows of opportunity emerged in changed conditions for policies to support women’s participation in the economy and to tackle relative poverty.

  – – – –

CVP Platform INOU CORI NWCI CWC

           

PNR

88

           

89

   

– – – –

90            

92

93

          –   –   – ADM 

PESP

91            

95     NESC   NESC

PCW

94 P2000

97

created NESC   created   Y     Y   Y     Y  

96

98

Y Y Y Y Y

99  

01  

PPF

00  

02 divided N Y Y N N

03

  out out

  out

SP

04  

05

– Y Y – –

07   in     in in

T2016

06

90 PESP

91

92

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓   ✓     ✓ ✓   ✓             ✓             ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 3.7  1.7  4.7  6.5  2  2.5   ✓     ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 16.3 15 12.9 14.7 15.1

89

Crisis (FF) General election Change of gov. Local elections Centre-­left gov. Centre-­right gov. GNP % growth Slowdown Fiscal crisis Unemployment %

PNR

88

87

Year  

PCW

94

✓ ✓     ✓ ✓      3  6.5 ✓   ✓   15.7 14.7

✓

93

Table 5.1b  Timeline of key political and economic factors

        ✓    6.4     12.2

95         ✓    8.1     11.9

96   ✓ ✓   ✓ ✓ 11.5     10.3

P2000

97

99

01 PPF

00

02

              ✓         ✓                 ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ 8.4 10.7 9.4 5.7 6.5                     7.5  5.8 4.4 3.7 4.3

   

98

          ✓ 4.4 ✓   4.5

03

✓     ✓   ✓ 4.6 ✓   4.4

SP

04

✓         ✓ 6.2     4.6

05

          ✓ 5.4     4.5

      6.0     4.7

  ✓

07 T2016

06

Notes: Y= yes to agreement; N = no to agreement; – = not involved in negotiations The National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) was created in 1993 and CORI, CWC, INOU and NWCI were represented on it. NESC – In 1995 the Taoiseach nominated representatives from the INOU and NWCI to join the National Economic and Social Council (NESC). From 1997, the CVP nominated its own members to the NESC, like existing social partners.

87

Year

Table 5.1a  Timeline of access to key arenas by selected organisation

W     W

 

W     W

 

Unemployment Poverty Childcare Local development Equality

88

 

W     W

89

W

W     W

90

91

W

W     W

PESP

W

W     W

92

Key PNR – Programme for National Recovery PESP – Programme for Economic and Social Progress PCW – Programme for Competitiveness and Work P2000 – Partnership 2000 PPF – Programme for Prosperity and Fairness SP – Sustaining Progress T2016 – Towards 2016

Note: W = window of opportunity by issue

PNR

87

Year

W

W W   W

93

Table 5.1c  Timeline of windows of opportunity by issue 94

W

W W   W

PCW

W

W W   W

95

W

W W   W

96

97

W

  W W W

P2000

W

  W W W

98

W

  W W W

99   W W    

01

 

  W W  

PPF

00

 

  W W  

02

 

  W W  

03

04

 

  W W  

SP

 

  W W  

05

07

 

  W W  

 

  W W  

T2016

06

66

Asymmetric engagement

The timeframes for these periods of opportunity are important aspects of the concept of asymmetric engagement. While small organisations may be viewed as lacking power or influence this should be viewed not in a static way but dynamically: small organisations can achieve some success in the context of periodic crises of legitimacy in the political elite, or periods when political sentiment in the demos is shifting. While these windows of opportunity last for limited periods, and do not of themselves guarantee any policy change, they can provide the conditions for success if organisations are prepared, organised and persistent. This study shows how some small organisations took advantage of such windows of opportunity to achieve policy changes over the course of social partnership after 1987. It may be useful for the reader to refer to Tables 5.1a, 5.1b and 5.1c in the course of reading this chapter. Crisis and the re-­emergence of corporatism The origins of a distinctly new form of community and voluntary sector engagement with the state can be traced back to the cumulative effects of an economic, fiscal and unemployment crisis and more immediately to the effects of public spending cutbacks. Figure 5.1 presents the trend in two of the key economic rates – the GNP growth rate and the unemployment rate – which point to the underlying difficulties facing the Irish state in the late 1980s. Debt to GDP ratio increased from 80% to 107% between 1980 and 1987. The spending cuts, initially disguised by inflation, had begun in the early 1980s but 18 GNP % growth Unemployment rate

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

0

Figure 5.1  GNP and unemployment rate based on CSO Labour Force Survey and CSO Quarterly National Household Survey 1988 to 2007

The CVP: an overview

67

deepened in the 1987/8 budgets when a newly elected minority Fianna Fáil government was faced with a major fiscal crisis and was offered the support of the main conservative opposition party, Fine Gael, provided that it would implement a programme of cutbacks to re-­balance the public finances.1 The 1987 government immediately sought to insure itself against electoral rejection by re-­establishing tripartite bargaining. It succeeded in securing the collaboration of the employers, trade unions and farmers in a three-­year Programme for National Recovery (PNR). The rationale for such an agreement was set down in 1986 by the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) in a comprehensive strategic statement (National Economic and Social Council 1986). This was critical in so far as the NESC included the ‘social partners’. The unions in particular, following several years of relatively fruitless free collective bargaining, with little or no net gain in incomes, loss of employment in unionised workplaces and declining membership, were prepared to support a more encompassing approach to economic policy and labour market development. However, in view of the massive rise in unemployment and marginalisation of a large section of society, even the harnessing of such major interest groups still left a substantial section of the Irish population outside the new governance coalition. First, after a short-­lived improvement, during the course of the PNR, large-­scale unemployment persisted – indeed it worsened in the early 1990s. In addition, the social welfare provision for the unemployed and other groups was regarded by the Commission on Social Welfare in 1986 as quite simply inadequate to meet the basic cost of living and stave off poverty (Commission on Social Welfare 1986). Despite the CSW report, the most that the Programme for National Recovery (PNR) could offer over the 1987-­90 period was the prospect of protecting the existing (inadequate) value of social welfare payments.2 The expenditure on social welfare in Ireland was described in the PNR as ‘exceptionally high’ due to the scale of unemployment. The social welfare provisions under the second agreement, the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP), agreed in 1990, were not much better than those in the PNR. The PESP only committed to reaching the ‘priority rates’ of social welfare, a long way short of the Commission’s recommended minimum rates.3 Furthermore, with high levels of long-­term unemployment and with the marginalisation of whole communities and younger population groups, there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with government and the system of social partnership as it was designed in 1987. In addition, cutbacks and charges on public services in healthcare, housing, and education were severe in relation to older people, people with disabilities, public service users and those on social welfare, and public spending cutbacks left little scope for policies to address unemployment directly – merely the hope that increased employment would result from growth in the economy.

68

Asymmetric engagement

A hybrid of distinct forms of partnership Against this background, the Department of the Taoiseach became pivotal to a number of key institutional innovations and a more co-­ordinated approach to government and policy-­making from 1987. The Secretary General of the Department also chaired the NESC and the tripartite social partnership talks that resumed in 1987 after six years of free collective bargaining. The Taoiseach and the Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach increasingly exercised leverage over other departments partly by virtue of the part they played in marshalling the consent of key non-­governmental interests to a difficult and longer-­term approach to public policy. Irish social partnership was also very consciously constructed in the shadow of developments at European Community level, including the recognition given under the EU Commission, led by Jacques Delors, to ‘social dialogue’, and the ‘social dimension’ of the internal market and monetary union projects from the late 1980s. In the 1990s, the EU continued to be a shaping influence by promoting an open method of co-­ordination between member states on employment and unemployment policy and creating new competences in the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 pertaining to social exclusion and discrimination. At the same time, the Irish model was to operate in an economy and polity where economic and regulatory policies were liberal by comparison with most European countries, akin to the UK and the US in many respects, but also one in which a church-­controlled voluntary sector has long held an influential status in state funded health, education and other welfare fields. One of the distinctive features of the new phase of social partnership in Ireland was its hybrid character. It was not simply tripartite bargaining along neo-­corporatist lines but became interlaced with a new type of local area-­based development partnership – which in turn was also influenced by thinking in the EU at the time. In addition to its role in social partnership, the Department of the Taoiseach had a direct hand in initiating local, area-­based approaches to tackling long-­term unemployment and local development through local level partnership companies. Under the second agreement (PESP, 1990) the government and social partners (employers, farmers and unions), assisted by European Structural Funds for local development, committed to the establishment of local level development partnership bodies. These bodies brought together diverse interests of civil society in local area-­based development partnerships to address social exclusion and long-­term unemployment at local level. They were established by the Department of the Taoiseach, with an intermediary agency – Area Development Management (ADM) – to take responsibility for oversight and shared overhead support. In an interview for this study, a senior official said that one of the justifications for giving social partner status to the community and voluntary sector was that it was involved in local level partnership but excluded from the national level:

The CVP: an overview

69

we had already engaged with the community sector at local level in a way that was very consciously directed from here, subsequently through ADM. So it began outside the national level. So, in a sense there was an anomaly in that we had partnership operating at the local level but not nationally. (DM)

While the terminology of ‘social partnership’ has been used loosely in Ireland to include both local partnerships and national level social partnership – this has been viewed as a source of analytical confusion. The case for maintaining a distinction has been made already (Larragy 2006). In this study, therefore, a distinction will be made between social partnership as a bipartite or tripartite system of wage bargaining (with other related issues involved in the trade-­off) on the one side, and partnership arrangements bringing several actors together to address a specific set of problems such as local development on the other. The latter can be termed ‘multipartite’4 partnerships in which the participating actors are effectively board members, and can be local or sectoral. In the Irish context, a very distinct form of multipartite partnership, known as area-­based partnerships, local partnerships or ‘partnership companies’ also emerged. These take the form of state-­funded not-­for-profit companies limited by guarantee without share capital.5 Local partnerships may be focused on local development or tackling long-­term unemployment and social exclusion, but they do not have any intrinsic connection with wage moderation or the fiscal trade-­offs associated with wage bargaining in the national tripartite or corporatist set-­up. The ties of accountability to their nominating constituency can therefore be quite tenuous; in effect board members can become relatively autonomous agents as they gel with other members of the board. The focus of the present study is not local or multipartite partnership bodies of the latter kind but the very unusual feature of Irish social partnership whereby an alliance of national community and voluntary sector associations managed to obtain seats in the tripartite system of social partnership, under the name of the Community and Voluntary Pillar. However, it is important to understand that the CVP came about in part due to the prior emergence of these two distinct types of partnership. Some community and voluntary groups (e.g. the CWC) helped to forge local partnership but later broke into the tripartite social partnership arena. For these actors, local development, local democracy and relationships with representative local government constitute an important focus – and a very fraught and complex one to address in the Irish context. Other CVP member groups made their argument for acceptance into the tripartite talks based directly on their claim to represent the unemployed nationally (e.g. the INOU) or the interests of poor people (CORI Justice). For the latter groups, the focus was more clearly related to policy outcomes in the area of employment and income maintenance. It is important to bear this diversity in mind when discussing the significance of the CVP. Most accounts of the wider aspects of social partnership tend to offer very cursory

70

Asymmetric engagement

and misleading accounts of the components of the CVP. One study, which did devote a specific chapter to this topic, which is more than others have done, nevertheless left many lacunae in its account of the Pillar (Hastings, Sheehan and Yeates 2007). Politics, the electorate and the logic of the new Pillar Important as links with key civil servants and the Taoiseach’s Department were to the newcomers to social partnership in the 1990s, it would be a mistake to view this dimension in abstraction from the wider electoral and political context of representative democracy. The move by the state to a widened engagement and a more innovative model of social partnership could also be justified in relation to the political or democratic process, which also reflected the unpopularity of fiscal adjustment and the extensive hardships of unemployment and poverty that were felt by a substantial part of the electorate. Parallel to the widening engagement with civil society by the state through social partnership (and other mechanisms6) was a shift in electoral interest towards parties with policies that would address unemployment, poverty, inequality and public service provision. Despite the protestations of Mr Haughey, noted above, that all sections were adequately represented in social partnership in 1990, the circle was widened by 1996 to include several community and voluntary organisations representing the interests of the unemployed, the poor or marginalised groups. A senior government official interviewed for this study justified the adaptation of social partnership to accommodate more partners as an essential ingredient in legitimising painful government policies. Such policies should be shaped by those they most affected, and social partnership was a mechanism to provide procedural and substantive fairness: The social partnership project from the very early days was always seen as about fairness in a broad sense, and it became more sharply focused on unemployment and the response to unemployment. But from the beginning it was seen that if pain, the pain of fiscal adjustment, was to be supported, then people would want to see that the burden was spread equitably and the benefits would accrue equitably. So, some sense of this being a social as well as an economic project was there from ’87 on, and I think that from the unions’ point of view – and they were the ones carrying the more overt burden – that they wanted to be able to say that this was being done in the cause of something that would benefit ordinary people in terms that they could understand. (DM)

This is plausible. However, civil servants are responsive to political leaders in government, and this extension of social partnership did not happen without an implicit electoral mandate. When ‘ordinary people’ think of fairness, they ordinarily think in terms of parliamentary politics and elected government rather than social partnership institutions. ‘Ordinary’ public sentiment trans-

The CVP: an overview

71

lates into election results and, while the precise policy message or mandate from elections often needs to be divined or constructed afterwards, it is usually possible to recognise the overall drift. In this respect, however, the ‘electoral will’ in 1987 was more difficult to decipher than usual because Fianna Fáil’s pre-­election slogans as an opposition party – ‘health cuts hurt the old, the sick and the handicapped’ – contrasted with the policies it implemented afterwards (even larger health cuts) as a minority government.7 In other words, many who voted for Fianna Fáil were not voting for cutbacks! Sentiment was somewhat clearer in the snap election of 1989 after which Fianna Fáil admitted that it misread the electorate’s attitude to the cutbacks it had gone on to implement in 1987. Fianna Fáil lost a further four seats in 1989 but the election result still enabled it to form a coalition government with the neo-­liberal Progressive Democrats (whose seat-­count was dramatically down to 6 in 1989 from 14 in 1987). This was significant – Fianna Fáil had never been in coalition before. Moreover, there was a further string of ‘upsets’ including the election of the left candidate, Mary Robinson,8 as president of Ireland in 1990, and the ‘Spring tide’ election in November 1992, which brought the biggest ever number of Labour Party deputies into parliament – a historic peak of 33 – leading to a Fianna Fáil–Labour coalition (1993-­94), before a rainbow coalition of Fine Gael, Labour and the Democratic Left replaced it (1994-­97). The rise of the community sector to the status of social partners coincided with these political shifts and can be seen as part of the overall political response to simmering discontent of the ‘ordinary people’. The doubling of Labour Party seats in the 1992 general election was a strong indication of serious discontent in the electorate with the employment and distributional outcomes of the interim years. It is important to acknowledge the context of the continuing influence of the voting public and their impact through the representative democratic process because the legitimacy of the CVP has been questioned on the grounds that it might usurp the basic prerogative of democratic government (O’Cinnéide 1998/9). While this is always a vital concern, it is important to view the extension of negotiated governance in a wider political perspective. It is suggested here that in the final analysis it was an elected government that adopted social partnership as a method of resolving a fiscal crisis, while also seeking to attenuate a legitimation crisis. In an electoral system based on proportional representation, outcomes are often far from clear-­cut. While a first-­past-­the-­post system in the UK yields clearer mandates, it has also produced blunt stick regimes, none more so than in the 1980s, when elections yielded a simplistic government of the new right. In the Irish case, centrist or mixed party governments are almost inevitable and therefore, in order to overcome a crisis of motivation in government, a resort to governance with the help of civil society can be a solution. An interesting aspect is that such an innovative model as Irish social partnership emerged

72

Asymmetric engagement

before a theoretical justification for it was ever set out. In short, where theory conjured up such models in the abstract elsewhere, as set out in Chapter 3, it was force of circumstance that produced an actual experiment in Ireland. Community sector convergence and engagement If more active government engagement with civil society sprang from a crisis, rather than deep reflection on political philosophy, then the emergence of new associations anxious to engage with the state was another factor in bringing about the creation of the CVP. As put simply by a senior civil servant interviewed for this study: ‘I suppose the third factor [in creating the Pillar] was the pressure from particular groups to become social partners …’ (DM). A number of organisations were either formed or began to rethink their mission in the 1980s. The traditional focus on service provision, which formed the basis of statutory–voluntary sector relations for over a century and a half, was overshadowed by something new. The starting points were broad issues rather than specific services – poverty, social justice, employment loss and community marginalisation. Moreover, in the 1980s, common factors, arising from the depth and extent of the social crisis due to unemployment, brought diverse groups closer together, particularly after the sharp public spending cutbacks of 1987/8. The seeds for the CVP were sown at that time as various organisations found themselves confronted by a shared challenge, in addition to the more specific issues that brought them into being. Some of the organisations that made up the new alliance were involved mainly in seeking rights and recognition for minorities suffering discrimination due to Traveller status (Pavee Point; Irish Traveller Movement – ITM), disability (Forum of People with Disabilities – FPD), sexual orientation (Gay and Lesbian Equality Network – GLEN), and lone-­parent status (One Parent Exchange Network – OPEN). During the 1980s, there was a shift towards a rights-­based approach in several social service areas which were previously the focus of philanthropic voluntarism. Indeed, longstanding organisations in the voluntary tradition were also re-­examining their mission with a view to greater recognition of social rights and the need to lobby for policy change, notably the Society of St Vincent de Paul – an immense voluntary organisation by Irish standards, founded on Catholic charitable principles (Brennan and McCashin 2001). At local level, the community sector was growing in self-­ awareness through the 1980s as a result of innovation under the European anti-­poverty programmes. These programmes focused not on income maintenance policy, which was determined by member states, but on piloting multidimensional approaches through local capacity-­building, organisation and development. In that sense the local development strategy might identify gaps, or complement what governments were assumed to be providing through social security and welfare policies. With this, a new layer of community sector groups and

The CVP: an overview

73

community work practitioners emerged and began to identify opportunities for mainstreaming innovative area-­based approaches to social exclusion. Among these were the Community Workers’ Co-­op (CWC), Community Action Network (CAN), and later the European Anti-­Poverty Network (EAPN). These organisations played a key role as policy entrepreneurs in the field of local development and contributed to some distinctive features of social partnership in the Irish case. The CWC is particularly significant in that it acted as a leading intellectual force for this diverse group and even formed a major sub-­alliance called the Community Platform which operated within the Pillar, as will become apparent from subsequent sections of this chapter and more particularly in Chapter 7, where the CWC is examined in detail.

Innovative engagement between state and civil society Over the years between 1987 and 1996 a series of innovative forms of consultation and engagement between state and civil society were set in train. These developments paved the way for a number of organisations to make their way, ultimately, into social partnership, and they arose out of a crisis of legitimacy that was not sufficiently bridged through the institutions of social partnership initiated in 1987. The principal developments are examined below. A political and organisational vacuum The significance of the specific instance of the community and voluntary sector within social partnership can be viewed in the context of Chapters 2 and 3, which argued that neo-­corporatist variants can conceivably be extended to include wider communities of interest – in particular the more vulnerable communities affected by forms of material exclusion or unequal status – even though they are not ‘functionally’ embedded, in the way trade unions are, in the labour market and economy, and even if they find it more difficult to organise. However, as stated previously, the implicit logic behind including newly created associations in governance networks stems from the need to mediate, sift and process the claims of variously constituted ‘private publics’, as opposed to viewing electoral outcomes as a carte blanche for election victors. The strengths and weaknesses of the CVP elements, separately or collectively, need to be understood not purely in the terms used to assess the power of employer or trade union organisations in relatively closed corporatist institutions. They also need to be understood more specifically in relation to the part such bodies can play in mediating between the will of the demos as expressed by the electorate and the decisions taken by the elected government. The very emergence of the CVP as a feature of social partnership in Ireland suggests that despite the presence of the trade unions at the table, the system still failed to encompass the wider constituency of labour (in the form of the unemployed, most obviously)

74

Asymmetric engagement

either organisationally or in terms of political ideas and policy solutions and, to that extent, social partnership failed to address the crisis of legitimacy of the government before the demos. There was a vacuum in political, organisational and policy terms that needed to be filled – i.e. there was a legitimacy deficit even after the elected government established social partnership in its post-­1987 form. The elements that led the way to the creation of community and voluntary sector representation in social partnership identified that vacuum and sought to position themselves. While protest and voice continued in the 1980s as unemployment increased, and as state spending and funded services contracted, the eventual success of the community and voluntary organisations is not solely attributable to their criticism of existing policy or mobilisation in protest marches. More important, in some ways, was the capacity of these organisations to come up with innovative concepts for policy that might gain a hearing in view of the evident gaps in what existing social partnership deals offered. Each of the key actors selected for separate treatment in this study – the INOU, CWC, CORI Justice and NWCI – engaged with policy-­makers on both levels – the critique of existing policy and policy entrepreneurship. There were a number of arenas in which this happened before they were directly involved in social partnership. These included local partnership, the Joint Oireachtas [parliament] Committee on Employment (JOCE), the National Economic and Social Forum, and the National Economic and Social Council. These phases are now briefly examined, as they were stepping stones in the campaign to gain a voice in the social partnership system itself. Gaining ground through local development partnership A legacy of the long decade of unemployment (the 1980s) was the marginalisation of many local working-­class communities and peripheral rural areas. The policies to address the fiscal crisis reflected and accentuated the inability of the state to invest in local development. While the state was lacking in funds, the European Community was in a position to support local development through its Structural Funds. However, the expertise for utilising these funds and, in particular, the local organisational infrastructure, was lacking. This opened a window of opportunity for community sector organisations to take the initiative in promoting local development. The CWC, which later became a leading player in the creation of the Community Platform and the CVP, quickly developed expertise and policy entrepreneurship around the potential for using Structural Funds to address local social exclusion, and created the basis for serious engagement with the government, first at local and then at national level. In turn, the engagement of the community sector with the implementation of innovative partnership at local level created the leverage to push for greater involvement in agenda-­setting:

The CVP: an overview

75

One of the key demands of the Structural Funds campaign was participation in decision making and having that voice at the table. Other social partners were participating so it was a small jump to talk about social partnership for the community sector. (NC)

As noted already an interview with a senior government official for this study, one of the justifications of social partner status for the CVP was that the sector was involved in local level partnership already but excluded from the national level: ‘In a sense there was an anomaly in that we had partnership operating at the local level but not nationally’ (DM). The intervention around local development will be elaborated on in Chapter 7, which deals with the CWC. However, it is worth noting here that the PESP agreement between the existing social partners in 1990 endorsed a pilot initiative for a number of area-­based partnership companies, and subsequent agreements mainstreamed them. Thus, although such local development companies have no intrinsic connection with the original purposes of corporatist bargaining, this local dimension became intertwined in the distinctive Irish hybrid model. Political engagement on unemployment While the CWC and other community sector organisations were engaging with the government on the Structural Funds and the new local partnership arrangements, another form of engagement began separately at national level around employment and unemployment policy. The INOU and others had lobbied for a national forum on unemployment since the mid 1980s. In 1992, following mounting support among opposition parties for a new initiative to generate ideas in the face of this intractable issue, the JOCE was set up by the Fianna Fáil–Progessive Democrat coalition, under the chairmanship of a Fianna Fáil Senator, Brian Hillery. The Joint Committee did not complete its work due to political factors – the government collapsed over an unrelated issue – but did set an important precedent by bringing sections of the community and voluntary sector together into a significant policy arena, as its chairman stated in July 1992: It is the first time in the history of the State that outside organisations were invited to nominate representatives to assist an Oireachtas Committee and serve on its sub-­committee structure. These representatives include nominees from the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the employer and farming organisations and other relevant bodies such as the Combat Poverty Agency, the Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed, the National Youth Council of Ireland and the Conference of Major Religious Superiors. (Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment 1992)

In interviews for this study, respondents from both the INOU and CORI Justice acknowledged the importance, in retrospect, of this experience as a stepping stone towards social partnership: ‘I think it still remains the only Oireachtas Committee which has included non-­Oireachtas members as equal participants’

76

Asymmetric engagement

(MA). It is also noteworthy that this engagement with new actors from civil society was launched not through social partnership institutions (which were entirely separate from parliament) but through parliamentary institutions: the innovation could be said to be parliamentary in origin, and liaison was directly between representative democratic bodies and collective interests from civil society. This indicates the extent to which the government was not only short on ideas but seeking legitimacy by bringing representatives of the unemployed and poor into the ‘tent’. Making inroads: National Economic and Social Forum The Joint Committee produced no substantive policy outcome but was an important rehearsal for the next development, which proved to be much more important. The FF–PD coalition was defeated in a general election in November 1992 and replaced in January 1993 by a new coalition of Fianna Fáil and Labour, following a historic peak in support for the Labour Party. Labour was king-­ maker and was to exercise considerable influence in two different coalitions over the next four years. One of the first steps initiated by Labour, through the office of the Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister), Dick Spring, was the establishment of the National Economic and Social Forum. The NESF was a major departure – a hybrid of an interdepartmental committee model and an NESC model – which was conceived in response to pressure from organisations like the INOU to establish a national forum on unemployment and related issues. The NESF was big and potentially unwieldy, with 15 representatives in a parliamentary strand, another 15 in a social partners’ strand, and 15 representatives from the community and voluntary sector in a ‘third strand’. In the first term of office of the NESF there were three representatives of women’s organisations, three representing the unemployed, three representatives of the disadvantaged, and one each representing youth, elderly, disability, environmental groups, and two people from the community and voluntary sectors designated as academics. The scope of the NESF was broadened beyond the topic of unemployment to cover a range of social exclusion and equality issues. This made it more attractive for community and voluntary activists and created opportunities for policy entrepreneurship across several fields. It provided a context in which community or voluntary organisations which had something to bring to the policy process, after years in the wilderness, could put forward ideas through direct engagement with the existing social partners and the state. The most prominent organisations in evidence in the third strand of the NESF and the ones whose spokespersons were most influential in its proceedings over the ensuing years were the CWC, INOU, NWCI and CORI, and these constitute the four units of analysis in the following chapters of this study. In the NESF, community sector organisations actively engaged in drafting proposals for NESF reports. Indeed, the community and voluntary sector

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77

appeared to make more use of the NESF than either the parliamentary or the social partners’ strands. The parliamentarians tended to take a listening brief while the social partners tended to view the Forum as just that – a forum. From the perspective of employers, unions or farmers the ‘real action’ in relation to influencing policy was in the NESC and in the social partnership talks. They thus also adopted an auditing mode rather than engaging with the third strand, leaving it to the latter to come up with ideas. As reports published in the early years of the NESF attest, the third strand set about making the most of its opportunity. These reports included a submission on Negotiations entitled A Successor Agreement to the PESP (National Economic and Social Forum 1993a), The National Development Plan 1994-­1999 (National Economic and Social Forum 1993b), Ending Long-­ term Unemployment (National Economic and Social Forum 1994a), Income Maintenance Strategies (National Economic and Social Forum 1994b), and Commission on Social Welfare – Outstanding Recommendations (National Economic and Social Forum 1994c). Each of these reports bore the stamp of the third strand. For example, although there were differences among the third strand organisations, the report on income maintenance strategies included the first public consideration of the concept of a basic income scheme as one option – alongside others – for the integration of taxation and social welfare. The respective influences of the INOU, CORI Justice and the NWCI are evident in the report on long-­term unemployment, and that of the CWC is clear in the submission on the national development plan. Interview respondents referred to the emerging collaboration among the various organisations in the third strand of the NESF. One respondent from the CWC referred to the emerging challenge of getting involved in social partnership and – to that end – the importance of developing collaboration with other organisations through the NESF: The NESF was quite important for that because it did create the working relationship between the sector and there was a greater trust between the INOU, the Co-­op, the Women’s Council, I can’t remember the other ones but particularly those three because we were all on the management committee of the NESF together. (NC)

Another member of the strand, in an interview, also referred to collaboration and mentioned how she, Niall Crowley and Sean Healy collaborated on the NESF and ‘used to do quite a lot of … co-­ordinated work before we went into meetings’ (UB). At a more general level, there was a process of exchanging ideas among the third strand groups that was quite exciting and novel: ‘I suppose what I am trying to say is that there was a buzz in terms of engaging with the policy system, the central policy system, but also in terms of working out some dialogue across different interests and possible allies’ (UB).

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Asymmetric engagement

The NESF report on a successor to the PESP agreement (1990) was critical of the previous agreements because the emphasis was not on tackling unemployment and because of failures to achieve even the modest targets set even in relation to the ‘priority rates’ set out in the report of the Commission on Social Welfare of 1986 (not to be confused with the higher, recommended rates). While it was inevitable that the NESF would refer to the constraints within which macro policy operated, there is a great deal of emphasis on developing the employment and social dimensions of the forthcoming pact – clearly reflecting the ‘language’ of the third strand. The role of the local development component of the National Development Plan was highlighted, as were proposals to address long-­term unemployment. There was even reference to making departures from the established concept of work and consideration of various options including a proposed pilot scheme from CORI Justice to provide jobs paid at the going rate through arrangements with voluntary and public sector organisations. The point to stress is that diverse organisations from different social or intellectual starting points were initiated into a new type of engagement with the policy system, and with each other, through the medium of the NESF. They evolved and engaged with each other, knocked ideas together and found common ground. The process in the NESF was not simply one of taking several submissions from a variety of organisations from within civil society to be sifted by the parliamentary strand and government. Rather it was one of attempted clarification, sifting and synthesis by the organisations themselves, in so far as these ideas were shared or disputed. Protracted and extensive unemployment and deep and ‘consistent’ poverty were major challenges or anchoring issues that pulled diverse groups together around some key objectives, but the NESF created the opportunity to bring such groups together in a focused attempt to formulate coherent policies. There were, of course, potential difficulties as, firstly, not all underlying political, ideological or practical and methodological differences could be smoothed out and, secondly, there would be competition over seats, if and when they crossed the threshold of social partnership. The NESF was a key arena before entry to the inner sanctum of social partnership itself and one which continued subsequent to entry. Strategic access: National Economic and Social Council Over time the resistance from existing social partners to including the newly emerging community and voluntary sector component in social partnership began to erode. In 1995, two representatives from the sector – one from the INOU and the other from the National Women’s Council – were included in the Taoiseach’s nominees to the National Economic and Social Council (NESC). In effect, this gave the community sector participation rights in the

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79

body responsible for drafting the strategic reports that would underpin negotiations for the social partnership agreement to succeed the 1993 agreement, the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW). This brought them close to the agenda-­setting phase of the partnership process. As one of these nominees noted in an interview for this study: We had a very fast learning curve ourselves in NESC I suppose but it did make us realise very quickly how important NESC was and how that strategic document was the negotiations to some degree, not just the framework for it; but actually if you haven’t got it on the table there, you weren’t getting it on the table inside, when you got inside, so I think we copped that fairly early on and we realised, sure this is where the action is, it was more strategically important than we thought it had been to be on NESC. (MM)

Access to the NESC was to prove critical in the run-­up to negotiations for Partnership 2000 in 1996. The work put in over the preceding years by a number of key organisations in the community and voluntary sector eventually brought them into the social partnership mechanism itself. The next section sets the wider scene against which this step was taken.

Inside social partnership From 1987, the key non-­governmental actors in the social partnership process were the Irish Business and Employers Confederation9 (IBEC) and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions10 (ICTU). These bodies had a long history of engagement in centralised wage bargaining, particularly during the 1970s, when they negotiated through the bipartite Employer–Labour Conference under an independent chairman.11 They also have a longstanding involvement with the National Industrial and Economic Council (NIEC) set up in the early 1960s, which became the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) in 1973. Although there was centralised wage bargaining in the 1970s, the process was not co-­ordinated with macro-­economic and industrial development policy. The 1970s experiments in neo-­corporatist bargaining were abandoned in 1981 and there was a return to free collective bargaining. In 1987, there was a resumption of centralised bargaining. From 1987 to 2008, a total of seven agreements – each one of roughly three years’ duration – were signed by government and social partners. However, this time the process was preceded by a detailed strategic analysis carried out by the NESC and, even from the start, included a wider grouping of non-­ governmental interests (in particular farmers’ organisations). Table 5.2 shows the duration, participating partners and general scope of the ‘social’ dimension of each agreement. The pay terms in each of the agreements are contained in Appendix 2 to this book. The essential structure of all the agreements was still ‘tripartite’ in the neo-­corporatist sense of having a pay agreement at the centre,

80

Asymmetric engagement

in exchange for certain broad undertakings by government and social partners relating to taxation, industrial relations conduct and other matters. In the first three of these agreements the traditional social partners were flanked by farmers and other business interests represented separately from the employers’ organisation IBEC. These interest groups sought to build in commitments that might as easily have been the subject of separate policy processes. In the case of the farmers, for example, whose relations with the outgoing coalition of 1982-­87 deteriorated, Fianna Fáil leader Haughey cemented an alliance in the 1980s and gave them a place in social partnership from 1987 (Hastings, Sheehan and Yeates 2007). The successful inclusion of the farmers and other business interests in social partnership meant that it began to become a very prized arena where some influence on policy-­making could be exercised. But by being in the social partnership arena, they could stake their claim to a share in what was becoming a system for dividing the spoils of economic recovery and growth. The farmers, for example, could exercise influence in relation to complex grant schemes and European agricultural policy negotiations and implementation (Hastings et al. 2007: 168–171). Farmers had exchanged the ‘protest’ for the ‘briefcase’, increasing the number of interest groups inside the proverbial tent and reducing the relevance of space outside for other groups. This gave a boost to the government in seeking to stave off future electoral grief, following cutbacks introduced in the 1987 budget. In the context of the first three agreements (PNR 1987, PESP 1990 and PCW 1993), however, the ‘community sector’ was still on the outside and sought ways of influencing policy through submissions. Some groups – in particular the unemployed – sought to lobby the trade union pillar, and the ICTU liked to view itself as representing more than the employed workers in its affiliated unions. The INOU initially sought to work through the ICTU, while lobbying from the outside. As noted above, the newcomers beavered away through local partnership bodies and associated government departments, and in new policy discussion arenas at the national level – particularly in the NESF. The entry of other interests, like farmers, into a system that still pivoted on a tripartite system of wage bargaining was to set a precedent that community and voluntary sector organisations at length sought to emulate – moving, as Mike Allen of the INOU put it, ‘from streets to corridors’ and embarking on a ‘long march’ through the institutions. The experience of entry to social partnership is briefly summarised in Table 5.2. The social developments in the first three agreements, as illustrated by this table, were very limited in scope. Indeed, apart from the endorsement of the local area partnership bodies, the main focus was on maintaining expenditure restraint and limited tax reductions. In 1996, the negotiation of Partnership 2000 saw the first direct participation by community and voluntary groups in the talks. Column 4 of Table 5.2 shows how much the scope of the

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81

agreements was broadened with the involvement of these new actors. It shows that there was a deeper coupling of economic and social dimensions over the course of the CVP’s involvement which should, at least in part, be attributed to them. This is particularly marked in the terms of Partnership 2000 and the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness – when the Pillar was, arguably, at its zenith. The Partnership 2000 (1996) agreement included almost €1 billion in tax cuts, both meeting business interests and appeasing the trade unions with net wage gains in exchange for moderate gross wage growth. However, social spending was to be raised by €500 million; the Commission on Social Welfare (CSW) recommended minimum rates were finally conceded. The Pillar managed to stave off workfare-­style policies and won an expansion of the enlightened Community Employment (CE) scheme for the unemployed; employment-­friendly tax and welfare reforms for the lower paid were included, and there was a commitment to Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP). Partnership 2000 endorsed a National Anti-­Poverty Strategy (NAPS), which set targets (albeit modest ones) for reductions in poverty. Proposals from the INOU for a Local Employment Service (LES) were accepted, while innovative ideas such as the Social Economy and basic income (BI) were to be the focus for active consideration or feasibility studies. The gains made in Partnership 2000 by the Pillar should not be seen in a vacuum. There was a shift in the electorate towards the left, reflected in the improved performance of the Labour Party and its participation in coalition governments between 1994 and 1997. The success of the CVP was not attributable to its intrinsic ‘bargaining’ power in the way the gains of unions or employer organisations can be understood. It was contingent on the continued vulnerability of elected government to the demos, and the ability of the Pillar to build on this. The period running up to the end of 1996 presented opportunities for the ‘neophytes’ to pursue demands. That the balance had been tipped in their favour in the context of Partnership 2000 can be seen in how the CVP eventually won their demand on the implementation of the CSW recommendations on social welfare payment levels. The Pillar was on the brink of rejecting the deal but the government conceded at the last moment. While in retrospect this concession was not a burden to the increasingly buoyant exchequer, the reasons why the demand was conceded were not fiscal but political – a general election was imminent and the government was vulnerable. The economic circumstances surrounding the negotiations for the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (1999) were much improved: unemployment was tumbling and the labour force was growing rapidly. This took some of the impetus from the CVP, insofar as unemployment had been a key focus of its campaigning. Nevertheless, the level of prosperity was so great

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Asymmetric engagement

Table 5.2  Social partnership pacts, participants and ‘social’ dimension Pact

Period

Partners

‘Social’ Dimension

PNR

1988– 90

PESP

1991– 93

State, employers, unions, farmers, business Ditto

PCW

1994– 96

Ditto

P2000

1997– 99

State, employers, unions, farmers, business plus Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP)

PPF

2000–2

Ditto

SP

2003–5

T2016

2006–7

Ditto (However, Community Platform and NWCI rejected the deal and were excluded from social partnership) Government, employers, unions, farmers, business and reconstituted CVP (Afterwards, Platform and NWCI were re-­admitted)

Narrow in scope largely about wages, taxes, and fiscal correction, preserve value of social welfare only; tax cuts of £225 million Proposes local partnership on inclusion and unemployment; progress towards “priority” CSW rates; tax cuts of £400 million focused on low paid Expansion of local partnerships; presentations and submissions through NESF and directly by C&V sector Almost €1 billion tax cuts; social spending rise of €500 million; CSW minimum recommended rates finally given; expand CE; employment-­friendly tax and welfare reforms for low paid; Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP); endorses National Anti-­ Poverty Strategy (NAPS); Local Employment Service (LES); review of Social Economy and Basic Income (BI) ideas; measures on educational disadvantage Social spending envelope of €1.5 billion; tax and welfare reform for low paid; minimum wage from 2000; review group on indexing social welfare to earnings; Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID) programme; Child Care strategy formulation; educational disadvantage package; No new money promised; support of NAPS target of € 150 p/w (2002 prices) by 2007; 10 special initiatives: Housing and Accommodation; Insurance; Migration and Interculturalism; Unemployment; Educational Disadvantage; Waste Management; Care; Alcohol/Drug Misuse; Information Society; Ending Child Poverty Shorter-­term wage bargain with ten-­year non-­pay targets related to national development plan; Life Cycle Framework derived from the NESC report, The Developmental Welfare State

Key PNR – Programme for National Recovery PESP – Programme for Economic and Social Progress PCW – Programme for Competitiveness and Work P2000 – Partnership 2000 PPF – Programme for Prosperity and Fairness SP – Sustaining Progress T2016 – Towards 2016

The CVP: an overview

83

and the main indicators in the economy were so positive that it became possible for the government to pursue a number of potentially competing objectives, such as debt reduction, tax reductions and increased social spending, simultaneously. The key social terms of the 1999 agreement reflect this. An additional social spending envelope of €1.5 billion was provided; tax and welfare reform was provided for the low paid; a minimum wage was to be introduced from 2000. With the issue of implementing the CSW recommendations now resolved, the focus shifted up a gear to the identification of new benchmarks focused on the relationship between social welfare and earnings. The CVP won a significant concession in the form of a review group comprising social partners and government on indexing social welfare to earnings. The local development agenda was also promoted and a new programme to provide targeted investment in the most disadvantaged areas was agreed in principle, later to be called the RAPID programme. The steep growth in employment among married women with children brought the issue of childcare to the top of the agenda and brought the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) to the forefront of talks in 1999, which committed to developing a Childcare Strategy. The burgeoning labour market also served to reduce resistance to the introduction of a national minimum wage in 2000 – a goal which the ICTU had been campaigning for throughout the 1990s. However, although the CVP was making gains in 1999, all these changes were committed to in the context of a government that was flush with revenue. There was a change of government in 1997, with the return of a FF–PD coalition, and while this government maintained a commitment to social partnership, it was targeting considerably more of its resources to tax cuts and a range of tax reliefs across the economy, and even devised a special savings incentive scheme (SSIA) which clearly favoured middle-­ and upper-­ income groups. In some respects the CVP was coasting during this period; it was losing the cutting edge it originally had when unemployment and ‘consistent poverty’ rates were extremely high and when it was putting forward innovative policy proposals. At the same time, the crisis of legitimacy which the government faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s had given way to an economic boom that strengthened the legitimacy of the elected government. This uneasy equilibrium lasted until 2002, even though there were disputes between the CVP and the government over its post-­election 1998 budget and its budget for 2000 which followed the signing of the PPF agreement. The government budget for 2001, however, was designed with the forthcoming (2002) election in mind, but as soon as the FF–PD coalition was re-­elected in 2002 the government abandoned its up-­beat pre-­election rhetoric and replaced it with a focus on the global slowdown in the wake of 9/11 and the dotcom recession.

84

Asymmetric engagement

The influence of the CVP organisations was rising prior to their participation in social partnership; there was a plateau from 1996 to the late 1990s, and a sharp decline in the early 2000s. Not everything that was sought was satisfactorily progressed in 1999, but some tangible commitments were made. In the course of 2002, however, in the wake of the election, and the global recession, the run-­up to the next round of social partnership talks saw a hardening of government attitudes on pay bargaining and increasing resistance to the demands of the Pillar. With Sustaining Progress signed off by the unions at the end of 2002, after difficult negotiations, the government appeared to have regained the initiative, and it gave short shrift to the CVP, as will be elaborated upon in subsequent chapters. The political establishment’s enthusiasm for ‘governance’ of the mid 1990s had given way to toleration in the late 1990s before a readiness to return to ‘government’, with or without partnership, from 2002. This changed the terms of engagement with the CVP and reflected the loss of tactical leverage on their part. This shift in advantage was also reflected in shifts in discourse on substantive policy areas, such as in the debates on poverty and inequality, and on whether the issue of relative or ‘absolute’ concepts of poverty would prevail in public discourse. Moreover, many of the ideas that the CVP came up with in social partnership involved mechanisms to make the labour market function better or to promote employment through developing the social economy as an alternative to an exclusive reliance on state and market employment. With the burgeoning of the economy in 1999-­2001, these ideas were difficult to sell to government. The main themes around which the CVP was able to muster in the early 2000s were relative income poverty – which was the focus of CORI Justice in particular, and the range of policy issues around increased participation in employment by women, such as childcare costs and service provision. Under the terms of Sustaining Progress, no new money was promised for social spending. There was support for a National Anti-­Poverty target of €150 per week (in 2002 prices) – but this had been accepted earlier when advanced by the statutory agency Combat Poverty – and would not need to be reached until 2007. The large collection of initiatives and policy sub-­groups was replaced by a simplified list of ten ‘special initiatives’. These were listed as: Housing and Accommodation; Insurance; Migration and Interculturalism; Unemployment; Educational Disadvantage; Waste Management; Care; Alcohol/Drug Misuse; Information Society; Ending Child Poverty. The terms in which these initiatives were set out were very much dictated by the government and presented to the Pillar on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. Some special initiatives were clearly not targeted at the most vulnerable: the housing initiative in particular was geared to promote owner occupation in the context of rapidly rising house prices, and emphasised getting younger households onto the housing ladder, rather than focusing on public provision or financing of social housing through public rental schemes.

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85

As far as the CVP was concerned, the conduct of negotiations for Sustaining Progress was in sharp contrast to previous rounds (this will be explored in detail in the later chapters). Ultimately, the CVP signed off on the agreement very reluctantly and indeed two key components of the Pillar – the Community Platform and the NWCI – rejected it. Both of these entities were immediately told that they were excluded from social partnership. Apparently, this came as a surprise to them, particularly in the case of the Community Platform, and, in the following three years, organisations such as the CWC, which played a leading role in the Platform, had funding withdrawn – another indication of the extent to which the tide had turned (Harvey 2007). Once outside social partnership, the Platform initially sought to rally opposition against the government’s welfare retrenchment measures, but this initiative soon petered out. Those who stayed in the Pillar, in particular CORI Justice, who had begun to have a leading role on social welfare policy by the early 2000s, chose to bide their time. They managed to secure certain procedural concessions (this tactic will be examined in detail in the chapter on CORI Justice, below) but nothing substantive. The evidence provided by this study over this period is sufficient to demonstrate that the influence of the community and voluntary organisations that engaged with social partnership waxed (1993-­99) and waned (1999-­2002). While for some it appeared to be the end of the road, there was another significant turn worthy of analysis. What is interesting to note here is that the advantage seized by the government in 2002 for a rightward turn did not last too long and, moreover, did not go down very well with the electorate. Also, the international slowdown of the early 2000s was much less pronounced in Ireland than elsewhere, and was shorter-­lived internationally than expected, so the economy soon bounced back. Indeed, a degree of hubris had crept into government. But the local elections of 2004 saw the government suffer losses on a significant scale as the electorate showed distinct leftward leanings and gave the administration something of a wake-­up call. It was apparent that if they were to have any hope of winning the next general election – due in 2007 at the latest – the coalition needed to re-­think their direction. This new turn of events in 2004 created windows of opportunity for the CVP once again to take up the pursuit of objectives relating to social welfare, childcare, and local investment in social infrastructure. The details of CORI Justice’s work around the benchmarking of social welfare to average industrial wages achieved significant breakthroughs and will be explored in Chapter 8 below. Also, although the NWCI were excluded from the process, they continued to exercise influence from the outside and later succeeded in achieving concessions in relation to additional early childhood support for working parents. This is examined in greater detail in chapter 9. After 2004, there was a definite swing in government policy towards

86

Asymmetric engagement

increased social spending (combined as usual with tax cuts) and, when the government searched around for policies, it turned to elements in the CVP among others for credible ideas, and, by association, credibility for the government. Significant improvements in social welfare took place in the 2005-­7 period and new payments were introduced in a range of areas including support for working parents of young children, carers of dependent relatives living at home, etc. These policies had been canvassed by elements in the Pillar over several years and, to that extent, some credit must go to them. As the government shed its right-­wing Minister for Finance (Charlie McCreevy) and made a ‘social turn’ between 2004 and 2007, it showed a readiness to take some of the CVP policies ‘off the peg’ and all but adopt them wholesale. The post-­2003 sequel once again illustrates the point about the waxing and waning influence of small organisations which have some connection to the lives and experience of vulnerable interests and communities, and which can act as policy entrepreneurs. Also it shows that it is not enough to have moral right on one’s side or even a good analysis: shifts in the demos are critical to determining if such policies will get the ear of government, or otherwise come about. Thus, the broad economic and political context plays a key part in determining the windows of opportunity for small organisations to be effective in pursuing their demands or acting as policy entrepreneurs. They may be a small factor in the complex machinations of government and social partnership but, when they connect with the larger force of the demos, they can appear to punch above their weight. The outline of events given above covers the wider – ‘extra-­local and ­historical’ – context within which the CVP came into being, and will be elaborated on in greater detail in the examinations of specific organisational units involved in the Pillar, in Chapters 6-­9 below. However, before going to these accounts, it is first necessary to describe the internal picture – the organisational development and dynamics between the community and voluntary organisations in social partnership.

