The Political Economy of the Irish Welfare State: Church, State and Capital 9781447332923

Table of contents :
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE IRISH WELFARE STATE
Contents
Preface
Introduction
The colonial context
The Irish Revolution
The ‘Church-State Alliance’
Economic modernisation and development
Cultural modernisation and secularisation
Crisis, austerity and democracy
1. Why the welfare state matters
Origins of the welfare state
Welfare and citizenship
The welfare state under pressure
The Irish welfare state: myth or reality?
Understanding Irish social policy
Justice, decency and social obligation
Conclusion
2. Revolution, culture and society
Cultural nationalism: ‘the stirring of the bones’
Slum dramas and social realism
Sinn Fein: ‘A movement of movements’
Poverty and people
Rural exodus, unemployment and diaspora
The labour movement, syndicalism and popular militancy
The Democratic Programme 1919
Women, new identities and changing gender relations
Popular culture, youth mobilisation and national identity
Conclusion
3. Welfare in the Free State
The 1922 Constitution
Politics and society
The first-wave welfare state
The politics of austerity
Property, housing, and urban development
The Irish Poor Law legacy in national consciousness
Poor Law and health services
Austerity and insurance reform
‘An attack on the old and blind’
Women’s rights, insurance and maternity benefit
The detention of single mothers
The Great Depression and populist politics
Unemployment and social assistance
‘Invasion of industry by women’: Conditions of Employment Bill 1935
De Valera’s demographic project: children’s allowances and family poverty
Conclusion
4. Religious nationalism, sectarianism and anti-semitism
Religion, education and cultural policy
Religion, culture and identity
Education, sectarianism and cultural segregation
Anti-semitism, refugees and asylum policy
Public morality, youth and sexuality
Censorship and women’s subordination
The 1937 Constitution and family solidarity
The Catholic social movement and organic community
Social Catholicism, corporatism and vocationalism
Muintir na Tire and rural community development
Urban social protest and political activism
Intellectual dissent and social policy
Conclusion
5. The welfare state debate
Secular humanism, civil virtue and social reform
Modernisation, clientelism and social rights
Religious cosmologies and welfare states
The British welfare state in Northern Ireland
Welfare state or ‘servile state’: the making of the Irish ‘third way’
The politics of health
The health debate: defending inequality and residualisation
Human rights, mental health and community care
Social service councils: the Catholic Church and voluntarism
Education, segregation and modernisation
Youth culture, emigration and modernisation
Housing crisis, urban policy and land speculation
Homelessness and housing action
The ‘ad hoc’ development of the social welfare system
Conclusion
6. Poverty and social inequality
The meaning and scale of Irish poverty
The Irish poverty debate: structural versus trickledown theory
The media, poverty and ‘fake news’
The birth and death of a poverty programme: ‘A tuppence halfpenny committee?’
The National Anti-Poverty Strategy and the politics of poverty measurement
Social inequality and the distribution of wealth
Conclusion
7. Liberty, gender and sexuality
Modernisation, identity and modernity
The emergence of an open society
Social reform and clerical resistance
The media and sexuality
Gender, poverty and abuse
Modernisation and liberty
New social movements and Irish cultural politics
The rise of the women’s movement: ‘second-wave feminism’
The politics of reproductive rights
The Kerry babies case: ‘a modern-day witch-hunt’
The abortion debate
Divorce and family politics
Gay rights and the decriminalisation of homosexuality
The politics of change
The politics of secrets: the child abuse scandals
Conclusion
8. The marketisation of the welfare state
The residual welfare state, market values and institutional voids
Path development, European integration and social partnership
Welfare productivist capitalism and the knowledge economy
The Celtic Tiger economic boom
Economic development, capital and political corruption
The ‘social partnership project’
Neoliberalism, modernisation and the welfare state
The developmental welfare state: ‘Recasting the Irish social debate’
The Irish model: a failed welfare state?
Conclusion
9. Crisis, austerity and water
Alchemy, greed and ‘leprechaun economics’
Property bubble and housing crisis
Austerity, welfare and water
The Apple tax debacle: the contradictions of Irish public policy
Conclusion
10. Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

TEXT TO COME

Governments around the world are seeing locality as a key arena for effecting changes in governance, restructuring state/civil society relations and achieving sustainable growth. This is the first book to critically analyse this shift towards localism in planning, through exploring neighbourhood planning; one of the fastest growing, most popular and most contentious contemporary planning initiatives. Bringing together original empirical research with critical perspectives on governance and planning, the book engages with broader debates on the purposes of planning, the construction of active citizenship, the uneven geographies of localism and the extent to which power is actually being devolved. Setting this within an international context with cases from the US, Australia and France the book reflects on the possibilities for the emergence of a more progressive form of localism.