Inside the CVP In news media and in various commentaries the CVP is often regarded as a singularity. However, not only did the CVP comprise a large number of organisations in a single entity but there were critical tensions latent within the CVP from the beginning. While the CVP remains ‘the case’ for the purposes of this study, the critical issue is to establish precisely what it is ‘a case of’. The previous sections have addressed that question by describing the context – economic and political – out of which the CVP emerged, and in which it subsequently operated. This section sheds light on the same question by setting out the main organisational components and peculiar characteristics of the Pillar.

The CVP: an overview

87

The CVP was an alliance of several small organisations which were not merely driven by interest or analysis but which were value-­driven and intellectually passionate as well, and it is to be expected that the life of the Pillar – in its relations with government and internally – should be fractious at times. That is part of the price of its vitality. This analysis therefore highlights the presence of lines of potential fracture in the CVP, which were present from the beginning and which came to the surface later. These features contribute to the thesis advanced here that the CVP needs to be understood dynamically by showing how various strands making up the Pillar succeed or fail in coming together to make an impact on policy. In 1996, several organisations in the community sector, which had earned their spurs through a series of innovative forms of engagement with the state (outlined above), confidently expected some form of invitation to participate in talks on a new agreement to succeed the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW) (Government of Ireland 1993) due to take place later that year. The next step was to decide who was to be recognised as a social partner and a mechanism for representation. To put it crudely, there were two approaches to representation – bottom-­up and top-­down. The bottom-­up model, devised by the CWC, was to create a Community Platform, as an autonomous vehicle based on broad principles shared by its members, with a brief to represent the sector as a whole in national level social partnership. Once the Platform was recognised as a social partner, it would be the gateway for access to social partnership. The top-­down model would have the government first create a CVP and then decide which organisations to allow into it. This model would leave it to each organisation to make its own case for participation directly to government, creating potential for competition between them, and giving the gate-­keeping role to government. In the event, while the Community Platform was created in May 1996, it did not formally receive recognition as a peak organisation (like the ICTU or IBEC) in the partnership talks, but was listed with others as part of the new structure known as the CVP devised from above by the government in October 1996, and maintained its identity and focus for several of the affiliates, e.g. in the development of position papers (e.g. Community Platform 1999). Organisations with a direct invitation to be in the Pillar could also remain in the Community Platform (INOU, SVP, CORI and NWCI did so). There were other organisations invited into the Pillar too, who did not affiliate to the Platform. In 1996, these were: Protestant Aid, the National Youth Council of Ireland and the Congress (ICTU) Centres for the Unemployed. The full list of members in the Pillar in several key years between 1996 and 2008 is contained in Table 5.3. How these organisations came to be selected in the first instance received much comment from respondents. The approach seems to have been quite pragmatic. When asked what the approach was, a key civil servant noted:

88

Asymmetric engagement

I think government’s disposition would always be towards inclusiveness. So if there was a case for participation there is no great incentive for government to try and resist it. But that is a case that had to be made to the existing partners as much as to government. We have a similar situation with other pillars – perhaps not so much in the trade union pillar … So there is a limit to inclusiveness – I mean inclusiveness to the point of chaos is not very welcome. But on the whole the disposition is to permit people to come in if they are a plausible addition to the party. So it has been reactive. There has not been an attempt to define who are – you know like the Dalai Lama – who is the ‘real’ social partner ‘hidden from us’, and bring them in. That was not the dynamic. (DM)

A key focus of this study, moreover, is the origins, formation and critical points of engagement by the actors which came to make up the CVP. This section maps out the more detailed organisational developments within the CVP as a context for the more specific examination of selected components in subsequent chapters. These organisational developments tell a story and point to the origins, dynamics and tensions within the Pillar. Far from the CVP being a singularity, it comprised numerous organisations and a variety of ideological tendencies. Moreover, during the course of its life from 1996 to 2008, the Pillar witnessed significant tensions including a serious split in 2002 and the exclusion of some key component organisations from social partnership in 2003. Also, from 2004, the government admitted a new group of organisations to the Pillar. Table 5.3 presents an analysis of the evolving composition of the CVP member organisations between its establishment in 1996 and 2008. At the outset, in 1996, there were eight member organisations in the Pillar but there were nine seats because the Community Platform were allowed two seats in recognition that the Platform brought numerous national organisations together under the one umbrella (as shown in Table 5.4). This level of representation for the Platform continued over the years to 2003, when the Platform and the NWCI were excluded from social partnership after rejecting the terms of the Sustaining Progress agreement, and the membership of the Pillar fell from 9 to 6 seats. Table 5.3 also shows the addition of new members to the Pillar, which increased its representation in social partnership to thirteen, and remained at that level until 2006. Then, after agreeing to implement the terms of Towards 2016 (agreed in 2006) the Platform and NWCI were re-­admitted to the Pillar in the course of 2007 (with one seat each) and the number of seats on the Pillar increased to 15. Table 5.3 shows both the founding organisations in the Pillar and the later entrants, dating from 2003 and afterwards, in order to provide a complete overview. As noted earlier, however, much of the focus of this study is the formation period and first phase of participation before 2003, but it also follows through beyond that year in relation to the continuing impact of the original and defining elements. The issues and concerns of the post-­2003 entrants, such

89

The CVP: an overview Table 5.3  CVP structure and representation (in seats) 1996–2008 Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP, the Pillar)

1996 1999 2002 2003 2006 2008

Conference of Religious of Ireland   (CORI Justice) Congress Centres for the Unemployed  (CCU) Irish National Organisation of the   Unemployed (INOU) National Women’s Council of Ireland  (NWCI) National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) Protestant Aid (PA) Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (SVP) Community Platform (CP / the Platform)* Carers’ Strand (Carers’ Association) Children Strand (Children’s Rights  Alliance) Disability Strand (Disability Federation of  Ireland) Housing Strand (Irish Council for Social  Housing; National Association of Building Co-­ops) Local / Voluntary Strand (Wheel) Older People Stand (Age Action Ireland;   Irish Senior Citizens’ Parliament) Rural Strand (Irish Rural Link) Total seats in the CVP

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

–

1 1 1 2 – –

1 1 1 2 – –

1 1 1 2 – –

1 1 1 – – –

–

–

–

–

–

– – – 9

–

1

1 1

1 1 1 1 1 1

–

1

1

–

–

1

1

– –

– –

– –

1 1

1 1

– 9

– 9

– 6

1 13

1 15

–

1 1 1

* Community Platform was conceded two seats because of its large number of affiliated national organisations. This concession was not made when the Platform was re-­admitted in 2007. Source: Collated from various sources including DFI Dept of Taoiseach, CWC &Dáil reports

as ‘The Wheel’, or groups representing older people, or housing organisations, however, are not pursued here. The listing of organisations in Table 5.3 does not capture the complexity and dynamics of the CVP over time. First, attention should be drawn to one of the members, the Community Platform, whose evolving composition is presented in Table 5.4. As noted, the Community Platform was proposed by the CWC and other organisations as the preferred shape for representation of the sector, but this was not accommodated by the state, and indeed there was a certain degree of competition for seats from organisations seeking to ensure their own seat. Instead, a number of organisations were given seats in their own right by government, which created the CVP. While the government capped the size of the Pillar, Table 5.4 shows that the number of affiliates to the Community

90

Asymmetric engagement

Table 5.4  Community Platform membership at selected times and dates of establishment Member organisations 1996–2008

Est.

12/96

2/00

12/02

4/04

10/08

  1. Community Action Network (CAN)   2. Community Workers’ Co-­operative (CWC)   3. Conference of Religious in Ireland (Justice) (CORI) *   4. European Anti-­Poverty Network (EAPN)   5. Focus on Children   6. Forum of People with Disabilities (FPD)   7. Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN)   8. Irish Commission for Prisoners Overseas (ICPS)   9. Irish National Organisation for the Unemployed (INOU)* 10. Irish Rural Link (IRL) 11. Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) 12. Pavee Point 13. Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (Ireland) (SVP)* 14. National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI)* 15. One Parent Exchange Network (OPEN) 16. National Adult Literacy Agency (NALA) 17. National Network of Women’s Refuges & Support Services 18. National Traveller Women’s Forum (NTWF) 19. Threshold 20. Vincentian Partnership for Justice 21. Women’s Aid 22. Voluntary Drug Treatment Network (VDTN) 23. Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) 24. Simon 25. Irish Association of Older People (IAOP) 26. Older Women’s Network (OWN) Total

1989 1981

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

1981

✓

✓

1990

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

1992 1990

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

✓ ✓

1988

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

1986

✓

✓

✓

✓

1987

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

1991 1990 1983 1844

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

1973

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

1994

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

1980

✓

✓

✓

✓

1970s

✓

✓

✓

✓

1988

✓

✓

✓

✓

1978 1995 1974 1992

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

✓ ✓ ✓

24

✓ 25

✓ 24

1985 1969 1990 1995

15

Notes: * Organisation also had independent standing in the Pillar ✓ = is member of the Platform in that year

22

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Platform increased over the next eight years. In 1996, when first formed, there were 15 members. For some years, as the CVP became more established, the Platform was the only mechanism through which access to social partnership could be obtained (indirectly) without a government decision. Over time the Platform became a focus for attracting additional organisations looking for policy change through social partnership. By 2000, there were 22 affiliates, and further affiliations brought the Platform membership to 25 in 2004. The second interesting feature of the Platform shown by Table 5.4 is that four organisations in the initial list of affiliates had succeeded in obtaining individual seats on the CVP. Only three organisations in the Pillar, therefore, were not also connected to the Community Platform at the start. This odd arrangement was the outcome of a process of ‘jockeying’ for positions in the run-­up to admission to social partnership. In a sense these four organisations were in a position to go with the Platform or go it alone should the need arise; they were prepared to be aligned with the Platform but were also looking to their own independence. This indicates the extent to which the CVP was always an alliance of distinct organisations rather than a singularity, and underlines the need to understand that the internal diversity and dynamics were as much a part of the story of the Pillar as the changing political and economic context in which the Pillar sought to function. Both of these features – the growing affiliation of groups to the Platform over time and the duplication of rights for some members of the Pillar and Platform when formed in 1996 – are of significance. Over the period from 1996, expectations of social partnership were rising, and the Community Platform became a focus for articulating more aspirations from additional groups. As this membership widened, the Platform became the funnel for a diverse range of issues – sometimes issues over which social partnership had little scope to act – which caused the Platform to become unwieldy and restive in the context of social partnership. Moreover, pressure grew to increase the number of seats for the Platform within the Pillar. In addition, there is some correspondence between external developments and the internal dynamics of the Pillar. When the political establishment’s crisis of legitimacy was at its greatest in the early phase, the CVP was relatively united and focused. In the late 1990s, as the big issue of unemployment was surmounted, there was a tendency for different elements in the Pillar to pursue different objectives, with a resultant loss of its high profile. When the political and economic scene changed again in 2002, the tensions in the CVP increased. In the course of 2002, sections of the Pillar – mostly in the Platform – engaged in some protest walkouts over various issues; some of these issues were tangential to the social partnership process. In the same year there was a serious disagreement among organisations in the Platform (and the Pillar) over the level of representation for the Platform within the Pillar. Together, these

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internal difficulties contributed to a split which also coincided with differences within the Pillar over whether to sign off on Sustaining Progress in early 2003. Tables 5.3 and 5.4 together show the organisational expression of these underlying dynamics, which are pursued in more depth in the detailed chapters that follow, in particular Chapter 7 on the CWC and Chapter 8 on CORI Justice.

Conclusions This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of some key factors in the origins and dynamics of the CVP. A central issue is that the source of the Pillar lies in a prior period of major economic fiscal and social crisis and a crisis of legitimation for the political establishment. The adoption of social partnership in 1987 only partly addressed the crisis that separated the political elite from the demos. The new associations that emerged to articulate major social grievances were cutting with the grain of public alienation from government due to the widespread impact of unemployment, poverty and forms of social marginalisation. Clearly, the alliance of small associations that the Pillar comprised did not have the same type of bargaining power as other actors such as employer or trade union interests. Yet the significance of the CVP cannot be encapsulated simply in terms of being a ‘moral’ influence. Its influence waxed and waned – often inversely with the crisis of legitimacy of the political system. The Pillar could not have been conceived – let alone created – had it not been for the very exceptional circumstances of the late 1980s and early 1990s that generated a crisis of legitimacy for the political elite. While the elements in the CVP pursued policy objectives even when there was government resistance, the influence of the Pillar fluctuated in the context of shifts in the demos. The study of the CVP, therefore, needs to take changing circumstances in the economic and the political cycle into account. In adopting this general standpoint it becomes possible for researchers to avoid simplistic conclusions as to the fate or significance of the Pillar. Broad generalisations about the Pillar as presented in existing interpretations of social partnership tend to oversimplify its significance. A more dynamic concept of unequal or asymmetric engagement is required to capture the more contingent character of the Pillar’s influence and significance. The capacity of small forces to have an impact in institutions where bigger players operate depends critically on the wider context and legitimacy conferred by the demos. Elected governments and powerful interest groups are not invulnerable to this reality in a democracy. The concept of asymmetry acknowledges the relatively limited resources and bargaining power of small organisations but this does not imply incorporation by the state. Fluctuations in government legitimacy play a part in opening opportunities for policy entrepreneurship by small and mobile

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organisations with a clear analysis and strategy. Nor do asymmetries in power assume that small organisations must reinvent themselves (i.e. redefine their interests or identities) in the process of interaction with other social partners. On the contrary, they may be most effective if they can define their goals clearly and persist with them on the basis that sooner or later their argument and the general interest, as perceived by the demos, will coincide. Thus, a clear identity rather than a permeable one may pay a better dividend in the longer run. Because of its internal tensions, the experience of the ‘community sector’ in social partnership is difficult to appreciate when the focus is only on the overall level of the Pillar, and sharper insights can be gained from an exploration of specific players in the Pillar. Therefore, the next four chapters try to follow distinct organisational narratives of the key actors within the Pillar. Each of the organisations discussed reveals distinct and important aspects of the origins, significance and impact of the Pillar as a whole, as well as the internal dynamics of the Pillar. The more detailed studies show how small organisations can bring different types and levels of expertise and experience to bear in the policy process, and represent less well-­organised social interests, where they are often rooted. The studies show that windows of opportunity arise for small organisations with a worked-­out analysis and arguments. They show how small organisations can sometimes punch above their own weight while at other times they appear to achieve little despite a great deal of effort.

Notes  1 This move by Fine Gael was known as the Tallaght Strategy, after the location of the meeting where it was formulated.  2 ‘The government will maintain the overall value of social welfare benefits and within the resources available, will consider special provision for greater increases for those receiving the lowest payments’ (Government of Ireland 1987: 13).  3 The government only committed to moving to the Commission on Social Welfare ‘priority rates’ over the following three years. These rates were a political contrivance designed to provide a stepping stone towards the recommended minimum payments (set at a range of £50–£60 in 1986 money). The cost to the exchequer for this step was put at £65m compared to £327m to meet the recommended rates (Government of Ireland 1990: 21-­23)  4 Tripartism arises out of a context of industrial relations and corporatism that is well understood as such in comparative literature. ‘Multipartite’ partnership has a distinct provenance in European (Andersen and Mailand 2002) and Irish contexts (Vestergaard 2001).  5 Information on partnership companies is available on the PLANET website www.planet. ie/about.html and from POBAL.  6 The 1990s saw a Green Paper on relations between the state and voluntary sector and there was a White Paper in 2000. This was another response to the restiveness of a range of ‘third sector’ organisations in the context of economic stress and state cutbacks – which often affected the sector directly.  7 Fianna fáil formed an administration with 81 out of 166 seats.  8 Mary Robinson’s candidacy was sponsored by the Labour Party.

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 9 IBEC is the product of a merger between the Federated Union of Employers (FUE) and the Confederation of Irish Industry (CII) 10 ICTU originated in 1896 as the ITUC, but was divided into two federations from 1945 to 1959, when it was reunited. Since then it has operated on behalf of the majority of Irish trade unions. Over time the number of trade unions has fallen – particularly following mergers in the late 1980s and 1990s. 11 TCD Professor of Politics Basil Chubb.

6 Reversal of fortune: the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed T

Introduction The Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) was one of the key forces in the initial push to open the institutions of social partnership to new actors from the community and voluntary sector. The INOU is a good example of an organisation cast up by the rising tide of unemployment in the 1980s. It captured some high ground on the strength of its criticisms of government failures and its policy entrepreneurship and was probably the most important organisation triggering a process that led in the end to the creation of the CVP. This chapter reviews the origins of the INOU, its aims and philosophy, objectives and relations with other civil society actors and the state, up to and in the course of social partnership. The chapter seeks to bring out the experience of the INOU in social partnership as a good illustration of the concept of asymmetric engagement in the case of the CVP. One interesting aspect here is that while the INOU sought to participate in social partnership as a part of the labour side in a tripartite model, its entry to social partnership was to place it in a new and separate pillar, alongside voluntary and community organisations. Another interesting aspect is that the influence of the INOU was arguably at its peak in 1996, before it became a social partner, but waned thereafter. Its experience in negotiating Partnership 2000 in 1996 (Government of Ireland 1996) is particularly important in illustrating the way in which the influence of small organisations can work. Then, in the late 1990s, the trend in unemployment was dramatically reversed and the effect of this reduced the profile and impact of the INOU in social partnership. By the late 1990s and early 2000s the INOU had moved into a very different space. As unemployment gave way to labour shortages the INOU focus shifted to service issues, though it retained its individual membership and continued to respond to issues, but its ‘heroic’ phase had clearly passed. While it participated in some of the protests over the implementation of the PPF (in 2002), and was unhappy with Sustaining Progress in 2003, it nevertheless signed up to the new pact. Its

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heart was with the Community Platform, which rejected the pact, but its head kept it with the CVP.

Emergence of the INOU In order to assist the reader to keep track of the account of the INOU, Table 6.1 provides a chronology of the main landmarks on its ‘long march through the institutions’, covering the context and preceding events surrounding its foundation in 1987, its initial policies, strategy and tactics, and its eventual engagement with the NESF, NESC and social partnership. Foundation and engagement with trade unions Unemployment in Ireland had been nudging upwards when the first oil shock in 1973 ushered in a period of stagflation and was a focus of growing concern for trade unions in the 1980s (Irish Congress of Trade Unions 1984). The general election of 1987 saw the installation of a minority FiannaFáil government facing large debts, deficits and an unemployment rate of 16.3%, of which two thirds were long-­term unemployed, as shown in Table 6.2. Against this backdrop, the early 1980s saw various attempts to organise the unemployed in grassroots organisations such as the Unemployed Workers’ Alliance and some local trade union branches. This activism was characterised by a mix of ‘traditional’ working-­class ideologies. By the early 1980s there were ‘centres for the unemployed’, both independent and linked to the ICTU. Royall (2000) confirms that although the trade unions were typically assumed to speak for the unemployed, there was no national focal point before 1987. In spring 1987, following increases  in the live register1 from 86,000 in January 1981 to 245,100 in December 1986, a national conference was held in Dublin. As a key respondent from the INOU recollected: It was in 1987 that the organisation was founded and it was in the middle of a very rapid and seemingly unstoppable increase of unemployment and emigration and a lot of dissatisfaction about the response of government and the response of the trade union movement and so on, and there were a number of rumours of an attempt to set up various national umbrella groups for the unemployed – and the Dublin Council of Trade Unions at the time took the initiative of bringing some of those groups together and having a meeting to see where it would go. (MA)

Various organisations, from trade unions to church and community groups, attended the founding conference but, significantly, a number of ‘previously invisible unemployed organisations were emerging into the light’ (Allen 1998: 133). One of the first demands of the conference was for the implementation of the 1986 CSW recommendations on minimum social welfare payments, with calls by some for militant demonstrations to demand government action. Six months later a smaller conference met to adopt a constitution

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Table 6.1  INOU and social partnership landmarks Year

Landmark

1980s

Live register of unemployed rose from 86,000 in January 1981 to 245,100 in December 1986; unemployment (International Labour Office basis) rose from 180,000 to 226,000 between 1983 and 1986 (Central Statistics Office); formation of several local unemployed groups and centres Commission on Social Welfare recommendations on minimum social welfare payments INOU founding conference; INOU criticised the Programme for National Recovery (PNR), negotiated by the ‘traditional social partners’ and government Campaigning against Jobsearch programme, later withdrawn by government INOU received first dedicated funding from the Department of Social Welfare Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP) wider in scope than PNR, but criticised by INOU for failures on social welfare and unemployment 1992 protest march was of only limited scale; improved Labour Party vote leads to new centre-­left coalitions from 1993 to 1997 INOU joins newly established National Economic and Social Forum (NESF); Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW) agreed between traditional social partners and government, ‘rejected’ in a straw poll of INOU members INOU input to NESF report Ending Long-­term Unemployment (June) Task Force on unemployment, which issued a report in 1995 (Task Force on Long-­term Unemployment 1995); INOU member sits on the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) INOU participates in Community Platform; gains independent seat in negotiations for Partnership 2000; makes significant inputs and secures Commission on Social Welfare recommended rates within Partnership 2000; Local Employment Service promised Booming economy brings major improvement in unemployment rate and level; social welfare focus shifts from unemployment and consistent poverty to issue of relative shares and minimum wage issues; centre-­right coalition elected (1997–2002) Negotiations for Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) focus on benchmarking social welfare to pay; votes to accept PPF; committee on benchmarking of social welfare rates alongside other Pillar representatives Centre-­right coalition re-­elected (2002-­7); INOU joins protest walkout with Community Platform over range of issues INOU votes to accept Sustaining Progress despite reservations; remains within social partnership but is sympathetic to those excluded Supports Towards 2016

1986 1987 1988 1991 1990 1992 1993

1994 1995 1996

1997–99

1999– 2000 2002 2003 2006

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Table 6.2  Labour force, unemployed and long-­term unemployed Period

Year Labour Unemployed Long-­term* Unemployed Long-­term unemployed rate (%) unemployed force (000) (000) rate (%) (000)

April April April April April April April April April April Mar–May Mar–May

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

1,327.7 1,307.8 1,332.1 1,354.4 1,371.8 1,403.2 1,431.6 1,459.2 1,507.5 1,539.0 1,621.1 1,688.1

217.0 196.8 172.4 198.5 206.6 220.1 211.0 177.4 179.0 159.0 126.6  96.9

137.8 128.0 110.2 119.7 116.5 125.4 128.2 103.3 103.3  86.3  63.5  41.6

16.3 15.0 12.9 14.7 15.1 15.7 14.7 12.2 11.9 10.3  7.8  5.7

10.4  9.8  8.3  8.8  8.5  8.9  9.0  7.1  6.9  5.6  3.9  2.5

* Longer than 12 months Source: CSO QNHS 4th Quarter 1999: Table 9 (ILO basis)

and gear up for a protracted campaign for jobs. Prominent trade union leader Billy Attlee struck a welcoming if cautious note at the meeting (Allen 1998). The founders of the INOU were trade union-­minded, and regarded the employed and unemployed as sharing a broadly common economic interest. Without the support of some trade unions the INOU would not have survived initially – the Local Government and Public Services Union (LGPSU), the Workers’ Unity Trust (WUT) and the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union (ATGWU) supported the INOU (O’Reilly 1990) in various ways. The INOU criticised the outcome of national pay talks – the Programme for National Recovery (PNR) in 1987 negotiated by the trade unions – and there were tensions with the unions due to this, but the INOU was later equally critical of the PESP (1990) and the PCW (1993) as these pacts related to the unemployed. It was unemployed people who established the INOU (Allen 1998: 3–4). The INOU’s first general secretary was Eugene Hickland and he was succeeded by Mike Allen,2 both originally from from the Galway Association of the Unemployed. Staffing for a Dublin Office came via the Social Employment Scheme (SES – later it became Community Employment), a scheme to enable unemployed people to work in a part-­time capacity in non-­profit organisations. Resources were minimal, with not even a phone at the beginning, and a room loaned by the Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland (FWUI). Small one-­off monies came later from the Rowntree Trust and Catherine Howard Foundation. The leadership of the new INOU was a pragmatic alliance of broadly left,

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trade union-­minded and often politically non-­aligned people. As one respondent put it, three things were needed: first a ‘political vehicle’ to express the interests of unemployed; second, ‘a programme for that political vehicle to articulate’ and, third, ‘a place around the table or within the halls where these things are discussed’ (MA). From its earliest stages, the INOU was active in Europe. It helped to establish the European Network of the Unemployed organisations (ENU) and linked up with European social NGOs through which it was linked by the European Anti-­Poverty Network. Through these networks, submissions were made to all the key European policy papers, helping the INOU to develop its expertise,3 and to learn from the wider network in Europe. Aims, analysis and orientation of the INOU The INOU soon set out its policies in a pamphlet entitled There’s Work to be Done (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 1989). Two core aims for policy, which were repeated in various forums around the time, were to reduce unemployment to less than 100,000 by the end of the 1990s (the live register had peaked at 250,000 in 1988/9), and to end ‘involuntary emigration’, which was surging in the late 1980s. The pamphlet advocated a ‘credible’ economic and industrial strategy, emphasising that matters could not be left to the free market alone, and called for a public sector investment arm, a National Development Corporation to help establish several indigenous firms. Solidarity through organisation One great difficulty for the INOU and local centres was to create a positive sense of identity and motivation for the unemployed. Status identification needs something positive, as in the case of class, ethnicity or gender, which the individual embraces in the long term. As Allen put it, ‘proud to be unemployed’ is a ‘non-­starter as a rallying call’ (Allen 1998: 119). The real challenge for the INOU was an organisational approach to incorporating the interests of unemployed people with the trade union movement. While drawing inspiration from Irish labour history, such as the Dublin Unemployed Association (DUA) and the Unemployment Protest Committee (UPC) of the 1950s, the INOU leadership saw the late 1980s as very different times presenting different circumstances and requiring different tactics. The INOU thus began to establish a niche for itself as a credible and articulate protagonist of the interests of the unemployed, alongside the trade unions.

Capacity-­building and engagement In fact, as it evolved, the base of the INOU was more diverse. In 1989 the INOU carried out a detailed study of its affiliated bodies (McGinn and

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Allen 1991): the study provided a valuable profile of the INOU affiliate base and ­activities.  Affiliates varied in size, from 4 to 250 members; the level of ­formalisation in affiliates was varied (McGinn and Allen 1991). Services were the main  focus of affiliates, but campaigning was also prominent. Staffing for affiliates came from the SES (later CE) and further support was garnered from church bodies, trade unions, the Combat Poverty Agency, local authorities, voluntary trusts and from the European Union. The INOU concluded that the local associations were ‘significant representatives of unemployed people’ and the INOU itself was ‘a legitimate voice of the unemployed at national level’. Among the findings, campaigning for jobs was seen as essential. Public policies to tackle unemployment were clearly inadequate, and solutions had to be found, particularly in the case of the long-­term unemployed. Campaigning on issues of income adequacy was also to be a key priority, on behalf of the unemployed and their dependants. The study helped the INOU to position itself in relation to other parts of civil society, particularly the trade union movement and local community-­based organisations, by co-­ordinating campaigns, drawing on the experience of local associations and lobbying state agencies and public representatives ‘to promote full employment and to defend (the) rights of the unemployed’ (McGinn and Allen 1991: 38). The INOU saw itself both as a link to the trade union movement nationally and a significant component in the community and voluntary sector and was also prepared to engage with government. The INOU and its affiliates deserved statutory support ‘for their future funding and development’ if they were to contribute fully to ‘community and national solutions to unemployment’, according to McGinn and Allen. They continued: Associations provide a local and trusted link with communities which state services need but cannot for historic or practical reasons achieve directly. This has enormous potential for government and public bodies which are in danger of losing real contact with increasingly alienated communities. However, such potential can only be realised where the independence of voluntary associations is maintained (McGinn and Allen 1991: 39).

Specifically the INOU sought statutory core funding for itself, analogous to statutory funding arrangements with the National Women’s Council of Ireland or National Youth Council, which the state ‘recognised as providing an informed lobby, independent from government, on behalf of their constituencies, and are resourced to that end’ (McGinn and Allen 1991: 42). Relations with the trade unions The INOU viewed social partnership as a bargaining process built around the labour–capital relationship, and itself as representing a large and disenfranchised section of labour: ‘we were saying that labour is less able to negotiate its best interest because 20% of its strength is not at the table and so the employers

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are going to get a better deal’ (MA). Despite the growth in unemployment, the Irish trade unions were not known for their interest in unemployed members (Roche and Larragy 1987: 30-­31). Unity of employed and unemployed interests would give the unions a more encompassing view. The INOU saw itself as part of the working-­class movement, complementing the trade unions and supporting politics of a social-­democratic hue. Though the trade unions would seem natural allies of the unemployed, Allen allowed that ‘workplace interests’ of employed and unemployed can diverge (1998: 285). Another difference of emphasis arose in the approach to taxation. Allen described the ICTU in the early 1990s as supporting tax reform by widening the standard rate tax band, which reflected the interests of better organised and often better paid members,  whereas the INOU always emphasised raising basic allowances (Allen 1998: 284). In October 1990, a conference was jointly organised by the National Campaign for Welfare Reform and the INOU on the topic, Ending Poverty, Trade Unions and the Poor – The Same Struggle. This conference publicly reflected the strong orientation towards trade unions among the INOU leadership, though not on the basis of a defined stance on social partnership. There were calls for a major assault on long-­term unemployment (Flynn 1990). Although the INOU had been very critical of the Programme for National Recovery, respondents interviewed for this study from the INOU were mainly critical of the outcome rather than the principle. The conference discussed ‘National Agreements and Social Reform’ and a key contributor, Laurence Bond, who reviewed the experience of countries with neo-­corporatist traditions, concluded that they had met with more success in general than non-­ corporatist countries in Europe on employment, social justice and equality. He added that he supported ‘further moves down this road’, noting, ‘to be honest, I fail to see what the alternative is’ (Bond 1990). This view was partly echoed in Mike Allen’s closing comments to the conference (Allen 1990). Other community and voluntary organisations From the outset, the INOU distinguished itself from other community and voluntary organisations and, when the Programme for Competitiveness and Work was negotiated in 1993/4, the INOU declared that it was de jure a social partner and symbolically voted against the agreement. But there was competition from a number of politically diverse community and voluntary associations and the views of the INOU differed markedly from some of its future bedfellows in the Pillar, in particular the ideas of CORI Justice, for adopting an ‘end of work’ hypothesis, proffering the concept of a basic income as an alternative solution to full employment. Nevertheless the two organisations found much common ground on the immediate priorities around social welfare. Good relations developed between the INOU and the CWC, which one

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INOU respondent regarded as an ‘honest broker’ in the context of several community and voluntary organisations involved in social partnership because its agenda specifically included the promotion of participative democracy. However, the INOU was more pragmatic than the CWC, and focused on its own goals and securing its own opportunities for engagement with government. Relations with the Women’s Council were not necessarily harmonious initially, and NWCI respondents suggested the INOU’s analysis lacked a gender dimension. Nevertheless they found common ground in a joint campaign on access to training for women called ‘Breaking the Barriers’ (see Chapter 9 on NWCI). The emergence of the NESF (see below) with its wide representation of organisations and interests faced the INOU with the challenge of ‘knocking heads together’ and they learned to work out common positions and focus less on their differences. Campaigning and protest While full employment was the main INOU goal, its immediate focus was on the current circumstances of the unemployed and policies to reduce unemployment. The INOU’s approach was to seek policies that would turn economic growth into employment on the one hand, and policies to protect and improve social welfare entitlements and claimant conditions on the other. It also called for activation measures such as meaningful education, training and labour market measures. Income maintenance was a central concern, but not exclusive to the unemployed. Of more particular interest were conditions at labour exchanges, which were already grim in many parts of the country, and worsened with the growing numbers signing on. Many of the local associations had sprung up in response to such issues during the 1980s and they were no less important in the INOU. One of the first campaigns of the INOU was around the government’s Jobsearch programme, introduced in 1987 by Fianna Fáil as a crude form of activation policy, which had little regard for the dearth in employment opportunities and simply emphasised ‘stick’ rather than ‘carrot’ to no useful purpose. The exercise was seen as humiliating and punitive of the unemployed and amounted only to churning people through job-­seeking training activities with little prospect of progression. A question from the Labour leader in opposition on the progression rate for people seen under the programme in Tralee, Co. Kerry, elicited the reply that while 4,218 were interviewed and 1,121 were ‘placed’, only 80 were placed in job vacancies, while the rest were put on various training and work experience schemes (Dáil Éireann 1987). Famously, on one training course when there was no equipment with which to offer training in telephone skills, trainees were asked to improvise by using bananas.4 An INOU protest demonstration demanding a meeting with the Department of Labour on Jobsearch was a double-­edged sword. While it was

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possible to mobilise people, an INOU delegation soon met with well-­prepared officials who challenged its claims on the treatment of claimants as anecdotal. For the INOU, this highlighted the need for analysis and, duly, a critique of Jobsearch by Laurence Bond was published in the journal Administration (Bond 1988). Following continued exposure, Jobsearch was eventually scaled down (Allen 1998: 138-­139). In 1989, following this experience, the INOU launched a campaign, ‘A Better Deal on the Dole’, which involved a survey of hundreds of live register claimants. Many claimants raised the issue of privacy when signing on, and the indignities associated with the process, such as queuing in the rain. Over the course of the 1990s, there were some improvements, and even the renaming of labour exchanges as social welfare offices. Also, weekly signing-­on requirements were reduced and, in some cases, payments were made in post offices (though the latter often gave rise to privacy problems too). Initially, the weight of INOU activity was on campaigning. Over time, it developed a more elaborate approach to policy development and intervention, as well as developing its expertise in providing welfare advice and information to the unemployed. Centrally, and through the affiliated centres, the INOU took up issues facing unemployed people and engaged in advocacy and protest activity including pickets, leafleting and petitions. Attempts by the Department of Social Welfare to clamp down on fraud, often involving humiliating confrontations at labour exchanges, became an issue from the late 1980s: the Department took the view that its control procedures needed strengthening while the INOU sought to fend off harassment of the unemployed. In 1991, the INOU received dedicated funding from the Department of Social Welfare – with which it developed a working relationship – towards the employment of a welfare rights officer. The post was taken up by Mary Murphy. This led to useful engagement with the Department: We had direct meetings with the people who were in the policy and planning unit and the legislation unit so we met them prior to the development of social welfare legislation … I think we did bring in relatively good feedback and they actually used it in their policy. (MM)

By 1994 the INOU was producing a variety of publications including a welfare handbook and leaflets for unemployed people providing practical information and advice, as well as a series of five pre-­budget papers on different themes including child poverty. The INOU also made submissions to the EU on Social Policy, which was being refocused around promoting employment in the mid 1990s (interview with MM), and this in turn helped the INOU in Ireland. At the European level, the INOU had established links with the European Network of the Unemployed (ENU) and campaigned in it for an attempt at simultaneous

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marches in several countries. 6 October 1992 saw a National Day of Action, the fruition of months of planning of a national march for jobs, to coincide with European-­wide campaigning activity on unemployment. It had been hoped that the unemployed would mobilise in large numbers, based on what had been achieved in the 1950s unemployment marches, as the scale of unemployment seemed to warrant such a response. The 1992 march, as it turned out, was only of limited size, with between 2,000 and 3,000 participating. Peter Cassells (Cassells 1989) of the ICTU addressed the rally, as did Johnny Mooney, a veteran of the 1950s campaign days. But, Allen concluded, ‘such demonstrations of strength did more to suggest weakness’ (Allen 1998: 276). Allen relates that the effort alone cost the INOU heavily in organisational terms and resources. Royall (2000) confirmed that the level of militant action in the 1980s was sporadic and fragmented, without national co-­ordination, and generally petered out, and was perceived as ineffective by the emerging national ­leadership. Allen disagreed with the conclusion of Royall (2000) that the only power of the unemployed is to disrupt. Of the street actions, he concluded, ‘in themselves they were successes’ but ultimately they failed to ‘influence decision-­making’ (Allen 1998: 279). In the context of the early 1990s, Allen identified both the necessity and opportunity to engage constructively with the state, particularly due to the emergence of social partnership: During the long flat grinding years we must have other strategies … In fact, the current political structures allow other forms of access to decision-­making which can produce better results for unemployed people than marching down the street in ever smaller numbers. (Allen 1998: 280)

While the INOU looked to the unemployment campaign of the late 1950s for inspiration (with its protests, electoral success and even hunger strikes), times had changed (Allen 1998: 125). The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a shift across the trade union movement towards a different approach with less industrial action and more collaboration with the state and employers. In that context, the politics of protest was unlikely to carry the day. At the same time, the INOU tried to counter the drift towards an apolitical service model by introducing a category of individual membership to bring in more unemployed people directly. Tony Monks was assigned the task of recruiting individual members and noted in an interview: They functioned, and it worked up to a point, but anybody who was expecting a mass membership organisation I think [was] rather naive [and] would be quickly disillusioned. (TM)

The early 1990s were a time for capacity-­building by the INOU during which they developed innovative policies as an alternative to the punitive measures that were propagated in the 1980s. Ongoing contact with individual government departments laid the basis for increased trust between

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government officials and the INOU. This was important against the background of ‘Workfare’ in the US under the Reagan/Bush administrations up to 1992, and in light of the British experience under Thatcher. The INOU saw its role in part as defending against coercive approaches to active labour market policies, as Mike Allen noted in an interview: I think absolutely, definitely, that would have been introduced into Ireland, to no good for the people who had to go through them, if it hadn’t been for the presence of the INOU. (MA)

From streets to corridors: the INOU and social partnership While the INOU continued to combine protest and lobbying, the accent gradually shifted to engagement. As another respondent said, In the beginning it was about mobilising unemployed people to politically assert their rights and demands, so it was about trying to organise strong local groups, gear them up to be campaigning, lobbying organisations, a lot of street campaigns, demos, stunts, you know, ‘on the ground stuff’. (MM)

Ultimately, the INOU embarked on a strategy of what they described as the ‘long march through the institutions’ i.e. to seek representative status alongside the ‘social partners’ on behalf of a section of the labour force who were excluded from the partnership process. The INOU was particularly critical of the first agreement, the 1987 Programme for National Recovery (PNR): The underlying assumption in that agreement [was]: we don’t particularly need to talk about unemployment in any real sense but it will come right as a result of what we are doing here [through] some sort of undefined process. (MA)

But it was not clear whether the membership were unhappy about the principle or the content of the deal. The Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP), agreed in 1990, began to pose the question of participation because it was slightly wider in scope than the PNR, and it was beginning to emerge that there might be some scope for influencing policy more from within than from outside. But the INOU decided not to seek to participate in talks then either, although the issue was debated. There was a lack of confidence within the organisation as to how well it would hold up amid a plethora of experts from the state and other, better resourced social partner organisations: … we weren’t strong enough: if we were there, we weren’t sure what we would be pushing for and if we didn’t get it, we didn’t know what we would do … you wouldn’t have been strong enough to be in there, in that ring. (MA)

Instead, the INOU sought to engage with the trade unions, who promised to articulate the interests of the unemployed and to listen to the Organisation

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in the  PESP talks. However, when the INOU later became a participant in 1996,  it realised the pitfalls of leaving the unions to fight the corner of the unemployed. While the trade unions actively engaged in the wage and related negotiations, the INOU negotiator observed, ‘Once [the negotiations] moved off wages, there was nobody in government buildings except for [named ICTU official] and one or two other people’ (MA). While this neglect of the unemployed could be seen as ‘class betrayal’, he said, the INOU reading was more pragmatic: ‘It would be rare that somebody would deliberately ‘do you in’, but simply by your absence your interest isn’t put forward, and you see that when you are at the table yourself!’ (MA) The Joint Oireachtas Committee and the NESF It was to be some time, however, before the INOU got a seat at the partnership table. Before that happened it participated in the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment (JOCE), and then in the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF, the Forum), both of which were described in Chapter 5. Considerable credit for the establishment of both the JOCE and the Forum should go to the INOU. From the mid 1980s there was a protracted process of lobbying to have a national forum on unemployment.5 When the INOU formally campaigned for a forum in 1989 they got support from across the political spectrum. Public perceptions of unemployment as the most important problem were at a peak in 1991. Ninety-­six per cent of people viewed unemployment as the most important problem facing the country, according to an Irish Times poll/MRBI poll, reported on 25 June 1991. Before too long the forum idea became ‘one of those common-­sense proposals that is mentioned in chat shows and phone-­ins; it took on a life of its own’ (Allen 1998: 289). The concept of a national forum gained wider currency and was taken up in 1992 by Fine Gael leader John Bruton. The FF–PD coalition instead set up the JOCE (see Chapter 5) but it disappeared when the coalition collapsed in disagreement over other matters. Allen noted that the JOCE showed that a hybrid structure (statutory/NGO) could play a role in generating new approaches to policy and with the new FF–Labour Coalition in January 1993, it paved the way for the Labour Party proposal for a more independent format, the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF). The INOU made substantial inputs to the Forum’s early work, in particular on the subject of long-­term unemployment. For the INOU, the Forum was to prove an effective stepping stone, a training ground prior to later participation in the social partnership process. The Forum was also a vehicle for the community and voluntary sector on social policy issues that were ‘insufficiently debated between the traditional social partners’ (Allen 1998: 290–291). The INOU’s efforts led to the NESF report, Ending Long-­term Unemployment (June 1994), which contained new proposals aimed at turning growth into jobs

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and in particular addressing the issue of long-­term unemployment with new, supportive measures. A big issue in the INOU’s input to the NESF report concerned the need for a new type of Local Employment Service (LES) operating directly with the long-­term unemployed because they tended to be passed over in favour of people with greater labour market readiness. As Allen said, of the report: I think that made a very substantial difference … It does matter who gets [a job] … Even if it was just churning within the labour market, you are distributing work; you are doing something! (MA)

The INOU was against the policy orthodoxy and the practice of Foras Áiseanna Saothar (FÁS, the National Training and Employment Authority) at the time, which simply looked at overall numbers, leaving thousands of people locked in localities or schemes that had little progression. The INOU also saw the potential impact of the proposed LES if integrated into the work of local partnership companies established under PESP and the PCW: I think it had a substantial impact on the Area Partnerships who, I believe, at the time, for the most part, were drifting off into … community development and capacity-­building without any notion of how important success in the labour market and earning your living is for an individual, for a family or for a community. The LES structure … brought them back to that analysis and brought people into the groups who recognised those sort of things, so that was one impact that the forum had. (MA)

Through the NESF, the INOU prompted the government to set up a task force on unemployment (Task Force on Long-­term Unemployment 1995). The concept of the LES as expressed in the Task Force Report was some way short of the model that the INOU envisaged. It failed to address the lack of integration of various government agencies at the local level. The ideal way to address this in the opinion of the INOU was to devolve ownership of the LES to local organisations, possibly the local development partnership bodies established under the PESP and PCW (discussed in Chapter 7 on the CWC). Otherwise the LES could become a tokenistic addition to the more centralised public employment and training body, FÁS. The second criticism it made was of a tendency to regard training and schemes as equal to jobs – which the INOU rejected in favour of making paid employment or ‘real jobs’ the key goal of all labour market initiatives (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 1995). The NESF experience strengthened both the standing of the INOU with policy-­makers and its confidence that it could hold its own in the central social partnership arenas. Also, by engaging in the work of the NESF, the INOU had worked out a range of policies in dialogue with other policy actors, many of which were now in a published NESF report, which it could use as a basis for participation in partnership. As one respondent put it,

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[The NESF] made the trade union movement and the employers and senior officials more amenable to having groups like ourselves actually at the negotiations, that we were capable of putting ideas on the table, and we were capable of striking a deal and sticking with it. (MA)