Quintin Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in Planning and Housing at Leeds Beckett University, leading post-graduate study in planning and housing. He leads research into community planning and localism, housing rights and social movements. URBAN STUDIES / SOCIAL STUDIES

www.policypress.co.uk

Sue Brownill and Quintin Bradley

Sue Brownill is Reader in Urban Policy and Governance at Oxford Brookes University. Her research focuses on public participation and spatial equity in planning and regeneration, affordable housing and community planning and localism.

Localism and neighbourhood planning

“This book provides an analytical, current, and essential insight into localism and neighbourhood planning and is a must read for anyone studying or engaging in urban planning and public policy today.” Adam Sheppard, University of the West of England

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE IRISH WELFARE STATE CHURCH, STATE AND CAPITAL

FRED POWELL

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE IRISH WELFARE STATE Church, state and capital Fred Powell

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2017 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-1-4473-3291-6 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-3537-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-3538-2 Mobi ISBN 978-1-4473-3292-3 ePdf The right of Fred Powell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Hayes Design Front cover image: www.alamy.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

I wish to dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Dr Anthony Powell 1913-2002, who believed that the Hippocratic Oath entitled every person to medical treatment as of right, regardless of class, religion or ethnicity.

“This is one of those rare books that can step back from the flow of history, identifying the continuities behind seemingly sweeping changes. Thus, it is far more than a history of the Irish welfare state as it places this embodiment of a just society in the wider context of the forces shaping Irish society and the grossly unjust and unequal outcomes. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how, over the last century, Ireland has become what it is. Perhaps more importantly, it sets out the immensely challenging agenda facing those who seek to lay the foundations of a society that has the will and the ability to work for, and cherish well, all its citizens.” Peadar Kirby, University of Limerick “The political economy of the Irish welfare state is at once a coherent and provocative examination of the role of social policy in shaping modern Ireland, a comparative analysis of Irish modernisation and a vital contribution to Irish social history. It combines both breadth of analysis and lucid focus. Professor Powell’s landmark book should be required reading for students of modern Irish history, Irish society and Irish institutions.” Bryan Fanning, University College Dublin “This is a forthrightly critical, wide ranging and engaging study. It conveys with skill and panache the particular, unique development of the welfare state in Ireland, shaped by conservative Catholic culture and power, as well as progressive social movements, particularly the women’s movement. This is contextualised throughout by reference to social policy regime analysis and modernisation, laced with a keen sense of social justice opposed to undemocratic corporate power, neoliberalism and patriarchy.” Norman Ginsburg, London Metropolitan University “Professor Fred Powell has written a book which captures the complex narrative of the Irish Welfare State. In a clearly written and engaging account of welfare politics and policy, he documents how the progressive instincts of democrats, socialists and feminists were overwhelmed from the establishment of independent Ireland in the early 1920s by an alliance of state, church, and property interests. This has given rise to a society where the welfare of the people and the values of social justice are secondary to the priorities of institutions, economy, and local and global vested interests.” Cathal O’Connell, University College Cork

Contents Preface

vi

Introduction 1 one Why the welfare state matters 13 two Revolution, culture and society 31 three Welfare in the Free State 65 four Religious nationalism, sectarianism and anti-semitism 99 five The welfare state debate 123 six Poverty and social inequality 167 seven Liberty, gender and sexuality 193 eight The marketisation of the welfare state 225 nine Crisis, austerity and water 253 ten Conclusion 265 References 271 Index 291

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Preface This book is the product of four decades of teaching and research. What has been clear to me for a long time is that Irish social policy, and its institutional manifestation as a welfare state, is unique. Many scholars have tried to fit the Irish welfare state into one of the preexisting international models, with limited success (Esping-Andersen, 1990). As this book will show, there is no clear agreement about what kind of welfare state exists in Ireland. The most positive endorsement one can make regarding the Irish welfare state is the stark reality that without its existence half the population would be ‘at risk of poverty’ (Central Statistics Office, 2015: 5). On the other hand it is important to acknowledge that it is a residual welfare state dominated by means tests, with an American style two-tier health service (Wren, 2003), a dysfunctional housing system driven by a culture of property-ownership and asset acquisition at the expense of the poor, who experience over-priced rents and spiralling homelessness (Norris, 2016), and an education system that is religiously and socially segregated. Given the overweening power exercised the Catholic Church during much of the history of the Irish state, it is fair to say that the welfare state has been a contested ideal in Ireland that against the odds has emerged in the shadows of Irish polity. To quote Dr Johnson’s remark about the dog walking on his hind legs: ‘It is not done well: but you are surprised it is done at all’. The Irish welfare state is officially described as ‘hybrid’ and ‘complex’ (National Economic and Social Council, 2005). It is in reality an enigma in search of an explanation. That is the task of this book. I have been interested in this intellectual project for most of my academic life because the welfare state encapsulates the practice of civic virtue in modern society. I hope the book will bring some clarity to the social policy debate and the importance of the welfare state in the future development of Irish democracy. My personal biography has coincided with many of the debates that have shaped Irish social policy. It has equipped me with some of the sociological insights of the participant observer into understanding the path development of the Irish welfare state. William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet, wrote ‘the child is father of the man’ in his 1802 poem The Rainbow; this is a good metaphor for the Irish welfare state, combining hope with illusion. My youthful interest in social policy, and the idea of a welfare state, was kindled by the ‘Just Society’ debate in the 1960s and reading George