Dress rehearsal: Programme for Competitiveness and Work The INOU began to gain in confidence and to seek recognition of its status as  legitimate representative of the unemployed in the national pay talks, as they were still described. In the run-­up to the signing of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, in 1993, the INOU was invited to make a presentation to the social partners. Its presentation covered issues such as dissatisfaction with current welfare policy, particularly the failure to convert economic growth into employment. Subsequent to the ‘signing off’ on the PCW by the social partners, the INOU convened a special delegate conference that took a straw poll of its members, which resulted in a ‘rejection’ of the terms. A key issue over which the agreement was opposed by the INOU was income maintenance and its failure to implement the CSW minimum recommended payments during the course of the agreement. Of course this was only a symbolic exercise, or dress rehearsal, but for the INOU it was its way of asserting that it was a legitimate participant in social partnership. It adopted a corporatist view of social partnership and  justified its place in representational terms on behalf of some 20% of  the working population who were neither employed nor represented by the trade unions. The INOU still saw itself as different – in this sense – from other community and voluntary sector organisations that began to seek social partnership status around then and as having a more clear-­cut case. Looking for a place at the table From 1993, the INOU sought its own path into social partnership and its leaders explored various avenues in the years up to 1996. When asked whether there was ever a discussion to the effect that the INOU should be a part of the trade union movement pillar within social partnership, Mike Allen responded: ‘It was discussed, yes; it was discussed in a number of ways. Ruairí Quinn, when he was Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment, encouraged us to do something we were thinking of at the time, which was to form the INOU specifically under trade union structure and affiliate to ICTU.’ The INOU met with Peter Cassells and ‘discussed that option from both perspectives [but] it wasn’t a workable system because … if we had formed a trade union we would have got two delegates, we probably would have got on the executive’. But this would have given the INOU very indirect access to social partnership: ‘So you would have had to go in as a trade union and then you would have had to reach Congress …You would be lost in the thing; … because we’d have been on the

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inside, but not able to have sufficient influence on the power structures to be satisfied’ (MA). Also, by the early 1990s there were others in the queue for social partner status and inevitably there was jockeying for places among the groups which participated in the NESF as part of the ‘third strand’. Eventually, the view that prevailed was that the community and voluntary sector should form a separate Pillar – a concept devised by the Department of the Taoiseach. The INOU was confident of getting a seat directly through that structure. However, because the Community Workers’ Co-­op (see Chapter 7) had convened the Community Platform (see Chapter 5) during 1996, the INOU hedged its bets and signed up to the Platform too. In the NESF, the issue of a new pillar in social partnership began to be broached by civil servants, albeit pragmatically. As a key INOU respondent put it, ‘They just bunged us all into one pillar and said, “right get on with it”, and what is amazing is that we did get on with it!’ (MA). In late 1996, the INOU became very prominent in the negotiations for Partnership 2000, and in subsequent negotiations for the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, in 1999/2000. Throughout, it maintained its dual position in the Platform and Pillar. Even when, in 2003, the Platform was excluded from social partnership for rejecting Sustaining Progress, the INOU was to retain its membership of the Platform, while continuing to participate in social partnership through the Pillar in its own right. Indeed, over time, the INOU position evolved from tactical involvement in the Platform to solidarity with it when the latter was excluded. Agenda-­setting at the NESC The INOU also gained representation on the National Economic and Social Council in 1995, as the Taoiseach’s nominee.6 This was a critical agenda-­setting body. The  INOU intervention in the NESF also influenced the activation policies set out in the next programme, Partnership 2000, agreed in December 1996. The European context provided a supportive backdrop for the interventions of the INOU in Ireland, particularly with the publication of a European Community (EC) White Paper on the Economy (European Community 1993), the Essen Process from 1994, and the beginnings of what was later called the EU’s open method of co-­ordination (OMC), later incorporated in the Amsterdam Treaty (Larragy 1998). The EU at the time was steering a course between Keynesianism and monetarism and laying the basis for a European Employment Strategy (EES) that superseded the OECD jobs strategy (Organisation for Economic Co-­operation and Development 1994) with a more moderated approach to activation. At the same time as the INOU was seeking access to social partnership, it had to parry attacks on the unemployed over dole fraud, after the Central Statistics Office covertly sampled people known to be on the live register under

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the cover of the 1995 Labour Force Survey, and turned up some discrepancies (Central Statistics Office 1996). Despite a brief moral panic in the press, rational debate nevertheless prevailed, not least due to the INOU influence within institutions. While there was undoubtedly some fraud, there were also good reasons for many of the ‘discrepancies’ between the live register and the Labour Force Survey as measurements of unemployment. The issue of unemployment statistics became the subject of a further NESF report (1997), which presented a balanced view. The NESC strategy (National Economic and Social Council 1996) was being hammered out when the CSO exercise was undertaken, as if to emphasise that the INOU needed to be well prepared in all its dealings with government. In the event, the NESC strategy was measured on live register control issues and fraud, and put the emphasis on activation. Similarly, the content of the new social partnership agreement (Partnership 2000) followed similar lines. The INOU can safely be credited with playing a part in this outcome. Indeed, it is in marked contrast to the incipient workfare policy of the late 1980s, critically reviewed by Bond (1988). What kind of ‘power’ or influence did the INOU have in the NESC? The insights of Bachrach and Baratz (1962) on power and on the importance of agenda-­setting were mentioned in Chapter 3. The NESC was an agenda-­setting arena, and exercised much influence before the social partnership negotiations took place. As one respondent explained, in relation to Partnership 2000 (1996), the fact that the INOU was at the talks was only one part of the real achievement and, in a sense, was only the completion of earlier work on the NESC: With Partnership 2000, the achievement came before negotiations, and the achievement was getting onto NESC – Mary Murphy’s7 appointment to NESC – which was a Taoiseach’s appointment at the time, and her role in negotiating a package … for social inclusion. (MA)

In previous rounds of negotiations (in 1987, 1990 and 1993), there had been no involvement by the INOU or other community groups in the preparatory discussions at the NESC. Usually they made submissions to government prior to the ‘pay talks’ and were not privy to what was discussed in the preparatory groundwork at NESC until the NESC strategy was published. There was no ‘package’ for social inclusion in the three earlier social partnership deals because the ground was not prepared at the NESC. The innovation in 1996 was that the NESC deliberations and NESC Strategy earmarked this provision in advance of the Partnership 2000 talks. In effect, certain commitments had been pencilled in during the deliberations at the NESC, and it was just a question of getting these ‘nailed down’ in the negotiations. The earlier involvement was critical:

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Mary [Murphy] was there the next time round [1996], and was able to mark out that space, and that meant that when we got into the negotiations there was a place to be. Two things: if Mary hadn’t been able to bring her experience … and analysis of the processes which had led up to the negotiations, on one hand … and secondly, [if we didn’t] have that specific hook to hang our demands on, we would have been completely at sea; and that was absolutely crucial. (MA)

After the process at the NESC, where the social partners – in ‘deliberative’ mode – set the agenda, much of the partnership talks consisted of wage bargaining and a tax package designed to achieve a given take home pay rise while gross wage growth was moderated. Various other issues would be a matter of topping and tailing because they were explored at the NESC stage, and informally over a period before the talks. The lesson drawn by the INOU was: If you come in when all that has been done and you don’t know about it being done, and you don’t know what the issues are … you’re going to get footnotes, you know, and an adjective is all you’re going to get! But because she, or the INOU, had done that [work on the NESC] … we were able to bring that into the Pillar – and that was available to everybody in the Pillar, not just the INOU – and that made an enormous difference. (MA)

The importance of the NESC strategy report is clearly evident in the detailed presentation from the INOU to government on 23 October 1996 when the unemployed were first represented at the talks (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 1997). The document dovetailed with the NESC strategy, putting the accent on the key areas of interest to the unemployed while adopting a discourse of broadly shared objectives. The approach was to acknowledge the broad constraints and competing demands on government policy while putting the accent on how to address unemployment and welfare matters in a supportive and constructive way. The presentation covered everything from macro-­economic policy to institutional issues related to developing social partnership. It called for tax and social welfare reform and adjustments designed to address poverty and unemployment traps, without making welfare recipients worse off. It supported the retention of certain primary and secondary benefits and reforms such as free medical care (medical card scheme) to all children, and substantial increases in child benefit. While these were not deal-­breakers, and would not necessarily be included in the deal to follow, they were tailored in such a way as to be candidates for policy-­makers at later points should economic circumstances improve, or the political cycle dictate. The INOU also supported the concept of the ‘social economy’ as defined in the EC Economic White Paper (European Community 1993): In the talks, therefore, the INOU and Pillar followed through and secured significant concessions including increasing the number of Community Employment places from 25,000 to 40,000, some commitments around the number of Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme places; Back to Work Allowance places, things like that. (MM)

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There were also modifications to the in-­ work benefit, Family Income Supplement (FIS) and a promise to move towards tax credits, as a more transparent and equitable form of income taxation. Another key issue was the further development of the concept of an LES and a pilot scheme was already in existence by the time Partnership 2000 was negotiated. The LES was to provide a much more hands-­on approach to counselling and matching services for unemployed people on a local area basis. Partnership 2000 promised to extend the pilot LES ‘through the country on a phased basis, initially to areas of concentrated unemployment, such that the LES will have commenced in all designated partnership areas during the period of this Partnership’ (Government of Ireland 1996). The expanded LES was intended to provide ‘advice and support services to all those seeking work’ with priority being given to groups that might be passed by, such as long-­term claimants of means-­tested unemployment payments, dependent spouses of such claimants, claimants of other means-­tested payments, unemployed young people under the age of 18, lone parents and persons in receipt of Disability Allowance (Government of Ireland 1996: 16). A crunch issue: social welfare rates A major, indeed central issue for the INOU was poverty, and the very inadequate level of unemployment payments, and other social welfare payment rates, that prevailed in the 1980s. The CSW (1986) had addressed this issue and recommended a minimally adequate Social welfare payment of between £50 and £60 per week for an individual, in 1986 prices. The INOU had long set its sights on this target while the first three social partnership deals failed to commit to it. In 1996, however, the issue was flagged strongly in the NESC strategy (1996) with a view to meeting the minimum threshold within the duration of the coming deal. During the talks, however, the government pulled back. To the INOU, this was a disaster: years of effort with nothing to show, and it looked as though the INOU would have to reject the package. Mike Allen, who was the INOU negotiator on the CVP team in the 1996 partnership talks, stated in an interview for this study that this was a crucial demand: It had to be a deal breaker for us because it was the point at which we had essentially broken with the trade union movement’s failure to deliver it the last time. It was because they had failed to deliver it last time, that the INOU had come to the conclusion that we had to be there ourselves! (MA)

Winning that demand was one of the triggers that led the INOU to get into the talks themselves: So having got there, we couldn’t fail to deliver on it ourselves – we just simply couldn’t! You wouldn’t have got it; there was no way! Even if you had tried to deliver such a programme, you wouldn’t have got it through the membership, and you knew there was going to be a very lively debate, so it was a deal breaker. (MA)

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In fact, there was an assumption until late in the talks that the issue had been conceded but at a late stage it was pulled from the table, apparently without much reaction from the trade union pillar or other parts of the community pillar. According to one account, only the INOU and the St Vincent de Paul Society were prepared to reject the deal: Everybody else was signed up, we were the only ones not signing, the rest of the Community and Voluntary Pillar were even signing, the social partnership had finished … minimum social welfare rates were not in the deal and Vincent de Paul and INOU were walking out, nobody else was. (MM)

There were still some ongoing meetings taking place on other details at the same time as Mike Allen was en route to the RTÉ national television studio, where he was expecting to have to announce the INOU’s rejection of the deal. Just then, at the last moment, the issue was resolved. In an interview for this study, Mary Murphy recollected being at government buildings at that moment: … and [named senior civil servant] came up to me at the coffee break and he said ‘You have it’, and I said, ‘But sure Mike is after going, he is gone into RTE to the news’, and [civil servant] said, ‘Get him, stop him, don’t let him go on the telly because you have it’. I contacted Mike and, literally, De Rossa8 was there and Mike didn’t believe De Rossa, not that he didn’t believe him, like, I remember saying to [civil servant], ‘If this is a trick [first-­name] it is not going to work’, and he said, ‘I give you my word, you have it’ … There was no reason not to believe [him] and I contacted Mike, and we did go on the telly but we went on the telly to proclaim how happy we were that the rates were in the programme! But we would have walked out, we would have, and it was quite frightening to think that we would have walked out. (MM)

And so it was! In January 1997, there was a sigh of relief from the INOU negotiators and a delegate conference of the INOU ‘critically accepted’ the agreement. What type of power or influence was at work here? This was more than the power of agenda-­setting. It appears that the wider political context played a significant part. Sean Healy of CORI, in interviews for this study, suggested that Tánaiste, Dick Spring, played a part in breaking the logjam on the social welfare rates issue, as he did on other Partnership 2000 negotiations.9 Just then the prospect of an unavoidable election in 1997 loomed. It is likely that Spring sensed that his party had been elected to restore some of the balance in social terms after the years of cutbacks and austerity, and the run-­up to an election was not a time for being contradicted on that, particularly by the very elements of civil society his party had initially helped into the process through the NESF. He would also have to reckon with the revamped Fianna Fáil organisation under its new leader, Bertie Ahern, and would not be able to count on the bounce received in the November 1992 election.

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In effect, the political circumstances appear to have been propitious for the CVP. Here, as at other times, the political cycle and other factors could tip the balance in favour of – or against – the CVP in social partnership. In this case, the INOU would appear to have succeeded not simply on the basis of their intrinsic resources of social support or expertise – essential though these were. Rather, the Labour Party and the Democratic Left in government were leery of the shifting demos and were now threatened with being exposed for refusing to implement Commission rates. This – after five years in office in the case of Labour, just at the point when the state coffers were filling – was something to avoid. One respondent from the INOU even suggested that the ICTU would have been reluctant to see the rejection of Partnership 2000 by the INOU and the Pillar because it might affect voting on the deal in their own ranks: It has always been well understood that one of the most significant elements of the INOU’s influence within [social partnership] structures is its capacity to influence the trade union movement. The INOU came very close to not signing up to Partnership 2000: now, had they not signed up that would have put the trade union movement in an extremely awkward situation … (CL)

If that had happened, the government would have been in even greater difficulty, though it remains a matter of speculation as far as the present study goes. At any rate, this concession came to be easily affordable over the next few years due to sustained growth, rising employment and increasing government revenue. The estimated cost of this proposal at the time – at £100m to £125m – was easily met from the massive revenue growth of the late 1990s and further eased by falling unemployment. But this does not vitiate the significance of the concession and the achievement of the INOU in particular. The achievement of the INOU on the social welfare rates issue in Partnership 2000 is not trivial and, with the clear support of only the SVP, the INOU has to receive most of the credit. What is important to note is that the CVP organisations were not restricted to exercising moral influence but that by articulating clear goals and persisting in their pursuit they can succeed, particularly when political sentiment shifts. This sequence of events shows that even smaller organisations can play a pivotal role when circumstances are right, in relation to the positioning of greater forces – both in the political domain and in social partnership. The social welfare rates issue points to the deeper potential of small organisations with clear ideas, when the demos comes into the equation. A senior government official observed that one of the ways the CVP actors can be influential is simply by being inside the partnership process at all stages: If there’s a group around the table who have a bright idea about responding to a problem, which is a shared – or defined as a shared – problem, then if it’s within a reasonable cost frame, producing that at the right time, that can also be quite effective. (DM)

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However, is not just the timing of ‘good ideas’ in a technical sense within the process of deliberation, negotiation or lobbying that counts, but also the support such ideas command in the demos, and the balance of forces in the bargaining process at the time. In that sense the Pillar depends not only on the technical merit of ideas but also on the process of what is later described as ‘asymmetric engagement’. It is wrong to take a static view of the potential influence of small organisations in determining events: when stronger players are out of kilter with the electorate things become less predictable and a small force can tip the balance – call it ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ or, as meteorologist Edward Lorenze famously put it, ‘the Butterfly Effect’! (Gleick 1991: 23)

Plateau and decline of the INOU’s impact From Partnership 2000 to the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) Paradoxically, just when they won this concession in 1996/7, the influence of the INOU had already reached a plateau because economic and political circumstances had begun to change. Respondents from the INOU referred to a changing set of challenges in the years from 1997. The rainbow coalition was ousted following the election of May 1997. If the May 1997 general election had been postponed until the autumn the rainbow coalition’s chances of a second term might have increased: unemployment fell dramatically from almost 12% in April 1996 to less than 8% in April 1998 (see Table 6.3). Falling unemployment rates in the late 1990s were not just relative, i.e. due to increased employment, but absolute, and there was a sharp drop in the number of long-­term unemployed from 177,000 to 127,000. Growth in demand for services and increased spending power among employed skilled or highly educated workers hired in the early 1990s contributed to the Celtic Tiger boom of the late 1990s that was first driven by export-­led growth, then by private consumption and finally by public spending. The rapidity of the economic success had a major impact on the negotiating context and on the political agenda of the incoming centre-­right government. The labour market improved even before many of the special Partnership 2000 policies could have had an effect, and this changed everything for those who were geared up for tackling a more intractable unemployment problem. As the labour market improved, the political crisis around unemployment lessened, and the impact of the INOU began to decline with it. According to respondents active in the INOU at that time, their focus began to shift from the ‘big’ question of mass unemployment to the more specific areas of difficulty that tended to be overlooked – such as the need for special counselling and a holistic approach to people finding it very difficult to become attached or re-­ attached to the labour force.

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Table 6.3  Trend in unemployment rate 1994–2003 Year

Unemployment (%)

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

14.7 12.2 11.9 10.3  7.8  5.7  4.3  3.7  4.2  4.4

Source: CSO Labour Force Survey 1994–97; Quarterly National Household Survey 1998–2001 (2nd quarter, International Labour Office basis)

In the negotiations for the next agreement in 1999 (the PPF), the INOU sought a job guarantee scheme for those unemployed for over five years, for example. They also saw declining government momentum behind such initiatives as the LES, and a tendency for the traditional FÁS approach to reassert itself. Political factors too came into play. A new FF–PD coalition was elected partly on a populist agenda of cutting taxes – after criticising the rainbow coalition for tardiness – and launched a programme with strong tax reductions at its heart (Government of Ireland 1998). The first budget of the incoming government, for 1998, focused on tax rates for middle and higher income groups rather than on basic tax allowances.10 Nevertheless the budget also started the process of moving towards tax credits instead of allowances, which the INOU had been campaigning for since 1990. At around this time, some respondents detected the beginnings of a change, and a lessening of the impact of the Pillar. As an INOU respondent put it, I’m not sure if it was because there was a change of government or whether it was connected to the economic situation and the analysis that the community and voluntary sector had. (MM)

In effect there had been common cause in relation to tackling unemployment in the first half of the 1990s but the longer-­term agenda around socio-­economic inequality was not a shared one. Referring to the government’s fickleness in relation to the CVP, this respondent felt: they were happy to engage in problem-­solving if the problem was considered to be a problem by all concerned. So, when we were all talking about poverty induced by unemployment, we were all talking the same talk, and they needed our ­solutions … But when unemployment dropped significantly and ‘consistent poverty’11 dropped significantly with it – and that was good – I think people would have liked it if we had said, ‘well thanks very much and that is great’. (MM)

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But, of course, the INOU did not leave the pitch and, in the PPF negotiations, the CVP focused on the more challenging issue of relative income poverty and a wider economic equality agenda. While the rainbow government and Partnership 2000 had combined to put social exclusion and anti-­discrimination policies into operation, on separate and parallel tracks, the CVP was grasping for a more radical combination of these self-­contained elements: We started talking about the next challenge, or the parallel challenge, being the inequality from the point of view of anti-­discrimination, but also from the point of view of income inequality. I think that is where the divergence happened. (MM)

The distance of the CVP’s position from the post-­ 1997 government was ­particularly evident in the occasional vocal taunts delivered by the Minister for Finance, who referred disparagingly to the ‘poverty industry’ for instance; ­but some divergence might have occurred anyway, had the outgoing government been returned to office: I’ve a funny feeling that the coalition government before that – the rainbow ­coalition – I think their heart was in unemployment and consistent poverty … I’m not really sure how much they would have been that happy to have taken on the bigger challenge of inequality, even though in theory the rainbow coalition should have been more keen on the structural stuff around inequality. (MM)

The 1999 budget intensified the reduction of tax rates and promoted individualisation to favour households with two income earners, and there was a trend subsequently towards a retraction of various active labour market policies, threats to reduce Community Employment and a lessening urgency about the development of the LES. According to the INOU, the budget for 2000, which continued with the minister’s preferences for low tax rates on the higher paid, nearly derailed the partnership negotiations at that moment because it paid such menial increases in social welfare and left many of the lowest paid workers liable for tax. The framework of social partnership was kept afloat nonetheless but there was a growing sense of confidence among elements in the government. There was also some pressure to restore and increase public spending in health and education, which followed in the budgets for 2001 and 2002 – ahead of a general election due in May 2002. From movement to service provider? Against this backdrop, things were changing for the INOU as an organisation as new resources came through the Anti-­Poverty Networks Programme under the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy and, in the buoyant job conditions, its affiliate base shifted from the local unemployed groups to community and voluntary sector agencies (for example Citizen Information Centres). The resources of the INOU grew considerably over the ten years following its foundation.12 More significant than that is the source of its income. In its 1998 Annual

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Report there was no reference specifically to affiliate body contributions or to trade union funding. Instead, the bulk of the funding came from statutory sources, including the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs (DSCFA), the Combat Poverty Agency, the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment and FÁS (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 1998: 17). So, paradoxically, as things became easier, the prominence of the INOU began to decline and, of all the four organisations reviewed in this study of the Pillar, it was perhaps one of the most at-­risk of losing the initiative for promoting change. Another development was the loss of its original personnel around this time: Mike Allen moved on to become general secretary of the Labour Party, Mary Murphy left to work for the SVP as a policy analyst and Camille Loftus, who had been actively involved in the PPF preparations, also moved on, while Tony Monks, formerly an officer in the INOU, became general secretary from May 2000, but was soon succeeded by Eric Conroy in 2001, who was a newcomer to the organisation – and part of a new guard. Linking social welfare to earnings The INOU was by then much less prominent, but the ‘old guard’ contributed actively in the work preceding the negotiations for the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, through a sub-­group of the CVP on income ­maintenance policy (Camille Loftus on behalf of the INOU, Mary Murphy, by then with SVP, and Fr Sean Healy of CORI Justice). This sub-­group worked up proposals on ‘benchmarking social welfare to average earnings’ for the PPF talks. Various formulations of this were considered – net or gross average industrial earnings and alternative percentages of industrial earnings were discussed and subsequently came up in negotiations. Eventually gross average industrial earnings (GAIE) became the focus; it was a less than ideal benchmark but one for which available data at the time was better than other income variables. Although efforts to have the link agreed in the partnership negotiations were unsuccessful, the INOU and the other members of the Pillar were to sign off on the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) at the beginning of 2000. The level of revenue buoyancy at the time made it possible for government to provide substantial concessions on social welfare and other demands put forward by the Pillar, and it was hard to justify rejection of the deal. The INOU’s February 2000 Bulletin noted the benefits of the PPF, which included a £1.5 billion social inclusion package, or a tripling of what was committed under Partnership 2000. The INOU described this and other commitments as ­victories – and they were indeed significant landmarks (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 2000). Following the campaign to have social welfare linked to average earnings, the PPF included provision for a working group, under an independent

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chairman (Dr Kieran Kennedy, former Director of the Economic and Social Research Institute – ESRI), ‘to examine benchmarking and indexation issues, including their long-­term economic, budgetary, PRSI [pay-­related social insurance] contribution, distributive and incentive implications, in light of trends in economic, demographic and labour market patterns and to report by April 2001’ (Government of Ireland 2000: 80). Also, while the PPF did not commit to a linkage, it provided that in the event that economic growth was in excess of the expected rates, achieving increased social welfare rates ‘will be a high priority’ (Government of Ireland 2000). The latter wording was dubbed the ‘escalator clause’ by elements in the Pillar – it was vague enough to be conceded, but clear enough to be invoked later by the CVP should the opportunity arise. However, in the 2000s the lead on this issue shifted from the INOU to CORI (see Chapter 8 on CORI for a fuller account of this topic) and the INOU star dimmed somewhat by comparison. When it reported in 2001, the Working Group on Benchmarking and Indexation of Social Welfare accommodated a majority and minority position by recommending a short-­term benefit rate equal to 27% of the gross average industrial wage in the near future, and possibly 30% in the longer run (INOU Press Release 5 December 2001). But the government did not act on this, and the INOU was very unhappy with the budget for 2002 because it failed to take up even the majority view of the PPF Working Group at 27%. The INOU’s 2002 pre-­budget submission for a €14 increase in all basic social welfare payments met with some success (INOU Press Release 14 November 2001). In the budget, there were weekly welfare increases of between €10 and €12. However, there was no shift by government to a principle of indexation, even if the flagging of this issue was a significant achievement that was to bear fruit some time later. Caught in the middle – Sustaining Progress (2003) As noted in Chapter 5, the general election in 2002 returned the FF–PD coalition with a stronger majority, and it immediately highlighted the international slowdown and signalled much tighter public spending controls in the foreseeable period. While other parts of the CVP were becoming restless over a range of issues, the INOU was fighting its corner in defence of gains made previously and under threat. Although it was by then more reliant than ever on government funding, the INOU held a rally at the Dáil when cuts in Community Employment were proposed even prior to the 2002 general election. But the Programme for Government after the election in June 2002 confirmed the cuts. The INOU called another protest rally outside Leinster House (the parliament building) calling for ‘consultation not cuts’ (INOU Press Release 5 June 2002), but the tide was against them. As recorded in Chapter 5 there was also a protest walkout from a meeting with government by the Community Platform during the final stages of

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the PPF in 2002, which angered the government. The INOU had joined this walkout (as did SVP) but later, when the voting on Sustaining Progress took place in early 2003, the INOU reluctantly signed off despite being very critical of its terms – evidently sensing the risks of expulsion and threats to its funding. At the same time, matters came to a head within the Community Platform and Pillar. The INOU found itself caught in the middle between CORI and the CWC (as also did the SVP). CORI had opposed the token walkout in 2002 and also fought against a bid to increase the voting power of the Community Platform within the Pillar during 2002. In the midst of talks for Sustaining Progress, in December 2002, the INOU were angered by the budget for 2003, due to the paltriness of the increase in the lower social welfare payments, at €6 (INOU Press Release 6 December 2002) and by Minister for Social Welfare Mary Coughlan’s announcement restricting eligibility for the Back to Work Allowance (BTWA) and the Back to Work Enterprise Allowance (BTWEA) to those who were out of work for at least five years (previously 12 to 15 months), from January 2003 (INOU Press Release 20 December 2002). In January 2003, it was announced that supplementary welfare rent supplement was to be capped. The INOU criticised this as increasing the risk of homelessness for unemployed people living in private rental accommodation. Also, in the early part of 2003, news on unemployment was disappointing. The Quarterly National Household Survey for December 2002 recorded a ‘modest increase of 1.4% in employment in 2002. However, there were 84,000 persons unemployed in the last quarter – an increase of 11,500 in the year. The unemployment rate increased from 4% to 4.5% over the year, while the number of long-­term unemployed increased by 3,400 to 24,700 in the final quarter’ (INOU Press Release 20 February 2003). In February 2003 the INOU was critical of the cuts in allocation to FÁS under the Social Economy Programme from a promised €40m to €31m – seen as ‘just another strike at the most marginalised in Irish society to enable the Government to balance the books … totally unacceptable for a fledging programme borne out of the PPF’ (INOU Press Release 26 February 2003). The General Secretary added, ‘it is important that the Government returns to the commitments made in the PPF and reinvests in the Social Economy programme’. He diplomatically noted that ‘by honouring commitments, (the government) instils credibility in social partnership especially at this time as the INOU ponder on whether to accept or reject Sustaining Progress’. Nonetheless, in mid-­March 2003, a Special Delegate Conference of the INOU decided ‘to critically accept the proposed new National Partnership Agreement, Sustaining Progress’. They defended this decision even though Sustaining Progress offered ‘no clear specific actions or resources to address the needs of the unemployed’. This acceptance of the agreement is worthy of analysis. The general secretary of the INOU explained,

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Although the new Agreement offers no clear specific actions or resources to address the needs of the unemployed, we feel that the processes and mechanisms that the Agreement offers can be used effectively to address the issue of unemployment and poverty.

The ‘processes and mechanisms’ comprised special clauses on consultation which were incorporated in Sustaining Progress after strenuous lobbying (see Chapter 8 on CORI). If it landed itself outside social partnership, the INOU would be denied access to much more than these mechanisms, as the experience of the CWC and NWCI would demonstrate. So, the INOU joined the SVP and CORI Justice in reluctantly acceding to the agreement, along with those parts of the Pillar which were not involved with the Platform. As to the substance of Sustaining Progress, the INOU clutched in particular to its endorsement of the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy (NAPS) target to eliminate long-­term unemployment by 2007 and to set the lowest social welfare payment at €150 per week for an individual (in 2002 terms) by 2007. Failure to progress towards these targets, it said, would lead to questioning of government commitments to the social partnership process (INOU Press Release 14 March 2003). Other press releases from the INOU carried bad news about lack of progress or cutbacks in areas such as the social economy programme (Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed 2003). Although the INOU reluctantly accepted the agreement Sustaining Progress in 2003, it was qualified in its support (Irish Times 23 June 2003) and vocal in its criticism.

Conclusions What does the experience of the INOU tell us about the CVP as a whole? The rise of the INOU and its subsequent partial integration into social partnership and a service and advisory role might be regarded as clear evidence that social partnership acts so as to incorporate small organisations. But the notion of an alternative route outside social partnership was somewhat theoretical. The INOU had pursued the protest route, but this ultimately led them to engage with social partnership. Also, when it did engage with the NESF and the social partnership process, the INOU was able to pursue a raft of very significant policy positions and to make some gains, particularly in the mid 1990s. The main factor affecting the positioning of the INOU was the extraordinary economic turnaround in the economy and the drop in unemployment that took effect in the late 1990s. In these circumstances, however, any organisation of the unemployed on the outside of social partnership would disappear entirely. The INOU engaged with the social partnership process but that is not to say that they were incorporated by it. What happened is that the crisis conditions which originally gave the INOU an exceptionally high media profile gave way to new circumstances in which the INOU experienced a reversal of

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fortune. It did not disappear or become redundant, however, but its role shifted from the critique of the big picture to a focus on the more detailed and ongoing issues of the people who continued to be unemployed, and related issues about low pay and the need to fend off poverty among the newly employed groups of people in less skilled or desirable jobs. The fate of the INOU, therefore, reflects the decline in unemployment itself. Moreover, the INOU contributed to shaping Irish government policy on the treatment of the unemployed at a crucial time. Its successes were not especially due to its origins as a social welfare movement of the unemployed – which in a sense it was originally. Rather its main trait was its focus on certain policy objectives and its policy entrepreneurship. It made use of the opportunities for engaging with the state, ultimately through social partnership, and this, combined with the wider shifts in political sentiment in the demos, was critical in the context of Partnership 2000 in particular. The example of the INOU illustrates how ‘new’ associations of the excluded or marginalised can intervene in a context where corporatist institutional arrangements were previously dominated by ‘traditional social movements’ as social partners. Their impact will vary depending on how the issues they highlight line up with the agenda of other actors – statutory and non-­governmental. In a period of crisis, such as unemployment in the late 1980s, when a policy question becomes a major one for the demos, the profile of small, principled campaigning organisations can be heightened. The INOU had wanted to be with the trade union pillar and share in its bargaining power. Instead it became part of a new Community Pillar whose dynamics and influence relied on a number of contingent factors, not least the shifts in economic and political cycles and shifts in the wider political mood of the electorate. In the initial phase, the INOU acted like a locomotive for the other organisations that became social partners through the Pillar. These organisations went on, in some cases, to supersede the INOU in terms of fighting on the key issues of the day – whether in relation to poverty and income maintenance or childcare support for working parents. That is part of the unique dynamic of small organisations that made up the CVP. When such crises pass, the small organisation does not necessarily disappear or become incorporated, but may continue to tackle the issues and engage with policy-­makers at a different level, with a lower profile. The INOU has engaged with greater forces to some effect, and adapted to the CVP and social partnership over a period during which the unemployment problem lessened dramatically.

Notes  1 The live register is a monthly compilation of local social welfare office administrative data on jobseeker Benefit and Jobseeker Allowance claims. According to the Central Statistics

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Office, the live register is not the official measure of unemployment but, unlike more rigorous surveys carried out quarterly, it provides detailed data on local and seasonal variation. Because of its frequency and comprehensiveness it is often a source of headline news.  2 Allen had been made redundant by a computer database company in the city in the early 1980s and has provided a very valuable source on the origins and history of the INOU (Allen 1998).  3 These included the White Paper Growth, Competitiveness, Employment – The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century, COM 93/700 Final, Brussels, 5 December 1993; the Green Paper European Social Policy: Options for the Union, 17 November 1993 COM 93/551; European Social Policy, A Way Forward for the Union – A White Paper, COM 94/333.  4 Poet Rita Ann Higgins has incorporated this in her work. See www.ritaannhiggins.com/ independent90.html.  5 The idea of a cross-­party forum with social partners and the unemployed dated back to 1986 in the wake of the All Ireland Forum, which had laid the ground for a subsequent peace process in Northern Ireland.  6 The formula of nominating quasi-­representative members in this way got around the initial reluctance to formally widen membership of the Council.  7 Mary Murphy was nominated by the Taoiseach as a representative of the INOU. The Council for the Status of Women (soon renamed the National Women’s Council) was similarly included in the NESC at that time. It was also a test phase, and the use of nominee status rather than allocation of a seat to the INOU and NWCI allowed for reversion to the status quo if the experiment did not work out.  8 Minister for Social Welfare, and leader of the Democratic Left Party.  9 CORI respondents provided an independent account of these events, mentioned lobbying Dick Spring and implied that CORI too would have refused to sign off on the deal if the CSW rates were not conceded. 10 Tax rate cuts in the 1998 budget were estimated to cost £311m while allowances and standard rate band improvements came to £163m. 11 In Ireland the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy adopted targets set in terms of ‘consistent poverty’, a measure that combines indicators of deprivation with a relative income poverty line. 12 In 1997 INOU income amounted to £290,709 and in 1998, £338,847.

7 Community or demos? The Community Workers’ Co-­operative

Introduction The Community Workers’ Co-­operative (CWC, the Co-­op) had a key role in the creation and evolution of the CVP. The Co-­op emerged as an association of people committed to community work values and practice, engaged with marginalised communities and minorities, and focused on empowerment through local and national engagement with statutory institutions. The philosophical roots of the Co-­op were in building capacity from below rather than in the voluntary-­philanthropic tradition. A focus on the CWC and its role in social partnership thus also serves to highlight the unusual local dimension in the hybrid of corporatism and other types of local partnership entities implicated in the Irish model, which have been a source of confusion in accounts of Irish social partnership, particularly in a comparative perspective. The experience of the Co-­op within social partnership also brings out important issues in relation to the distribution of power. A brief chronology is provided in Table 7.1. This chapter starts by examining the origins and outlook of the CWC in the early 1980s, highlighting its focus on community empowerment, which informed its practice over subsequent years. In the next section, the focus is on the Co-­op’s shift from critique to engagement and negotiation by the CWC with government. From the late 1980s, this engagement centred on the use of EU Structural Funds to support a new local development and social inclusion programme. This discussion sheds light on why central government effectively bypassed representative local government structures and, instead, directly supervised the rolling out of parallel local development partnership bodies in the 1990s. The Co-­op was a key player in facilitating this roll-­out and during the 1990s many CWC members participated on behalf of the community sector, alongside the ‘conventional’ social partners, on area-­based partnership boards. A further stage of the CWC’s engagement with the state developed through the NESF from 1993. For the CWC, the NESF was a bridge between the world of local partnership and that of tripartite social partnership. The Co-­op used the

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Table 7.1  Community Workers’ Co-­operative landmarks Year

Landmark

1981 1987–89

Establishment of Community Workers’ Co-­operative CWC sets up Structural Funds sub-­committee and develops expertise   and proposals for local development PESP includes proposals for 12 local area-­based partnerships on  unemployment Co-­op submissions around Barrington Report on local government   reform focused on deeper reform and greater local participation Area Development Management (ADM, later Pobal) established  as national agency overseeing local area partnerships, with CWC representation CWC enters National Economic and Social Forum in ‘disadvantaged’  strand; interaction with INOU, NWCI and others; submissions to PCW talks directly and through NESF Contributes to NESF report on new national development plan and local  development social inclusion programme (NESF 1993b) Under PCW, the number of local area partnership companies is increased   to 38, supplemented by 35 community development projects CWC begins to formulate approach to seeking social partner status May: establishment of Community Platform by CWC with 14 other  organisations CWC and Community Platform join talks leading to Partnership 2000 Partnership 2000 supports social inclusion, NAPS, new equality agenda,  committee on social economy Equality Authority established, and CWC member Niall Crowley  appointed its CEO, and replaced by Siobhan O’Donoghue in negotiations on next Agreement (PPF) Co-­op Proposals for TIDA in PPF negotiations PPF proposes an Interdepartmental Working Group to develop TIDA  and to consult social partners Interdepartmental Working Group, after disputes with CWC, proposes  RAPID Gradual roll-­out of RAPID in 22 urban areas, and later 20 rural towns Co-­op leads Community Platform walkout from final PPF review session Dispute over share of seats for Community Platform in CVP leads to   departure of CORI Community Platform rejects Sustaining Progress and is excluded from   social partnership CVP is restructured with new entrants CWC loses its funding as an Anti-­Poverty Network from 2005 Towards 2016 signed by other Pillar members CWC/Platform are re-­admitted to social partnership; funding restored;  one seat

1990 1990/1 1992 1993

1994–95 1996

1999

2000/1 2001 2002

2003 2004 2006 2007

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NESF as an opportunity to develop alliances with other national associations. With the Labour Party in coalition on its highest ever poll share, the Co-­op was better able to give added impetus to a broad equal status agenda alongside the expanding social inclusion agenda. The NESF was a significant stepping stone towards social partner status for the CWC. The following section reviews the process of becoming a social partner and the Co-­op’s initiation of the Community Platform, which it hoped would be recognised by government and the existing social partners as the community sector social partner. However, the Platform did not receive an exclusive negotiating licence. Instead, the government created and regulated admission to its own creation, the CVP, in which the Platform was given two out of nine seats. The fact that the CWC put as much thought into procedure and process as into substantive policy outcomes is significant. It points to a concern about the unequal concentration of power in representative democratic institutions (locally and nationally) and the CWC’s attempts to compensate for that power inequality through other mechanisms – such as participative mechanisms at local level and social partner or negotiating status for the community sector at national level. Indeed, the new local partnerships promoted such mechanisms and circumvented representative local government. This section then reviews the gains made by the CWC in the 1996 negotiations for Partnership 2000, particularly on newly defined social inclusion and equality agendas. The creation of the CVP led to re-­assessments of the nature of social partnership itself. Therefore a key NESF report, A Framework for Partnership (National Economic and Social Forum 1997), is considered in the light of what the CWC were trying to achieve This section shows how the CWC tried to grapple with the practical application of participative, deliberative and representative democracy. The following section deals with the implications for the Co-­op of prosperity after 1997. The Co-­op’s attempts to find new bearings in the context of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) talks in 1999/2000 are dealt with in this section. A key issue here, marking a significant turning point in relations between the CWC and the state, was the initial proposal for Targeted Investment in Disadvantaged Areas (TIDA) or, as it became, Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID), and the subsequent difficulties over its implementation. This is dealt with in detail because it marks the start of a long-­term push to re-­assert the prerogative of representative government – central and local – over what was by then a substantial parallel infrastructure of local development with ‘participative’ governance and corresponding national level participative structures. Finally, the stresses of 2001-­2 are dealt with, including deepening tensions for the CWC within social partnership, the split in the CVP, rejection of Sustaining Progress and the subsequent fallout.

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In some senses, the CWC and the Platform sought to embody the community sector as a version of the demos because the latter was not satisfactorily embodied through the institutions of representative government at local and national level. However, while the CWC and the Pillar were closely aligned with the demos when the government was in the throes of crisis, the situation was dynamic and the political establishment regained a commanding position by the early 2000s.

Origins and Outlook of the CWC The CWC originated in 1981 in a context of social crisis, increasing exclusion and the growth of disadvantaged areas that reflected the effects of unemployment and income poverty, often compounded locally by poor planning and indifferent management of local authority housing in certain areas. The groups affected became more alienated from or apathetic about government, particularly local government. Widespread attitudes to minorities, particularly Travellers, remained prejudiced, assimilationist or paternalist. Support for professional community work had only begun in the late 1960s and was still negligible. Indeed the concept of professionalisation is a contentious one in the history and tradition of community work generally, which embraces conservative, liberal and radical schools of thought (Ledwith 2005). In the period from 1981 to 1987, the CWC operated in a context of limited opportunity for institutional engagement and it focused on developing coherence among community workers and leaders. It was critical of clientalism in Irish political culture and the irrelevance of local government on many issues confronting local communities, and was engaged in wider issues of equality and anti-­discrimination. However, it sought to engage with the decision-­ making process and began to articulate its vision in terms of empowerment of local groups and communities of interest and to promote participative democracy as an antidote to the failings of representative democracy – at local level in particular. From 1981, the CWC provided a coherent focus for reflection and practice development for community workers and activists in marginalised c­ ommunities – not just as defined by locality but also by identity (e.g. Travellers, gender and community). A key CWC informant (AC) identified one factor behind the establishment of the Co-­op1 as underlying concern among community workers employed in health boards that community work was essentially seen as a dimension of social work. The CWC wanted ‘to promote community work as a means of intervention for social change’. The approach was radical – ‘very much in contradiction to the traditional Muintir na Tire2 idea of community development’ but still attracted ‘a fairly broad base of members’ including full-­time community workers, community activists

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and others who were interested in using community work methods in their own area of work. Some members were more committed activists while others valued ‘a particular set of principles and … a particular direction’ provided by ‘a smaller cohort of people who are prepared to actually think out the strategies’ in line with the principles of the Co-­op (AC). During the 1980s, Co-­op members supported international solidarity campaigns3 and local efforts such as the organisation of local women’s groups. As another key respondent (NC) stated, the Co-­op was ‘an organisation that came out of people working at community level for social change, people pursuing community development approaches to social change, approaches that were focused on collective good rather than individual benefit, issues of empowerment as well as access to resources’. Co-­op members aimed at local mobilisation, participation and empowerment. The CWC distinguished between the self-­organising community sector and the traditionally philanthropic ‘voluntary sector’. For example, community workers contributed to redefining of the discourse around Travellers in Ireland in terms of racism and rights: ‘The work with Travellers was through Pavee Point … There was quite a crossover of the people involved … Pavee Point … got [its] first funding in 1985 and started work with Travellers on support programmes and on education programmes in 1985’. Gender provided another new focus: ‘In the earlier part of the 80s there was a very active women’s group in the Co-­op … which was quite important because … the traditional community development arena was very much a male domain’ (AC). While the Co-­op recognised resource and power issues in community work, the focus, as recounted by respondents, was emphatically on the empowerment side: ‘I think empowerment was really central because it was about communities defining their own needs and what the most effective responses to those needs were’ (NC). While mutualism is a key part in community work, the Co-­op argued that vigorous interaction with the state was essential to empowerment. It emphasised the ‘capacity to negotiate’ because achieving change was not simply a matter of self-­determination. Also, rather than focusing on individual level welfare themes, the Co-­op stressed ‘collective issues for people overall’ (AC). Individual level issues, such as income maintenance and unemployment, were being addressed by other national organisations and the Co-­op was mainly interested in capacity-­building in communities – particularly the capacity to engage with statutory bodies and political leaders. The Co-­op stressed the importance to democracy of a tension between dissenting communities and representative government – in fact this was a defining feature of the CWC’s involvement with government. The Co-­op sought to balance dialogue and opposition in an ‘acceptable level of dissent’ in community sector relations with the state. As a prominent CWC figure wrote: ‘How … is the state to fulfil its commitment to democracy if local and

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special interest groups are not resourced and supported to develop their own networks/organisations?’ (Crickley 1992: 22)

From critique to engagement Against this backdrop, the CWC began to develop more concrete perspectives with a view to engagement with the state. The Co-­op learned from the Second and Third European Community Poverty Programmes (1985-­89 and 1989-­94 respectively) and identified opportunities to access European funding to support local development under new sub-­programmes of the reformed Structural Funds. This was a critical departure for the Co-­op and enabled it to make the transition from being a critical outsider, serving the sector, to engaging at a new level with the state through the Department of the Taoiseach and the Department of Finance. This would lead on, later, to engagement in the new National Economic and Social Forum, from 1993. CWC, Structural Funds and local partnership Europe opened opportunities for the community sector to engage with the state in the late 1980s. The re-­launched poverty programme of 1985 (Poverty II) was followed by a further programme based on more coherent principles for locally integrated multidimensional action in 1989 (Poverty III). There were increased resources for these ‘pilot’ projects. The launch of the Single Market Programme and the Single European Act in 1987 took matters a step further. It brought renewed vigour to the European social and regional development dimensions of the internal market programme and saw the doubling of European Structural Funds. The focus of the funds was radically shifted from the priorities of the original Social Funds under the Treaty of Rome from re-­ training for employment to tackling long-­term and youth unemployment and promoting greater integration of these groups (Brine 2002). A key Structural Funds Regulation in 1988 defined a new framework for the allocation of the main Structural Funds (the Regional and Social Funds) based on five priority objectives. Due to its relatively low national income per capita the whole of Ireland was designated an ‘Objective 1’ region with the result that it would gain substantially from the greatly increased funds. Objective 1was ‘promoting the development and structural adjustment of those regions whose development [was] lagging behind’ (Brine 2002: 55). Structural Funds’ operating principles were also changed with a new focus on ‘partnership’ between the Commission and member states at national, regional and local level. The reformed Structural Funds played a pivotal role in infrastructural investment in Ireland at a time when the government was shoulder-­deep in debt. While these funds covered much more than local development or social inclusion, the reform created openings for the community sector in

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local development. The EC put the emphasis on decentralisation and local community input in allocations of funds to stimulate innovative methods of local development and tackling disadvantage. As one CWC respondent noted in relation to this expansion of support: ‘Suddenly the amount increased and the amount Ireland received increased … [The Structural Funds] were the key resource for the state and also for the NGO sector’ (NC). Despite some scepticism on Europe among community workers, the Co-­op viewed this development as an important opportunity and it focused on how to maximise the social inclusion emphasis of the increased level of Structural Funds in Ireland in the 1990s. The CWC viewed integration of poorer European regions as a positive dimension of the internal market programme and a potential boon to Ireland. Moreover, the EC could provide leverage for the CWC with the centralised structure of government in Ireland, due to the atrophy of the scope and independence of local government. The interventions of the CWC around EU Structural Funds involved a steep learning curve for some of its members. Individuals in the Co-­op began to develop a special interest and expertise in this field. As the key person in this aspect of the CWC’s work noted: The big area of my work was around Structural Funds and I … largely led that work for a long time. [We] looked at how we wanted to see the European Union and how we wanted to see it monitored, see its achievements measured and assessed, and I … convened a Structural Funds sub-­group for quite some time. (NC)

Under the new rules, as the CWC learned, the Irish government could not access a global grant for local development unless it adopted the principle of decentralisation and direct community level participation in the programme design. The CWC was first to notice the tardy response of the Irish state to the Structural Funds reforms, which it attributed to the Department of Finance’s tight central control over the deployment of funds. While the Department undertook consultations on draft local development proposals, the Irish submission was transmitted to Brussels before the process was completed. However, Crowley (1992) of the CWC took the Department to task after it had effectively turned down a global grant for local development of £8 million because it could not satisfy the condition that an independent intermediary body disburse the grant: ‘Community groups were not to be trusted with this windfall, which leaves little room for optimism for any real partnership’ (Crowley 1992: 10). This criticism had additional resonance given the dire circumstances of the time and the lack of state resources for investment in local infrastructure or social development. This failure to work in partnership with disadvantaged local communities reflected badly on the government in the face of egregious social ills. The CWC made an issue of this with the Department of

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the Taoiseach, which ultimately came up with a design for local area-­based partnership companies with boards comprising business, union and community sector representation. The new initiative drew on the lessons of the pilot projects under Poverty III across the EC (1989-­94), three of which were located in Ireland (Cullen 1989). Under the supervision of the Department of the Taoiseach, a proposal for a number of pilot projects was included in the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP) in 1990. This was a very significant achievement for the CWC. Indeed the fact that it was built into the pay deal – rather than a parliamentary initiative – was also significant. The new programme was conceived as a pilot scheme, and twelve areas were selected. Given the straitened times for public finances – with a €10m global grant from the European Commission to be matched by the Irish government – this was a considerable investment in what was strictly a pilot programme. The Department of the Taoiseach took the initiative directly and set up Area Development Management (ADM) as an intermediary body.4 Thus began a major new local development process that was expanded and mainstreamed in 1993 under the next agreement, the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW). A senior government official acknowledged this as a key step towards the eventual inclusion of the community sector in social partnership, nationally: As we focused on unemployment, and once the fiscal cycle or fiscal vicious circle had been broken the focus was on long-­term unemployment and we put in place, under partnership, the local demonstration projects, which became the area partnership companies. So, in a sense, we had already engaged with the community sector at local level in a way that was very consciously directed from here, subsequently through ADM. (DM)

Because the Department of the Environment and Local Government, which has responsibility for local government, was bypassed, the CWC and the community sector came into direct contact with the Department of Finance and the Department of the Taoiseach and went from being outsiders to active participants engaged with government. Elected local government was also circumvented as community workers engaged with business, trade unions and other actors in new legal entities. Nationally, CWC representatives were included in structures such as ADM and Structural Funds monitoring bodies. Ironically, the CWC was keen to see local government reform and, ideally would have preferred a reformed local government structure with strong community sector participation. The CWC gave a critical welcome to the Barrington Report of 1991, on devolution. Barrington endorsed partnership with local communities as in line with ‘the approach to “partnership” introduced by the EC in its reform of the Structural Funds’ (Barrington 1991). However, local government was ill fitted to meet this new challenge and local

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government reform was not proceeding rapidly enough to facilitate the new local development model. In the CWC’s opinion, the Local Government Bill of 1991 did not adequately address the Barrington Report recommendations (Crowley 1992: 11-­12). The CWC would have wished to go further than Barrington, in any event. The NESC too, in its comments on rural development policy, rejected as premature the notion that ‘rural development should now be placed under the aegis of local authorities’ – even reformed local government. It added: ‘Effective and accountable rural and local development policy requires a partnership of state, statutory, voluntary, private and community groups’ (National Economic and Social Council 1994: 20). As stated in the Dáil by the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Ruairí Quinn: The purpose of the grant is to support the development of indigenous potential at local level … In particular, the grant will aim to support and tap fully local enterprise initiatives and to promote integrated economic, social and community development of local areas. It will aim to support the main forces of local development by providing funds to develop local leadership and capacity where required. (Ruairí Quinn, Dáil Éireann 1993)

The growth of local development in Ireland in the 1990s was to remain separate from that of elected local government and while this put the CWC into the national arena it postponed the day when all local agencies would work together. In a later submission around the Local Government Bill 2000, the Co-­op referred to the low standing of local government in the eyes of many, particularly those in marginalised communities. It emphasised the need for a re-­focusing of local government on social inclusion and engagement with local communities. It called for steps to ‘supplement the operation of traditional forms of representative democracy with innovative models of participative democracy’ (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2000: 3). Indeed, a major public inquiry into local government corruption was instituted after allegations of irregular payments to politicians in 1997. Evidently things had not moved on much in the 1990s. The acquisition of knowledge and expertise on Structural Funds had a very direct effect on the Co-­op’s visibility. According to a key CWC respondent: It gave us a profile at European Union level – quite a good profile because Europe was quite interested in dialogue with the NGO sector … we ended up being the knowledge holders in quite a complicated area of Structural Fund regulations, national plans and operational programs and monitoring committees. (NC)

The Structural Funds issue was a catalyst for advancing other CWC concerns: It did give us a head start in a wide range of issues. It was a very all-­encompassing theme, a good theme for an organisation like the Co-­op, which isn’t a single-­issue organisation; inevitably … people do lots of different things in terms of com-

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munity development and local level; so what were the themes that actually united people? … The Structural Funds encapsulated so many of those and there was, at different times, huge energy in that campaign. (NC)

Indeed the CWC intervened with submissions at European level on the design of the 1994-­99 Structural Funds round (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 1992) and the corresponding national development plan (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 1993). Apparently these interventions had some success – albeit qualified: We don’t claim credit for all of them, but you can see shifts in the regulations towards a more social inclusion agenda, a shift in the Irish National Development Plan towards a more social inclusion agenda. Not perfect … but certainly an area you could see progress in … I think if you look at the regulations from Delors I, to Delors II, to Agenda 2000, to the current round, there is a much better focus on social inclusion and equality in terms of the regulations. There is a much better response from the Irish government in relation to the social inclusion and equality dimensions of the regulations and I think we were at the heart of that. We weren’t the only reason it happened but we were at the heart of that. (NC)

The Structural Funds flowing into Ireland by the early 1990s were very substantial, and critical to infrastructure and planning, and required technical knowledge.5 The CWC stated that they mastered the technical knowledge, which gave them an advantage in dealings with the government. The CWC ‘were looking for community sector participation in decision-­making and community sector participation in the monitoring committees of the Structural Funds’ (NC), and they succeeded. The directors of ADM were drawn from the traditional social partners but also the community sector, i.e. from the local partnerships and nationally from the Co-­op.6 This was eventually to open an avenue for them into the national level arena of social partnership itself, where its principles could apply to broader matters. The intervention by the CWC around the Structural Funds is a good example of a successful form of engagement by a small association – and probably the CWC’s finest hour. The CWC was a small force – a comparative minnow in the 1980s – that identified opportunities to advance its objectives of local community sector access to resources and participation in their deployment. Based on its expertise, the CWC successfully engaged with the state at the central departmental levels of Finance and Taoiseach. CWC’s achievement is also significant in so far as the political establishment were clearly behind the pace and, only for the rapid engagement by the Department of the Taoiseach through the social partnership apparatus (as distinct from the Dáil), would have been exposed to severe criticism at a time when it was already suffering from a legitimacy deficit. The CWC intervention was critical in bringing it a step closer to participation in the mainstream social partnership process. In addition, it created an intertwining of two distinct types of partnership – local

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area-­based ‘multilateral’ partnerships on the one hand, and the quite different phenomenon of tripartite social partnership on the other. Finally, while the existence of parallel structures at local level today is not ideal or perhaps even desirable, in no sense can the CWC intervention around the Structural Funds be viewed as a simple process of incorporation by the state or a usurpation of the political prerogative. Rather it is an example of adroit engagement by a small force with the state that ultimately derived legitimacy from its social content and local input. National Economic and Social Forum For some time the boundary between tripartite social partnership and community sector aspirants was successfully guarded. However, the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) provided a critical stepping stone.7 As outlined in Chapter 5, the Labour Party had substantial influence in the two successive governments that operated from January 1993 to May 1997 and the initiative for the NESF came from the Office of the Tánaiste8 or Deputy Prime Minister, Dick Spring, leader of the Labour Party. Minister of State Eithne Fitzgerald, also of the Labour Party, took responsibility for launching the NESF. In some respects, although it did more than this, the NESF complemented the local area partnership companies in so far as it addressed issues of unemployment and social inclusion, which the local partnership bodies also addressed, and the NESF was not involved in the tripartite system (unlike the NESC). For some existing social partners, the local partnerships and the NESF were as far as the community and voluntary sector should go. As a CVP respondent, who wished to remain nameless, was told by a union official, ‘There are horses for courses!’ Agreement on the actual personnel who would represent the different strands on the NESF was protracted in the case of the third strand, as this was subject to the approval of the Office of the Tánaiste, but the CWC was satisfied with its eventual representation through the ‘disadvantaged’ sub-­strand.9 In addition to having delegates from the Co-­op, the government nominated another Co-­op member – Anastasia Crickley – as one of two academics, the other being Fr Sean Healy of the CORI Justice Commission, to the NESF. The NESF was described in Chapter 5 as an experiment in deep consultation and deliberation for the community sector alongside parliamentarians and the ‘traditional’ social partners. Its management committee included representatives from the CWC, the INOU and the NWCI. According to at least one CWC respondent, the experience of working together with these delegates on the management committee provided a good confidence-­building opportunity for subsequent collaboration. While these community sector bodies were bullish in relation to the NESF, more traditional voluntary-­philanthropic bodies were not geared up as yet.10

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According to some respondents from the CWC, there was not much difficulty in principle about the decision to be at the heart of the NESF. It flowed logically from the Co-­op’s intervention around the Structural Funds from the late 1980s. As Crowley noted: One of the key demands of the Structural Funds campaign was participation in decision-­making and having that voice at the table. Other social partners were participating [in the NESF] so it was a small jump to talk about social partnership for the community sector … and one of the goals that I remember was about creating a context for negotiation and us being part of the context for negotiation. (NC)

The CWC viewed the NESF as a stepping stone to social partner status: ‘Certainly when the NESF was created … we would have been alert to the fact that it [was] a pre-­social partnership venture and it was a gateway to social partnership’ (NC). The impact of the CWC was evident in the second NESF report, entitled National Development Plan 1994-­1999 – The Proposed Local Development Plan (National Economic and Social Forum 1993b), which focused more specifically on extending and developing the innovative local partnership measures begun under the PESP. This was the first in a series of reports in which the new thinking originating in the community sector, and in the CWC in particular, began to emerge. This report provided a very comprehensive blueprint for expanding the local development axis under the national development plan. It made some 60 recommendations covering criteria for area-­based development companies, a greater community sector focus for the proposed county enterprise boards, more rigorous targets for partnership bodies and development of Community Employment in a more inclusive direction. While the CWC had played a critical role in 1987-­91 around local development and community work, its position was to remain significant due to the terms of the next social partnership agreement, the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW) covering 1994-­96. The PCW effectively mainstreamed the local partnerships initiated three years earlier under the PESP, to cover 38 areas, and these were further complemented by 35 community development projects in other areas, which effectively created national level coverage of area-­based initiatives. By 1994 the local level area-­based partnership companies had begun to be rolled out, and the CWC was on the Structural Funds Monitoring Committee and the ADM management board. The CWC’s influence was further strengthened through its membership of the NESF. The inception of the NESF in 1993 provided a national focus for the local activists and brought the CWC together with a number of other national organisations and interests such as unemployed groups, women’s organisations and religious organisations with a focus on rights, equality and social inclusion.

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The existence of the NESF posed questions as to the logic or fairness of the mechanisms of social partnership that excluded the community and voluntary organisations representing the unemployed, people living in poverty and marginalised communities. But the CWC was some distance from becoming a social partner in the tripartite bargaining system. The NESF was, in effect, an anteroom for the CWC as a social partner in waiting, but still the inner sanctum beckoned.

Becoming a social partner In 1996, the social partners negotiated Partnership 2000, the fourth in the series of tripartite agreements that had begun in 1987. As previously, a wage deal lay at the heart of the agreement. This was to be the first time the community and voluntary sector were participants in the social partnership negotiations. As outlined in Chapter 5, the CWC was a key player in the effort to determine the shape of this participation, and its intervention is now examined in greater detail. The CWC had a key role in the creation of the Community Platform, and what became the CVP: ‘In May 1996 the CWC was the main initiator in setting up the Community Platform as a mechanism through which the anti-­poverty/ equality focus of the sector could organise its potential participation in national agreements’ (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003a: 15).11 The Platform concept was not merely an organisational mechanism but an expression of the attempt to empower the community sector. The CWC has always maintained a distinction between the community and the voluntary-­ philanthropic sector. Its thinking also departed from the ideology of community self-­sufficiency, and focused instead on social change through engagement between communities and the state. Thus, engagement with the state nationally and locally – and with other civil society actors – was intrinsic to the CWC view of itself and its sector. In this context, the rhetoric of the CWC highlighted ‘participation, a collective focus, solidarity and accountability’ towards goals of ‘development, equality and justice in Irish society’. It called for participation by ‘those who experience exclusion and poverty’, and ‘mechanisms of accountability’ to bring proposals ‘back into these communities’ (Community Platform 1997: 7) One difficulty that the CWC encountered was the unwillingness of other key organisations to buy into this view. The CWC sought to avoid ‘a contest by individual organisations to get a place’ (NC). It was a difficult path to pursue as a Platform would imply the co-­operative development of agreement on priorities by a diverse group of organisations, and that might not appeal to organisations which could do better for themselves by keeping their identity and demands separate. As seen in Chapter 5 the Platform did not get sole rights

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to represent the sector. Respondents from the CWC thought the government could have avoided this, had it but the will: I think had the state said: ‘you all go through the Community Platform’, they would have got away with it. Everybody would have joined the Community Platform. I think there would have been a big fight there, but everybody would have resolved that by making sure that the same people went forward but at least they would have gone forward as representatives of the sector. (NC)

As the separate discussion of the INOU and CORI shows, the CWC view was not universally shared – other groups had a specific agenda and the possibility of pursuing it more freely on the basis of separate recognition in the social partnership process. Moreover, government was clear that the Platform was just one component – albeit a big one – in the wider Pillar or ‘community room’ to which eight organisations in all were invited for the 1996 talks. The CWC were disappointed: [Government] invited the Community Platform as one of the members of the Pillar – which was very confusing because it wasn’t an organisation – and then invited some of the organisations within the Platform as representatives in their own right, and then invited … others, who were outside the Platform as well, so it was a bit of a mess. (NC)12

This outcome was attributed to the non-­governmental sector rather than the ­government. In fact, the concept of a ‘pillar’, created by the state into which the community and voluntary organisations would enter, corresponded roughly to  the existing pillar structure in social partnership and on occasion the ­government had actively regulated entry to a pillar – e.g. between different ­associations representing small and medium enterprises. In effect, the CWC lost the argument over the structure of their representation and implicitly over its ideological shape. The Pillar was not as tightly banded as it might have wished. But the CWC was committed to the Platform, as a matter of principle; it could have sought a separate seat but, on principle, it did not. At the same time, the CWC led the creation of and provided intellectual cadres within the Community Platform, and their fates were intertwined thereafter, but there were other ­tendencies in the Pillar and some of these too were active in the Platform. Some partners are more equal than others The CWC was also concerned about the bigger question regarding the status of the new social partners among ‘traditional’ ones. The Co-­op position was that the community sector should be treated as ‘equals’. What they got was participation status. During the talks, the Department of the Taoiseach regulated CVP access to other social partners and to the state. In a sense the community sector was treated fairly since every social partner brings something unique to the process, rather than something ‘equal’. The CWC/Platform provided a link

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to communities and a link to local area-­based partnership initiatives. There was a parallel between the inter-­sectoral boards of local partnership companies and the inter-­sectoral membership of national social partnership. However, the logic at the heart of the local model was collaboration, which is quite different from the logic of the national model because of the critical bargaining dimension in the latter. But the CWC initially pressed for immersion in that side too, as implied in the Platform’s statement, ‘the Platform seeks to insert the sector as an equal actor within this emerging model of governance’ (Community Platform 1997: 8). This might be conceivable if the process was essentially deliberative, rather than a bargaining or power-­mediated process. While parity of deliberation was possibly achievable in a body such as the NESC, it was less realistic in the context of social partnership negotiations. There, what a partner can gain depends on what it can bring to the table. The CWC and Platform brought their acquired expertise and a potential source of legitimacy for government. With a voice at national level the CWC could possibly hope to influence reform of local government which had implications for their sector (e.g. by deepening local democracy, reforming local government funding, widening its scope and developing its engagement with local communities around a strong local development and inclusion agenda). However, under the leadership of the CWC, the Community Platform put the focus elsewhere and sought involvement for itself in pay bargaining, as the following quote shows: Social partnership is expressed at the national level in different types of arenas. These include permanent institutions such as the NESC and NESF, institutions with a more specific and time delimited remit such as various task forces and the Structural Fund monitoring committees, and once-­off negotiating arenas for national agreements alongside an ongoing monitoring structure. The Platform seeks full participation in all these arenas. Within this, one dimension of social partnership is the negotiation relationships between capital and labour. Given the rapidly changing global economy, different interests must now play a role in this relationship. The Platform seeks to insert the sector into this relationship where social and economic progress is being negotiated. (Community Platform 1997: 8 – emphasis added)

Whether this was naivety or chutzpah it was unlikely to go down well among the ‘traditional’ social partners representing ‘capital and labour’. The thought of the community sector being inserted – perilously close, perhaps, to the elbows of trade union negotiators – in the pay talks would, to say the least, have created discomfort. Such interventions are not incompatible with an awareness of the state’s ability to orchestrate play-­offs between organisations, and may be viewed as a necessary part of the jostling process. The justification offered – ‘given the rapidly changing global economy’ – may well have come across as arrogant, implying that the Platform had a better understanding of the wider

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global context than the unions had. Respondents interviewed for this research indicated that some trade union representatives were uncomfortable with the involvement of the new social partners in the overall process. CVP respondents from other organisations in the Pillar could recollect this gambit and were bemused at the notion of the Platform or CVP being involved in pay talks. Unsurprisingly, the proposal fell on deaf ears. In the talks that resulted in Partnership 2000, the government carefully choreographed all the ­arrangements, meeting the different social partner groups in separate rooms. The Platform and CVP sought ways around this and requested a multilateral meeting of all the social partners, but without success. They were conceded a meeting where they could directly present issues, which the Community ‘room’ were discussing, to participants from the other social partners. They were also allowed to participate in a session of the ‘business room’ (as distinct from the employer/unions room). Apart from these sessions, their innings comprised four meetings where different CVP teams met with the Secretaries General of the Departments of the Taoiseach and Finance and Office of the Tánaiste, accompanied as required by other civil servants.13 Subsequently, in its own review of these talks, the Community Platform expressed the view that multilateral meetings would have more effect if undertaken at earlier stages when agendas were being set, i.e. in the NESF or the NESC. It was difficult to make progress at the ‘bargaining’ stage when other parties to the process were by then more narrowly focused on achieving objectives within broadly agreed principles. However, the suggestion of CVP involvement in the pay talks never subsequently arose. Inclusion and equality: outcomes from Partnership 2000 Generally the outcome from Partnership 2000 was deemed worthwhile by the CWC and the Platform. In particular, the major themes for them were commitments in the areas of ‘social inclusion’ and ‘equality’. Also, the concept of social partnership itself was addressed in the agreement and there was evidence that the NESC and NESF were seriously engaging with the need for new concepts of participation in a process of broadened negotiated governance. This was very welcome for the Co-­op and Platform, which sought gains in terms of changing the process of governance itself. Referring to the nature of gains made in Partnership 2000, one respondent recalled that the concept of a voice for the disenfranchised ‘was an important one, going back to the notion of participatory democracy and governance that the Co-­op had always promoted’ (LS). Among the substantive outcomes valued by the CWC, in relation to social inclusion, one was the naming of the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy (NAPS) in the agreement: ‘I think the key thing in Partnership 2000 was having NAPS named … the Co-­op’s agenda would have been poverty and social inclusion … so having NAPS named was critical in terms of bringing that strategy forward

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because, while there was a government commitment to it in principle, there was very little that said what are the mechanics and how was this going to be operationalised’ (LS). The NAPS was in fact quite modest in its goals but it was the first strategy that defined income–poverty reduction targets using the available data – a qualitatively new departure, as compared to the poverty programmes that had concentrated on pilot projects at the level of local communities.14 In a sense, the NAPS complemented all methods being utilised to bring about poverty reduction or social inclusion, by providing an objective measure of progress which focused policy-­makers’ minds. The NAPS was also significant because it laid the groundwork for recognising certain bodies as ‘national anti-­poverty networks (NAPNs)’ of which ten were later created, and the CWC was recognised as one of these. Virtually all the other Poverty Networks were members of the Community Platform too.15 NAPNs received government grants towards capacity-­building and this provided a boon to a range of anti-­poverty organisations. The other major issue for the CWC and Platform was what was described in the NESC strategy (National Economic and Social Council 1996) as the ‘new equality agenda’. The CWC had been an active proponent of the rights of communities and particularly of the cultural rights of different groups, such as Travellers or ethnic minorities. While they were not the sole originators of this type of equality agenda in Ireland, they were keen to run with it. The origins of the proposed new legislation went back to the work of Labour Party leader Dick Spring, who tabled a private member’s Equal Status Bill in 1990, which reached the second stage in March 1992. While the FF–PD government opposed the Bill, the concept remained alive and, 10 months later, when Labour got into government this was tabled as a government Bill. A legislative programme thus began under the Labour–Fianna Fáil coalition (1993-­94) and was continued under the rainbow government (1994-­97) to include a new Employment Equality Act (1998) and a new Equal Status Act (2000). In some respects, the CWC and Platform took ownership of the equality agenda. In both the NAPS and the equality legislation, the Irish government was breaking some new ground that had a resonance in a wider European Community context. The EU shortly afterwards developed a European-­wide process called the National Action Plans for Inclusion (NAP Incl.), utilising the new mechanisms of the ‘open method of co-­ordination’ that had emerged around employment in the mid 1990s. In that way the idea for NAPS, which was prompted by the UN ‘Poverty Summit’ in Copenhagen in March 1995,16 and was piloted in Ireland, was then taken on in Europe through NAP Incl. In its turn the EU – through the open method of co-­ordination – put pressure on the Irish government to raise its aspirations. In the case of equality too – or more specifically anti-­discrimination – there

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was a corresponding EU dimension. The Amsterdam Treaty made provision for ‘non-­discrimination’ on a range of grounds, after getting a fillip from the Irish Presidency in 1996. This was a further boon to the quest for legal protection of the status of a wide range of minorities. This combination of outcomes – a strategy to address social exclusion and a legislative and policy programme to address equality issues – was a substantial development. While these developments were not by any means solely attributable to the Community Platform or indeed the Pillar, they made a genuine contribution to bringing them about. The politics of the mid 1990s involved a shift to the left and while the political content cannot be characterised as social democratic it would be simplistic to regard it as neo-­liberal either: it was somewhere in between. The emergence of a twin-­tracked social agenda that separated redistribution issues from status equality issues (based on a number of grounds such as age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation) defines the character of the paradigm – if one can so describe it – that took a clearer shape in the mid 1990s. The elements of this were contained in Partnership 2000 and, as seen below, were subsequently followed up in the PPF. This separation of the social inclusion and equality agendas was pursued as the social policy complement of a broader project around the very rapid expansion of the Irish economy in the 1990s: on the one hand it complemented requirements for higher skills, more female labour force participation and increased immigration. On the other, it deployed a range of measures to address a large legacy of deprivation and poverty after two decades of social malaise and high unemployment. The content of policy was something of a middle way: equality was not defined in socio-­economic terms while redistribution was not defined in egalitarian terms. While poverty reduction was an objective, reduced resource inequality and limitations on wealth accumulation were not. In light of how rapid growth generated new sources of relative inequality, it is easy to see the limitations of the Community Platform. On the other hand, it could be argued that this was inevitable without a broader political movement, rooted for example in a left-­Keynesian political economy or a social democratic tradition. Hence, the orientation of small organisations did not cut against the grain in the late 1990s as the economy boomed and fortunes were made. Deliberation, participation – social partnership transformed? By 1997, the Co-­op, the Platform and the CVP as a whole were increasingly committed to an elaborate system of governance. Soon, efforts were under way at official level to understand the significance of this development. After the completion of the Partnership 2000 negotiations the NESF commissioned a key report, published in 1997. It argued that the nature of social partnership was changing, particularly following the creation of the CVP (National

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Economic and Social Forum 1997). The report proposed a new interpretation of Irish social partnership that diverged from the way social partnership was conventionally described, i.e. in terms of corporatism and bargaining. Instead, the NESF report characterised the process in terms of deliberation and problem-­solving, and an enhancement of democratic governance. It argued that traditional partners and the ‘traditional’ concept of ‘social partners’ – with their bargaining monopolies and their capacity to deliver their members’ support for a ‘deal’ – were yielding ground to a new type of social partner and social partnership. New social partners were more inclined to exchange ideas and redefine their interests in a process of deliberation. This new concept fitted well with the aspirations of the incoming ­community and voluntary sector actors, which would not have much bargaining power anyway and were, in a sense, often relying on their deliberative capacities. In particular it appealed to the CWC because of its interest in the process of deepening democracy through participative mechanisms. If this transformation was really happening, it could be good news for them; if not, then, as players in a bargaining process, their presence might only expose their weaknesses. But, could this really be happening? Amid the sophisticated eloquence of the NESF report there are two issues that need to be brought out.17 First, the assumption underpinning a shift from the logic of bargaining to the logic of deliberation was that the traditional social partners were not as strong as in the past and would accept deliberation at the cost of posturing, haggling and arm-­ wrestling. But the corollary was that the state now held the ring. In that sense the traditional concept of social partner itself was giving way to a new one. In that context, if indeed it was valid, the CWC and Platform might conceivably achieve a form of parity with the other social partners, but only on the implicit understanding of increased control by the state. While the NESF report dealt with risks to the existing partnership model from the introduction of the community sector, these risks related to the potential unwieldiness of the wider agenda and increased complexity of social partnership rather than to the power of its new constituents vis-­à-­vis the existing social partners and state. Yet the critical issue that is often poorly grasped relates to the power dynamics. The second issue is the status of ‘deliberation’ and its relationship to ‘participation’. Here there has often been some confusion of terminology as between ‘participative’ and ‘deliberative’ democracy, but they really are distinct. The view taken in this study is that the potential for participative democracy is typically greatest in small communities or at the local level (and this is where the potential of area-­based partnerships arises). Genuine participation requires small scale – what made the Greek Polis all the more remarkable as a form of participatory democracy was that it could achieve a considerable scale.18 As a rule, the higher the level of governance (local, regional, sectoral, national and international) the less participation there will be and the greater

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the need will be for delegation and more independent representation. While ‘deliberation’ operates at many levels, it typically involves the sifting of divergent viewpoints via conference and debate to produce a set of conclusions as a basis for decision-­making in the ‘general interest’. Moreover, parliamentary deliberation and group formation (e.g. through political parties) are essential to the functioning of elected assemblies since members are elected severally but must act collectively and much deliberation takes place within parties as they strive for election victory and, subsequently, as they claim to act always for the ‘general good’. Parliaments and governments too are deliberative entities, but clearly they limit participation and are very indirect forms of democracy. The institutions of social partnership are also subject to the difficulties of scale and the constraints of indirect representation, and in principle these rules apply as much to the community sector as to the trade unions or employers when they sit at the table at national level. The notion of deliberative democracy appears to have become confused in some minds with participative democracy, particularly in the late 1990s, when this language became prevalent. The CWC/Platform, having become more deeply committed to engagement with government in various forms, long advocated the concept of participative democracy – which they encapsulated in slogans such as ‘nothing about us without us’. Moreover, they were very critical of the limits of representative democracy – particularly in local government – pointing to falling electoral interest as evidence of the need for a more participative model, and rejecting the absorption of local development by existing local government before the core structures of the latter were made more participative (Lloyd 1998: 23). At the same time, they said little about deliberative democracy, which is ironic since the CWC, through the Platform, were party to deliberative fora at national level that were very far removed from the people affected by decisions – clearly with the danger of being unaccountable. The CWC sought to maintain its own accountability through the Platform but this was a very difficult and often painful process, as reflected in comments from several respondents. In any event, as a player within social partnership, the Platform was a grouping of national groups with only tacit links to constituencies in the wider community. Did the CWC have illusions about its own participation in social partnership? It is possible that some community sector representatives used language in a certain way. As one respondent commented, there was ‘an infatuation with notions of participative democracy and with notions of change from the bottom up through participative democracy among some’. The respondent continued, ‘Because, in Ireland, there has been such a disassociation from representative democracy – and the representative political parties – there was a … parallelism developing between representative frameworks and p ­ articipative frameworks’ (AC).

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While for other CVP actors the substantive outcomes were much more important than the institutional mechanisms (e.g. reduce u ­ nemployment, relative poverty or gender disadvantage), the outcomes sought by the ­ CWC were frequently about challenging power structures and deepening ­democracy  – local and national. In theory, social partnership should cause unease for the CWC because it was an imperfect vehicle for deepening ­participative ­democracy. Yet grasping the handhold that social partnership offered seemed unavoidable, given that it had become a key arena of state–civil society ­engagement on key policy questions. The danger of confusion lay in believing that social partnership could operate on the basis of parity among the sectoral participants when in reality it was a very indirect form of representation of diverse and opposed interests. The potential of small organisations in social partnership cannot be realised except through identifying the questions of importance to the demos. The wider context of political, economic and social forces determines where the balance of legitimacy rests, and when campaigning organisations can meet with success. In simple terms, it is not possible to substitute for the demos, even in the guise of the ‘community’ and this rule applies to small campaigning organisations as much as to political parties and governments purporting to speak for all. This poses the question of politics and, with that, political parties as the conventional vehicles for engagement with the demos via a coherent worldview and programme. Hardiman (2006) has contended that, in the final analysis, politics trumps partnership or, to put it another way, whatever the merits of participative mechanisms for marginalised interests, there is no getting around the representative ones. For a time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, political parties of the centre-­right depended on social partnership, but this dependency then lessened. This became more manifest for the CWC from 1997, as prosperity increased and a new centre-­right government took the reins and sought to woo the demos directly.

Political counterpoint (1997-­2000) Given the favourable wider circumstances of the mid 1990s the CWC made some headway. Proposals the CWC had championed in 1996, such as the social economy, were on the drawing board by 1999 as a result of working committees set up under Partnership 2000. However, as the work proceeded on how to implement these proposals the problem they were designed to address – unemployment – was receding dramatically, as high growth rates and rising consumption triggered growth in construction and services and provided many jobs for the vulnerable unskilled groups. The political focus began to shift from a crisis threatening governments to a dilemma over how to distribute the benefits of growth, and this in turn posed new challenges for the Co-­op.

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While the fascination with extra-­ parliamentary forms of deliberation continued for some, at least in the Co-­op, representative democracy – or rather cabinet government – was making a determined comeback, as reflected in the policies of the Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy (Larragy 1997/8) and this resulted in serious disappointment from an anti-­poverty perspective (Irish Times 1997). The new coalition government, elected in 1997, was singing from a distinctly neo-­liberal hymn sheet, and increasingly jarred with the themes of social partnership. After a disappointing 1998 budget, the run-­up to the 1999 budget saw some protest activity and showed that the social consensus between the new civil society partners and state could be ruffled. A demonstration themed ‘Share the Wealth’ on 19 November 1998, highlighted that, despite enjoying its Celtic Tiger years, Ireland’s growing prosperity was not being translated into reduced income inequality. Seven anti-­poverty networks, mostly belonging to the Community Platform, organised the demonstration, voicing concern about commitments from Partnership 2000 that had not yet been implemented, including the Commission on Social Welfare recommendations, local employment service, active labour market policies and other inclusion and equality measures. The government was pragmatic, however, and the 1999 budget, which was due to be the last budget before the next round of partnership talks began, proved more placatory. The budgets of 1998-­2002 oscillated as the electoral and partnership cycles interlaced in sometimes intriguing ways. The new prosperity served to obscure underlying tensions as it became possible to give ‘something to everybody’. There were ironies: apart from McCreevy’s pre-­partnership 1999 budget, the neo-­liberal Minister Mary Harney presided over the introduction of the minimum wage in 1999. A new Equality Authority was established under equality legislation, and Niall Crowley, a leading light of the CWC, was appointed its director in 1999. Up to that point Crowley was on the NESC and laid the groundwork there for a key proposal (TIDA) which was a key focus in the PPF talks (as RAPID) for vexed relations between the CWC and the state over the next few years. This is important enough to consider in a little depth. The Programme for Prosperity and Fairness and RAPID Despite the pre-­budget protest in 1999, the prosperity effects must have been odd for those in the Platform and CVP: suddenly, after labouring like Sisyphus on the hillside, they found themselves on a plateau. Some things became unexpectedly easier and funding was more readily available. The Community Platform (1999) prepared a position paper and joined in the next round of talks following the NESC strategy document (National Economic and Social Council 1999) and in the context of a new National Development Plan for

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2000-­6. Its submission to the talks was structured under headings set out for the talks – prosperity and economic inclusion, social inclusion and equality and improving the social wage. Niall Crowley, who was a key knowledge holder in relation to Structural Funds and local development policy, was replaced by Siobhan O’Donoghue as the CWC representative on the NESC, as the talks began on 1 November 1999. There was a good deal of continuity between the principles underlying Partnership 2000 and the PPF. The difference, however, was that resources were more plentiful. As O’Donoghue put it, The thinking was carried on but … In PPF there were tremendous resources … The social inclusion budget was £1.5 billion … we were talking at a totally different level compared to previous times. There really were [tremendous] resources, there wasn’t a case of, ‘the money wasn’t there’. (SO)

There was also more focus on social rights, and the NESC strategy contained a statement on the social rights of citizenship: Citizenship rights encompass not only the core civil and political rights and obligations but also social, economic and cultural rights and obligations which are embedded in our political culture and which underpin equality of opportunity and policies on access to education, employment, health, housing and social services. (National Economic and Social Council 1999).

Although this suggests a strong commitment to universalism, deriving as it does from Marshall (1950), and was quoted in the PPF, the broad paradigm informing the NESC strategy was some way short of the potential that social citizenship has conventionally entailed. What the PPF proposed, citing the NESC, was ‘a three-­pronged approach to problem of poverty and exclusion, covering social welfare, mainstream public policy programmes and a special investment package’ (Government of Ireland 2000: 78), and to continue along lines laid out in Partnership 2000. But it would go much further in terms of resources, and would see more implementation where previously Partnership 2000 had set out proposals or established working groups. As set out in Chapter 5, the PPF made a commitment to increase social inclusion spending measures including basic social welfare spending by an annual £1.5 billion by 2003 (compared to about £530 million under Partnership 2000). A further sum, of at least £200 million per annum by 2003, was earmarked for other social inclusion measures. Here, the focus is restricted to a consideration of the main issues on which the CWC led in the talks. From the CWC perspective the key issue in the PPF was tackling deprivation at local level through local development, skills support for the long-­term unemployed, targeted local investment in various types of physical and social infrastructures, community capacity-­building and local empowerment. In the PPF, extra resources were to be devoted to enhancing existing programmes

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on drugs, community development programmes in rural and urban areas, urban renewal in large and small town contexts, and integration of public services. Under the heading of ‘local governance’, objectives and measures for integration of local government and local development were set out in the PPF in very positive terms, with the emphasis on local community empowerment through participation in strategic policy committees at local government level. At the same time, elected local councillors were to have a more meaningful role in policy-­making, and there was to be greater transparency in local government while its scope was to be broadened to include social inclusion functions, local enterprise development and greater interdependence with the local development initiatives. The social partners, more generally, were to become more involved in local governance, in a deliberative capacity, through county development boards. Some of the ideas initiated in Partnership 2000 were at the implementation stage. The Working Group on the Social Economy (SE), for example, had reported, and the PPF included a set of proposals for a social economy programme with a budget of over €40 million, mostly diverted from Community Employment (CE). The SE programme aimed to maximise the potential of different types of enterprise broadly divided into three ­categories – ­community enterprises, deficient demand enterprises and public service contract e­ nterprises – for the purposes of generating employment and meeting important local social needs. All of these enterprises belonged on a continuum between purely commercial and purely statutory provision. The timing, however, was not great because the labour market was changing so rapidly and instead of mass unemployment there were not just skill shortages, but labour shortages, in many sectors. The key initiative in the PPF talks proposed by the CWC/Community Platform was initially called Targeted Investment in Disadvantaged Areas (TIDA), but it was eventually to emerge in 2002 as Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID). The concept originated when the CWC put forward broad proposals in the context of the NESC strategy preparations in 1999 for a more concentrated focus on disadvantaged areas. As reported subsequently, ‘the rationale and broad framework was accepted and outlined in the [National Economic and Social] Council’s report … published prior to the PPF negotiations’ (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003b). The NESC report acknowledged that despite the wide geographical distribution of the majority of poor people, there were many very poor areas that warranted special attention and required an integrated multidimensional approach and infrastructure for local recovery. The CWC’s TIDA proposal was to be focused on the 25 worst-­hit communities in rural and urban areas:

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to stem the social and economic costs of social exclusion by developing a range of integrated measures such that the physical, social and community infrastructure of designated communities is developed to allow them to harness the social capital and capacity necessary for economic and community development. (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003b)

The negotiation of TIDA took some time as the PPF had not clarified in detail how the substantial budget of up to £200 million was to be spent. Judging by various comments of CVP respondents, there seems to have been some tension in the Platform over this. An INOU respondent believed that the Co-­op was too vague, focusing on process rather than earmarking what every penny should be spent on. He felt that this risked allowing government to pull back the money later or to dispute spending under it. The PPF talks at length committed to an Interdepartmental Committee to work out the implementation of the proposal ‘following detailed consultations with the social partners’, and with due reference to measures and services to be integrated in each area. The PPF stated that ‘substantial increases in funding are planned for social inclusion measures under the NDP [National Development Programme]’. TIDA was to ‘ensure that these funds and actions are co-­ordinated and targeted at the areas of greatest need’ (Government of Ireland 2000). But the subsequent talks on implementation between the CWC and the Interdepartmental Committee were to prove trying, and the tensions gave rise to some breaches of the confidentiality that might normally insulate such talks. As noted in earlier chapters, there was a changed political climate in Ireland by 2002, which may well have affected the consultations of the Interdepartmental Committee and the CWC. But there were difficulties from the outset in 2000 on the TIDA/RAPID issue. CWC respondents felt resistance from the Interdepartmental Committee at an early stage and perceived the Committee’s proposals as platitudinous – better co-­ordination of existing services without any appreciable increase in resources or local capacity development. The committee was chaired by the Department of Tourism, but the Department of the Environment was the key player. According to a CWC respondent the Committee was unreceptive and sought to revise what was in the PPF, and there was a feeling that the CWC and the whole local development sector were being belittled. One respondent (who shall not be identified) reported being grilled by an official as to what right the CWC had to speak for ‘Mrs Browne who lives in a council estate’. Out of frustration, this respondent noted, the CWC decided to circulate a letter to all members of the Dáil outlining the problem ‘as to what was going on and what needed to happen’. There was considerable anger on the Committee over this move but it appeared to have some effect in getting a compromise proposal on which the CWC were willing to sign off. It was a pyrrhic victory:

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as later reflected in the CWC’s own review, control of RAPID was split and shunted between three line departments before settling in the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (DCRAGA), and the oversight structures were very complicated.19 In contrast to this the CWC model had sought devolution of budgets to the community sector, stating: ‘Budgets should be made available to independent national community work organisations such as the Community Workers’ Co-­op, to build community capacity and support their members to actively engage in the process’ (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003a: 8). But that was not to happen: this was a struggle to reassert the prerogatives of ‘representative’ over ‘participative’ democracy, and who could rightfully speak for ‘Mrs Browne’ – and the tide was turning in favour of government.

Things fall apart: tensions within the Pillar The tensions over the design and implementation of RAPID during 2001-­3 were part of a broader shift in the nature of the government’s engagement with the voluntary and community sector around that time. Another example can be found in the direction and implementation of the White Paper on the voluntary sector (Harvey 2004a). At the same time, issues that were brewing outside social partnership were giving rise to frustration and tensions within the Community Platform and the Pillar. Signs of CWC frustration were evident in an article by one of its negotiators, Siobhan O’Donoghue (2001), who noted two trends. First, while participation in local ‘social partnership’ by the community sector was initially enabling for the sector, there was a shift towards a stronger directive role for the state, and local authorities, in the creation of new local bodies such as County/ City Development Boards. Indeed, the same could perhaps be said for the role of ADM (later Pobail). Second, O’Donoghue’s account of the situation relating to national social partnership reflected impatience with the Community Pillar, which she characterised as an imposition, artificially created from above. The article acknowledged a power asymmetry – with the state in a pivotal position and employers, trade unions and farmers with power derived from their position in the ­economy – more or less in that order. But – in answer to the question of the power of the community sector – she noted: ‘Our power really has to do with our ability to exert moral pressure in the interests of large sectors of society who are not benefiting …’ but the community sector was increasingly feeling subject to ‘criteria and conditions designed to limit and control this participation’ (O’Donoghue 2001: 19). Frustration over these wider developments began to be reflected within the CVP itself. Since 1996, when the Pillar was created, the Community Platform only had two votes in the CVP regardless of how many affiliates it had – but

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the number of its affiliates had increased from 15 to 25 organisations by 2001. Essentially, O’Donoghue identified a ‘dilution’ of the potential effectiveness of the Platform because of the pragmatic way that the government invited or accepted direct applications from individual organisations. The Community Platform, she noted, had always been based on certain shared values and an agenda including active participation by affected communities, a collective rather than individual level focus and solidarity with people experiencing poverty, inequality and exclusion. While organisations such as CORI or the INOU were also members of the Platform (and indeed CORI had contributed secretarial support over the years to the Platform), they were also direct members of the Pillar and were able to advance their own specific agendas. O’Donoghue noted that this had the effect of diminishing the ‘collective ability of a range of interests to be brought forward’ by the Platform. The structure of the Pillar allowed for this and O’Donoghue described the Pillar as creating a ‘gatekeeper effect’. An article by Pillar activist Mary Murphy (2002) also reflected the tensions within the Pillar over its achievements and options, and suggested that additional strategies – conflict and protest – might be necessary. But she warned that these tactics had not proved very effective for the community sector in the past. This article too echoed the tensions in the Platform and the Pillar, which soon came to a head. During 2002, the Community Platform found itself in turmoil. In April, the CWC led a walkout by the Platform from the final plenary session of the social partners (the purpose of which was a quarterly review of progress with the PPF). According to the Platform, ‘This protest was because the Government had rolled back the equality and rights agenda by bringing in legislation, which had NOT been agreed in partnership. The Government did NOT consult with us on legislation relating to: Disability; Travellers and Asylum Seekers’ (Community Platform 2002). There was bitter disagreement in the Pillar over this protest; the SVP had reluctantly gone along with it, as had the INOU, but CORI was opposed and dissociated itself from it. Evidently, the walkout did not go down too well with government officials either and, undoubtedly, added animus in the context of talks that would soon take place on the next agreement. The Pillar was effectively divided on entry to the talks leading to Sustaining Progress. The Community Platform was on a collision course, it would seem, while CORI was determined to stay in the frame, while the INOU, as noted already, was caught in the middle, not wishing to desert the Platform but aware of the threat to its own position in social partnership. Tensions took shape around the issue of how many votes the Community Platform should have within the deliberations of the Pillar, and in upcoming social partnership talks on a successor to the PPF, to start in late 2002. In view of its increased number of member associations from 15 to 25, the CWC reasoned

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that the Platform should have its representation in the Pillar increased from two to four places. This proposal was put to a vote in the Pillar, as recounted by CORI respondent Sean Healy, in the course of 2002, and carried. It received support from the INOU, NWCI, SVP and Community Platform, while it was opposed by CORI, The National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) and the ICTU centres for the unemployed. Protestant Aid, in keeping with a pattern of non-­involvement in the affairs of the CVP up to that period, did not participate in the vote. Supporters of the vote proposed that the Pillar should therefore write to the Department of the Taoiseach to say that the position had changed, intimating too that there might be some co-­ordination of relations between the Pillar and the government. At this point (according to Sean Healy’s account) CORI strongly objected to any suggestion that its relations with the Department should be conducted through the Platform or any putative secretariat of the Pillar, and refused to be bound by the motion in any way. As far as Healy was concerned, CORI Justice was a social partner in its own right and did not accept the notion of a secretariat for the Pillar as an intermediary, and insisted on receiving correspondence from government separately. This, said CORI, was the same way as employers’ and farmers’ bodies were written to – separately, not through one peak organisation. When CORI announced that it would not be bound by the vote, the decision to write to the Department was suspended and a sub-­committee representing the different viewpoints in the Pillar was set up to attempt to find a compromise.20 Following unsuccessful attempts to resolve matters through this committee, CORI decided to part company with the Platform. Exit Community Platform The negotiations on pay leading to Sustaining Progress in late 2002 were difficult, before the trade unions eventually agreed terms. But the Platform was unprepared for what came next in the talks. According to Harvey (2004b) the Platform and Pillar were taken aback by the government’s summary and uncompromising approach to the negotiations: one respondent to Harvey’s survey confirmed, ‘the government’s approach winded both the Pillar and the Platform and they never fully recovered’ while another ‘expected some package right up to the very end – but it never came’, and a third recalled, ‘There was no PPF Mark II on offer and the Platform did not know how to respond’ (Harvey 2004b: 18 ff). In the end, in a departure from the ‘traditional’ three-­year wage package, an 18-­month pay agreement was reached and this was set in the context of a much more broad-­brush programme than usual. Gone was the detailed listing of commitments in a large number of social policy areas. Instead, a limited number of ‘Special Initiatives’ was set out by the government side, and it was up to the social partners to relate to them. As noted in Chapter 5, the style of the talks changed from the PPF model as everything was tightly controlled

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in plenary sessions chaired by the Department of the Taoiseach flanked by the Department of Finance, and there were no bilateral discussions allowed between Pillar members and other government departments. The CWC and Community Platform were extremely critical of Sustaining Progress, viewing it as a partial return to a pay deal that – with few exceptions – ignored social exclusion. According to the CWC, ‘The Agreement commits no new resources to addressing poverty, social exclusion, or inequality, and makes no specific commitments in relation to these issues.’ This they contrasted with ‘the very specific nature of the Pay Deal part of the Agreement’. They said that the new agreement was a significant abandonment of the social partnership model as they understood it: ‘This Agreement proposes a “paradigm shift” in what national social partnership is meant to be about.’ i.e. it was no longer about ‘sharing resources or committing resources to social inclusion’ but merely a ‘problem-­solving’ process around limited themes or Special Initiatives. Even then, there would be no commitment to making resources available should a problem’s solution require it (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003b: 1). The Community Platform (now minus CORI) met in March 2003 and decided to reject Sustaining Progress. In a press statement issued on 23 March, they said that the new agreement would ‘not combat poverty or inequality’ and ‘completely ignored’ the plight of people experiencing poverty or inequality. They did not express any intention of ceasing to participate in social partnership, noting: ‘We will continue to engage with the government and other social partners wherever decisions about the lives of the people we represent will be made’. However, they also announced the formation by the Community Platform of a new campaigning front dubbed the ‘National Equality and Anti-­ Poverty Action Movement’ to be launched in June 2003, adding: ‘The time has come for a new space and a new voice for radical social change.’ However, they promised to focus on the new round of the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy and the local elections.21 The response from government was to remove the Platform from the Pillar and from a range of related consultative bodies, which took the CWC by surprise. Writing in 2004 in their strategic plan, the CWC stated: ‘We find ourselves now excluded from a number of social partnership arenas where the voice of the most marginalised communities in Ireland is no longer heard. Despite this, the CWC (and the Community Platform) remain committed to working in partnership with the state and others where possible.’22 The Platform leaders may have been surprised to be excluded over rejection of Sustaining Progress but the government was in no doubt as to the logic of rejecting the agreement. When asked for his view of this exodus from social partnership, a key civil servant noted: Well, I think there were a number of organisations that were genuinely shocked that they couldn’t continue in social partnership having rejected the agreement,

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which would make you wonder what they were doing for the number of years that they were in. You know, it’s just not credible. It may be a flawed and limited framework, but that’s how the game is played. So that was a bit of a surprise, that they were in turn surprised. I suppose, secondly, there was the interesting phenomenon that there were lots of organisations quite happy to come in while others were going out, and who saw the benefits of access even in the context of what was regarded by many as a disappointing agreement. (DM)

In effect, this is a reminder that small players really have to be aware that in rejecting an agreement they will have to be prepared for the consequences. A review of the options facing the Platform was undertaken during 2003 by Brian Harvey (Harvey 2004b). These were: 1. return to national agreements at the first opportunity (favoured by about a quarter of the Platform); 2. Return to national agreements in better political times with a different government committed to a broad model of social partnership (favoured by about a fifth of the Platform); 3. Assume that a return to national agreements is neither feasible nor desirable for some time, and form an independent coalition of organisations concerned with social inclusion and equality (favoured by a majority). Following the exclusion of the Community Platform, the CWC also lost significant funding when the government removed it from the list of Anti-­Poverty Networks in 2005. In the event, a loose coalition of forces was established but its impact on the outside was negligible and, in the period after 2004, when the government made a ‘left’ turn, the possibilities of re-­engagement improved. The CWC were kept outside social partnership from 2003 until after the negotiation of Towards 2016, in 2006. As for RAPID, funding was gradually allocated, estimated at €350m between 2001 and 2005, but concentrated in the 2004-­5 period (Fitzpatrick Associates 2006).