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Orwell as a schoolboy in a medieval Benedictine Abbey at Glenstal in remote County Limerick. Through reading books and newspapers, I began to realise that the European Enlightenment had produced a rupture with the medieval world dominated by church, monarchy and a feudal social order. Revolution and the rebirth of democracy in the eighteenth century had ushered in the modern era based on secular cultural values: egalitarianism, human rights and the welfare state. I also grasped that Irish society had been caught in a time warp and was embracing modernisation in a societal attempt to escape from a failing historical project, the hallowed cause of Irish Independence. It was a fascinating time to be alive: to directly witness the transformation of Ireland into a modern globalised society. The result has been a variety of capitalism with Irish characteristics, in which the welfare state finds itself integrated in the larger project of economic development. However, the past keeps catching up with the present, as witnessed by the confirmation in March 2017 by the Mother and Baby Home Commission that up to 800 children’s bodies were buried in a septic tank on the grounds of a mother and baby home in Tuam, owned by a religious order. Many of these children’s deaths coincided with my own childhood, reminding me of the highly stratified society that existed in Ireland at the time and the harsh moral codes that people were subjected to in a country dominated by a secretive Church-State alliance. Even as a child, I was aware of this oppressive and intolerant hegemonic social order based on fear and deference. In Ireland ‘the Great Chain of Being’ (with the church at the top of the social hierarchy) created a society of moral Lilliputians (‘little people’ who lived on a fictional island in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, written in 1726). Church power became the raison d’etat. Independent Ireland was a dystopia for many of its inhabitants, albeit a privileged elite prospered in a property-based welfare system that supported asset accumulation at the expense of the poor and urban working-class (Norris, 2016). The ideal of the welfare state, as the embodiment of social citizenship in a just society that respected human rights, became almost unmentionable in public discourse. A myriad of contemporary public inquiries – concerning historic abuse in industrial and reformatory schools, Magdalene asylums and mother and baby homes, and foster care – attests to the absence of meaningful social citizenship and human rights in modern Ireland (Powell and Scanlon, 2015). This troubling developmental context has made writing The political economy of the Irish welfare state a challenging intellectual task. I have sought to write the book in the manner and style of a peoples’ history,

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

as exemplified by the great American social scientists Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, whose books Regulating the poor (1971) and Poor people’s movements (1979) became modern classics. This approach involves an analysis of the developmental pathway of the Irish welfare state encompassing: struggles for rights waged by the poor and oppressed; marginalised citizens’ experiences of social domination and class subordination in a property-based welfare system, and the ideological conflicts concerning social citizenship, gender relations and human rights in a polity shaped by a secretive Church-State alliance. Critical social thinking was not encouraged in Irish universities for much of the twentieth century, which made it difficult for a young student with a desire to explore ideas (Fanning and Hess, 2015). In the late 1960s, I became a student at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) which was still under a ‘ban’ – a form of fatwa – from the Catholic Church. Because the ban was being increasingly ignored by Catholic students in pursuit of freedom of thought in a society that was slowly beginning to open up to more diverse cultural influences, it was rescinded in 1970. Three cosmopolitan intellectuals, who were also politicians, embodied TCD’s association with independent thought and capacity for public dissent in 1960s Ireland: Dr Noel Browne, who served as a radical reforming Minister for Health in the 1948-51 inter-party government; Professor David Thornley, politician, RTE journalist and socialist parliamentarian; and Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien, UN Envoy to the Congo, Labour Party Minister in the 1970s Irish Coalition Government, Editor-in-Chief of the Observer newspaper, and latterly (and very controversially) Ulster Unionist candidate in a Northern Ireland election. All of them influenced my thinking and search for truth in what was still a traditional religious society. David Thornley was my teacher and intellectual mentor. I worked as a student volunteer for Noel Browne, the local TD (MP) in Dublin South-East, and listened to him talk passionately about Irish politics and contemporary history, in which he had been a key actor. I encountered Conor Cruise O’Brien at a distance, as I watched him pursue his scholarly and literary activities in the TCD library, writing books, essays and plays. Inspired by the transformative potential of a ‘Just Society’, I subsequently decided to study social policy at Edinburgh University, where I was introduced to the idea of the welfare state and the normative possibilities of social justice as the basis of a ‘good society’. The experience drew me into an academic career. It began at the University of Ulster in the midst of a sectarian conflict that had produced a polarised society. A religiously segregated education system had fuelled the fires of inter-communal distrust, undermining civil