Conclusions The study of the CWC shows that while there are real possibilities to effect some change there are also serious limitations to what can be brought about via social partnership. The experience of the CWC tested these possibilities to the limits and this experience sheds light on the unique features of Irish social partnership. It shows that the underlying system of representative government, or more specifically cabinet government, was robust enough to extend the partnership model while retaining ultimate control. In a technical sense, the Co-­op’s success in relation to accessing social partnership came from becoming a knowledge holder in relation to the Structural Funds and its capacity to build on this as a policy entrepreneur over several years, using local partnership as a stepping stone to the central institutions. The CWC gained ground because it identified not only local deprivation and ways

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of tackling it through local development but also government failures to access and distribute available EC resources in a time of need. At the same time, the underlying role of shifting electoral sentiment should not be underestimated in changing the tactics of the government. Implicitly, the CWC made headway due to a leftward shift in the demos in the early 1990s, which in turn predisposed the state to more active engagement with the community sector. While the CWC focused on alienation of marginalised communities from local government, their progress was contingent on that wider shift in the dynamics of representative democracy. Their focus on participative democracy may have led them to leave these wider dynamics out of their calculations – in contrast to CORI Justice, which as the next chapter shows, was acutely sensitive to them. There was a tendency to substitute the notion of the community for the demos, as implicitly superior. With changed economic conditions, the government of the late 1990s and early 2000s re-­established its legitimacy, and the salience of the CWC as a force to lever resources for innovative projects was reduced. Small organisations which do not take account of changing realities are at risk of losing ground and, in a sense, the CWC, and with it the Platform, failed to anticipate the consequences of rejecting Sustaining Progress, insofar as they did not expect to be ejected from social partnership. And, while a majority of people in the Platform subsequently were in no hurry to get back in to the institutions, there was dismay at having been pushed out. This account points to ‘conflicted’ thinking, if not illusions about the limits and possibilities of bargaining and deliberative modalities, and confusion about the rules of participation in social partnership. For most other actors, social partnership – inside the Pillar and more generally – is a bargaining ‘game’ (with limited possibilities and a range of trade-­offs), where concepts of participatory democracy have at best a limited rhetorical value. Ironically, while the CWC chafed at the limits of representative democracy, it might not always have been sufficiently aware of the shoulders of the demos that carried it along at certain moments. Indeed, the shift in political climate from the local elections in 2004 – when government parties received a drubbing – was largely responsible for a new readiness by the government to commit resources to RAPID and indeed to readmit the Platform to social partnership after Towards 2016 was signed off in 2006. The government was, after all, preparing for the 2007 general election in that phase. In reality, the modalities of social partnership for the CWC and other CVP actors were more complex and cannot be understood without reference to the power asymmetries within the institutions and the wider dynamics and shifts in economic fortunes, political control and electoral sentiment. Other actors, such as employers and unions, carry various types of power and in particular bargaining power. The power of smaller organisations is not in bargaining.

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They have to be strong on analysis and they have to be aware of wider political dynamics. One of the modalities of government is coercion, and small organisations that lose touch with the demos are open to coercion, for example being excluded from the institutions of social partnership, or losing state funding. Still less than bargain, the smaller associations of the CVP do not deliberate as equals in social partnership; rather they put their organisations on the line and interact with the state and other actors in a complex asymmetrical ‘game’. While small actors can be highly effective, they have to take bigger risks and should be aware of the impact of the tactics they deploy. They may choose to defy the state at times but they should not be surprised to land on the outside and should be equipped with a strategy and tactics in that event. If they are to operate more freely in the overlapping margins of the state, social partnership institutions and ‘the people’ they need to develop a capacity for pursuing important questions with great tactical facility and awareness of the dynamics of representative democracy.

Notes  1 Among those mentioned by respondents were Joe Kelly, Terry Morrissey, Tríona NicGoillechoile, Claire Smith, Brian Kenny, Sinéad Brady, Pat Browne, Frances Chance and Tony Downes.   2 Muintir Na Tíre was founded in 1937 to harness a sense of community purpose drawing support across classes in rural Ireland and continues to this day.   3 These included support for the anti-­Marcos movement in the Philippines, the British miners’ strike in 1985, Nicaragua support group, the campaign to clear the name of Annie Maguire, Travellers’ rights, and other justice issues.   4 Area Development Management (ADM) was a national level agency established under the Department of the Taoiseach. Later, it was placed under the aegis of the new Department of Community Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (CRAGA) and was reformed and renamed Pobail.   5 From 1973 to 2003 Ireland received approximately €17 billion in EU Structural and Cohesion Funds. Receipts peaked in the course of the 1990s while all of Ireland was designated as an Objective 1 region. (National Development Plan/Community Support Framework Information Office www.ndp.ie.)   6 The first Chair of ADM was Paddy Teahon of the Department of the Taoiseach. Philip Mullally, Enterprise Trust, Brian Geoghegan, Employer Organisation, Brendan Hodgers, Trade Union, Tom Curran, Farmers’ Organisation, Mary Dorgan, Area Partnership Companies, John Burns, Area Partnership Companies, Philip Watt, Area Partnership Companies, Anastasia Crickley, Community Workers’ Co-­operative, Helen Landers, Community Development Projects, Bill Farrell, Irish Rural Link, Blaise Treacy, Local Government, Des Fahey, Business Innovation Centres.   7 The origins of the NESF are covered in more detail in Chapter 5 on the CVP and in Chapter 6 on the INOU. Here the focus is on the CWC and NESF.   8 There is no department of the Tánaiste and the office mainly began to become important as coalition governments became the norm, with the office normally going to the leader of the second party to the coalition. This practice lasted from 1992 continuously until 2007, when it changed.   9 The three representatives were Niall Crowley, Fintan Farrell and David Joyce.

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10 The Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP), for instance, did not engage with the NESF initially although some members did regret the fact and later SVP did get involved in social partnership (Brennan and McCashin 2001). 11 This section draws on interviews with CWC and other community sector respondents, and other relevant sources and publications, as to the manner and outcomes of this process. Among the published sources is a particularly valuable account of the initiation of the community sector into social partnership, aptly entitled Achieving Social Partnership (Community Platform 1997) issued soon after the negotiations leading to Partnership 2000. 12 The Platform was given two places while a selection of organisations which were also in the Platform (CORI, INOU, NWCI, SVP) and three which were outside the Platform (NYCI, ICTU Centres for the Unemployed and Protestant Aid) were given one place each – a total of nine seats. 13 The agenda for these meetings derived from the chapters in the NESC Strategy Report (NESC 1996) and the NESF Opinion (National Economic and Social Forum 1996). The topics covered were: ‘Macro-­Economic Framework’, ‘Action on Living Standards through Pay, Personal Taxation and Social Inclusion’, ‘Action for Greater Social Inclusion’, ‘Action Towards a New Focus on Equality’ and ‘Action on Partnership and Monitoring’ (Community Platform 1997: 11–12). 14 The NAPS was not a direct creature of the social partnership process, but the department of the Taoiseach was quick to relate to the idea, which was developed by the Combat Poverty Agency following a conference in Copenhagen in 1995 that identified indicators of poverty in a comparative perspective and drew attention to Ireland’s lacklustre performance. 15 The others were Irish Travellers’ Movement (ITM), Forum of People with Disabilities, One Parent Exchange Network (OPEN), Irish Refugee Council (IRC), Irish Rural Link, Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU), Children’s Rights Alliance (CRA), Older Women’s Network (OWN), European Anti-­Poverty Network – Ireland (EAPN). 16 The World Summit for Social Development, convened by the United Nations, Copenhagen, Denmark, 6-­12 March 1995. 17 The NESF report was prepared by Rory O’Donnell, who was also Director of the NESC for most of the 1990s and 2000s. 18 See Held (2006:18) on the Athenian constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes, in which the quorum for the assembly was 6,000 (free, male) citizens! 19 The detail is set out in Appendix 1 RAPID Programme National & Local Structures (Community Workers’ Co-­operative 2003a: 51). 20 This committee comprised four people in all, two from either side – Donal Geoghegan, NYCI, Sean Healy (CORI), Orla O’Connor (NWCI) and Siobhan O’Donoghue (CWC). 21 Source: RTÉ news archives:www.rte.ie/news/2003/0303/partnership.html (accessed 5 July 2008). 22 Community Workers’ Co-­operative (2004) Strategic Plan 2004-­2007: www.cwc.ie/stratplan04.html (accessed 12 September 2008).

8 Superior tactics? The Conference of Religious in Ireland (Justice Commission) The CORI Justice Commission

Introduction One of the most interesting actors in Irish social partnership has been the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (hereinafter CORI Justice), which became perhaps the single most influential voice of the CVP over time. Although there might be no surprise at a Catholic organisation exercising influence in what has been traditionally defined as a Catholic country, the positions taken by CORI Justice have often departed from the official line of the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy on the major economic challenges of recent decades. Moreover, while the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland has a longstanding concordat with the secular elite, CORI Justice has often been viewed as the bane of politicians and the civil service.1 At the same time, while radical in many ways, CORI Justice does not portray itself as inspired by liberation theology, is much more likely to refer to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and frequently makes reference to its roots in Catholic social teaching (Healy and Reynolds 2005). Yet CORI Justice should not simply be seen as a current of opinion in a much larger Church in Ireland but perhaps the most public face of a federal body (CORI) that represents the interests of well over 100 religious orders in Ireland and deals with the Irish state on education, health and other social services in which religious orders and Church bodies have been major players for nearly two centuries. Considerable changes in Ireland’s Church–state relations have taken place since the 1970s, largely in response to changes in society and challenges within civil society to an alliance that was all too comfortable and close in the past. In particular, since the 1990s, the reputation of the Irish Catholic hierarchy and religious orders has been damaged over their concealment, until very recently, of endemic patterns of physical and sexual abuse of children in their trust. Against this backdrop, and plunging levels of religious adherence and practice, it is remarkable that CORI Justice successfully forged alliances with diverse organisations, of women, the unemployed and communities

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of interest, and become an important voice for social welfare-­dependent groups. This chapter explores some of the paradoxes of CORI Justice’s circumstances and attempts to identify the formula of its successful ascent in the CVP of social partnership. First, the chapter looks at the origins and in particular the distinctive outlook and analysis of CORI Justice. In particular there is a brief examination of its interpretation of Catholic social teaching, which is infused with a pragmatic social reformism that goes well beyond the dominant approach of Irish Catholicism or the historic corpus of Catholic social teaching that informed social policy in continental Europe from the 1890s. This pragmatic interpretation enabled CORI Justice to engage with other community and voluntary actors in attempting to influence policy. At the same time, the focus of CORI Justice’s critique is more or less entirely on areas where the state rather than the Church is provider. This has enabled CORI to avoid falling foul of the Church. CORI Justice has adroitly drawn on the cachet of Catholic influence in Irish political life while dodging the criticism directed against the Church in recent years. Simultaneously, it has concentrated on social welfare policy issues, which were previously left by the Church to the state as part of an historic accommodation, and has quietly left the battlefields of private morality – as instanced in constitutional referenda and legislative change around divorce, contraception and abortion – once monopolised by the Church. The chapter also seeks to reveal how CORI Justice proved adept not only in relation to this macro environment but also in the conduct of its tactics vis-­à-­vis allies in the CVP. Where CORI Justice has shone is in its focus on social welfare issues and the question of relative poverty. CORI Justice has, like other participants from the CVP in social partnership, suffered from the power differential that affects the new social partners as compared to employer organisations and trade unions, in dealings with the state. Nevertheless it has demonstrated a capacity for successful engagement against considerable odds. While its position is perhaps unique in that it enjoys the protection of the Church, its success cannot be reduced to that factor alone. CORI Justice has had a love–hate relationship with others in the CVP, in which it has kept its own flag high. In the wider Irish context CORI Justice has demonstrated a capacity for ducking and diving in order to maximise its opportunities, survive the doldrums and avoid the dangers that arise from the political and economic cycles. Indeed, it is contended here that its efforts met with tangible success, after many years of persistent campaigning, even though it may have at times appeared to be tilting at windmills. As a study in asymmetric engagement, therefore, CORI Justice can be instructive on a number of levels.

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Origins of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) The Conference of Religious of Ireland – formerly known as the Conference of Major Religious Superiors (Ireland)2 – is the representative body for religious congregations in Ireland both in the Republic and Northern Ireland. The CMRS was established in 1958 at the request of the Vatican, which approves its statutes, in preparation for the Second Vatican Council. Originally it was organised in two sections – for male and female religious congregations – until these were merged between 1980 and 1983. In 1994 the CMRS, following approval from the Vatican, changed its name to the Conference of Religious in Ireland and is widely known as CORI. Today, CORI comprises some 125 religious congregations with up to 13,000 members on the island of Ireland. In the past, leaders, or ‘superiors’, of each congregation formed the core group of leadership of CORI. Today, an executive board of 15 is elected every four years by an annual general assembly.3 Other religious members participate through Commissions, Regional Associations, and other groups, each with its own structure and relationship with the Conference. CORI describes its goals as vocational development and promotion of Christian life, and extols ‘prophetic’ action in support of social justice, the poor and the natural environment. Reflecting the fact that many of its affiliated religious orders are engaged in missionary work abroad, it has a particular focus on the Third World. It proclaims support for women, both in the Church and in wider society and for peace with justice for all in Northern Ireland. It makes analyses of social issues, promotes a vision of a better society and fosters collaboration among its own affiliates and with other denominations and civil groups. CORI carries out its work through ‘Commissions’. Prominent among these is the Education Commission which is based on the longstanding influence of religious orders in first and second level education in Ireland, which are organised largely along religious lines with state funding and denominational management. The Education Commission represents the interests of religious orders in relation to schooling and education practice and policy-­making with a view to promoting Christian education in Ireland. Following revelations in the 1990s regarding sexual abuse by religious and clergy, CORI established a Child Protection Task Force to engage with victims of sexual abuse. Religious orders have been involved in health services over almost two centuries and in 1998 CORI set up a Healthcare Commission to co-­ordinate its response to healthcare policy developments. The Health and Education commissions can be viewed as representing the interests of religious congregations in relation to the service areas in which they have had a major role since the nineteenth century. There are other commissions, which relate to more internal matters, such as the Commissions for Religious Life, Pastoral Affairs, and Northern Ireland.

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Table 8.1  CORI Justice landmarks Year

Landmark

1958

Establishment of Conference of Major Religious Superiors, prior to Vatican II Gaudium et Spes – The Church in the Modern World (a key document of Vatican II) Congregations adopt the commitment to justice of Gaudium et Spes Synod of Bishops – Post-­Vatican II on ‘Justice’, meaning social justice CMRS establishes the Justice Commission and a Justice Office to carry out its work Letters re. Criminal Justice Bill; support for Dunnes Stores workers’ strike against Apartheid First pre-­budget submission First socio-­economic review Social Policy conference Taoiseach Charles Haughey makes disparaging references to CMRS in Dáil, 14 March First submission to social partnership (PESP) talks Submission to talks leading to PCW Government nominates Rev. Sean Healy as academic to NESF Change of name from CMRS to Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) October: CORI Justice allocated seat on Community and Voluntary Pillar Under Partnership 2000 CORI Justice gets a committee on basic income, and pilot jobs scheme CORI Justice gets Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Working Group from PPF talks NAPS 2 aims to increase lowest welfare payments to be increased to €150 (in 2002 prices) by 2007 CORI remains in the CVP but splits from Community Platform, which is expelled from social partnership CORI signs up to Sustaining Progress, Community and Voluntary Pillar is restructured September: Rev. Sean Healy address to Fianna Fáil at its think-­in at Inchydoney, Co. Cork Series of budgets raise social welfare payments to 30% of gross average industrial earnings Signing of Towards 2016

1965 1970s 1971 1981 1984 1986 1987 1988 1990 1990 1993 1993 1994 1996 1996 1999 2002 2002/3 2003 2004 2004–8 2006

In contrast to these commissions, the Justice Commission, which is examined below, does not represent the ‘interests of congregations’ but exercises an ‘option’ for social justice in society more generally. In other words, it engages with civil society and the state through the public sphere on the basis of a set of values it sees as serving the public good. This puts CORI Justice in a position somewhat similar to other non-­governmental public interest organisations in the CVP.

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The Justice Commission According to CORI Justice,4 in 1971, following from Vatican II, the Synod of Bishops addressed the issue of social justice and, in the 1970s, many religious congregations began to re-­examine their role and mission. The establishment of the Justice Commission by CORI in 1981-­82 was a reflection of this shift in the discourse within the Catholic world, related in part to secularisation, economic expansion and state activism. At a time when the Church continued to expound conservative positions on a range of ‘moral’ issues, in relation to marriage and sexuality for example, CORI Justice was turning its attention to economic and social issues. While commentators usually refer to CORI as a social partner, the view of key respondents from CORI is that it is the CORI Justice Commission only that is a social partner, and member of the CVP of social partnership. The Justice Commission, also known as the ‘Justice Desk’ and ‘CORI Justice’, was established in the early 1980s by Sr Brigid Reynolds and Rev. Bill McKenna, a Jesuit. The current Directors of the Commission are Sr Brigid Reynolds SM and Fr Sean Healy SMA5 – who have occupied these posts since 1982-­83. As a key informant put it, ‘The CORI Justice Commission is the social partner, and was invited to be a social partner. CORI tends [to be] used as shorthand for obvious reasons, but that tends to misrepresent the perspective’ (SH). CORI Justice and Catholic social teaching CORI Justice adopts the perspective of the Judeo-­ Christian tradition. It subscribes to traditional teachings Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII 1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI 1931) but claims a new approach for the Church. Whereas, formerly, the Church ‘would have thought that it had the answer’ now it ‘wants to be in dialogue’ (SH).6 While CORI Justice’s rendition of Catholic social teaching is still rather abstract, there is a radical idea at the heart of its approach. CORI Justice is critical of the direction of the economic development model of contemporary capitalism in so far as this fails to allow for ‘right relationships’ and a balance between the more meaningful aspects of life and paid employment. In its contribution to a conference in the Vatican City in 2005 celebrating the 40th anniversary of Gaudium et Spes, an important encyclical from Vatican II, CORI Justice made the point: Structural analysis and working for structural and systemic change are cornerstones of the agenda of the CORI Justice Commission … In the past, charity … was seen as sufficient to ensure that everyone could cross the threshold of human dignity … [but] charity and the heroic efforts of voluntary agencies … cannot on their own, solve these problems on a long-­term basis. (Healy and Reynolds 2005)

While still in line with more abstract elements of Catholic teaching on the avoidance of extreme polarisation of wealth and income, CORI Justice

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­ onetheless explored and advocated some radical concepts, in particular basic n income (BI), as a basis for structural change in the fiscal and social welfare systems, which places it broadly on the left of the Catholic spectrum. The thinking of CORI diverged from that of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland on this subject. CORI Justice and Irish Catholicism In the Irish Catholic context, the radical positions of CORI Justice stand out even more than they would if viewed in a comparative context. In Ireland, for historical reasons, ‘Catholic social teaching’ has been attenuated by liberalism while Catholic moral teaching and the social power of the Catholic Church, paradoxically, have been stronger than in continental heartlands (Carey 2007; Fahey 1998; 2007). Esping-­Andersen (1990) included Ireland in the ‘liberal’ – as distinct from the ‘conservative corporatist’ – welfare regime cluster due to limited de-­commodification and adherence to Beveridgean social insurance principles. As highlighted by recent scholarship (Carey 2007; Fuller 2002; Inglis 1998; O’Leary 2000; Peillon 2001) the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland has traditionally supported means-­tested or flat-­rated benefits and private welfare while exercising its influence in education, health and personal social services spheres. Catholic social power rather than Catholic social teaching was the prevalent factor in the Irish case and for a long time the formula suited an authoritarian Church in a parsimonious state dominated by the rural petit bourgeoisie. Against this background CORI’s proposed universal provision of basic income as the cornerstone of income maintenance is really striking. This departs from the longstanding tradition of mainstream continental Catholic social thinking on ‘subsidiarity’ but diverges even more from the Irish Catholic Church’s policy on income maintenance. CORI Justice’s position on income maintenance is – in Irish Catholic Church terms – truly radical. In the face of large-­scale unemployment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of basic income provided CORI Justice with a more radical profile than the Catholic mainstream – and indeed the political mainstream. However CORI Justice never succeeded in having the concept of basic income taken up by the Catholic hierarchy or by other significant groups in the CVP, and the INOU, for one, has advanced a very different view, in favour of full employment. CORI Justice’s basic income position has some affinities with ‘post-­ productivist’ schools of welfare thinking (seen for example in some variants of environmentalism). While clearly unrelated to the social democratic tradition, the basic income concept aspires to a more egalitarian society, narrowing the relativities and income disparities associated with liberal and even conservative welfare models. The ideas of CORI Justice on incomes are on the left of the Catholic spectrum. What CORI Justice does not challenge are the domains of social

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provision in which the Church has traditionally been dominant, particularly education, where the state has funded a strongly confessional primary school system and Church-­controlled but publicly funded secondary schools; still less has it challenged the public/private healthcare mix, whereby religious orders, the state, private medical professions and commercial interests share control. Peillon (2001: 70ff) has noted how other bodies such as the CSW (now incorporated in the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs, ICJSA) have been more forthright in calling for universal health or education provision. Hierarchy versus CORI Justice on jobs CORI Justice has expressed a view of social policy that is associated with more radical positions than found in the mainstream of Catholic teaching. The economic crisis facing Ireland in the 1980s and early 1990s was the subject of separate analysis by the Irish bishops, who have tended to put a greater stress on work as the key – not just the key to human dignity but also to the success of the economy (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 1996). The bishops’ thinking would be viewed as closer to that of policy-­makers in the 1990s. While making the distinction between work and jobs, the bishops were in no doubt that the key to meeting ‘the moral obligation of honouring every person’s need and right to work translates, in the Ireland of today, into the need to create more jobs’, adding, ‘we have heard no convincing argument nor seen any evidence that there is a sound alternative to job creation’ (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 1996: 16). The bishops restated the original teaching of Pope Leo XIII (1890) on the condition of workers, which stressed the concept of ‘a fair day’s pay’, i.e. a job as the remedy for poverty, while adding: ‘This link is still strong today’ (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 1996: 17). Referring to Centesimus Annus (John Paul II 1991) they also stated: ‘Unemployed people are entitled to an income which allows them to live with dignity. However, jobs that pay fairly remain the norm towards which Church social teaching points’ (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 1996: 17). The mainstream thinking stresses ‘the dignity of earning’ and notes that ‘until we have exhausted every avenue for economic development and job creation, we can not describe our jobless levels as inevitable’ (Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference 1996: 18/23). CORI Justice developed positions on income maintenance and social policy that diverge from this line of argument, suggesting that ‘full employment’, as well as being not necessarily desirable from a ‘right relationships’ perspective, is not attainable in the global economy of the twenty-­first century. The interviews for this study were undertaken at a time when Ireland had come through a remarkable economic turnaround involving the practical achievement of full employment. CORI cautioned that this success was somewhat exceptional in a global context and that its analysis was for the global reality and the longer term, in which full employment would not be the rule.

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In the 1980s, when unemployment was still rising, CORI (CMRS) Justice had been supportive of improving social welfare, and supported the recommendations of the report of the CSW (1986). Over time, however, CORI Justice began to think in more radical terms and pursued basic income as appropriate to the longer term. But, as a respondent noted, CORI Justice would not ‘allow the best to be the enemy of the good’, so short-­term income maintenance goals were also advanced. Basic income is defined by its international supporters as follows: A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways: it is being paid to individuals rather than households; it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources; it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered. (Basic Income Earth Network 2009)

There are, however, many variants of and motivations behind the concept. In the case of CORI Justice, the concept of basic income came in part from a philosophical concept of ‘right relationships’. BI is in keeping with this concept as it is a work-­neutral form of income maintenance, intended to protect the choice of homemaking and indeed other types of ‘work’ – as distinct from ‘job’ – without exposing homemakers to increased risk of poverty. It is often associated with a ‘post-­productivist’ view of the challenges to the welfare state in an era when human productivity is technically sufficient to meet human needs but economic organisation is such that it drives production further, regardless of the danger to habitats or structured inequality in the distribution of products, services, income and wealth. CORI Justice tuned into new ways of looking at work and welfare (Healy and Reynolds 1993). In that context CORI Justice linked up with a varied international network of radical thinkers through the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), formerly called the Basic Income European Network, which was founded in 1986, around the time the Justice Commission was developing its own analysis. Fr Sean Healy was for a time a member of the BIEN executive committee. Many, although not all, BI supporters come from an environmentalist as well as an egalitarian perspective. Some, including CORI Justice, have argued for BI on the grounds that it would remove unemployment traps implicit in existing social welfare systems. Compared to the Catholic mainstream in Ireland, CORI Justice can be seen to have a more radical social policy vision, in relation to the interdependency of jobs and income. It diverges in other respects too. The concept of basic income implies a great degree of state intervention in the market economy that appears to run up against Catholic social teaching, which stresses subsidiarity, or the principle that the state only intervenes if solutions proffered at the smaller scale

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of family, local community and enterprise are inappropriate (Quadragesimo Anno: paragraph 80). The Church in the past, in Ireland in particular, has favoured voluntary management while accepting statutory funding in service provision. Internationally, in the context of social security, it has favoured more fragmented and stratified mutually funded social insurance models rather than universal tax-­funded policies, largely on such grounds. In Ireland it has been much less assertive on this issue, in accepting means-­tested, liberal or Beveridgean social security. The approach of CORI to income maintenance is in contrast to this method.

Relations with government and other actors Making a name for itself CORI was originally called the Conference of Major Religious Superiors (CMRS) and the Justice Commission faced a dilemma in that – in a real sense – it was self-­elected as spokesperson of the voiceless and the poor. Initially the CMRS Justice Commission took up justice issues in the wider sense.7 In time the focus narrowed to issues of distributional justice, but establishing credibility here was not too easy. This is highlighted by a Dáil exchange in March 1990,8 when an opposition deputy, Jim Higgins, quoted a CMRS document on increasing poverty figures. Taoiseach Charlie Haughey’s response, in which he rejected the figures, included the remark: ‘I am always a bit doubtful about any organisation that has “major” and “superior” in its title.’ In 1994 the CMRS officially changed its name to the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI). However, according to a CORI Justice respondent, this change was not connected to the exchange in the Dáil, and the timing was coincidental. While the Haughey remarks got much criticism in the aftermath, the issue of precisely who the CMRS/CORI Justice legitimately represented is a complex one. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 5, the Dáil exchange between Higgins and Haughey was precisely intended to raise the issue of lack of representation of the poor and marginalised sections of Irish society in social partnership.9 CORI Justice saw its role in terms that have been applied to Catholicism, after Vatican II, as ‘prophetic’ and expressive of an ‘option’ for the poor. In the run-­up to participation in social partnership from the early 1990s, CORI Justice came to focus on three selected groups: ‘Now, the three groups that we identified as being significant and not represented at the table were poor people, unemployed people and women’ (SH). Of course, CORI itself is not made up of the poor or unemployed, or women, except in so far as a majority of the members of religious orders are women. CORI can, in the strict sense, only represent its membership. But politically, CORI Justice chooses to champion certain other groups, because of its analysis of issues of justice and equality. One interpretation of the organisation’s choices is that CORI Justice saw

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these interests as its key focus for analysis and advocacy. Another reading is that it merely identified the need for these three groups to be directly represented by their own delegates at the negotiation table. In the event, the NWCI was admitted to represent the interests of women directly and the INOU was admitted to provide direct representation for the unemployed. In fact, there is an irony in so far as the INOU opposed the CORI Justice analysis of unemployment. The NWCI too developed its own analysis on gender and, although there was much common ground in the early 1990s, some tensions between their respective positions were later evident. The ‘poor’ did not have an explicit organisation to represent them directly and it is in relation to poverty that the Justice Commission subsequently gained distinction. CORI Justice set great store by their independent analysis. ‘The big thing … is critical reflection on our side … The civil service by its nature is very happy with little bits of progress, very incremental, and I think we have to be extremely careful on the big questions’ (BR). By focusing on income maintenance, CORI Justice sees itself as the most consistent advocate of income adequacy for the poor: Income is always very low on the priority list of most, even the community and voluntary sector. They talk about educational disadvantage or access to medical cards … but generally we put [income] on the agenda. (BR)

CORI Justice’s claim to becoming a social partner, in this sense, is its analysis, as CORI Justice is not elected by or otherwise ‘representative’ of the poor. In fact, any organisation can come up with an analysis but of itself that does not make it a social partner. Analysis seems to be CORI Justice’s principal offering. Nevertheless, when CORI Justice press statements were reported in news media, they usually had a note appended stating that CORI represented 135 religious congregations with over 12/13,000 members in 1,400 communities throughout Ireland.10 This clearly adds some weight to the analysis of CORI Justice, though whether it is intended to imply that CORI Justice represents this number in the partnership process or to convey the collective adoption of the analysis by all the membership is never explicit. CORI Justice’s access to partnership rests on the cachet of a body of such standing – adding weight to the intrinsic appeal of its analysis. A striking part of CORI Justice’s formula for success is its astute and assiduous use of the print media. As part of this study a trawl of articles on or about or inspired by CORI in the Irish Times produced a very large amount of content. Between 1996 and 2007, some 44,000 words were printed in articles specifically focused on CORI – and 90% of this content related to the policy interventions of CORI Justice. There is a downside to this wider association. A small percentage of the coverage relates not to CORI Justice but to CORI more generally, and has mainly focused on issues of abuse and on apparently

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cosy relations between religious congregations and the state. Being a very prominent face of CORI, the ‘Justice Desk’ was inevitably drawn by journalists on controversial issues – and very particularly on the history of failures by the Church hierarchy and religious congregations to prevent or address child abuse by members of the clergy or religious orders over several decades. Just before the government went out of office in 2002, it came to light that CORI (as distinct from CORI Justice) was involved in brokering a deal with key ministers to limit the financial liability of several religious orders for the compensation of abuse victims formerly in their care – a deal which appeared to many to let these orders off very lightly. When a representative of CORI Justice was tackled by a reporter on the subject, he attempted to distance the Justice Commission and indeed CORI itself, as honest broker, from the controversy, as a limited number of orders had been implicated.11 Generally speaking, however, CORI Justice avoids entanglement on issues to do with the management and control of health and education services and issues to do with the sphere of private life, and has successfully used the media to promote its analysis and keep up the pressure on politicians. Engaging with social partnership from outside When the Programme for National Recovery (PNR) was negotiated in 1987, the community sector simply was not involved, but this soon changed. The involvement of CORI’s Justice Commission in social partnership began, as with other organisations, through submissions to the negotiators in the context of the PESP in 1990 and the PCW in 1993. The references to the CMRS in the Dáil in 1990 were the first indication that widened participation in social partnership might yet be attainable. According to CORI Justice, access to senior civil servants across various departments was considerable: in 1990 its representatives met the Secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach, Paddy Teahon and some sixteen assistant secretaries; in 1993 CORI Justice had access to any government departments they wished to meet in relation to the forthcoming agreement, the PCW (Hastings, et al. 2007: 152). The making of submissions prior to the social partnership talks became an established pattern, and was acknowledged in the PCW (1993). There is little evidence that these submissions had much influence, particularly in relation to any real progress in relation to social welfare, which was the key issue for CORI Justice (as indeed for the INOU, as noted in Chapter 6). This began to change following two consultation initiatives – the short-­lived Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment (1992) and the more enduring National Economic and Social Forum (1993) – providing much greater access to the policy process for community and voluntary groups.

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The NESF: common cause despite different analyses The origins of the NESF have been examined in more detail earlier. Of note here is that the government nominated Rev. Sean Healy as one of two academics identified with the community and voluntary sector. For him, this was to become a long-­term involvement – three three-­year terms. In a further development, he was also appointed to the NESC in 1997, bringing him much closer to the action of social partnership. In the NESF, the Justice Commission found some common ground with the ‘third strand’, as the community and voluntary sector were described, on income maintenance policy. There were differences of analysis on the possibility of ending unemployment, with CORI Justice taking a pessimistic view, and promoting the idea of a basic income. The problem of poverty, which was concentrated mostly among unemployed people, and the inadequacy of social welfare, brought a sense of common purpose. Despite the presence of these two organisations, the NESF submission to the negotiations for the successor to the PESP was vague on the matter of the minimum levels of social welfare payments recommended by the CSW (National Economic and Social Forum 1993: 22). Evidently the difficulty was in relation to persuading the other strands to agree, and clearly much work was still needed if the third strand was to have any impact. In the context of the other work of the NESF in late 1993, on long-­term unemployment, the Justice Commission submitted their defining paper, Work, Jobs, Income – Towards a New Paradigm. The main focus of the paper was on the impossibility of full employment and the consequent need for a distinction between separate rights, to meaningful work on the one hand and to adequate income maintenance on the other. CORI Justice put forward the concept of ‘basic income’ in its paper. Initially the concept drew more interest from academia than from the other actors in the NESF. In an early response to the Justice Commission’s proposal, Honohan (1994) noted that basic income is ‘difficult to attain and, bearing political realities in mind, may be out of reach for the present’ but he acknowledged that ‘basic income is a useful reference point for thinking about and even for guiding the direction of partial reforms’. In effect, even if it was never adopted, basic income was a very useful concept for a lobbying group like the CMRS Justice Commission to utilise in expounding its critique of existing arrangements. The CMRS succeeded in making the concept of basic income a focus of further analysis within the context of social partnership over subsequent years. Nonetheless, there were objections even in 1994. Honohan estimated that a basic income paid to all citizens would lead to high marginal tax rates on low to middle incomes (albeit compensated for among the low paid) in the order of 60%. Other research put the cost higher and even its advocates did not view it as cheap. Charles Clark estimated a flat tax rate of 47% for a basic income variant he outlined for Ireland (Clark 2002: 49).

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The views of CORI Justice were opposed by the INOU on the grounds that unemployment was capable of being tackled and it was a distraction to be speculating about an ‘end of jobs scenario’. However, the matter was still somewhat academic and the INOU were busily promoting many practical policy proposals on unemployment. CORI Justice too demonstrated a pragmatic side and their paper also contained a pilot proposal for a part-­time employment scheme whereby unemployed people would be able to get the rate for the job in exchange for voluntarily working a number of hours up to the level of social welfare entitlement.12 The part-­time employment proposal nonetheless shows the flair for policy entrepreneurship on the part of CORI Justice that complemented its more aspirational side. The CORI jobs proposal was adopted by the government as a pilot proposal in the budget for 1994 by Finance Minister Bertie Ahern as part of an expansion of the Social Employment Scheme, which was re-­named Community Employment, to 30,000 places. He included provision for the CORI proposal and 1,000 places were to be created under a scheme to be devised in conjunction with the Department of Enterprise and Employment.13 It should probably be acknowledged that the proposal was given a fuller hearing due to the fact that it came through the NESF, which rewarded CORI Justice for its policy entrepreneurship, rather than directly. CORI Justice also pursued the debate on basic income through other avenues, including its annual social policy conference in 1995, when it invited representatives of all five main parties to give responses to the concept. Only the Democratic Left – then in the rainbow government with Labour and Fine Gael – said they subscribed to the concept. However, even they were at most committed to a ‘basic income for children’ to replace and integrate several existing schemes, and they expressed caution on a fully fledged basic income in Ireland in the foreseeable future. Fine Gael and Labour were concerned about the cost; Fianna Fáil said the real issue was the level rather than the mechanism for income maintenance, while the liberal right Progressive Democrat party were dismissive (Reynolds and Healy 1995). The government focused on removing employment traps from the tax and social welfare code and the Minister for Finance set up an Expert Group chaired by the former Secretary of the ICTU, Donal Nevin (Working Group on the Integration of the Tax and Social Welfare Systems) in 1996. In the event, the Working Group favoured a more complex approach to reform in preference to basic income.

First gains and longer-­term goals: Partnership 2000 In 1996, CORI Justice secured its independent seat in social partnership, along with seven other bodies, and also joined with 14 other organisations and networks to form the Community Platform in the negotiations in late 1996 on a

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successor to the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, which resulted in Partnership 2000, published in December 1996. As already noted (see Chapter 6 on the INOU) a major issue that arose for the CVP in Partnership 2000 was over the recommended minimum rates of social welfare in the 1986 Report of the Commission on Social Welfare, which had still not been reached. The CVP, whose member groups had lobbied without success so far, wanted the targets to be met before the end of the three-­year term of Partnership 2000. A detailed account of how this concession was achieved was provided in the chapter on the INOU. However, CORI Justice was also a keen supporter of this demand. It seems that although the spearhead on this front was the INOU, according to an account of events from CORI Justice, Sean Healy too played a role by lobbying the Tánaiste Dick Spring in the week before Christmas 1996. At a function in Kerry that weekend, Spring passed a note to Healy – apparently around the same moment as key INOU figures were being informed by senior civil servants of the breakthrough in Dublin – to the effect that that the government had come around on minimum recommended social welfare rates. The issue of basic income also was, of course, raised during the talks by CORI Justice and, while the concept had no government support, a working group was conceded under Partnership 2000 to examine the arguments in detail.14 Already basic income had been the subject of detailed study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (Callan et al. 1994). Further work and analysis took place (Callan et al. 1999; Callan et al. 2000) and a Green Paper was eventually published in 2002. This was a remarkable achievement for a non-­governmental organisation, even if – disappointingly from CORI’s perspective – successive governments were not persuaded as to the merits of the concept.15 As noted, the main counter-­argument to the CORI position was based on the impact of basic income on taxation. Estimates of the tax rate from supporters of the concept put the rate at 47% of all income – still substantial enough to imply a major shift from a low income-­tax economy (Government of Ireland 2002: 21). The CORI model was deemed not only to be too radical in that respect but also a possible threat to the incentives to investment and the take-­up of employment. In a way, the technical niceties of basic income per se have not been as important in Ireland as the essential idea of a minimum income guarantee for all, which betokens a commitment to fairer distribution of income and the eradication of income poverty. This is certainly counter to a liberal welfare model or even a Beveridge-­style model of welfare policy that has characterised the Irish welfare regime until now. Thus, the significance of basic income for CORI Justice partly resides in its symbolism and, while its analytical merits are the subject of ongoing debate, basic income serves as a new paradigm for the social reform of the existing systems. In the meantime more incremental reforms have to be pursued and the Justice Commission has sought to promote both objectives. It therefore pursued the benchmarking

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of social welfare as a key theme under the negotiations on a successor to Partnership 2000, which resulted in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF). CORI Justice demonstrated a pragmatic streak that would never to allow its longer-­term and more distinctive aspirations to get in the way of lesser but achievable concessions.

Challenging relative poverty: Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) The campaign on what was dubbed the benchmarking of social welfare payments (against movements in earnings) is an example of what is viewed in this study as a pattern of ‘asymmetric engagement’, or the tactical manoeuvring over the medium term by small organisations in pursuit of their goals. By the late 1990s, the growth of wealth and employment had not been translated into redistributive justice in Ireland. Division of the benefits of growth – and redistribution more generally – is affected by several factors including the balance of forces the between capital and labour, previously embedded patterns of the welfare state, the current composition of government, and electoral sentiment. The challenge for the CVP was to achieve its goals taking account of shifts in some of these independent factors and to get its timing right as between economic and political cycles. Increasingly, CORI Justice got into the fray as the leading voice on the issue of relativity between social welfare and average earnings. This campaign is instructive, both as to the possibilities created by focused and determined campaigning and also the ultimate limits of such efforts. In the context of the PPF negotiations in 1999 (Government of Ireland 2000), the CVP was seeking big improvements in social welfare, child benefit and reforms to the existing structure of social welfare. Again, pragmatic effort focused on achievable objectives due by then to the marked improvement in the economy. From an economic perspective, there was never a better time to push for improvements: unemployment had fallen, government revenue was rising and the issue of sharing the growing prosperity had begun to emerge from the shadow of other preoccupations such as how to remove employment traps in the tax and social welfare code. An INOU respondent suggested in an interview that: ‘There was an agreement on a rhetoric’ in the PPF talks, ‘which was an adequate income for every man, woman and child’ and consequently any disagreement on topics like basic income ‘was put aside’ (MA). Politically, however, matters had moved against the CVP. The general election of 1997 had replaced the centre-­left rainbow coalition with a centre-­right coalition of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats. With the economy booming, and a fresh mandate, the new cabinet was less reliant on social partnership and if it did not dare to abandon the model it was certainly keen to set the terms.

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Benchmarking social welfare against incomes Ironically, after all the difficulty in agreeing to increasing social welfare in line with the 1986 CSW recommendations, the economic expansion of the 1990s meant that there were few financial impediments to meeting the commitment over the life of Partnership 2000 (1997–99). In fact, increases in social welfare in that period exceeded the original demands. Nevertheless, these recommendations related only to a target related to absolute poverty, or a fixed value determined in 1986, adjusted for inflation. This posed the question of pushing for reductions in relative poverty – going into the next set of talks in 1999 – or how to benchmark social welfare to other incomes in the future. CORI’s Sean Healy, the INOU’s Camille Loftus and Mary Murphy, on behalf of SVP, formed a sub-­committee of the CVP to formulate demands on this issue. While there was broad agreement on the new challenge, there were differences of emphasis in the sub-­committee: the focus of CORI’s attention was on the ‘headline’ social welfare figure, paid to the main recipient. The INOU and others, including the SVP at that time, and the NWCI, sought substantial improvements in both child benefit – the universal payment in respect of all children – and child-­ dependant additions to social welfare payments. It is noteworthy that, although the outcome of the PPF talks was not clear-­ cut, the process had improved; the Pillar was regularly engaged in bilateral meetings with individual departments rather than merely in the orchestrated arrangements of the Partnership 2000 talks of three years before. In one of these ‘bilaterals’, a CVP delegation met with senior officials in the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs (DSCFA) in January 2000 to discuss their proposals on the level of social welfare payments and the NAPS. The CVP wanted to peg the level of social welfare to a set percentage of the average industrial wage. This attempt to achieve a norm relative to earnings was intended to lift the social welfare-­dependent population out of poverty. Simply to link the recommended minimum rates to the price index would not carry much weight, as government would, in any event, be under electoral pressure to protect social welfare from inflation. So, the Pillar needed to shift the focus to relative income poverty instead of ‘consistent’ poverty – hence ‘benchmarking’ social welfare to earnings growth. The idea of benchmarking social welfare was initially raised because the Pensions Board, a regulatory and advisory body on pensions, had been reviewing the adequacy of the state pension system as a mechanism to prevent poverty in old age into the future. In a review of pensions launched in 1997, called the National Pensions Policy Initiative (NPPI), the Pensions Board recommended that the contributory old age pension should be pegged at 34% of gross average industrial earnings (GAIE). Historically, the old age contributory pension was the highest of the social welfare payment rates. In light of this, CORI Justice began to argue that the short-­term social welfare payment rate should also be

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pegged to earnings, and that it would ultimately be prepared to accept a level of 30% of GAIE. This became the focus for CORI Justice in the PPF negotiations but there was vigorous opposition from employers’ organisations, from the Department of Finance and also from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment headed up by Mary Harney, leader of the neo-­liberal Progressive Democrats, who was also Tánaiste. In the event, although the trade unions tacitly supported the 30% target, the CVP had an uphill struggle with its demands in the talks, and efforts were made to find a compromise on the percentage, provided that the principle of linking social welfare and earnings was accepted, and a lower figure of 27% also emerged – apparently supported by the farmers and the DSCFA but still unacceptable to other parts of government or the employers.16 In the event, the principle of indexation was not conceded to the CVP in the PPF. What they got, however, was significant – a Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Working Group, chaired by Kieran Kennedy of the Economic and Social Research Institute, to examine issues related to the benchmarking of adult and child welfare payments. The Working Group began in December of 2000 and reported in September 2001. The majority position was that a benchmark for social welfare payments should be linked to rises in standards of living, set initially at 27% of GAIE. The minority recommendation of the CVP and the Trade Union Pillar that the benchmark should be 30% was not ruled out in the medium term and could to be considered in further reviews of the benchmark. CORI Justice welcomed the report in general terms but kept its focus on the target of 30%. An account of subsequent events, as provided by a key CORI respondent, suggests that persistent pressure will eventually bear some fruit. We then, CORI, came back and looked at what we had achieved and what we had not achieved and we amended our strategy. And we said, OK, the next opportunity we have is the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy and we will now go after a target for the lower social welfare rate – to be set within the revised NAPS – so that the lowest social welfare rate will be set at 30% of GAIE. And we went after this, big time. (SH)

The Justice Commission happily admits to doing a solo run on this issue: Now, we did a certain amount within the Pillar but we did most of it outside the Pillar. We did an enormous amount of lobbying within the political process, right up to and including the Taoiseach but also between the departments, and argued up and down. (SH)

A key concession was eventually achieved in the review of the NAPS in early 2002 (before a general election), which was to raise the lowest social welfare rate to €150 (in constant 2002 prices) by 2007. This made headline news in

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February 2002 as CORI Justice interpreted the move in such a way as to keep the 30% of GAIE benchmark in the public eye, as the following quote from the Irish Times shows: The Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) has welcomed as ‘a major breakthrough on income adequacy’, the 2002 review of the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy. Father Sean Healy, director of CORI’s Justice Commission, said last night that this year it will mean ‘an increase from €118.80 to €150 a week for a single person on the lowest social welfare rate’. In percentage terms this was an increase in excess of 26 per cent. ‘This is a substantial commitment and we welcome it,’ he said. The increase was equivalent to 30 per cent of Gross Average Industrial Earnings (GAIE), he pointed out. It also meant ‘that social welfare rates will be benchmarked to increases in average industrial wages from now on’, and meant that the gap between the present level of the lowest social welfare payments and 30 per cent of the GAIE would be bridged by 2007. (Irish Times, 22 February 2002)

Without taking away from this achievement, it was not strictly correct to say that pegging the short-­term social welfare rate to €150 (by 2007) would be sufficient to achieve the relativity of 30%, as this only insulated the 2002 level against price changes. In 2002, the short-­term social welfare rate was about 23.3% of GAIE. But average industrial earnings had been increasing faster than prices and could be expected to continue doing so over the following years. Logically, benchmarking social welfare only to €150, in 2002 prices, would fail to meet the 30% GAIE target if that trend in average earnings growth continued up to 2007. The main CORI respondent, in an interview during 2004 for the present study, reconciled this as follows: When it was eventually announced – in that context we always recognised that if the Department of Finance had any say in the matter the one thing they always insist on is you never put a percentage on an index, never tie yourself to a percentage index in any form. They reject that everywhere, as a dogma of faith! So the actual thing proposed, when it came out, was that it would set a target in 2002 terms, to reach by 2007, €150 a week. The year that that was set, 30% of GAIE was €150.15. So, as far as we are concerned, we achieved what we wanted. We eventually got the government to agree to a target of 30% of GAIE and we have been marching that way ever since, to be reached by 2007. (SH)

Whatever is said about this interpretation, CORI Justice had managed to get a handhold through the revised NAPS and, in a critical window of opportunity before an upcoming general election, successfully pressed this issue in lobbying the outgoing coalition. Just after the 2002 general election, when the FF–PD coalition was re-­elected, the Justice Commission issued a press release calling for the new government to ‘give priority to developing a fairer society which balances economic development, social equity and sustainability’ and welcoming ‘the commitment in the programme to meeting the target contained in the revised National Anti-­Poverty Strategy of raising the lowest social

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welfare payment to €150 a week (in 2002 terms) by 2007’, and repeating that this was equivalent to 30% of GAIE in 2002 (Irish Times, 10 June 2002).

Getting through: Sustaining Progress The year 2002 was to become a very difficult one for the CVP member organisations, due both to an international slowdown in economic activity and growing tensions within the Pillar. With the coalition re-­installed by June, pre-­election optimism quickly evaporated as the incoming government highlighted the international recession, and indicated that they would take a tough line in the negotiations on a successor to the PPF later that year. Due to the substantial turnaround in the economy over the previous years, the re-­elected centre-­right coalition (FF–PD) in early 2002 was more emboldened in the assertion of the prerogative of elected government over consultative governance mechanisms. It felt confident enough to tighten the screws in the short term. As noted already, Sustaining Progress (2003) – made few concessions and was rejected by the Community Platform and the NWCI. However, without departing from its 30% benchmarking target, CORI Justice decided to endorse Sustaining Progress on the basis of tactics and timing. They calculated that if the government survived a full term in office there would still be an opportunity for concessions in a foreseeable further deal due to be negotiated around early 2006 – ahead of the next general election. A CORI respondent read the situation following the 2002 general election in a realistic way: Very early on in the negotiations we in CORI recognised that the government had taken a position that they were going to give little new money, if any. In fact, the pay agreement and that would be it. That was our view. Why? Because in the political cycle they had just been re-­elected, they had an increased majority, they had an overall majority for the first time. The opposition had been decimated; they had three years going forward and there was going to be another agreement before the next election, so why kill themselves in this one? It was a very good time for them to pull this thing in … they would spend no extra money. (SH)

The Justice Commission therefore decided not to be confrontational and signed up to the new agreement despite the lack of new resources and the changed atmosphere of the negotiations, but they did not go away empty-­handed: So we said OK, we are going to have to do some other things here because this is actually going to be another type of an agreement altogether. They are not going to be in any way open to putting 15 demands on the table. (SH)

What CORI Justice points to, instead, as its key innovative achievement in Sustaining Progress, was an explicit and broad-­ranging procedural provision for ‘Engagement with the Social Partners in relation to the Wider Policy Framework’ (Sustaining Progress: Ch 1, Paragraph 1.7). Paragraph 1.7 committed the government to consultation with the social partners across a

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potentially wide spectrum of policy, not only commitments within Sustaining Progress but throughout a range of at least thirteen other policy statements and programmes, including, for example, the National Development Plan and the NAPS. The main CORI respondent described how the formulation emerged during the talks with government: Now we were arguing and saying if you are not going to be giving us stuff, what then, you’ve been treating us badly in many ways, you are not honouring agreements so why should we sign the agreement at all. So they said, ‘OK’. I remember the moment [name of senior civil servant] said, ‘Here, we can get you a statement the government is committed to’ and we put that in the Agreement. It’s in [paragraph] 1. 7.’ (SH)

The idea behind the CORI tactic was that, even if nothing substantial was given in Sustaining Progress, there might be opportunities later to operate a defensive tactic, to slow down measures under which ministers might seek to pull back on existing social rights. While Paragraph 1.7 of Sustaining Progress did not imply any veto on the part of the social partners, it opened the door to consultation with the social partners, should the latter wish, across a range of topics. From the interviews, it is clear that CORI Justice was proud of this achievement and a key respondent pointed out that they made very effective use of Paragraph 1.7 in the course of the agreement’s life.17 An early opportunity to deploy this procedural clause arose in the context of the 2004 budget estimates, when the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Coughlan, sought to restrict eligibility for rent supplement under the Supplementary Welfare Allowance scheme. CORI immediately pointed out that this came under the ambit of Paragraph 1.7, and successfully demanded consultation with the CVP on it. CORI succeeded in getting a series of consultations on the issue. By February 2004, it was making headway in these talks.18 In interviews with CORI Justice, this was highlighted as a significant gain from a seemingly innocuous procedural clause: So, when the government, for example, reduces rent supplement without consultation we can say the government has broken the agreement: ‘Chapter 1, Section 7: there it is. You are supposed to consult us, you are supposed to give us time, you are supposed to give us new information, and you did none of it. Now, is that not a breach of the agreement?’ ‘So what can we do? What do you want?’ ‘We want a working group so we won’t have this again. So give a working group on rent supplement. Not alone that, we want to make sure there is no damage caused to the current rent supplement by the changes. So there’s two terms of reference. If there is anybody further disadvantaged because of the rent supplement, that group will look at it and they will also come up with proposals on how to deal with it and will also come up with proposals by July.’ (SH)

This defensive tactic was useful during a period in which the Minister for Finance was increasingly dismissive of the community sector and insisting on

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ministerial prerogative within his own department. The social welfare reforms were viewed as consistent with this new emphasis and to challenge it publicly had wider significance, even if such pressure had limited effect. However, the direction being taken by government was not as popular with the electorate as might have been intended and the local elections of 2004 acted as a wake-­up call for the Taoiseach, who was quick to react. The social turn The welfare cuts were very much in line with the tone of the incoming ­government of 2002, which had become less inclined to indulge the rhetoric of equality. Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy was pursuing an agenda of lower tax rates or what can be described as ‘fiscal welfare’ (Titmuss 1963) and regularly paraded his disdain for people he referred to variously as ‘creeping Jesus’ and ‘left-­wing pinko’ types. The new government was ideologically opposed to the language of social rights, a position that was articulated in particular by the PD Minister for Justice Michael McDowell. The same minister also successfully led a drive for a referendum to remove automatic citizenship for children born in Ireland unless their parents met stringent residence conditions. Against this backdrop, as described in Chapter 7, lines of fracture began to emerge within the CVP. The procedural paragraph (‘One-­ Seven’, as the Justice Commission referred to it) notwithstanding, the next two years were difficult for CORI and there was little progress on the social welfare target set in the revised NAPS, in either the 2003 or 2004 budgets. However, the government’s policies were not as finely tuned to electoral sentiment as they might have believed. The results of the local elections in 2004 sent a shock wave through Fianna Fáil and there was a substantial turn in government policy. The interviews with CORI for this study took place before the 2004 local elections and before what Roche (2008) has described as the ‘social turn’ by Fianna Fáil leader Bertie Ahern that followed them. But subsequent events bear out the CORI view, that it may be better for smaller fry such as the CVP to fight another day, as it was put in an interview, than to be sacrificed on a principle. The evidence in Tables 8.2 and 8.3 and the trend line in Figure 8.1 show how closely progress towards 30% of GAIE tracked these political developments. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment was when Fr Sean Healy – long the scourge of politicians – was invited to address the FF parliamentary party ‘retreat’ at Inchydoney, in September 2004. One newspaper reporter put the matter eloquently: By any standards, it’s a harsh penance. But there could hardly be a greater indication of Fianna Fáil’s desire to atone for the sins of McCreevyism19 than for the party to invite Fr Sean Healy, joint head of CORI’s Justice Commission, to address the parliamentary party in Inchydoney in west Cork tomorrow. Since the formation of the Fianna Fáil-­Progressive Democrats coalition in 1997, Healy has

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been a constant, vocal and extremely irritating thorn in the side of the government, criticising government policy in tones that vary from the reasoned to the downright abusive. (Leahy 2004)

The contrast between the 2004 and 2005 budgets could not be greater. A letter to the Irish Times from Fr Sean Healy summarised CORI Justice’s assessment of the last three budgets: I was asked by the Week in Politics programme (RTE 1, May 22nd) to rate the government on the social welfare component of its last three Budgets. My response was that I would give them 3 out of 10 for the Budgets of 2003 and 2004 and give them 9 out of 10 for raising the lowest social welfare adult rates in Budget 2005. Budget 2005 raised the lowest social welfare rates by €14 a week which was the amount required if Government is to meet its commitment in the National Anti-­Poverty Strategy to raise these rates to 30 per cent of gross average industrial earnings by 2007. It was the rise the CORI Justice Commission sought for these social welfare rates in its Budget Choices policy briefing published last October. When Government takes the steps required to meet its targets we have no hesitation in acknowledging this fact. (Irish Times 2005)

The trend was also sustained and the short-­term social welfare rate reached almost 30% of GAIE by the election year of 2007. While the government never gave explicit commitment to automatic indexation, this outcome was nevertheless very positive from CORI’s perspective. As can be seen from Table 8.2, GAIE rose faster than prices, as expected. Up to 2003, the single rate of short-­ term social welfare benefit had increased in real value but at a slower rate than GAIE. From 2005, however, it grew at a faster rate. Moreover, other social welfare payments, for adult dependents, and universal child benefit, which had been championed by SVP, NWCI and INOU, increased at an even more brisk rate throughout the 2000s, as reflected in the index for couples and families shown in Table 8.2. Had the €150 target indexed to prices alone been pursued, social welfare rates would not have reached 30% of the GAIE. Looking at Table 8.2, Table 8.3 and Figure 8.1, it is evident that social welfare rates increased more than average industrial earnings between 2005 and 2007 so that the short-­term rate had risen from 23.3% of GAIE in 2002 to 29.2% of GAIE in 2007. This is quite remarkable when compared to the average ratio of 22.9% and standard deviation of less than 1% over the period 1989-­2002, and points to the persistence of CORI Justice in relation to this matter, seeming to indicate the possibilities for making gains if an intervention is sufficiently focused and persistent.

Conclusion At the outset of this chapter, it was noted that an influential Catholic organisation should cause no surprise in a Catholic country. However, CORI Justice is

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Table 8.2  Index of short-­term social welfare rates, prices and gross average industrial earnings Year

Single

Couple

Couple + 2 children Couple + 4 children inc. CB inc. CB

CPI

GAIE

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

100 104.3 109.9 121.3 132.7 139.4 150.6 166.2 185.2 207.6

100 104.5 111.5 124.9 139.3 146.4 158.1 174.5 194.5 217.9

100 105.6 118.2 128 146 153 162.9 177.1 193.6 218.3

100 101.7 107.3 112.6 117.8 121.9 124.5 127.6 132.7 139.1

100 110.9 118.2 127.6 135.9 145.1 151.9 157.4 162.9 169.9

100 106.6 123.1 130.6 151.2 158.3 167.3 180.4 194.3 219.1

Source: DSFA Annual Reports, various years (base reset by author at 100 in 1998) Key CB–Child Benefit CPI–Consumer price index GAIE–Gross average industrial earnings

Table 8.3  Single short-­term social welfare rates as percentage of GAIE 1989–2007 Year

%

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

21.18 21.73 21.65 22.10 21.96 23.45 23.52 23.51 24.05 23.90 22.47 22.22 22.71 23.33 22.96 23.68 25.23 27.16 29.19

Source: Calculated from DSFA Annual Reports

180

Asymmetric engagement 31 29 27 25 %

23 21 19 17 2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1991

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

15

Figure 8.1  Single short-­term social welfare rates as percentage of GAIE

not simply a ‘chip off an old block’ but a chip off a block that is in a state of erosion and fragmentation. The rise of CORI Justice has coincided with a decline in the authority of the Catholic Church. With that decline in authority too, the old alliance between state and Church has been eroded. CORI Justice, among some other elements in the Church, has therefore moved into areas where it might reinterpret the Church’s values and teaching in a way that is relevant. This has also led to the adoption of some radical positions that confront both the state and the mainstream Church. CORI Justice advanced the concept of basic income against all the inclination of the political powers-­ that-­be, which ultimately knocked it down. Even so, the Commission ensured that the issue was debated throughout the 1990s. Its support for BI also departs from the traditional and mainstream positions of the hierarchy in Ireland on jobs, and enables CORI Justice to defend choices regarding the balance between employment and family life that is a dilemma for women with children. In many ways, however, CORI Justice has benefited from the cachet of Catholicism as a faith to which many among the voting public are still attached, even if the power and authority of the hierarchy and religious congregations is in decline. Indeed, in a period of rising market power in every walk of life, CORI’s radical economic proposals score highly in terms of de-­ commodification of income – to use the language of comparative social policy. Also, in view of the historic alliances between Church and state in Ireland, the cachet of the religious congregations may have carried more weight in the political establishment than in the wider public. On the other hand, CORI Justice adopted a pragmatic, realist tactical orientation in relation to the newly emerging social organisations which were addressing equality and social inclusion issues. In fact, as acknowledged by the

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NWCI, CORI Justice was quite capable of co-­operating with other associations that would not normally be allied with the Catholic Church. The influence of CORI was quite limited in the first years of social partnership, as compared to that of the INOU and the CWC. But by adopting a focused approach to income maintenance, particularly in the PPF context, the Commission ultimately had some remarkable success in relation to tackling the very difficult issue of relative poverty. The evidence from this chapter suggests awareness on CORI’s part that engagement in social partnership has its ups and downs, particularly for the smaller organisations, but that it is situated in the wider context of democracy. The tactical manoeuvrability of the Justice Commission demonstrates that it is possible to achieve change through persistent efforts, through the extended model of social partnership. CORI Justice played by the rules in that it sought to work within the arrangements of social partnership. It also made calculations as to when to push its demands and when to duck and dive in order to survive the threat from a greater force and live to fight another day. It is very difficult to attribute causal responsibility for policy changes but it seems fair to suggest that CORI’s persistence with clearly focused demands was a very significant contributory factor. Not many would have thought, in 2002, that the 30% of gross wages benchmark would be achieved by 2007. We can hardly refer to the CORI Justice Commission as becoming incorporated by the state. Indeed, from the Catholic Church’s perspective, CORI Justice is the template for an alternative mode of relating to the state. The old historic alliance of Church and state is fracturing and the opportunity exists for new state–civil society dynamics to emerge, whereby the Church will have to engage with other civil society actors around the discourses of equality and inclusion, as an equal. The example of CORI Justice illustrates the broader finding of this study in relation to the potential influence of smaller organisations acting as protagonists for social justice and as policy entrepreneurs. While there are clear limits to what can be achieved by such organisations acting outside of a broader political vision embracing a broader and more elaborate project, small organisations, through effective tactics, can turn the dynamics of asymmetric engagement to advantage. While they lack obvious coercive or bargaining power and are far from being equal partners in deliberation, even when this is structured through social partnership, they are not simply reduced to making moral appeals or being ultimately incorporated.

Notes  1 See Leahy (2004). The name CORI Justice is used as an abbreviation for the Justice Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI). Originally, CORI

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was known as the Conference of Religious Superiors (CMRS). Since 2009, the Justice Commission has formally ceased and has been succeeded by a less formally aligned body, known as Social Justice Ireland (SJI), largely on the same principles and under the same leadership but open to non-­religious (i.e. lay) membership.  2 ‘Major Religious Superiors’ meant the heads of the major Catholic religious congregations and orders.  3 See CORI website: www.cori.ie/Aboutus (accessed 7 March 2009).  4 The two respondents from CORI were Fr Sean Healy and Rev. Sister Brigid Reynolds.  5 S.M. refers to Society of Mary (Marists) and S.M.A. to Society of African Missions.  6 The Vatican has published an up-­to-­date compendium of Catholic social teaching with all relevant materials to date (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace 2005).  7 For example, in 1983, the Justice Commission wrote to TDs and Senators expressing concern about a new Criminal Justice Bill– a letter that caused a kerfuffle in the political establishment (Dáil Éireann Volume 345, 15 November, 1983 Criminal Justice Bill, 1983: Second Stage).  8 Dáil Éireann, 1990 Dáil Questions Volume 397, 14 March 1990: www.oireachtas-­debates. gov.ie.  9 For a verbatim account see Dáil Éireann, 1990, Dáil Questions Volume 397, 14 March 1990: http://www.oireachtas-­debates.gov.ie 10 See for example Irish Times, 26 June 2000. 11 ‘CORI priest silent over deal on abused’ Kitty Holland Irish Times, 4 Oct. 2003 12 Although this could run against the argument for basic income, this right to work (RTW) payment is actually a BI variant explored in wider discussions on the subject. However, as Honohan (1994) also pointed out, the logic of the RTW variant is different in important respects from fully fledged BI. 13 Later, this scheme was effectively superseded by Community Employment and other policy initiatives. 14 Sean Healy from CORI and another CVP representative (Noreen Byrne) participated on it. 15 CORI continued to take the analysis of BI seriously, linking with prominent scholars in this field (Clark and Kavanagh 1996) and with the Citizen’s Income Trust in Britain on a comparative study of the impact of basic income systems. It is part of the International Basic Income Network (BIEN) dedicated to research on the subject and hosted a major international scholarly conference on BI in Ireland in 2008. 16 There appears to have been some lack of co-­ordination between the CVP sub-­group members working on this issue. A CORI respondent takes the view that the 30% figure was introduced into the talks prematurely rather than being held as a ‘bottom line’: hence, the introduction of the compromise of 27%. 17 For details see Sustaining Progress: paragraph 1.7 ‘Engagement with the Social Partners in relation to the Wider Policy Framework’, Chapter 1, p. 16 18 See www.cori.ie/justice2/Social_Partnership/132-­Community_Voluntary_Pillar_Rent_ Supplement. 19 ‘McCreevyism’ is the term used to describe the mix of populist and neo-­liberal measures that typified the Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy.

9 Multi-­tasking: The National Women’s Council of Ireland

Introduction Bland terms like the ‘community and voluntary sector’ can understate what is really behind the phenomenon of the extension of social partnership to new sections of civil society in the 1990s. This is particularly the case when it is recognised that this sector takes up the issue of gender, a key dimension of inequality in any complex society. This chapter looks at the dimension of gender through the lens of the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI, the Council), which became involved in social partnership as one of the key components of the CVP. The chapter begins by setting the scene in relation to the changing social division of labour and the circumstances and economic role of women in Irish society. Against this background, the chapter briefly examines the emergence of the NWCI, and notes in particular its leftward trajectory in the early 1990s. The chapter then turns to its engagement with the state – initially when invited to participate in the NESF, from 1993, and then in relation to Partnership 2000. The NWCI, despite a sense of being ill-­prepared, grew assertive and made a small but not insignificant promise of an Expert Working Group on Childcare. While the NWCI was not a key player in the beginning, the scene changed very rapidly and the issue of gender became a central one towards the late 1990s. The NWCI transformed its own organisation in order to engage with the state and other actors, and participated in social partnership and in the Expert Working Group. Its recommendations to the Group, which were not adopted at the time, remained a focus for the Council over several years before its campaign eventually bore fruit. The chapter deals with the NWCI experience of the PPF and its rejection of Sustaining Progress in 2003, for which it was excluded from social partnership, before its return in 2007. The chapter shows that the NWCI refused to be incorporated and maintained a great degree of independence over the course of its engagement, and demonstrated a considerable capacity in what was at times a very difficult

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endeavour. The Council played a successful defensive role in Partnership 2000 (1996) in relation to threats to tax child benefit. Later, a more significant achievement of the NWCI was the early childcare supplement introduced in 2006 – which stemmed from recommendations the Council had made as early as 1997. The political context in which this payment was introduced is quite instructive in relation to the analytical framework of asymmetric engagement adopted in this study.

Background and context The position of women in Ireland for most of the twentieth century was subordinate, in that women’s roles were restricted largely to the private informal domain of family, household formation and long-­unacknowledged sphere of unpaid farm labour (O’Hara 1997). The subordinate position of women in twentieth-­century Ireland was conditioned by the evolution of post-­Famine family farming and has been chronicled and analysed in great detail elsewhere (Byrne and Leonard 1997; Connell 1950; Connell 1968; Considine and Dukelow 2009; Inglis 1998). The legal and constitutional architecture of the new state established in 1922 conceived the position of women and the family in conservative terms, removing access to paid employment from most married women – exemplified in the civil service marriage bar introduced in 1932 whereby women had to resign from the civil service on marriage. This was only repealed in 1973, as Ireland was entering the European Economic Community. The 1950s saw the failure of protectionist political economy and a predominantly rural economy. With economic stagnation and emigration came pressure for economic policy change, particularly in the context of a booming international economy. With the opening up of the Irish economy in the early 1960s and the expansion of second level education through the introduction of free education in the late 1960s, the possibilities for women’s participation in an expanding labour force improved. This posed the inevitable issue of challenging the limited civil and social status of women, although the conservative power of the Catholic Church in political and social life ensured that legal change was to follow at an agonisingly slow pace. Despite the opening of the Irish economy and industrialisation in the 1960s, the rate of progression of women into the formal labour force was surprisingly gradual: participation rates hovered around 30% from 1961 to 1979, and remained around 32% in the 1980s. Prior to the 1970s, labour force participation was concentrated among single women (Pyle 1990; Smyth 1997), and participation by married women was still below 10% by 1971. It began to increase from 1972, to about 12% in 1975, and rising thereafter to approximately 30% in 1990. Meanwhile the rate for single women declined from over 60% to around 50%, while the rate for widows declined from around 15% to

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approximately 5%. Admittedly, these figures are based on a principal economic status (PES) basis in the Labour Force Survey and tend to produce lower estimates of female participation than the internationally accepted International Labour Office (ILO) definition, which is the current standard measure. For example, in 1994 the ILO definition yields 38% compared to 33% on a PES basis. Even so, the trend over time was similar, whichever measure is chosen. From 1988 to 2008, by the ILO definition, women’s labour force participation rate increased by about 20 percentage points (Figure 9.1). Analysis of the labour force participation of married women by age group between 1997 and 2007 shows a marked upward trend among those in the 25-­44 year, child-­ bearing, age groups (Figure 9.2). Moreover, detailed analysis of the figures from the 1996 Labour Force Survey reveals that the participation rate increased rapidly among mothers of younger children: 42% of younger mothers (with children under 15 years) were at work (28% full time and 14% part time) while the corresponding rate for those with children over 15 was 24%. More surprisingly, the participation rate for those with very young children (aged less than 24 months) was 34%, as compared to 29% for mothers whose children were aged 2 to 4 years (Expert Working Group on Childcare 1999: 2) Compared to the trends of previous decades of expansion these trends were quite remarkable and had implications both for policy and for social norms more generally. Traditional norms about participation among married women with children were challenged and issues such as childcare were moving rapidly up the policy agenda. The 1980s witnessed turmoil concerning issues of sexual politics – marriage, divorce, birth control and social or ‘moral’ issues – which were related to trends unleashed in the 1960s, but the dominance 60.00 55.00 50.00 45.00 40.00 35.00 30.00 25.00 20.00 1988

1993

1998

2003

2008

Figure 9.1  Female labour force participation rate (%) 1988-­2008

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80 70 60 50 1998 2007

40 30 20 10 0

20–24

25–34

35–44

45–54

55–59

60–64

65+

Figure 9.2  Married women’s labour force rates by age group (%) 1998 and 2007

of the Catholic Church continued to be considerable even into the 1980s, albeit no longer uncontested, as women’s participation in education and healthcare, and in civil and public services more generally, increased. There was some growth also in employment of women in the new base being created through private sector foreign direct investment in new production plants, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s (Crowley 1997). But it was not until the 1990s that a decisive shift took place and the focus of debate on gender changed. Instead of contesting the power of the Church, women were contesting the barriers to entering the market. More than that, the labour market was expanding at such a rate that there were great ‘pull factors’ on women and there was a consequent change in political ideology in favour of this shift. Aside from that development, issues of economic parity with men in employment became increasingly important from the 1970s, reinforced by membership of the European Community. The Community had been the driving force for much of the Irish equality agenda in 1970s, but progress on gender equality in Europe was also hampered as the ‘new right’ politics of Thatcher in the UK began to slow down the whole social policy agenda at European Council level. Even in the 1990s, after the White Paper on the Economy of Jacques Delors, in 1993, the focus of social and economic policy was less on employment rights for those at work than on the right to work, how to cut unemployment and raise the labour force participation of all (Larragy 1997). Against this background of labour force growth and increasing female labour force participation, but also in the context of social marginalisation, which affected women in many poorer communities, the focus of the organisations representing women began to shift towards labour market issues. The

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Council for the Status of Women, or National Women’s Council of Ireland as it became in the 1990s, was to become a key focus in this period.

National Women’s Council of Ireland – from beginnings to social partnership The NWCI originated 1973, as the Council for the Status of Women (CSW), following the report of the First Commission on the Status of Women in 1972. The CSW was an independent umbrella for numerous women’s organisations. That was also the year of Ireland’s referendum on EEC membership. The Council’s work over many years concentrated on equality rights and legislative change, often resulting from European Community Directives but also in response to a range of indigenous women’s organisations set up in Ireland to pursue various issues. The Council’s vision and philosophy was refined and developed over the years. Prior to the 1990s, it was seen as pursuing a middle-­class agenda of equal opportunity or, as one respondent described it, removing the ‘glass ceiling’, while other women’s groups – sometimes affiliated to the Council – covered a wide range of orientations in the women’s movement and trade unions, political struggles around contraception, abortion and divorce, and in local communities. The Council received a regular grant from the state, even in the period of the cutbacks in the late 1980s, when other organisations were suffering.1 The original Council for the Status of Women adopted a more parliamentary-­constitutional approach and was more gradualist than some of these groups. However, following the impact of cutbacks and rising unemployment in the 1980s the Council itself became the focus of much soul-­searching and internal debate as to its orientation and, by the early 1990s, it was being drawn into a deeper engagement with issues of social exclusion than previously – with an accent on gender. A new echelon of women leaders in the Council were starting from the local level, where their experience was grounded, rather than national level politics. Two key figures, Gráinne Healy and Noreen Byrne, came up through local level organisations to take the leadership of the Council in the 1990s as it entered social partnership. When the first of the new agreements, the PNR, was signed off in 1987, the Council was not involved and there was considerable anger among women’s organisations over the cutbacks that went through at the same time. However, the second agreement, the PESP, provided a focus for many local groups because of the introduction of the concept of local partnership development companies. The local partnership bodies were structured to give six community representatives a place alongside equal numbers from business and trade unions. When local groups found that they had solutions and could hold their own against local government officials or others, they developed more confidence and wanted to go further. Gráinne Healy was involved in facilitating

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groups who were invited to engage with this new initiative. In an interview she said: It started to stir up a lot of interest in: ‘Are we really going to have a say in how this stuff happens?’… There was huge suspicion but at the same time there was a huge sense of possibility. (GH)

Also, as this process developed, and empowered people to some degree at local level, they began to ask about having a say at the national level: [They said], ‘If those issues are being sorted out in partnership on the ground, and NGOs on the local level are being involved in delivering some of those solutions, then should we be actually looking at … shouldn’t that mechanism or that way of doing things be reflected in, you know, where all the “big boys” are sitting down, essentially?’ (GH) Table 9.1  National Women’s Council of Ireland landmarks Year

Landmark

1973 1973 1973–79

Report of Commission on the Status of Women Establishment of Council for the Status of Women Advances in women’s equality at work due to European Community Directives Decade of drift, defeats for women’s movement while unemployment and poverty increase Local partnerships begin to draw in women from local communities New leadership in Council shifts direction to the left and revamps organisation; invited to participate in the NESF: interaction with INOU, CWC and others Taoiseach’s nominee from the Council on the NESC; Council renamed National Women’s Council of Ireland in July; gets funding from independent foundation as well as from the state May: joins the Community Platform by CWC with 14 other organisations December: invited to negotiations for Partnership 2000 Signs off on P2000; Opposes tax on Child Benefit in P2000 talks; expert Group on Childcare signed off Expert Group on Childcare established; Expert Group on Childcare recommends tax relief to stimulate demand side Participates in Programme for Prosperity and Fairness negotiations Budget introduces limited supply-­side childcare measures and new tax regime for working couples NWCI joins Community Platform protest walkout from plenary under PPF; supports the doubling of Community Platform representation in CVP NWCI rejects Sustaining Progress and is excluded from social partnership Towards 2016 signed off by all Pillar members and other social partners NWCI is re-­admitted to the Pillar in social partnership, with one seat as before

1980s 1993 1993 1995 1996

1997 1999 2002 2003 2006 2007

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The European Community, which had originally been influential in bringing equality legislation to Ireland in the workplace and labour market, was beginning to be a key factor for the Women’s Council in changing its own focus of work and also in the approach of government to its dealings with women’s community groups at local level. This further shifted the class focus of the Council from women in national politics to local groups of working-­class women. As the same respondent highlighted, I think it was also a period where European Structural Funds, social funds were [there] … like there were New Opportunities for Women, there was a specific budget for women, there was Horizon-­Disability, Horizon-­Unemployment … in order to draw them down you had to be willing to work in this partnership arrangement. (GH)

In this way, from the early 1990s, a new leadership began to emerge in the Council, with a working-­class community orientation, supplanting what one respondent referred to as ‘the Fine Gaelers’. Noreen Byrne, who had a strong track record in working with lone parents through Doras Buí (literally ‘Yellow Door’ – it was also known as the Parents Alone Resource Centre (PARC)) in Coolock, became a member of the Council’s executive committee and then Chair around 1995. Gráinne Healy was elected Vice-­chair in 1993 until elected Chair from 1999 to 2003. According to Healy, the Council underwent considerable change from its origins in 1973, reflected too in its change of name from the Council for the Status of Women to the National Women’s Council of Ireland in 1993. This change was intended to mark a ‘shift in focus away from being an organisation that essentially was reacting to whatever was happening out in the public sphere’ to ‘a more systematic analysis of the position of women in Ireland and more globally, but with a focus in Ireland’ (GH). During the 1990s, the NWCI was involved in a transformation through ‘the building up of the internals of the organisation so that it could in a more professional way have an analysis which looked at the “intersectionality” of things like class, gender, race and so forth’ (GH). At the same time it was making a shift to the left in the sense that it was focusing on the empowerment of women in local communities. Furthermore, the emergence of local partnership funding would lead to practical forms of engagement with statutory bodies and other civil society actors that might in some ways be perceived as incorporating the newly empowered local associations. The way this developed over the course of the 1990s is dealt with next, in particular through participation in the NESF and, eventually, social partnership. Whether its decision to become involved in social partnership accelerated or contained its ‘leftward’ turn is a moot point. On the one hand, the old Council was thought of by its new leadership as having been too close to mainstream politicians. On the other hand, there was serious scepticism among the new leadership about the

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benefits of social partnership into which they nevertheless found themselves inexorably drawn.

Participation in the NESF According to a key respondent from among the new leadership, the Women’s Council was ill-­equipped both organisationally and politically for the challenges of the 1990s, and had not been an active force in the initial stages of engagement between government and the new civil society actors such as the INOU, CWC, CORI and others, in the period since the establishment of social partnership in 1987. Noreen Byrne, who was elected to its national executive around 1993, was dismayed at the state of the organisation at the time, saying: ‘I was blown away by the extent of the hands-­on role I had to play in the beginning’ (NB). She had years of experience in Doras Buí, which was highly organised, and she could not fathom how a national organisation participating in the NESF could be such a ‘shambles’. Byrne was a leading figure in the shift in political direction in the NWCI from liberal feminism to communitarian or social feminism in the early 1990s. Up to then the Council had, in her view, been perceived as middle class, concerned about the ‘glass ceiling’ career issues, and political participation in representative party politics. The new forces in the executive perceived the old Council to be politically close to Fine Gael and sought to widen its base and re-­orientate it. Byrne’s account of her experience of the Council in the mid 1990s conveys a picture of an association that was limited by its resources and led by well-­ meaning but politically ‘middle-­class’ women without much grounding in the experience of working-­class communities where women bore the brunt of over a decade of rising unemployment and social challenges. Nevertheless, the Council had been invited – along with other constituencies marginalised by the policy process over the previous period – to participate in the National Economic and Social Forum on its establishment in 1993. However, the Council lacked a team of policy experts to back up its representatives on national bodies such as the NESF and social partnership. The same few people were trying to fill both roles. Noreen Byrne was unimpressed by the input of the Council at the time. It had wanted to be ‘in’, in her view, but was simply not prepared enough to play an effective part in policy networks. She was assigned to be a representative on the NESF alongside the Chair but she freely admits that the quality of its intervention there was very general and reactive and recalls that, when its first term of office ended, she was told by a senior official in the NESF ‘in a very upfront way’ that the Council ‘would have to get its act together and that its [input was] not good enough at all’ (NB). The NWCI took this feedback in a very constructive spirit, and Noreen Byrne actually found it very helpful and readily acknowledged the urgency

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of the matter. Soon afterwards she was elected to the Chair of the Council, and decided, despite her political scepticism, to take on both the political and organisational challenges of expanding the resource and skill bases of the organisation while turning the Council politically in a more radical direction. In 1996, the Council became a company limited by guarantee with charitable status, stating in its articles that its ‘main purpose … is to transform society into a just and equitable community, a community in which all women and men can participate with equal effectiveness as full citizens, in which the independence of women is determined by right’ (Article no. 2, Memorandum of Articles 1996). In the next phase of its involvement in the NESF, the NWCI considerably revamped its team, and became more actively engaged in making inputs to its reports, particularly through the work of Ursula Barry in the mid 1990s and Orla O’Connor and Joanna McMinn over subsequent years.

Engagement in Partnership 2000 (from 1996) While the NWCI – in common with other community and voluntary sector groups in the NESF – was not formally represented on the NESC, a member of the NWCI was nominated to the NESC by the then Fine Gael Taoiseach John Bruton in 1995 alongside another such nominee, Mary Murphy from the INOU, as noted in Chapter 6. Subsequent to the signing of the Partnership 2000 agreement in 1996, the NWCI got formal representation on the NESC along with other representatives of the community and voluntary sector. Membership of the NESC came to be viewed as important by the NWCI because of the NESC’s role in determining the overall strategy and context for the national agreements. However, its initial impact in the NESC was limited by the same factors as hampered the NWCI’s performance in the NESF and also by the fact that the focus on gender – particularly in relation to the labour market – was not very central in social partnership until later in the 1990s. The NWCI was formally invited by government to become a social partner in late 1996 at the same time as others who were to join the CVP. The NWCI was confronted by a new responsibility as a social partner representing women’s interests in the negotiations and monitoring of national agreements. Noreen Byrne’s immediate reaction was that there needed to be an urgent shake-­up in the Council’s organisation: It was like a nightmare …We didn’t have enough staff. The staff we had weren’t skilled enough … they weren’t hired to do any kind of policy work. [We felt] completely exposed … we weren’t at the races in any way, shape or form … and we went to the meeting! (NB)

While she was politically sceptical of social partnership, Byrne took the view that if the Council was to participate in such arenas it should be properly

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organised and equipped. She perceived that the Council was inadequately resourced at the time, depending principally on limited government grant aid to operate. The Council lacked the capacity to do any more than make the most general types of policy submissions. Around this time the Council started to address its policy-­making skill deficit. The Council’s capacity to write position papers was developed in order to provide ammunition for those who were to participate in the social partnership process in late 1996. Ursula Barry, from UCD Women’s Studies gave her time voluntarily to write papers and was also nominated to sit on the NESF along with Gráinne Healy, Carol Fawsitt and Noreen Byrne herself. The Council had relied principally on state funding but in the mid 1990s received considerable funding from charitable foundations which enabled it to hire a professional director and staff. From an initial staff of 2.5 full-­time equivalents in 1993, the Council increased its staff to approximately 15 by the end of the 1990s. Its membership base was broadened and increased, and affiliated organisations were involved in strategic decision-­ making through regular meetings – on average every two months. The funding from charitable foundation sources and its own affiliates was a key source of revenue in that it enabled the NWCI to avoid over-­reliance on government funding and any threat to its independence. It was paradoxical that this shift in leadership to the left took effect in the context of more active engagement with partnership-­style institutions that the new echelon viewed with suspicion. However, at least they were well aware of the risk of being incorporated and acknowledged their lack of capacity for engagement with the government and the ‘big boys’ (as one respondent described the traditional social partners) as a matter that needed to be addressed. There was one seat for the Women’s Council at the opening social partnership talks in late 1996, which Noreen Byrne, as Chair, had to take. After the initial crisis, she noted, the Council pulled together around an analysis of some key themes, which were brought to the talks. As she put it, referring to the new policy staff at the Council, ‘once we had the engine room going I felt … confident enough to go in because I knew I could trust the stuff I was getting from the engine room’ (NB). The Council was still in the position of catching up with other players and it was a major challenge to get its own position statements out. As Noreen Byrne noted, If you were to ask me, to be totally honest, what we were doing a lot of the time was fighting a rearguard action, fighting rearguard actions against everyone’s documents, including the INOU … It was a huge struggle because basically we were trying to influence everybody, not just the trade unions and the business people … We were trying to influence the INOU, CORI … Yes, to ‘gender proof’ everybody; we didn’t even have that language at the time. (NB)

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The challenge that faced the Council was not simply to lend legitimacy to a process without getting something to show for it. The Council was, as long as it was unprepared, at risk of alienating the new cohorts of women who were looking to the new leadership for a more effective campaigning strategy. Government wanted them in, some in the Council believed, because it would not look too good internationally, especially in a European context, if the NWCI were not in: We were in because, I believe sincerely, the government couldn’t leave us out. How would that look, not in Ireland [but] to the European Union, and to the UN, around gender? So it had to be including the women. But that’s as far as it goes is my sincere belief. They didn’t want to change any policies. (NB)

There may have been more to government motives than this. The NESF had been established as a means of including those who were outside the social partnership process and it would be difficult to justify excluding the most important women’s organisation in the country. Also, all the parties in the rainbow coalition had more liberal positions on gender than Fianna fail, who were then in opposition. Furthermore, as noted, the local area partnership bodies involved women’s organisations. From its own perspective, the issue of the Council’s credibility loomed large. At the talks in late 1996 this question was illustrated in the context of a position paper the Council submitted, and the response it elicited. Essentially, the Council decided to concentrate on three topics with a view to attainable gains at the talks. These were, first, the treatment of women in relation to access to training, and the perceived discrimination they suffered due to the role played by the live register in determining eligibility; second, the valuation and inclusion of domestic labour in national accounts; and, third, support for childcare costs – whether through social spending or tax relief. The training issue related to the changing realities of women’s labour market participation and shifted the focus onto women who had not had the educational or training opportunities of men and who, because they were often not signing on the live register as unemployed, were not eligible for mainstream training, i.e. apprenticeships and the like as distinct from personal development or ‘back to work’ style training (NB). This issue was connected with that of the measurement and recording of unemployment, the accuracy of the live register and the issue of the black economy. In the case of women, however, there was considerable undercounting of unemployment. The ILO measure of unemployment used in the Labour Force Survey produced consistently higher estimates of female unemployment than the older (principal economic status) measure, which disguised many unemployed women as homemakers. The live register understated female unemployment for similar reasons. As one respondent described the issue at the time:

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At that time they were trying to pretend that there wasn’t such a problem as women’s unemployment, to make it invisible so that when women went down to sign on they were told, ‘Ah, sure don’t bother, your husband is signing on and, you know, sure it’s more work anyway’. (GH)

The domestic labour valuation issue was something of a ‘political intervention’ at the talks, which was intended to challenge the shared paradigm of the established social partners. The notion of adding domestic labour to the national accounts was not exactly readily absorbed into the orthodoxy that informs either employers, the Department of Finance or even sections of the trade unions. But it certainly sent out a message that women, whether they were full-­time homemakers or trying to manage home and employment roles, were looking for forms of recognition and recompense. As one respondent put it, We wanted them to acknowledge the contribution that was being made to the economy by women’s unpaid work but what we got was [that] the government agreed to put a sentence in that agreement that they would look at examining what mechanism might be developed to allow them to capture that information. So they did that, they had a small piece of research done with the Central Statistics Office. (GH)

It was in relation to the third issue, childcare, the Council discovered that there were potential perils in participation in the talks, and there was an issue of trade-­offs, and that they needed to be guarded in dealings with the state and indeed other parties to the talks. The Council submitted proposals for a package of childcare support including tax relief and support for those on low earnings who might not benefit adequately from tax relief. As Noreen Byrne related their experience, however, a senior official of the government responded that if these measures were to be introduced there would have to be a quid pro quo – most likely in the form of taxation of child benefit, a universal payment. This was the first ‘red line’ moment for the Council, as the following account shows: At one point [senior official] came back and he said that if anything was to be done on childcare there would have to be the taxing of child benefit. Now I discovered that everybody on my side – the National Women’s Council were the only organisation in the whole process who were against that – CORI was in favour, the INOU was in favour, everyone was in favour. So this was a complete shock, I was in complete shock. I really didn’t believe it. So, the NWCI didn’t actually have a policy on … taxation of child benefit … So I decided, well we are not signing up to an agreement that taxes child benefit. Taxing child benefit can be done when there is individualisation, when there are all kinds of issues resolved but we are way, way away from taxing child benefit just because some well-­off women get it. So I said to [the senior official] in front of everybody, ‘Well the National Women’s Council won’t be signing up to that, we can’t stand over it. We would be eaten alive by our constituency.’ And we would, absolutely, completely! (NB)

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The Council could have been confronted with leaving the talks, if this was the price. However, when the Council representative rejected it, the suggestion was withdrawn. She recalled: Can you imagine? I said to myself, ‘My name is not going to go down in history as being involved in taxing child benefit!’ Anyway, so I said that … and it died, it just died! I couldn’t get over that! And I was thinking, have I got power here or what? So that was our big success. (NB)

She also wondered, in view of that, whether it was only a ruse: ‘I have a feeling it may have been a kite that some of the big boys were flying.’ However, it should be noted that this position was not absolute for the Council, even for Noreen Byrne. The notion of redistribution via taxation, while still preserving the status of universality for child benefit, was never canvassed by the Council but was not definitively rejected either. There was, as noted by another respondent, continued consideration of the idea in the context of developing a national childcare strategy during 1997-­98 (see below) and if the level of child benefit was increased substantially for care of younger children, the Council might not have opposed taxing the benefit: ‘From what I consider to be I think, a more radical perspective’ substantial increases in child benefit wouldn’t constitute ‘that big of a win [because] even though it was a universal measure it didn’t reduce the inequality between the kids’ (KZ). But the Council was not prepared to concede the point when there was little clarity as to the quid pro quo. At any rate, the outcome on childcare was not immediate but, under Partnership 2000, as often happened, an expert committee was promised, to develop a national childcare strategy. Even that decision, however, was a considerable achievement for the Council, given its limited resources. In fact, of the numerous committees established under Partnership 2000, the expert group on childcare was the most newsworthy over the next few years. So, despite real scepticism, something tangible came of the process for women: What they agreed to was to develop a national strategy for childcare. We were happy with that – we were very clear – because nobody really knew anything about childcare – how many children needed childcare, their ages, where they were … There was a whole lot of work to be done. So there was a big working group set up to progress that, and we did get a strategy and we did get the money from Brussels, and all that. (NB)

This achievement never got any publicity but it was as important for the Council as getting the CSW minimum recommended social welfare rates was for the Pillar as a whole. Another respondent recalled that this ‘was certainly acknowledged as a win’ (KZ) in the Council.

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Expert Working Group on Childcare The most significant intervention of the NWCI in relation to the Partnership 2000 talks was the commitment to developing a childcare strategy. The agreement eventually included the following commitment: In order to develop a strategy which integrates the different strands of the current arrangements for the development and delivery of childcare and early educational services, an Expert Working Group involving the relevant interests chaired by the Department of Equality and Law Reform, will be established under this Partnership to devise a National Framework for the Development of the Childcare Sector. (Partnership 2000 Paragraph 5.7, P. 24)

The Expert Working Group was intended to consider the findings of another working group on the job potential of childcare and the findings from an ESRI survey of existing childcare arrangements then under way on behalf of the Commission on the Family. The Working Group was also to consider specifically: the quantification of the job potential in childcare; the implementation the 1991 Child Care Act on health and safety standards in pre-­school services; the registration of child carers; a national certification and accreditation system and minimum qualifications of childcare workers; mainstreaming the Early-­ Start Programme while continuing to prioritise areas of disadvantage; and financing of childcare provision by a variety of means, in the interest of affordable and accessible childcare (Partnership 2000: 24). [The NWCI] put a huge effort into the childcare Working Group in terms of our policy inputs and everything; we put in a huge amount of effort because we really wanted to see that moving. We knew it had the possibility of moving forward, so that’s basically what happened. (NB)

The Expert Working Group on Childcare (EWG) was established in 1997 and reported in 1999. It was chaired by DSCFA Assistant Secretary Sylda Langford. In broad terms, the Council was seeking access to affordable childcare and provision of services that would both enable women with children to participate in the labour market and also acknowledge the value of the childcare role of women (KZ). Both Noreen Byrne and Katherine Zappone sat on the EWG, which was quite large and had a total of 93 members, including replacements, over its term. The work of the EWG took some time and there was some criticism in October 1998 from the UN on Ireland’s tardy progress on this issue. (A major UN conference of women had taken place in 1995 in Beijing and was attended by a strong delegation of NGOs along with government and parliamentary representatives from Ireland. It gave a considerable fillip, initially, to the Women’s Council and others seeking progress on this issue.) By all accounts the EWG adopted a ‘problem-­solving’ approach and the work dragged on through 1998. The ESRI report on use of childcare (Williams and Collins 1998) showed that 38% of parents of children aged less than 4 years, and 17% of parents of

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children aged 5 to 9 years, utilised child care services. The Expert Working Group suggested that existing demand could double by 2011. In the specific context of demand-­side measures, the EWG did not adopt a principle of universal provision but set out a mixture of measures geared to a varied set of users and related to means and circumstances. These included childcare subsidies, improvements to existing FIS (family income supplement), increasing income ceilings for recipients of the One Parent Family Payment, personal tax relief and removal of benefit in kind treatment for childcare services (in the tax code). The EWG considered four specific categories of families availing of childcare: (i) parents who are unemployed or who are low earners wishing to avail of training or education; (ii) low earning families paying little or no income tax; (iii) lone parents; and (iv) families paying income tax One alternative approach to the demand-­side – discussed by the EWG – was to increase child benefit substantially. This would have been a broad spectrum approach, and would have removed the danger of an unemployment trap. The EWG highlighted its high cost. The Women’s Council, among others, had some reservations but favoured a form of childcare supplement for parents of younger children as a more targeted parental benefit for young children that did not depend on labour market or marital status and could be used either to pay for care or to recompense a parent. Raising child benefit substantially might entail revisiting the taxation of child benefit, which was a tricky subject for the Council. When the EWG reported in January 1999, it favoured a policy of tax relief on the childcare expenditures of parents (for those families liable for tax) rather than increased child benefit or an early childhood care supplement as proposed by the NWCI. The key idea in the report was to provide varied amounts of tax relief up to a maximum (initially £4,000) for each child (depending on the ages and number of children) at the standard tax rate, and the EWG estimated the cost to the state at £30m, considerably less than the cost of child benefit or supplementary child benefit proposals. The tax relief would be complemented by childcare subsidies to the lower paid or amendments to the in-­work benefit, FIS, and special measures for welfare recipients such as lone parents. This tax-­relief policy was criticised by the Combat Poverty Agency, on various grounds, e.g. that it would not benefit women outside the labour market, or help with child poverty, and that it missed an opportunity to address more specific needs for early childhood education, in addressing educational disadvantage. While there was some reference to other matters such as regulation, qualifications and standards in childcare services, the main focus was related to the labour market, as reflected in both the supply-­side and demand-­side measures. The separate reports of the National Forum on Childhood Education (Coolahan 1998) and the Commission on the Family (Strengthening Families for Life, 1998), had focused more on disadvantaged children.

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On the provision side, the EWG also recommended the development of childcare services in a community development context, providing for those most in need. It also called for the establishment of 33 county and city childcare committees (corresponding to local government divisions) on a partnership basis to promote and facilitate the start-­up of local private or community-­based childcare services. In practice, there would be a large emphasis on private, small-­scale crèche services, while a regulatory framework for inspection was also recommended. The local childcare committees were intended to provide information and guidance on capital and other support available to such providers. The Council was supportive of the Expert Working Group, particularly in relation to the ‘supply-­side measures’. But it was not satisfied with the emphasis on tax relief and had clearly favoured a ‘social welfare’ over a ‘fiscal welfare’ model.2 In its October 1999 pre-­budget submission (Budget 2000), therefore, it put forward a number of proposals, the most far-­reaching of which was to introduce a ‘parents’ childcare payment’ of £20 per week, based on what it had submitted to the EWG, for children under 6, and a payment of £10 per week for those aged 6-­14 years. Against this backdrop, Charlie McCreevy’s budget for 2000 introduced a series of modest measures aimed at promoting provision of childcare facilities and an extension of tax relief introduced in the previous budget for those buying private care. The budget contained minor tax relief for workplace crèches and little more. But there was no budget for parental childcare payments as proposed by the Council. The Council Chair roundly attacked the budget, stating that it was relevant to only a tiny proportion of women and least of all to ‘thousands of mothers, especially in disadvantaged areas’ wishing to take up employment, adding, ‘Such families need subsidised childcare’.3 The more momentous measure in Budget 2000, however, was the individualisation of the standard rate tax band by which a distinction was made for the first time between the treatment of dual-­earner households and single-­ earner households under the income tax code. Under this change, where both parents were employed they would be entitled to double the single tax rate tax band whereas if there was only one earner the standard rate band for the couple would be capped at a lower level. What seemed to be driving policy in 1999-­2000 was an ideological commitment to tax rate reduction and a switch in government thinking towards a fiscal stimulus to female labour force participation. It was not strictly necessary to do this to stimulate labour force participation by women, as this rate had been rising very rapidly since the early 1990s. From the perspective of women and children, the issue was to develop and support access to an infrastructure of childcare. What seems to have been driving policy, more simply, was the unprecedented demand for labour at the time. Not only had the Irish economy run into skill shortages but there were labour

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shortages across the board. The budgetary measures on tax individualisation, side by side with the very limited policy on childcare provision in 2000, points to a strong labour market orientation on the part of the government with very limited reference to the wider aspects of childcare policy.

The Programme for Prosperity and Fairness By the time the negotiations for the PPF took place in 1999, the report of the Expert Working Group on Childcare was in the public domain and government policy was taking shape. Resources were becoming plentiful and the issue became how to deploy them. Because this was a period of such exceptional growth and prosperity it was possible to see some considerable level of activity to satisfy political parties and/or social partners with quite divergent priorities or ideological standpoints. Nevertheless, the overall shape of policy was shifting in the direction of the burgeoning labour market, with the Council fighting an uphill battle to extend childcare policy to address the needs of women, and indeed families, more generally. In the PPF agreement, signed off in early 2000, childcare is dealt with under ‘Framework IV on successful adaptation to continuing change’, reflecting the rapid growth in labour demand and the recognition that labour force participation by young mothers is part of the solution to this novel challenge. By the time the PPF was signed off, even the employers’ group IBEC were vocal on the issue of childcare strategy, where they had once been resistant. Beside the focus on removing disincentives to employment from ‘parents’ there are references to promotion of community and voluntary childcare, including after-­school care, implying the deployment of ‘social capital’ in support of improving labour market supply. This created a dilemma for the Council. In principle, the NWCI wished to see individualisation of the tax and social welfare system, or more accurately, the removal of the concept of adult dependency from women in the tax and social welfare code. On the other hand, simply amending the tax code to favour households in which there were two earners over those with one only one was not entirely satisfactory. The Council, moreover, had put much emphasis on reforms to the social welfare code to acknowledge the value of domestic work and parenting. These tensions between pro-­market tax policy and the NWCI’s own priorities were tolerable in view of the general prosperity, and did not trigger a departure from social partnership during the life of the PPF. There was a ‘feel-­good’ factor in that period of growing prosperity: ‘Yes, there was an optimistic kind of an atmosphere in the place’ (NB). The Council sought to intervene with policy proposals based on research into how the system could be reformed to treat women equally, particularly under the social welfare code, as exemplified in Murphy (2003). Nevertheless, the NWCI was qualified in its assessment of the impact of the PPF on poverty, access to employment,

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maternity rights and gender equality (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2000). The PPF covered the period January 2000 to October 2002. In its 2001 Annual Report, the NWCI noted that as a member of the CVP and Community Platform, it was working ‘to ensure the fulfilment of commitments to women made in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness … on issues such as individualisation of the social welfare system, equality proofing, and women’s access to labour market opportunities’. The NWCI was also acting in an advisory capacity to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform on the preparation of the National Action Plan for Women (NWCI Website 2001-2). The period after 1997 had been exceptional in terms of prosperity and this in turn enabled the government to run sustained budget surpluses and reduce debt/GDP ratio while also reducing taxes and increasing social spending simultaneously. The minimum wage – an issue that had considerable importance for women at work and which the ICTU had championed in social partnership since 1990 – was implemented in 2000 under Mary Harney’s watch as Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment. The minister, despite what might be expected in the light of her political ideology, was happy – as indeed was her party – to claim credit for the decision. Indeed, at one stage the party’s website actually claimed to have campaigned for this policy.4 But the period after 1999-­2000 seemed to some NWCI respondents to usher in a hardening in the attitude of government. There had always been a cool relationship with the Tánaiste Ms Harney – and there had previously been some public exchanges on the subject of single mothers between Ms Harney and women’s organisations. In the budget for 2000 – around the same time as the social partners completed negotiations on a successor to Partnership 2000 – Mr McCreevy announced major tax rate cuts, some of which took the form of individualisation of tax aimed at benefiting married women in employment. This was a considerable tax expenditure that took many, including the social partners, by surprise. The NWCI favoured the concept of individualisation of welfare, but that was a very different matter, and it had not worked out a detailed position on individualisation of taxation. Although it had not been consulted, it accepted the policy in principle. There was a negative response on behalf of women who worked full time as homemakers, and a home carer’s tax allowance was added as an afterthought. As it happens, the high level civil service Tax Strategy Group had advised against McCreevy’s approach because it appeared to favour couples without children over families. According to news reports, based on information released under Freedom of Information legislation, ‘the Tax Strategy Group … felt that resources would not be targeted towards families with children and, as such, this would be at variance with Government policy, which was to refocus tax and social welfare in favour of the family unit’.5

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The main issue on taxation that the NWCI highlighted was the importance of raising allowances, or credits as they later became, rather than cutting tax rates or widening tax bands, or even individualising tax bands. The Council was guided as much by a consideration of distributional effects as by formal gender-­ equality considerations. However, as the 2000 budget demonstrated, certain types of ‘individualisation’ of tax might not address either objective adequately.

Rejection of Sustaining Progress and aftermath After 2000, and although it had its independent place in the CVP, the Council chose to work closely with the Community Platform, particularly during 2002 in the run-­up to negotiations for what became Sustaining Progress. The incoming director, Joanna McMinn, was asked to introduce an equality framework: ‘So really I introduced that into the strategic plan in terms of the four spheres of equality’ (see below) and ‘that actually has become quite important for us and significant in terms of the shift. But it also allowed us to be very specific about what issues we worked on, and our desired outcomes’ (JMcM). The Council adopted a strategic plan for 2002-­5 in which it set out a framework for equality based on a more radical model originally set out by the Equality Studies Centre at UCD covering four broad ‘equality spheres’ comprising: (1) respect or affective equality (the right to love, care and solidarity); (2) redistribution, or economic equality (the right to a fair share of our society’s resources; (3) recognition or social and cultural equality (the right of everyone to autonomy and personal freedom); (4) representation and empowerment or political equality (the right to the protection of human and political rights). In addition to the traditional focus on increasing the role of women in decision-­ making, the NWCI strategic plan priorities for 2002 included ‘highlighting the value of (unpaid) caring work; engagement with diverse women’s groups experiencing disadvantage/discrimination; influencing outcomes of national negotiations to ensure a fair share of society’s resources for women; providing a support structure for education and training projects for marginalised groups’ (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2002: 8) In the Council’s 2002 Annual Report, it states: ‘The NWCI decided to work within the Community Platform for the negotiations so as to strengthen the collective voice of national organisations representing those experiencing poverty and inequality’ (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2002: 15). The Council developed a common strategy with other members of the Community Platform for the national negotiations. There was a range of demands put forward, which ‘included rights for people with disabilities, the right to work for asylum-­seekers, increased spending on childcare, benchmarking of social welfare payments, increased provision of accommodation and education for Travellers, measures to promote more women in decision-­making,

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paid parental leave and the introduction of a mainstream training programme for women returners’ (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2002: 4). Respondents from the Council said that their own analysis brought them closer to the Platform because their focus was on women at the ‘sharp end’ and they had developed an ‘intersectional’ view on inequality, in which gender was a dimension but not one to be separated off: The National Women’s Council made a commitment to support, to actually work on a consensus with the Platform, about getting issues in common. So that meant us saying we weren’t going to take our own issues separately, we were going to put them within a Community Platform, and our agenda was to ensure that gender, that women’s inequality was taken up by the Community Platform and to raise awareness of women’s inequality so that we would go down that road. We made a conscious decision to work in solidarity with the Platform in the Pillar. (JMcM)

With the Platform, but based on its own reasoning, the NWCI rejected Sustaining Progress in 2003, not because of specific or stated policy content but due to the general subordination of a range of social policy objectives to weathering the international slowdown. In the view of the Council, economics simply superseded social concerns and ‘the logic underpinning Sustaining Progress, was such that it is only as economic agents that people, especially women, have a right to share in the wealth of this society’. Having consulted its affiliates as to whether the agreement ‘provided for the diversity of women’s interests we represent’, the Council concluded: ‘The combined wisdom of the organisation was to reject the agreement, after a close scrutiny of the detail.’ The agreement evidently did not meet the objectives of the Council affiliates and ‘little was offered by way of timeframes, specific targeted outcomes and resource commitments relating to social inclusion’ (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2003: 1). In a statement following the NWCI decision, the broad argument behind rejection is given: Essentially the document is a pay agreement and while earlier agreement documents had costed social inclusion packages this document makes only aspirational statements about the evolution of an equal society. It makes no genuine attempt to address the needs of the marginalized or socially excluded – those whose voices are outside of the employed and employing classes. (NWCI statement issued 5 March 2003 signed by Gráinne Healy, Chair of NWCI)

While many in the Community Platform were surprised by their exclusion after rejecting Sustaining Progress, this was not true of the NWCI. Apart from some regret at being excluded from the NESC, although that too was qualified, the outcome was not too negative: immense time and energy, a considerable proportion of all staff time at the Council, had been ploughed into social partnership, its committees and the sometimes wearing sessions of the Pillar and Platform. In fact, getting something into an NESC report was no guarantee it would reach the agreement stage. The Council representative on NESC had

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‘worked extremely hard to get equality worked in and did successfully but when it came to the negotiations [it] was very clear that we weren’t going for the letter of the NESC strategy; we were going for the general spirit of it’ (JMcM). Referring to a wobbling within the Platform after their expulsion, the same Council respondent noted, I think, particularly for the smaller organisations, I think, in terms of people’s understanding of their influence, and their impact on power, there is an attachment to the idea that if you are meeting civil servants you are having influence, and it’s completely illusory; but people are attached to it and so there was a lot of soul-­searching around that; and people found that quite difficult at a personal level, I would say, as well as at an organisational level. (JMcM)

While the core funding for the Council came from the state, it nevertheless had considerable independent funding in addition, and national public standing. Joanna McMinn, Director of the Council from 2000, recollected an encouraging reference by historian Margaret MacCurtin to the effect that the Council had ‘a responsibility and a duty and a privilege to be in this position representing women’, and continued, ‘she put it in context … and it made me appreciate how it was seen and how important that is … and not to lose that’ (JMcM). The Council used the opportunity of being on the outside of social ­partnership to develop its analysis. It continued to draw on research and ­conceptualisation of the issues of equality developed principally by the UCD centre for Equality Studies, and sought to generate an agenda of its own – instead of struggling to keep up with the pace and direction of themes as set within social partnership. On the basis of this period of reflection and stock-­ taking, while outside social partnership, the Council published policy  documents on subjects such as ‘Valuing Care Work’, ‘A Women’s Model for Social Welfare Reform’ and other issues (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2003; Murphy 2003). The Department of the Taoiseach was apparently surprised and very definitely not amused, even angry, with the Council for rejecting Sustaining Progress, and let them know this. However, by 2004, relations were becoming ‘reasonably cordial’ and ‘and we have made it very clear … we disagreed with [Sustaining Progress] but we were very happy to work in social partnership and are committed to the idea of social partnership’ (JMcM). In reality, the Council did not reject the principle of social partnership, and viewed itself as being engaged with the policy process even if outside the tripartite social partnership system, rationalising: ‘Social partnership and the NWCI participation in it, has always been a wider and broader concept and practice than the various wage agreements.’ Further it declared: The NWCI is the umbrella  body for women’s groups in Ireland and we have always played our part, as is our right and duty, to represent women’s interests to Government, media and to policy makers. We will continue to represent the

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interests of  women in all the places where the diversity of women’s  voices are required to be heard. (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2003: 17)

‘It’s a long lane that never turns’ Several changes took place in the period 2003-­5 which made for a softening of positions. In particular, the economic policies which had been introduced in 2003 became very unpopular. The drubbing of Fianna Fáil in the local elections in June 2004, when they lost about 20% of their local council seats, reflected this, and was followed by a cabinet reshuffle in September, in which Finance Minister McCreevy was replaced by the more centrist and conventional Fianna Fáil figure of Brian Cowen. The period of social partnership following this election has been dubbed the ‘social turn’ by Roche (2008). One key reform, in the context of the social turn, was the introduction of the early childcare supplement, a direct payment of €1,100 per annum payable to parents for each child up to 6 years, modelled on the parental childcare payment originally promoted by the Council several years before on the Expert Working Group on Childcare – and rejected then – but which was introduced in the budget for 2006.6 Once again, as with the increase in social welfare short-­ term payments, the political cycle had put the incumbent government under some pressure ahead of the new partnership talks in the run-­up to a general election due in 2007. From the point of view of the NWCI this can be regarded as a significant achievement. As an old saying goes: ‘It’s a long lane that never turns’. However, while Fianna Fáil was reaching to take the original Council parental childcare payment ‘off the peg’, the thinking of the Council – while on the outside of social partnership – had moved on. In 2005 it published a report (Hayes and Bradley 2005) that set out a more elaborate array of policy reforms to address the issue of work–life balance. This model departed from the more simple cash grant model, which Fianna fail was set to implement, and incorporated elements such as publicly funded childcare provision, paid parental and paternity leave and increased paid maternity leave, altogether a more ‘social democratic’ approach. The 2006 budget did include some reforms on maternity leave and parental leave, though they fell short of the newer demands of the NWCI. By 2006, the Council was seeking a return to social partnership: the 2005 Annual Report recalled the Council’s long history of speaking for the women of Ireland and declared that that its decision ‘not to sign up to the last social partnership agreement … was … a difficult and courageous one’. But, despite resultant exclusion from the process, the NWCI had ‘continued to lobby on  prioritised issues, through well-­supported campaigns,  submissions to Government, and participation on relevant  policy committees’  (National Women’s Council of Ireland Annual Report 2005: 10).

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Despite its exclusion from social partnership, the Council was actively engaged with government over a promised National Women’s Strategy during 2005, contributing to ‘policymaking  bodies and Oireachtas committees’.  In 2005, an Interdepartmental Committee, lead by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform (DJELR), with representatives of ten government  departments, had been established to draft the National Women’s Strategy (NWS). In a significant step, the NWCI was invited to participate on a ‘Social Partners Group’ to feed into this (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2006). The strategy was not finalised until completion of the next social partnership negotiations in 2006, in order to splice these together. In the eyes of the Council, the National Women’s Strategy ‘would be the critical component’ in relation to women’s equality in the next social partnership agreement, ‘and the monitoring of the NWS would be conducted through the Social Partnership monitoring process’ (National Women’s Council of Ireland 2005: 24). The Council was clearly gearing up for a return to the table. In late 2006, the NWCI applied to be involved in the partnership process once again. While not invited to the talks, it was invited to participate in the implementation of the new pact. When the National Partnership Agreement Towards 2016 was concluded, the Council decided to accept the terms, noting that the agreement ‘leaves the issue of  gender (or women’s issues) entirely to the  forthcoming National Women’s Strategy’. It added: ‘In anticipation of a National Women’s Strategy  that will fundamentally address the issues  obstructing equality of opportunity  between women and men in Ireland, the  NWCI has agreed to implement the  provisions of Towards 2016, taking its  place at the Social Partnership forum once again to ensure that issues affecting women are visible and on the agenda at all times.’7 The Council was soon reinstated fully as a component organisation in the CVP.

Conclusions The CSW/NWCI sought to represent the interests of women from 1973. Originally of a liberal stripe, the Council followed a liberal agenda on equal opportunity and was associated in many minds with centre-­right political parties. The Council adjusted its class-­political orientation in the course of the late 1980s amid rising poverty, the growth of lone parenthood and the emergence of women in community organisations. In the 1990s, under a new and politically radical echelon, the Council re-­orientated to working-­class women and local communities and was restructured and (in July 1995) renamed the National Women’s Council of Ireland. From that point, the Council attempted to deal with the growing heterogeneity and multi-­tasking experience of women in Irish society – particularly following the rise in labour force participation – whilst keeping the focus on women at the ‘sharp end’ of social exclusion.

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This shift happened just as tripartite social partnership was being prised open by other community sector and unemployed organisations and some elements from the voluntary sector. While the Council was somewhat behind the other actors in the beginning, and was overshadowed in the Partnership 2000 talks, it made some gains, while professionalising and boosting its independent resources. Over the 1990s and 2000s the NWCI did secure some progress, initially in the National Childcare Strategy and later in the National Women’s Strategy and, less visibly perhaps, in areas of welfare reform and entitlements, particularly in the area of child benefit and early childcare supplements. These areas of reform have taken priority over tax reform. While it was ejected from social partnership and remained outside for a number of years (2003-­6), the NWCI maintained a high standing among women’s organisations. Organisations that operate in the intermediate domain of ‘secondary associations’ in civil society (after a stated definition) reflect and respond to the underlying changes taking place in market, family and state (Cohen and Arato 1992; Kocka 2004; Larragy 2002). The enduring significance of the NWCI in social partnership in civil society, both within and separately from social partnership, is due in part to underlying transformations in family formation and labour force participation among young married women with children. This happened at a fairly dramatic rate in the 1990s where previously such change was very gradual and the private informal system of the family operated to support what labour force participation of women took place – with very limited formal support from the state. This had to change in the 1990s. For a time, informal arrangements enabled more women to participate in the labour market but the need for formal and financial support too grew immensely. The issue of supporting labour force participation even rose up the agenda of employers in the context of skill and labour shortages in the late 1990s. However, the NWCI became increasingly social inclusion-­minded from the early 1990s and sought to address the labour market consequences not just for socially mobile women but also for those with low earning power, or women still confined to home – for example lone parents. The switch from the traditional orientation of the Council on formal equality, equal opportunity and the ‘glass ceiling’ in the 1970s and 1980s, to a multidimensional model of equality, reflected the complex needs that arose as large proportions of women were combining care and employment for the first time. This change in orientation and the need for a new formal infrastructure of care, and other rights and welfare changes, could conceivably have happened without social partnership as, of course, the labour market pressure would need to be addressed. More critically, whether or not social partnership existed, there is the issue of the tension between economic growth and the distribution of resources. Clearly, there were different interests involved in the changing labour market. In the early 1990s the Council was in an uphill struggle to

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have childcare acknowledged in social partnership, having only just got the issue in its sights. By the late 1990s employers had shifted from a position of leaving childcare to the private domain, implicitly families, to one of wanting state incentives to market provision and incentives to women to participate in employment. The tensions between different social actors were expressed in social partnership and more generally in the political system. The main form of incentive under the centre-­right governments, from 1997, favoured labour market-­driven measures such as the ‘individualisation’ of taxation in Budget 2000, which began to treat households differently if both partners were in employment. These favoured middle-­income and higher earning groups. The campaign by the Council on individualisation of social welfare received less support; parental childcare payments or free childcare services were resisted because they were labour market neutral. In the aftermath of the ‘social turn’ of the Ahern government from 2004, and particularly in the run-­up to the 2007 general election, the idea of a childcare payment was hurriedly adopted until introduced in the 2006 budget. Much of the credit for the introduction of the early childcare allowance should go to the interventions of the Council. However, as noted, the Council’s position went beyond this, in favouring free provision of childcare/pre-­school services. The Council’s own views on support for women in the labour force were designed to facilitate labour market participation but not to subordinate childcare support to the demands of a tight labour market. It wanted support for women in different household and labour market positions, such as lone parents, families with low income or unemployed groups. To that extent its policy proposals had a de-­commodifying content. Similarly, the Council did not oppose the concept of basic income, though it had little interest in it as a campaigning focus. The Council’s strong re-­orientation to working-­class women and local communities in the 1990s, and its ‘intersectional’ approach to inequality and social exclusion, brought it closer to the Community Platform in 2002. However, whereas in that context the Council allowed its demands to be spliced in among those of the diverse groups involved in the Platform, possibly losing definition in the process, the Council’s return to social partnership under Towards 2016 (Government of Ireland 2006) saw a sharper focus on ‘women’s issues’ in relation to the National Women’s Strategy. The Council had a mixed experience in social partnership. It was not as central as the CWC, INOU or CORI in the origins of the CVP but later it came into its own. In terms of the power or influence of the Council, it is possible to see that it had its moments of influence. It seems fair to describe it as another case of asymmetric engagement. The Council persisted with analysis, policy entrepreneurship and campaigning in a context where its policies in

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the childcare area were in competition with the positions of more powerful interests in particular – not only employers but the unions too. While it went through a period outside the ‘tent’ from 2003, shifts in electoral sentiment put the government on a more conciliatory path and the Council’s ideas made some headway. The NWCI’s falling out with social partnership does not appear to have greatly damaged the organisation; in fact, it may have strengthened it. The fact that its original demand – the early childcare allowance – was eventually granted (even though the Council was on the outside and had moved on its thinking) indicates how important the shifts in the political sentiment of the demos are in translating actively canvassed proposals of community interest organisations into policy. It was, perhaps, in the context of this success that the NWCI stayed with the principle of partnership, and was happy to resume its place in the Pillar once again in 2007.

Notes 1 Dáil Éireann Volume 383, 26 October 1988, Questions Oral Answers – Council for the Status of Women http://historical-­debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0383/D.0383.198810260010. html. 2 Richard Titmuss (1973) made this distinction in order to highlight the fact that governments do not necessarily bring about redistribution through visible expenditure and that much of the state’s intervention can take the hidden form of tax expenditures, which frequently benefit the better off. 3 See Irish Times, 2 December 1998. 4 See PD website: www.progressivedemocrats.ie/about_us/ (accessed 15 February 2009). 5 RTÉ news, Thursday 6 January 2000. 6 One difficulty with the government reform was that the cash payment was insufficient for childcare costs for those on low income. In the changed economic climate, the age limit was reduced to 5½ years from January 2009, and, the reform was later replaced by a guaranteed childcare place. 7 Source for annual reports: www.nwci.ie/publications/annual_reports (accessed 1 October 2008).

10 Asymmetric engagement

The starting point for the present study was the identification of a novel feature of Irish social partnership, the Community and Voluntary Pillar. While there has been considerable debate on the nature of social partnership, and while the issue of the Pillar has come up in the context of several studies, there has not yet been published a single study devoted specifically to the CVP. Only a few article-­length or chapter-­length accounts of the Pillar have been published – usually in the context of wider concerns. Some of these are very insightful or interesting but they do not attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of the subject. What this book has undertaken, for the first time, is an examination of the CVP by means of a focus on four pivotal associations that helped to create and sustain it. However, the subject of the Pillar is of interest not from the perspective of filling in blanks in empirical knowledge alone, if indeed that is ever reason enough for academic research, but because the Pillar is somewhat anomalous, as well as unusual, from the point of view of how it might be interpreted and how it might affect the way we interpret social partnership more broadly. On this score, debate has been lively and opinion divided. One of the main justifications for the present book, therefore, is to engage with significant theoretical debates and interpretations of social partnership in the light of an empirical study of the Pillar. While many different opinions and characterisations of social partnership have been proffered, as the early chapters of this study have shown, a number of themes have emerged as the main focus of debate. Broadly speaking there are critics (Allen 2000; O’Hearn 1998) who have viewed social partnership as handmaiden to a neo-­liberal economic and political project (emphasising either dependence of the small Irish economy on external investment or the combined dominance of native and foreign capital over the working population). In these perspectives, the Pillar is simply incorporated. There are other, less strong variants of these positions too. It is important to stress that the

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present study does not reject the influence of neo-­liberalism over the period studied. The book is situated in the context of a ‘new social pacts’ perspective which allows that scenarios of austerity and competitiveness, fiscal crisis and unemployment shaped the content of tripartite negotiations from 1987. However, while the traditional social partners, including the unions, tended to go with the flow, for example in relation to reducing taxes and making concessions on the social wage, the same cannot so readily be said for the CVP. On the contrary, it often appeared that it was the standard bearer for the social wage, albeit with very limited leverage at its disposal, as compared to the unions, and within a narrow scope. By contrast, there are critics of the Pillar, writing from a conventional perspective on the primacy of representative government, who have been concerned that associations, other than those functionally embedded in the economy and accountable to employers or labour, have no real mandate to be involved in social partnership, and could potentially be a threat to the prerogative of democratic government (O’Cinnéide 1998/9). Yet it would not be correct simply to reject this position with the claim that, on the contrary, the inclusion of the CVP simply enhanced representative democracy by transforming the nature of tripartism from a bargaining modality to a deliberative one (O’Donnell et al. various years). Both of these positions seem to underestimate the huge disparities in power between the main players that underpin the combination of representative democracy and social partnership seen in Ireland. Quite simply, even when the CVP was at its best tactically, it was vulnerable. It took a great deal of persistence for members of the Pillar to gain any ground for their objectives. When they did so, success depended to a considerable extent on shifts in the sentiment of the electorate. More concrete argumentation can be found in the ongoing debate among scholars with a specific focus on the phenomena of corporatism, industrial relations and political theory. Here the debate has explored the implications of the Pillar in more refined theoretical, historical and comparative terms, although still without any detailed account of the Pillar and its principal actors. In this debate there are shades of opinion but also some noteworthy differences and divisions. First, there are theorists who have concluded that Irish social partnership retained the defining characteristics of competitive corporatism, as a system of tripartite exchange, and who interpret the CVP as a new element in an extended political exchange equation (Roche 2007). There are also variants on this ‘strong’ corporatist thesis in which the Irish model is grouped in a family of new social pacts but is situated in a more elaborate network between state and civil society (Hardiman 2006). Second, in opposition to the corporatist interpretation – in its strong form at least – is the view that the logic of social partnership is shifting inexorably away from the modalities of bargaining and solidarity and being ‘transcended’

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by new processes, including deliberation and problem-­solving, and that the Pillar is both indicative of and implicated in this shift. This claim for changing modalities applies in principle, however, not only to the CVP but also to the other actors – the conventional social partners who engage in wage bargaining too. It is contended that the logic of the new model – dubbed ‘post-­corporatist concertation’ or ‘post-­corporatist pluralism’ – entails the redefinition of interests and identities by all social partners as a result of the process of interaction with each other (O’Donnell et al. various years). These disputes were covered in Chapter 2 but could not be resolved at the level of theoretical discourse. Such disagreement related in part to the fact that the associations in the CVP are quite different in many ways from those associated with corporatism, and quite diverse in comparison to each other. The gap in empirical knowledge on top of the differences of theoretical interpretation constituted a challenge. Empirical research can be fruitless if it does not lead back to the resolution of paradigmatic conflicts among theorists, while theoretically grounded hypotheses usually require some initial knowledge of the empirical terrain. In the context of the Pillar, the challenge identified was to conduct an empirical study and develop an analytical framework that provides a more coherent account of the significance of the Pillar and relates back to existing theory while addressing the ‘anomaly’ of the Pillar. This puzzle called for engagement with a broader range of potentially relevant theory than found in the literature on corporatism. Chapter 3 therefore provided a broad excursus into theory, particularly on the nature of associations, over a longer time span and in a broader comparative perspective than as yet has been cast up by debates on the Irish model. This survey explored the associative domain at a more general level, covering concepts of associations, civil society, social mobilisation, the demos, social movements, democracy and even ‘post-­democracy’. It highlighted how these themes have emerged and receded at different times, over two centuries at least, as the paradigm of state– civil society relations and of the general interest versus individual interests (as in Hegel’s political philosophy) gave way in the nineteenth century to paradigms of, structurally defined, class conflict over inequality, in which the state is an instrument of rule in the hands of a dominant class (as in Marxism). In the twentieth century, the ‘Gramscian turn’ saw a redefinition of civil society that attempted to address new challenges, while later still there was a resurgence of interest in civil society in the context of the collapse of Communism. The latter event also opened critical discussion on the limits of liberal democratic states and the potential of associational democracy in various shapes. These developments, and the attempt to re-­specify the role of the demos in conjunction with that of secondary associations, were seen as potentially relevant to the Irish context, with its hybrid of representative democracy, corporatism and new associations, in a single model over a considerable

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time. Conventionally, social partnership or tripartism introduces an institutional remedy for the ‘mischief of faction’ by involving major encompassing organisations of labour and capital in a social bargain with the government. But corporatism can still leave sections of society outside of the loop – and sometimes the bigger the crisis the more are left outside! In this wider context, discussion of associations and debates on ‘associative democracy’ pointed to the theoretical possibility of institutional innovation to bring in a wider range of associations. This wider theoretical discussion may find, in the CVP, what it has often lacked: an empirical example of what happens when the compass of participation is widened to include new ‘factions’. The CVP emerged without prior theorisation, in response to particular economic and political circumstances. Large-­scale unemployment, low labour force participation rates, restricted membership and scope of trade unions, left very substantial sections of society outside the corporatist model adopted in 1987. Against that background, organisations which had emerged in the 1980s as advocates for vulnerable sections of society were admitted to social partnership, but only after considerable persistence. They were admitted by the government – despite reluctance among existing social partners, a fact which points to the limited legitimacy afforded by the partnership model as then constituted. The study of the CVP is therefore situated in this theoretical context and the purpose of the wider trawl of ideas was to contribute towards developing an analytical framework that could account for different modalities, not just incorporation, bargaining, networking and deliberation – the modalities so far identified in the Irish debate on partnership. The emergent framework includes other dynamics of power (consent, coercion, compliance etc.), social movements, the elusive concept of democratic legitimacy and the role of the demos, as the locus of power and legitimacy shifts about due to economic and political crises and cycles. Against this theoretical backdrop Chapter 4 set out the rationale for and approach adopted in this study. Building on the previous chapters it set out an alternative framework for empirical investigation and conceptualisation of the dynamics in the CVP. Against approaches that view the Pillar as a singularity, this book looks at four key components of the CVP to provide a more robust account of the actual dynamics at work in the Pillar. Underpinning each of these studies are concepts relating to the difference between ‘small’ community and voluntary organisations and conventional ‘social partner associations’. Community associations engage less effectively in inter-­partner bargaining than in policy entrepreneurship. They can experience long periods in pursuit of a key objective, episodes of exclusion and moments of success. They operate in a dynamic space that is shaped by economic development, political cycles and shifts in the demos. The potential modalities governing their participation in

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social partnership are distinct from those (such as bargaining or deliberation) associated with tripartism. This set of dynamics is conceptualised in a novel way in the book as asymmetric engagement. Chapters 5-­9 presented evidence and drew conclusions based on the overall experience of the Pillar (Chapter 5) and more detailed analysis of each of four key associations in it: the INOU, CWC, CORI Justice and the NWCI, respectively, in Chapters 6-­9. The present chapter pulls things together with a view to a conclusion on the significance of the CVP. Is the Pillar, as implied or stated by others, a case of incorporation and co-­option of civil society by the state? Or is it a case of influence by self-­selected spokespersons seeking to punch above their own weight? Is it just an unusual adjunct to an otherwise conventional model of extended political exchange, or indeed a new type of post-­corporatist deliberation based on a new concept of social partner? Or can the CVP be characterised as a case of resource mobilisation by organisations poised at the tip of social movements and drawing impetus from that source? The present study finds that all of these fall somewhat short of providing a satisfactory account of the Pillar. In this chapter, each of these perspectives is examined in the light of evidence from the present study.

Incorporation Is the Pillar incorporated by the state and dominant groups? The incorporation of the CVP is implicit in accounts that view social partnership as a ‘myth’ in a neo-­liberal model. Of the four associations studied, the likeliest candidate for incorporation is the INOU. From being an independent association with a strong media profile based on unemployed groups in the late 1980s, the INOU became more dependent on state funding as its focus moved to more detailed issues facing particular groups of the unemployed. However, the key factor that this study highlights is how quickly unemployment fell, shortly after the INOU signed off on Partnership 2000 in 1996 – an agreement that included a number of INOU demands geared to supporting and facilitating unemployed people, fending off ‘workfare’ and improving social welfare. Obviously, the more that unemployment improved, the less salience would be attached to the INOU. Thus, the reversal of unemployment and emergence of labour shortages seems a more convincing reason for the declining public profile and critical voice of the INOU. The CWC showed little evidence of being incorporated, though its early successes arose from proactive engagement with the state, in establishing area-­ based development partnership bodies. The CWC formed the Community Platform in order to avoid incorporation, even if the tactic was only partly a success. The CWC was prepared to swim against the tide in the aftermath of the PPF on RAPID and opposed Sustaining Progress – at the price of exclusion

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from social partnership for the Community Platform. If anything, the experience of the CWC points to the deepening of dissent as much as to a deepening involvement with the state. CORI Justice stayed with social partnership in spite of the terms of Sustaining Progress in 2003 but maintained a steady stream of critical statements in the mass media on budgetary policy, before and afterwards. Against the political grain too, CORI Justice took up relative income poverty and the linking of social welfare rates to average industrial earnings. CORI campaigned with singular determination and was regarded as a ‘thorn in the side’ of government. In 2004, following disastrous local election results, it was Fianna Fáil who blinked, and conceded to CORI’s proposals – hardly a sign that social partnership had neutered CORI. The NWCI was on a leftward path in the 1990s and rejuvenated its organisation at the same time as it began to engage with social partnership. It shifted its political stance from a middle-­class agenda towards ‘women at the sharp end’ and, after securing an Expert Group on Childcare in Partnership 2000, it took an independent position within it by calling for a work-­neutral parental child care payment. Again, it was the government, in the wake of the 2004 local elections, which acceded to the Council with a childcare payment. Incorporation is a label that is difficult to pin on the NWCI, which also rejected Sustaining Progress and was quite comfortable with the decision afterwards. In defence of the ‘neo-­liberal’ characterisation, there is no doubt that a considerable part of government policy in the 1990s and 2000s was neo-­liberal. However, the CVP did have a substantial effect in countering the type of attacks on welfare that one usually associates with neo-­liberal welfare policy. The CVP had very little control over the broader trajectory of public policy, in relation to macro-­economic management, fiscal or industrial policy. That is a power asymmetry. It is one thing to campaign for certain policies – often against the grain – and to have only a limited impact, or even to lose altogether. It is quite another to be incorporated. It is difficult, based on the evidence of these organisations, to see how the CVP could be construed as having been incorporated.

Deliberation, interest and identity redefinition Do the modalities of ‘deliberation, interaction, problem-­solving and shared understanding’ ultimately ‘transcend’ bargaining modalities and solidarity (as hypothesised for example in NESF 1997: 31)? Does the Pillar redefine its interests and identity (or its constituent elements their own) as a consequence of interaction with other social partners, in order to generate a strategic consensus with other social partners and the state? Evidently, access to deliberative bodies such as the NESC or NESF was a feature of social partnership and this access was valued in terms of

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agenda-­setting, prior to negotiations. Also, in negotiating and implementing partnership agreements, problem-­solving was a normal ongoing activity. However, it is very difficult to find evidence of redefinition of interests or the blurring of organisational identities. What we find is that within the CVP itself, for the purposes of achieving a united front in negotiations with government, there was a great deal of thought exchange and accommodation, for example in the preparation of demands for indexation of social welfare to earnings in the PPF talks. Here, while CORI evidently ‘parked’ the basic income concept, this was a matter of tactics rather than any change of heart. Other shifts in the Pillar included a closer relationship between the NWCI and the Platform in the run-­up to Sustaining Progress. Again, however, there was no loss of definition on the part of the NWCI in that context. What needs to be remembered is that small associations are frequently strong in matters of principle. Moreover, it is bargaining associations that have to reach an ‘accommodation’ with a direct counterpart. Sometimes the bargaining is a plus-­sum game so that in addition to one side getting what it wants, it does not gain at the expense of the other, and there may well be additional shared benefits. In that sense, the bargaining process leads to a strategic consensus but interests and identities are not required to be fundamentally reshaped or exchanged. The evidence on the Pillar actors also points to ‘realism’ and tactical flexibility rather than redefinition of interest or identity. But there are some differences. In the deliberative institutions of the NESF and NESC, the CVP associations sought to bring their own analyses and issues to the table, where agendas were set in advance of the negotiation process. The CWC worked for several years from the late 1980s to achieve new policies on local partnership development, and much later showed stubborn determination in the attempt to shape RAPID in the implementation stage. The evidence on the CVP points to a dogged persistence towards objectives over several months and even several years, often against the grain, rather than a permeable organisational boundary that allowed for free exchange across organisations or with the state as a result of a deliberative and problem-­solving modality. Comments from the official side, in fact, express impatience with the proffering of language and analysis in NESC by parts of the CVP, in contrast to the other social partners who were inclined to let the NESC provide analysis, and simply draw the line when the need arose to protect their own interests. CORI Justice staked its very claim to social partner status on its analysis rather than its representativeness or identity. Although CORI Justice drew on the cachet of the large number of religious that the wider CORI entity represents, the value of such cultural capital too has proved volatile. In other words, CORI Justice has had to define its own principles and identity even in relation to other parts of the Church. The NWCI forged a new profile for itself by redefining its mission in the 1990s, not in order to fit in with social partnership, but in order to protect the

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interests and rights of working women with children, and groups of women in the community, including lone parents at risk of poverty. The NWCI position on work-­neutral childcare support for all classes cut against the neo-­liberalism of ‘McCreevyism’ and was upheld by the NWCI against the majority position of the Expert Working Group on Childcare. The NWCI took its decisions about signing off on each partnership programme based on its own assessment of the interests of women, primarily, rather than on the basis of having to reach a consensus.

Bargaining and other modalities Bargaining was a fundamental and intrinsic part of tripartite social partnership from 1987, and remained a consistent feature of the Irish model. But the wage bargain in social partnership tends to be part of a more complex trade-­off (Roche 2007), which is why it is difficult for economists to compare like with like when they suggest wage settlements would be the same under free collective bargaining. The unions continued to be directly involved in negotiating the wage outcome after the creation of the CVP in 1996, and the entry of the CVP to social partnership should be seen in this wider context. The question, then, is whether the CVP was a player in an extended political exchange equation. This is difficult to answer unambiguously because the nature of the new associations is different. The CVP was independent of the unions and cannot be assumed to have been an adjunct to the wage bargain, merely complementing this with a social wage conceived in terms of public spending. Indeed, when the unions sought or accepted tax cuts as the price for moderating wage growth, they prioritised net wage growth over the ‘social wage’. This ran against the role of the CVP, as a force for winning the social wage. By prioritising tax cuts designed to facilitate investment and growth, the new Irish social pacts obliged the CVP to engage in a labour of Sisyphus in a range of spending areas. While there are some noteworthy gains to be seen, it is apparent that gains in relation to the ‘social wage’ were limited in scope. Another possibility, which the analytical framework used in the present study has brought into focus, is that the new associations are often working towards some specific social objective – whether for women generally, against poverty, or for local area development. Securing these objectives may depend more on developments in the economy and labour market and the way the electorate is shifting than on the logic of the bargaining institutions. To the extent that the new associations are not analogous to bargaining entities like union and employer confederations, they can operate more directly in the public sphere, for example through the use of the mass media, as CORI Justice did regularly. Nevertheless, because social partnership existed from 1987, the landscape

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for community and voluntary sector organisations was immeasurably changed. It was difficult even for independent, campaigning organisations not to engage with social partnership, once it was established. The ‘leverage’ that the Pillar exerted was a little more complex than either a bargain, on the one hand, or pious appeals to morality and distributional justice alone on the other. What really mattered to the CVP was getting its proposals, which were often innovatory and for the most part would entail additional social spending, adopted by government. The fact that social partnership institutions were there, gave the CVP opportunities to increase the range of modalities they could bring to bear in order to achieve their objectives, which were often to take the character of a ‘public good’ rather than a concession to their own membership.

Social mobilisation What light can the theory of social mobilisation, social movements and ‘social welfare movements’ shed on the CVP, or in what sense does the study of the Pillar relate to social mobilisation theory? Firstly, the content, or substantive issues, around which the CVP ultimately came together, was heavily concentrated around social and economic issues such as unemployment, poverty, welfare and local development, though it also embraced concerns of new social movements around themes such as disability, gender, ethnicity and ‘equality’. The Pillar, in this sense, encompassed a wider agenda than the narrower template of ‘social welfare movements’. On the other hand, against the backdrop of a narrowed focus in social partnership that often left the major areas of welfare state design – health, education, housing and social services – out of consideration, the scope could be said to have fallen short of the ‘social wage’, as traditionally understood. Secondly, and perhaps more significant, although some of the organisations that eventually made up the Pillar began their life with independent lobbying and protest action, the eventual entry of several organisations into social partnership marked a shift towards negotiation and engagement. In the 1980s, many of the organisations that subsequently made up the Pillar were engaged in protests, but once structures were created and doors were opened, protest activity became the exception. This could imply that the associations abandoned their roots or ultimate goals; but that assumes that they could achieve more progress towards those goals than in social partnership. Although that is in the realm of ‘what if?’ there would seem to be limits to what could be achieved outside of social partnership given that the unions had gone into it. Indeed, the 1980s saw a decline in industrial action and mass protest more generally. Thirdly, for ‘strong’ social movement advocates, the mobilisation of oppressed groups in their own name around their own demands is the sine qua

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non of authenticity. The ‘strong’ social movement thesis involves a persistent confrontation with elites, eschewing institutional engagement and backed up by a participative movement. But even a ‘weak’ social movement concept based on resource mobilisation geared to negotiation with the political elite and major social actors has some difficulty fitting to the situation in the 1990s because even the resource mobilisation model requires some underpinning by the threat of protest and disruption. Such threats, as noted, were declining in the 1980s and minimal in the 1990s. The main obvious threat to the political elite in the late 1980s was from shifts in the electorate rather than from social movements – old or new. While the CVP elements did mobilise organisational resources and engage in policy entrepreneurship, it was in a sense the institutions of social partnership, rather than the threat of unleashing the masses, that gave them space and opportunities in which to pursue their policy objectives. The crisis of the economy and polity in the late 1980s gave a head of steam to the elements that became the Pillar, but social partnership allowed them to channel it more strategically. Finally, within the CVP, to the degree that some elements were outside their comfort zone in the institutionalised context of social partnership, tensions might be expected. Among the organisations that have made inputs to the CVP, and particularly the organisations that took a leading role in its life, there are important differences in mission and organisational ‘self-­understanding’. Some elements in the Pillar were ever-­sceptical of social partnership and looked forward to the resurgence of social movements at some point. But even such groups, such as the CWC, which were at times ambivalent about social partnership, were keen to make use of the opportunities it offered and, despite being expelled from the process, were keen to get back in later.

Asymmetric engagement: polity, partners and demos Several existing perspectives on the Pillar and social partnership have now been examined in the context of this study, and each was found wanting in some respect. The interpretation developed here – described as asymmetric e­ ngagement – is that the CVP, through its constituent member associations, emerged from and subsisted in a more complex political and institutional environment than usually assumed. The concept of asymmetric engagement involves: (i) recognition of the power and resource asymmetry at the heart of capitalist democracies; (ii) awareness of the full range of possible modalities of governance from coercion to deliberation; (iii)  understanding of the operation of economic cycles and economic crises  – fiscal, unemployment, inflation etc. – in disrupting political

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legitimacy and creating opportunities for weaker actors to gain ground; as well as (iv) acknowledgement of political cycles defined by the pressure on elected incumbents to respond to the demos before elections and utilise whatever latitude they can gain from electoral mandates in their aftermath. This concept of ‘asymmetric engagement’ clearly acknowledges that small organisations are not equal to the state or even to traditional social partners. But this is not to imply that small organisations always lose, or to deny that they have important strengths. While small associations are vulnerable they can still be effective if they successfully address big questions in the public domain. Their very lack of the vested power – associated with certain types of big associations such as employers or trade unions – can improve their capacity to speak or act legitimately on a matter of great concern to the demos. Asymmetry also acknowledges the intrinsic diversity (asymmetry) of associations of different sizes, traits, strengths and vulnerabilities. Just as ‘asymmetric warfare’ describes patterns of conflict between small mobile groups of guerrillas and the standing army of the state on the military front, so ‘asymmetric engagement’ describes patterns of engagement between small, mobile organisations and the political establishment and state bureaucracy on the civil front. To take this analogy a step further, small organisations that challenge the establishment may earn a high standing in the demos in certain circumstances, while the state or political elite is low in public opinion, even though there may be little or no direct communication between the small organisation and the demos in either context! It is this kind of tacit connection that is possible between the demos and the small purposeful organisation. While circumstances can create such conditions, it is useful for small organisations to be aware of what is going on. Otherwise it becomes possible to lose sight of what it is that contributes to the success of lobbying in the long run. The concept of asymmetric engagement is a dynamic one. The small scale or minute resource base of small organisations is not a predictor of failure because small associations operate within the broader context of a democratic polity and capitalist economy. Such societies are prone to economic and political cycles, to recessions and recoveries, to crises and booms. In moments of crisis the assumed balance and locus of power can shift and induce crises of rationality, motivation or legitimacy, and the impact of small associations can increase. The elements in the CVP are clearly small organisations which must operate in a context where greater forces are at work: the demos, the state and political elite, and the traditional social partners. During the 1980s, the CVP organisations lobbied and made proposals that largely fell on deaf ears. They did not have the ‘threat’ capacity of a social movement and could not use

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coercion in any convincing sense to achieve their ends. Even the INOU, which was well rooted, could not mobilise more than a few thousand marchers at its height. Mostly these groups relied on their analysis, policy entrepreneurship and the knowledge bases they developed either on the ground, as in the case of the INOU, or through acquiring specialist knowledge of a critical policy domain, as the CWC did in relation to the EU Structural Funds. While some of the organisations were built on a social basis in the unemployed and marginalised communities, others chose to align themselves with the poor, as in the case of CORI Justice. In the case of the NWCI, which was in existence from 1973, there was a shift in its direction towards women in more vulnerable situations from the late 1980s onwards. In a real sense, what these organisations thrived on and what gave them a special impetus, from the late 1980s, was the declining legitimacy of the political establishment as it tried to remedy the fiscal crisis at the expense of ignoring the unemployed or welfare-­dependent groups more generally. At a time when the scale of unemployment was sufficient to constitute a general problem, the government lacked any credible policies and was electorally vulnerable. In that context, it became possible for the activists in a number of small organisations to gain ground in the public sphere. It was not a case of these organisations being able to mobilise masses on the streets in support of their cause, as clearly they were not. Rather, by ventilating the issues in the public sphere, political parties in opposition would be receptive and would see opportunities to advance by lending support to or trying to take ownership of the policies and objectives articulated by the small organisations. The political party that gained the most from this in the early 1990s was the Labour Party. Not only did the Labour Party become pivotal from 1993 to 1997 but already, with the successful election of Mary Robinson to the Presidency in 1990, Labour had scored a remarkable political victory. While the small organisations thus assisted in nudging the polity to the left, the entry of Labour into coalitions in the mid 1990s, in turn, created institutional developments that provided greater access to the policy-­making process for these organisations. In that way the small organisations operated as a catalyst, even before they got into social partnership, for new policy departures. This led to the formation of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment and the National Economic and Social Forum in 1992-­93. These operated as stepping stones to involvement in social partnership in 1996. Another front was opened by the CWC in becoming knowledge holders in the area of Structural Funds for local development and social inclusion. This intervention had a more direct influence on the official level of the administration, exposing its reluctance to engage with the EU, and the price – in lost grand-­aid – that would ensue from this reluctance. The intervention led to the initiation of local partnership bodies under the PESP in 1990, and access to the

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board of a new national agency, ADM, for the CWC. Ironically, while these steps towards institutional involvement were influenced by the shifts in the demos, these organisations did not necessarily have high profiles, and members of the public would not know much about the organisations. Having secured a foothold in relation to the planning of local area-­based partnership, the CWC too joined forces with other organisations and developed the linkages between local partnerships and the new institutions at national level. The underlying context for this progression of the elements that became the CVP was the economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy that hinged upon it. However, the government – by instituting social partnership in 1987 – sought to bring the trade unions into the circle of negotiated governance to protect its flank in the context of future elections. This step had implications for the community sector organisations for at least two reasons. Firstly, by instituting an industrial relations truce, social partnership potentially limited support for extra-­parliamentary protest politics to the least well organised, and increased the likelihood that smaller organisations acting for the oppressed or marginalised would seek to engage with institutions. Secondly, in the context of high levels of joblessness and spending cutbacks, social partnership made the unions vulnerable to criticism for colluding with the government, and this risked giving the high moral ground to the vocal community sector organisations. These conditions created further reasons for the eventual progression of the small organisations into social partnership. From the perspective of the discussion in Chapter 3 on associations and democracy, bringing new associations from outside the traditional functional and social relations of production into an existing ‘tripartite’ arrangement can be understood in terms of resolving the ‘mischief of faction’ by inclusion rather than suppression. The innovation of the CVP opened access for associations of excluded or vulnerable groups mainly via social partnership to the system of government – channels traditionally restricted to well-­resourced or better-­ organised interests. Once that was put in place, it became conceivable for government to seek ways to sift and mediate the wishes of the demos as expressed in elections, through the medium of social partnership institutions. Asymmetric engagement does not imply the replacement of the underlying logic of social partnership by another set of working principles. However, it introduces or accentuates modalities other than bargaining. Bargaining implies some form of mutual counterbalancing by parties in relations based on exchange – whether in a bipartite or tripartite arrangement. But small organisations lack the clout of trade unions or employers and cannot rely on intrinsic bargaining strength. While the notion of participation and deliberation may attract them, their entrance to social partnership does not fundamentally change the internal logic of social partnership. The extent of the deliberative stage in preparing the ground for agreements has been greatly extended in the

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Irish model but that does not sidestep the need for a final stage of hard bargaining to get an agreement. The influence of the CVP elements, therefore, is more contingent than either bargaining or deliberative modalities imply, and subsists somewhere in the overlap between the institutional dynamics of partnership and the wider relationship between the demos and the state. Small organisations can have an influence in shaping debate on the provision of public goods and the contesting existing definitions of the ‘general interest’. Conventionally, the ‘general interest’, in so far as it can be expressed, is deemed to be channelled primarily through the representative democratic institutions of the state, rather than the collaboration of private publics or interest groups. The government is supposed to govern in the general interest and in accord with the demos and to transcend the ‘mischief of faction’ without fear or favour. The concept of asymmetric engagement recognises that small organisations have the opportunity to exploit moments or periods when government policies appear to lack the legitimate mandate of the demos. In other words, at certain moments, small purposeful organisations, by virtue of the persuasiveness of their analysis of government failures, or proposals for reform, can command considerable support in the demos, on a given policy issue, against the positions held by the elected government. A context of asymmetrical power and resource distribution will tend to maintain itself, often using a wider range of modalities than those associated with social partnership. As noted by Held, the possible modalities of governance can range across coercion, tradition, apathy, pragmatic acquiescence, instrumental acceptance, normative agreement and ideal–normative agreement (2006: 197). The modalities of bargaining and deliberation have been established only with great difficulty, predominantly in developed societies. In societies which are more unequal in terms of social class, status or power and in terms of other dimensions of difference (gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion etc.) the modalities of coercion, tradition, apathy and pragmatic acquiescence can be expected to be more prominent. However, economic crisis and political instability have frequently played an important part in undermining some of the more coercive modalities and forms of compliance that maintain the status quo, by creating a space for more emancipatory forms of engagement – if only temporarily. In such moments, weaker actors can play a more significant part in events. It is generally in moments of crisis that the modalities of tradition, acquiescence and pragmatic acceptance – which are often not adverted to but are nevertheless very i­mportant – can be challenged and new social constituencies can make significant inroads. In the context of Ireland, a series of moments of opportunity was set in train by the economic and social crises of the 1980s. A crisis of legitimacy

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opened opportunities for small organisations addressing important questions of the day. While political and economic crises and cycles created the impetus for the emergence of several small but focused organisations, the institutions of social partnership provided channels for policy entrepreneurship. In the present study, the framework of asymmetric engagement in the context of social partnership, captures the visible modalities of bargaining or deliberation, but is not limited to this focus. It also captures the moments in which small actors operated in the space between the state, the institutions of social partnership and the demos. The shifts in the demos, in particular, created a favourable context for successful policy entrepreneurship by the small organisations in the institutional setting. The key point to remember is that while resource and power asymmetries are resilient, the locus of legitimacy is ever shifting and is a central dimension in a democratic society. The analytical framework of asymmetric engagement allows ‘weaker’ players to punch above their weight at certain moments, because of the extra fillip they get from the shifting sentiment of the demos. In the empirical chapters several instances of this were examined. In the present study, therefore, the contextual dimensions of power asymmetry, economic and political instability, cycles and crises, are implicit in the empirical account of each actor. As against those who view the CVP as simply incorporated by the state or the dominant class, the concept of asymmetric engagement suggests that oppressed groups are capable of achieving change, and that those speaking for the poor, unemployed, women, etc. can, at key moments, rely on considerably more than moral suasion. Asymmetric engagement is not a static view. Power and legitimacy are elusive concepts. While power is unequally distributed and the balance of power is not easily shifted, economic and social reality is dynamic and there are tipping points for those exercising authority and those who are subject to it. The organisations that made up the CVP made headway because they could take advantage of these tipping points. Does this focus on groups and power struggles exaggerate the effects of access by new groups to social partnership or overlook the centrality of the demos and representative government as the basis for resolving distributional justice issues? Of course, in a democracy, power is notionally exercised in the common interest, as expressed by the electorate, and any deviation from that would create questions as to the legitimacy of government decisions. But the discussion in Chapter 3 illustrates some of the difficulties due to conflating the notion of the general will or public interest with the ‘empirical will’ of the demos as revealed by elections – which simply produce a government. The research findings appear to bear out the value of asymmetric engagement as an analytical approach. When we examine the components of the Pillar and try to establish the logic underlying its origins, actions and impacts,

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this framework gets closer to the fine-­grained dynamics and realities of the Pillar than other perspectives. The INOU reveals one key dimension of these dynamics in stark form. As a small movement of unemployed people, it made a substantial impact on the debate on how to respond to unemployment. The INOU critique of policy on unemployment and the unemployed resonated strongly with a widespread concern among the voting population at one time. However, unemployment was the core issue for the INOU and, as the trend in employment improved, the salience of the INOU as a lobby waned considerably. Similarly, the CWC identified government failures in relation to marginalised local communities and highlighted opportunities to tackle local disadvantage with the help of European Structural Funds. The pilot programmes against poverty in the 1980s laid the groundwork for area-­based partnerships. This set the CWC on the path to national level engagement with the state, and eventually into social partnership. However, the centralised system of government and the narrow scope of local government compelled the CWC to support a parallel system of local development initiated by the Department of the Taoiseach. Some years later, when the crisis had passed, the prerogative of representative government was reasserted (in the period 1997-­2001), posing a test for the CWC. There would inevitably come a day when the issue of local development and local government has to be rationalised – with implications for the CWC. There are limits to what can be achieved through social partnership when the current architecture of central and local government persists. While government and employers in particular have shown little appetite for tackling relative poverty, the success of CORI in achieving a significant benchmark by 2007 testifies to a very important reality: while politics trumps partnership, the demos trumps politicians. CORI Justice was seen as a thorn in the side of government until government received a ‘wake-­up call’ in the local election setbacks of 2004. Then, suddenly, CORI was invited to address the main government party and, before long, the government adopted elements of CORI’s policy in the interest of its own survival in the next general election. It is in the warp and weft of politics, institutional dynamics and wider economic and social reality that the significance of the CVP emerges. This is the value of asymmetric engagement as a framework for interpretation. It is compatible with the empirical reality and logic of the new associations in social partnership while providing a coherent link back to theoretical concerns. Similarly, asymmetric engagement operates in relation to gender. The National Women’s Council of Ireland subsisted with some success in the overlapping worlds of women – in the economy and society. The NWCI had to muster its resources at a time of massive change in the labour force participation rates of married women with children. While government policy after 1997 was often marked by a one-­track-­minded labour market orientation with

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tax incentives to married women, the NWCI brought a different, and more sustainable and societal, approach which focused on giving choices to women in how to combine childcare, welfare and employment. While its ideas were ignored for several years and indeed the NWCI rejected Sustaining Progress along with the Community Platform in 2003, the social turn did come, eventually. Here again, the Council articulated not a narrow organisational demand but a social requirement – a ‘public good’. Governments that are cavalier in relation to childcare and parenthood to provide fodder for the labour market are failing the demos, and the NWCI were not only principled but in tune with the wider public interest in taking a distinct line.

A final word Throughout this study, in the exploration of interpretations and theory, in the decision to broaden the theoretical compass, in the attempt to develop a theoretically rigorous but still exploratory account, in the application of an ‘extended’ and ‘reflexive’ approach to the case study and in the adoption of a single case study with embedded units, there has been one key goal. That goal was to address the question of the significance of the CVP in Irish social partnership. Through the application of the analytical framework of asymmetric engagement this study has made a contribution to knowledge that holds up in relation to empirical reality and received theory. There remain many issues for further exploration in relation to Irish social partnership but at least it should be possible as a result of this study to deepen further both theoretical and empirical investigation of this important topic, perhaps not only in the Irish context but more generally. The emergence of the players which featured in the study was the associational counterpart, in many ways, of a very significant shift to the left in the demos. The voters ultimately changed governments until the government created the NESF, which became a step for the new groups to social partnership. Getting into social partnership was significant both as an outcome and as a factor in what happened subsequently. Ultimately, the issue was not whether the groups were inside or outside social partnership but how successfully they operated – as small associations – in the triangle of forces constituted respectively by the demos, social partnership and the polity. The ‘counterfactual’ of fighting from the outside was – for these organisations in the conditions of the time – only as real as the ‘myth’ of social partnership itself. In the final analysis, if as von Clausewitz wrote, ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, then asymmetric engagement is, for small associations in social partnership, the continuation of political struggle by other means.

Appendix 1

Schedule of interviews  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Date

Name

Organisation

5 August 2003 6 August 2003 15 August 2003 19 August 2003 3 March 2004 3 March 2004 23 March 2004 1 April 2004 21 April 2004 28 April 2004 13 May 2004 13 May 2004 17 May 2004 19 May 2004 19 May 2004 25 May 2004 27 May 2004 2 June 2004 3 June 2004 29 June 2004 26 July 2004 24 August 2004 25 May 2005 27 October 2005 4 October 2006

Eric Conroy Mike Allen Mary Murphy Camille Loftus Anastasia Crickley Sean Healy Siobhan O’Donoghue Sean Healy Sean Regan Sean Healy Tony Monks Orla O’Connor Gráinne Healy Sean Healy Brigid Reynolds Aidan Lloyd Katherine Zappone Joanna McMinn Ursula Barry Niall Crowley Dermot McCarthy Rory O’Donnell Noreen Byrne John Mark McCafferty Liz Sullivan

INOU INOU INOU (SVP) INOU (OPEN) CWC CORI CWC CORI CWC CORI INOU NWCI NWCI CORI CORI CWC NWCI NWCI NWCI CWC Dept. Taoiseach NESC NWCI SVP CWC

Appendix 2

Pay terms of national social partnership agreements, 1987–2010 Note: This appendix details the pay increases under the National Agreements since 1987. It should be noted that the commencement date and the end date for each agreement may vary from employment to employment. This is because the agreements are voluntary, and such detail is left to local negotiation. The pay terms of all social partnership agreements are negotiated voluntarily and they come into force in individual employments through normal industrial relations processes. While the pay terms are not binding in the formal sense, it is expected that implementation would be effected through local agreement. In the case of non-­unionised employments and where the employer is a member of a body party to the Agreement, there is a clear expectation that the terms will be applied. However, it is open to an employee whose employer has refused to honour the terms of the Agreement to refer the dispute to the Labour Relations Commission. The dispute can only be investigated if the employer is willing to participate in such an investigation. Programme for National Recovery (PNR) (1988–90) In each year of the agreement: 3% on the first £120 p.w. of basic pay. 2% of any amount of basic pay over £120 p.w. or at least: £4 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP) (1991–93) Year 1 4% of basic pay. Year 2 3% of basic pay. Year 3 3.75% of basic pay.

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or at least: Year 1 £5 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Year 2 £4.25 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Year 3 £5.75 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. In addition local bargaining of 3% of basic pay in year 2 permitted. Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW) (1994–1996) Year 1 2% of basic pay. Year 2 2.5% of basic pay. Year 3 2.5% of basic pay for first six months plus 1% of basic pay for second six months. or at least: Year 2 £3.50 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Year 3 £3.50 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Partnership 2000 (P2000) (1997–2000) Year 1 2.5% of basic pay. Year 2 2.25% of basic pay. Next 9 months 1.5% of basic pay. Next 6 months 1% of basic pay. or at least: Year 2 £3.50 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Next 9 months £2.40 p.w, for full-­time adult employees. Next 6 months £1.60 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. In addition local bargaining of 2% of basic pay in year 2 permitted. Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF ) (2000–2) Year 1 5.5% of basic pay. Year 2 5.5% of basic pay. Adjusted pay terms 1 April 2001 2% of basic pay Next 9 months 4% of basic pay. 1 April 2002 1% of basic pay in the form of a one-­off lump sum payment or at least: Year 1 £12.00 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Year 2 £11.00 p.w., for full-­time adult employees. Next 9 months £9.00 p.w., for full-­time adult employees.

Appendix 2

229

Sustaining Progress Part 1 (SP) (2003–mid 2004) Private Sector Pay Phase 1 3% of basic pay for the first 9 months of the Agreement. Phase 2 2% of basic pay for the next 6 months of the Agreement. Phase 3 2% of basic pay for the final 3 months of the Agreement. Public Sector Pay A pay pause of 6 months to be followed by: Phase 1 3% from 1 January 2004 Phase 2 2% from 1 July 2004 Phase 3 2% from 1 December 2004 Sustaining Progress Part 2 (SP) (mid 2004–end 2005) It is agreed by the parties that basic pay for those earning in excess of €9 per hour shall be increased by 5.5% to be paid in the following phases: Private Sector Pay Phase 1  1.5% of basic pay for the first 6 months of the Agreement. Phase 2 2% of basic pay for the next 6 months of the Agreement. Phase 3 2% of basic pay for the final 3 months of the Agreement. It is agreed by the parties that basic pay shall be increased by 6% for employees earning up to and including €9 per hour to be paid in the following phases: Phase 1 2% of basic pay for the first 6 months of the Agreement. Phase 2  1.5% of basic pay for the next 6 months of the Agreement. Phase 3  2.5% of basic pay for the next 6 months of the Agreement. Public Sector Pay Phase 1 1.5% of basic pay from 1 June 2005 for 6 months. Phase 2 2% of basic pay from 1 December 2005 for 6 months. Phase 3 2% of basic pay from 1 June 2006 for 3 months.

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Towards 2016 – Transitional Agreement The pay terms will come into force on the expiry of the first module of Towards 2016 and shall run for 21 months. Private Sector Pay Phase 1 A pay pause of 3 months from the expiry of the last phase of the first module of Towards 2016. Phase 2 An increase of 3.5% for the next 6 months of the Agreement as it applies in each particular employment or industry. Phase 3 An increase of 2.5% for the next 12 months of the Agreement –exception: employees €11 or less per hour 3% increase will apply. Public Sector Pay Phase 1 A pay pause of 11 months from the expiry of the last phase of the first module of Towards 2016. Phase 2 An increase of 3.5% for the next 9 months of the Agreement. Phase 3  An increase of 2.5% for the remainder to the Agreement  – except for those earning up to and including €430.49 per week (€22,463 per annum) on commencement of Phase 3 where a 3% increase will apply. Source: Department of Enterprise and Employment

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Index

active labour market policies (ALMP) x, 81, 82, 105, 117, 145 Adshead, Maura 11, 12 Ahern, Bertie 113, 169, 177, 207 Allen, Kieran 5, 24, 209 Allen, Mike (MA) 80, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 113, 118, 123, 226 Amin, Ash 26 Andersen, Soren Kaj 93 Anderson, Perry 36 Annetts, Jason 41 Arato, Andrew 34, 206 Area Development Management (ADM) x, 63, 64, 68–9, ­125, 131, 133, 135, 149, 155, 221 Asymmetric engagement, concept of 58–60, 66, 95, 218, 219, 222, 223 Avdagic, Sabina 16 Baccaro, Lucio 5, 16 Bachrach, Peter 42–3, 110 Back to Work Allowance (BTWA) 111, 120 Baker, John 39 Baratz Morton 42–3 bargaining 1, 2, 3–4, 10, 13–16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25–6, 28, 29, 32, 37, 38, 42, 44–6, 49, 56, 57–60, 67, 68–9, 75, 79, 80, 81, 84, 92, 100, 111, 115, 122, 136, 138, 139, 142, 154–5, 188, 210–11, 212–13, 214–15, 216–17, 221–2, 223 Barrington (Advisory Expert Committee) Report 125, 131–2 Barry, Ursula (UB) 191, 192, 226 basic income BI x, 77, 81, 82, 101, 160–4, 168–71, 180, 182, 207, 215 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) 164, 182 Bond, Larry 101, 103, 110

Boucher, Gerry 13, 32 Bradley, Siobhán 204 Brennan, Catherine 72, 156 Brine, Jacqueline 129 Bruton, John 106, 191 Burawoy, Michael 51 Byrne, Anne 184 Byrne, Noreen (NB) 182, 184, 187, 189–96, 226 Callan, Tim 170 Carey, Sophia 14, 162 Carney, Gemma 40, 49 Cassells, Peter 104, 108 Central Statistics Office x, 10, 97, 109, 110, 194 Cerny, Philip 43 civil society viii, 4, 5, 7, 10, 21, 25, 26, 31–7, 42, 49, 61, 63, 68, 70, 71, 72, 76, 78, 95, 100, 113, 136, 144, 145, 157, 160, 181, 183, 189, 190, 206, 210, 211, 213 Clark, Charles 168, 182, 196 class vii, 4, 10, 24, 33–7, 38, 41, 43, 44, 74, 96, 99, 101, 106, 155, 187, 189, 190, 202, 205, 207, 211, 214, 222, 223 Clinch, Peter, 11 Cohen, Jean L. 34, 206 Cohen, Joshua vii, 5, 37–8 Collins, Claire 196 Collins, Gráinne 13, 32 Commission on Social Welfare (CSW) x, 67, 77–83, 93, 96–7, 108, 112, 113, 145, 163–4, 168, 170, 172, 195 Community Employment (CE) x, xi, 81, 98, 111, 117, 119, 135, 147, 169, 182 Community Platform vi, 25, 53, 61–3, 64, 73, 82, 85, 87–91, 96–7, 109, 119–21, 125–7, 136–9, 213–14 exit from social partnership 150–4

Index in the CVP 149 NWCI and 188, 200, 201–3, 207, 215 in Partnership 2000 140–5 in PPF 145–8 community sector 24–5, 69–72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 87, 93, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 137–9, 142, 149–50, 154, 167, 206 community work 127–8, 130, 131, 135, 149 Community Workers’ Co-operative (CWC, the Co-op) x, 41, 53, 63, 64, 69–73, 77, 85, 87, 89–92, 101–2, 107, 120, 121, 124–56, 181, 188, 190, 207, 213, 215, 218, 220, 221, 224, 226 community and voluntary sector 1, 3, 6, 31, 44, 56, 57, 67–9, 73–80, 95, 100, 106, 108, 109, 116, 117, 134, 136, 142, 149, 166, 168, 183, 191, 217 Conference of Religious in Ireland x, 6, 53, 90, 157–82 Conference of Major Religious Superiors (CMRS) x, 75, 159, 160, 165 CORI Justice vi, x, 6, 41, 50, 53, 55, 69, 74, 75, 77, 78, 84, 85, 89, 92, 101, 118, 121, 134, 151, 154, 157–82, 213, 214, 215–16, 220, 224 Connell, Kenneth 184 Connolly, Linda 39, 40 Conroy, Eric (EC) 118, 226 Considine, Mairéad 184 Convery, Frank 11 Coolahan, John 197 corporatism 1–5, 9, 12–13, 14–19, 20, 24, 38, 40, 45, 46, 60, 211–12 competitive 13, 17, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 62, 66, 68, 69, 73, 75, 79, 93, 101, 108, 122, 124, 142, 162, 210, 211 liberal 13 neo- 3, 13–14, 21, 27, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40 neo-liberal 13, 32 post- 25–8, 32, 213 Coughlan, Mary 176 Cousins, Mel 14 Craig, Sarah 6 Crickley, Anastasia (AC) 127, 128, 129, 134, 143, 155, 226 Crotty, Raymond 10 Crouch, Colin vii, 5, 36, 37 Crowley, Niall (NC) 75, 77, 125, 128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 155, 186, 226 Cullen, Barry 131 Dahl, Robert 42 Dáil / Dáil Éireann 8, 62, 89, 102, 119, 132, 133, 148, 160, 165, 167, 182, 208

247 deliberation 4, 24, 26, 27, 43, 44, 45, 49, 57, 58, 110, 115, 134, 138, 141–5, 181, 211–13, 214–15, 221–3 Della Porta, Donna 39 democracy vii, 4, 5, 7, 23, 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42, 46, 49, 57, 62, 69, 70, 92, 102, 126, 127, 128, 132, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 149, 154, 181, 210, 211, 212, 221, 223 associative 5, 32, 33, 46, 212 deliberative 25, 26, 28, 142, 143 liberal vii, 2, 11, 32, 33, 37, 211 participative / participatory 26, 102, 127, 132, 139, 142, 143, 144, 149, 154 de Tocqueville, Alexis 34, 47 Diani, Mario 39 Doherty, Michael vii Dukelow, Fiona 184 Dundon, Tony vii Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) x, 119, 196 equality 10, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 33, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 53, 59, 63, 65, 70, 76, 84, 101, 116, 117, 125, 126, 127, 133, 135, 136, 201, 203 CORI Justice and 164, 165, 177, 181 gender 183, 186–9, 199–200, 202, 205, 206, 207, 217 in Partnership 2000 139–45 in the PPF 146–53, 156 Esping-Andersen, GØsta 14, 162 European Anti-Poverty Network (Ireland) EAPN x, 73, 90, 156 European Community (EC) 68, 74, 109, 111, 129, 140, 186, 187, 188, 189 Expert Working Group on Childcare 183, 185, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204, 216 extended political exchange thesis 13, 20, 24, 27, 28, 32, 49, 210, 213, 216 Fahey, Tony 162 Fajertag, Giuseppe 5, 16, 18, 19 farmers 3, 20, 23, 68, 77, 79, 80, 82, 149, 151, 173 Irish Farmers Association 51 Ferner, Anthony 16 Fitz Gerald, John 11, 49 Fitzgerald, Eithne 134 Fitzpatrick Associates 153 Flora, Peter 14 Flynn, Phil 101 Foras Áiseanna Saothar (FÁS) x, 107, 116, 118, 120

248 Forum of People with Disabilities (FPD) x, 72, 90, 156 game, 2, 58–9, 60, 153, 154, 155, 215 theory 12 Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) x, 72 Gaynor, Niamh 1, 49 Geoghegan, Martin 6 Glaser, Barney G. 50 governance v, viii, xii, 1, 2, 5, 8, 20, 21, 23, 29, 31, 33, 38, 44, 49, 67, 71, 73, 84, 138, 141, 142, 147, 175 associative 46 flexible network 13, 24, 27–8, 32, 49 modalities of 56, 57–60, 218, 222 negotiated 50, 71, 139, 221 participative 48, 126, 143 Gramsci, Antonio 5, 35–6, 43, 211 Habermas, Jürgen 43 Hall, Peter 14 Hardiman, Niamh 2, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 27, 28, 32, 49, 144, 210 Harvey, Brian 85, 149, 151, 153 Hastings, Tim 6, 12, 49, 50, 70, 80, 167 Haughey, Charlie 62, 70, 80, 160, 165 Hayek, Friedrich 33 Hayes, Nóirín 204 Healy, Gráinne (GH) 187, 188, 189, 192, 194, 202, 226 Healy, Sean (SH) 77, 113, 118, 134, 151, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 226 Hegel, Georg F. W. 5, 34–5, 211 hegemony 17, 20, 35, 36, 43 Held, David 5, 33, 44, 57, 156, 222 Hemerjick, Anton 14 Higgins, Jim 62, 165 Higgins, Rita-Ann 123 Hirst, Paul vii, 5, 33, 47 Honohan, Patrick vii, 168, 182 Hyman, Richard 16 incorporation 24–5, 32, 45, 61, 92, 121–2, 134, 181, 183, 192, 209, 212, 213–14 Inglis, Tom 162 Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) x, 29, 51, 79, 80, 87, 94, 199 Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) x, 15, 51, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 94, 96, 101, 104, 106, 108, 114, 151, 156, 200 Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU) x, 6, 41, 50, 52, 53,

Index 64, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 87–90, 95–123, 125, 134, 137, 148, 150, 151, 155, 156, 162, 166–72, 178, 181, 188, 190–2, 207, 213, 220, 224, 226 Irish Times 55, 106, 121, 145, 166, 174–5, 178, 182, 208 Irish Traveller Movement (ITM) x, 72, 90, 156 Jenkins, J. Craig 40–1 John Paul II 163 Joint Oireachtas Committee on Employment (JOCE) xi, 74–5, 106, 167, 220 justice v, vi, 33, 72, 101, 155, 159, 160, 165, 171, 182, 217 Katzenstein, Peter 14, 16 Kavanagh, Catherine 196 Kinsella, Stephen and Anthony vii Kirby, Peadar vii, 10, 24, 25, 32 Kocka, Jürgen 206 Kornhauser, William 40 Kuhn, Thomas 8 Langford, Sylda 196 Leahy, Pat 178, 181 Leddin, Anthony vii Ledwith Margaret 127 Lee, Anna 6 legitimacy 3, 5, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 60, 61, 66, 71, 73, 74, 76, 83, 91, 92, 100, 108, 133, 134, 138, 144, 154, 165, 193, 212, 219, 220, 221–3 Leo XIII 161, 163 Leonard, Madeleine 184 Lewin, Leif 14 Lloyd, Aidan (AL) 143, 226 local development partnerships 6, 28, 41, 53, 63, 65, 68, 69, 74–5, 78, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 107, 124, 125, 126, 129–38, 149, 153, 188–9, 193, 215, 216, 217, 220–1, 224 Local Employment Service (LES) xi, 81, 82, 97, 107, 112, 116, 117, 145 Loftus, Camille (CL) 114, 226 Lukes, Stephen 43 McCafferty, John Mark (JMMcC) 226 McCarthy, Dermot (DMcC) 69, 75, 88, 114, 131, 153, 226 McCarthy, John 40, 41 McCashin, Anthony 14, 72, 156 McCreevy, Charlie 86, 145, 177, 182, 198, 200, 204, 216 McDonough, Terence vii

Index McDowell, Michael 177 McGinn, Pat 99–100 McKeown, Kieran 6 McLaughlin, Edward 12 McMinn, Joanna (JMcM) 191, 201, 202, 203, 226 MacSharry, Ray 12 Mailand, Mikkel 93 Mansbridge, Jane 5, 38 Marshall, Thomas 146 Marx, Karl 5 Marxian 4, 9, 10, 35 Marxism 211 Marxist 24 Meade, Rosie 25, 32, 40, 41 Melucci, Alberto 39 Mjøset, Lars ix, 22–3 Monks, Tony (TM) 104, 118, 226 Mouffe, Chantal vii Murphy, Mary (MM) viii, 40, 79, 103, 105, 111, 113, 116, 117, 118, 150, 172, 191, 199, 203, 226 National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS) xi, 81, 82, 121, 125, 139, 140, 156, 160, 172–4, 176, 177 National Campaign for Welfare Reform 101 National Economic and Social Council (NESC) xi, 2, 19, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30, 42, 53, 56, 64, 67, 68, 76, 77, 78–9, 82, 96, 97, 109–11, 112, 123, 132, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 147, 156, 168, 188, 191, 202–3, 214–15, 226 National Economic and Social Forum (NESF) xi, 5, 20, 25, 26, 63, 64, 76–80, 82, 96, 97, 102, 106–9, 110, 113, 121, 124, 125, 126, 134–6, 138, 139, 141–2, 155, 156, 160, 168–9, 183, 188, 189, 190–3, 214, 215, 225 National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) vi, xi, 6, 53, 77, 85, 88, 89, 90, 100, 134, 166, 172, 175, 183–208, 213, 214, 215, 220, 224, 225, 226 National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) xi, 75, 87, 89, 151, 156 Neo-liberalism vii, 5, 9–10, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 32, 45, 71, 141, 145, 173, 182, 209, 210, 213, 214, 216 Nozick, Robert 33 O’Cinnéide, Séamus ix, 11, 27, 49, 71, 210 O’Connor, Emmet 14, 15 O’Connor, Orla (OO’C) 156, 191, 226 O’Donnell, Rory 5, 12, 13, 20, 21, 25, 26, 30, 32, 49, 156, 210, 211, 226

249 O’Donoghue, Siobhan (SO) 146, 149–50, 156, 226 O’Hara, Pat 184 O’Hearn, Denis 4, 9, 10, 32, 209 O’Leary Don 162 O’Leary, Jim 11 Ó Riain, Seán vii, ix, 23 One Parent Exchange Network (OPEN) xi, 72, 90, 156 open method of co-ordination (OMC) xi, 68, 109, 140 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) xi, 15, 109 Partnership 2000 – for Inclusion, Employment and Competitiveness (P2000) xi, 3, 61, 65, 79–81, 82, 95, 97, 109–15, 117, 118, 122, 125, 126, 136, 139, 141, 144, 146, 147, 156, 160, 169–72, 183–4, 188, 191, 195, 196, 200, 206, 213, 214 pay terms 228 Peillon, Michel 162, 163 Pius XI 161, 165 Pluralism 12, 26, 31, 32, 42, 211 Pobail see Area Development Management Pochet, Philippe 5, 16, 18, 19 Polanyi, Karl 10 Powell, Fred 6 power v, vii, 35, 36, 42–6 asymmetry 32, 154, 214, 218, 222 bargaining 61, 73, 81, 142, 154, 181 Catholic social 162, 180, 184, 186 legitimacy and 5, 32, 212 multinational 17 representative versus participative 13, 126 of small organisations 7, 23, 31, 33, 37, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 92, 93, 104, 149, 207, 210, 219, 222 within social partnership institutions 109, 110, 113, 115, 120, 122, 124, 138, 144, 158, 195, 203, 208 Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW) 64, 65, 79, 80, 82, 87, 97, 98, 107, 108, 125, 131, 135, 160, 167 PCW pay terms 228 Programme for Economic and Social Progress (PESP) xi, 20, 21, 64, 65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 97, 98, 105, 107, 125, 131, 135, 160, 167, 168, 187, 220 PESP pay terms 227 Programme for National Recovery (PNR) xi, 3, 20, 21, 64, 65, 67, 80, 82, 97, 98, 105, 167, 187 PNR pay terms 227

250 Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) xi, 63, 64, 65, 82, 83, 95, 97, 115–20, 125, 126, 141, 145–8, 150, 151, 160, 171, 175–81, 183, 188, 199–200, 213, 215 PPF pay terms 228 Pyle, Jean Larson 184 Quadragesimo Anno 161, 165 Radio Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) 113, 156, 178, 208 Rawls, John 33 redistribution 18, 44, 141, 171, 195, 201, 208 Regan, Sean (SR) 226 Rerum Novarum 161 resource mobilisation 32, 40, 41, 213, 218 Revitalising Areas through Planning, Investment and Development (RAPID) xi, 82, 83, 125, 126, 145, 145–9, 153, 154, 156, 213, 215 Reynolds, Brigid (BR) 161, 164, 166, 169, 182, 226 Rhodes, Martin 5, 13, 16–18, 22 Roche, William ix, 5, 12, 13, 20, 22, 28–9, 32, 49, 101, 177, 204, 210, 216 Rogers, Joel vii, 5, 37–8 Royall, Frederick 96, 104 Sabel, Charles 6 Schmitter, Philippe 5, 13, 34, 38, 43 Sheehan, Brian 6, 12, 70, 80 Smelser, Neil 43 Smyth, Emer 184 social democracy / social democratic vii, 14, 20, 35, 101, 141, 162, 204 social economy 81, 82, 84, 111, 120, 121, 125, 144, 147 social movements 37, 39–41, 42, 44, 46, 122, 211, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219 Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Working Group 119, 160, 173 Society of Saint Vincent de Paul (SVP) xi, 53, 87, 89, 90, 114, 118, 120–1, 150, 151, 156, 172, 178, 226 Soskice, David 14 Spring, Dick 76, 113, 123, 134, 140, 170 ‘Spring tide’ election 71 Strauss, Anselm 50 Streeck, Wolfgang 5, 34, 38 Structural Funds 53, 68, 74–5, 124, 125, 129, 133, 134, 146, 153, 220, 224

Index Sullivan, Liz (LS) 139–40, 226 Sustaining Progress (SP) xi, 25, 54, 63, 65, 82, 84, 85, 88, 92, 95, 97, 109, 119–21, 125, 126, 150, 151–4, 160, 175–6, 182, 183, 188, 201–3, 213, 214, 215, 225 pay terms 229 Sweeney, Paul 12 Taoiseach, Department of the 27, 55, 68, 70, 78, 89, 129, 156 creation of the CVP 137, 139, 167, 173 local partnership companies 130–1, 133, 155, 224 nominees to NESC 109, 110, 123, 188 role in partnership talks 151–2, 203, 226 Task Force on Long-term Unemployment 97, 107 Teague, Paul 6, 13, 20, 21, 29, 32 Teahon, Paddy 155, 167 Titmuss, Richard 177, 208 Touraine, Alain 39 Travellers x, 41, 72, 90, 127, 128, 140, 150, 155, 156, 201 Trinity College Dublin (TCD) xi, 94, Turner, Thomas, 2002 13 Unemployment Protest Committee (UPC) xi, 99 University College Dublin (UCD) ix, xi, 192, 201, 203 Vestergaard, Mads 93 Visser, Jelle 14 Von Prondzynski, Ferdinand 14, 15 Walsh, Brendan 11 Wiarda, Howard J. 13 Williams, James 196 workers 4, 10, 35, 36, 80, 115, 117, 160, 163, 196 Workers’ Unity Trust WUT xi, 98 Working Group on the Integration of the Tax and Social Welfare 169 Wright, Robert vii, 11 Yeates, Padraig 6, 12, 70, 80 Yin, Robert 50, 52 Zald, Mayer 40, 41 Zappone, Katherine (KZ) 195, 196, 226