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society. It was, of course, a mirror image of the religiously segregated education system in the Republic of Ireland that constituted a fundamental repudiation of its professed republican values. In 1990, University College Cork (UCC) appointed me a professor and founding Head of the School of Applied Social Studies. We decided as a young and enthusiastic staff group to build on UCC’s historic capacity for social and political debate, personified by: former University President, Alfred O’ Rahilly (a noted controversialist on religious matters and advocate of the corporate state); Sean O’Faolain, writer, dissident and editor of The Bell (an Irish literary and social journal with a critical edge); and latterly Professor and Senator John A. Murphy, historian and public intellectual. Our task was to build a critical school of social policy and welfare practice. Community engagement and widening participation were core objectives in constructing this new academic project. We grew into a large and vibrant academic community with 35 full-time teaching staff. I hope this book will make a contribution to our intellectual mission at UCC to open up a critical social policy debate in Ireland. During 25 years as Head of School it has been my good fortune to work with a number of exceptional research colleagues: Donal Guerin, Martin Geoghegan, Katherina Swirak, Etaoine Howlett and Margaret Scanlon. We produced many books, articles and reports together, which have informed my scholarship and understanding of Irish society and social policy. I owe them a debt of gratitude. I would particularly like to thank my colleagues, Margaret Scanlon (for her help in the production of this manuscript), Cathal O’Connell and Fiona Dukelow for their advice and scholarly insights, and Laura Vickers, Susannah Emery, Jessica Mitchell and Phylicia Ulibarri-Eglite of Policy Press for unfailing politeness and encouragement. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their support during this particularly demanding odyssey. Professor Fred Powell, March 2017

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Introduction We evolved a half-baked Welfare State, a chaotic and enormously inefficient mix of public, private and charitable provision. And many parts of the political and bureaucratic systems are happy with this. The difference between having rights and receiving charity is accountability. Charity is unaccountable – it speaks to the goodness of the heart not the good of the citizens. And having this unaccountability at the core of so much of our system of public provision doesn’t just suit the church – it suits all those whose lives are made easier by not having to answer to the people they supposedly serve. Fintan O’Toole, Irish Times, 25 April 2017 Two Nobel laureates during the centenary year of the epic event of the Irish Revolution – the 1916 Rising – have been highly critical of the Irish state. Paul Krugman has mocked Irish growth statistics as ‘leprechaun economics’ (2016a), meaning trickster economics. More ominously, Joseph Stiglitz has called Irish taxation policy ‘corrupt’ and accused Ireland of ‘robbing developing countries’ and the United States, which sounds like a warning to a rogue state (The Irish Times, 31 August 2016). Ireland, according to The Irish Times (1 October 2016), is sometimes regarded as beyond the European Pale because it lacks its ‘enlightened’ core values: post-nationalism, advanced secularism, scepticism about market values, low tolerance of violence and a strong belief in the ethos of the welfare state. Are these profoundly negative characterisations of Ireland justified? Or is Ireland, as represented by the UN Human Development Index 2015, one of the best countries in the world in terms of quality of life? Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane (2007: 206-7) observe: … quality of life is an elusive and paradoxical thing … Despite the fact that Ireland has been lauded for having a high quality of life, it seems clear by the evidence that although substantial gains have been made in Irish society through pursuing neoliberal economic policy, this economic

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

modernisation has been accompanied by a variety of social inequalities and by a strong decline in social cohesion. Arguably, Ireland’s failure to move beyond a historic residual welfare state model, within what is essentially a competition state, has had very serious social policy consequences in terms of the well-being and social equality of the Irish population. That question is at the core of this book, which explores the development of the Irish welfare state from the Revolution in the early twentieth century to the present day. The title of this book is The Political Economy of the Irish Welfare State. It is intended to bring a critical edge to the Irish social policy debate. The term ‘welfare state’ emerged after the Second World War to describe a new era of democracy, in which social legislation and the provision of social services became integral features of modern life (Gough, 1979: 1). Its ‘golden era’ or ‘second wave’ was between 1945 and 1975, but the origins of the welfare state go back much further to the 1880s, its ‘first wave’. Since 1975 we have arguably been experiencing a ‘third wave’ in the development of the welfare state narrative, characterised by retrenchment and marketisation. A leading international authority, Gøsta Esping–Andersen (2002: 2), views the welfare state not simply as a technical solution in the form of social security but as an answer to the ‘social question’ (raised by socialists) that would ‘put an end to class inequalities’. In similar vein, Pankaj Mishra (2017: 13) views the origins of the welfare state in terms of a response to the ’shocks of modernity’, arising from the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century. Social policy emerged as a discipline out of the intellectual orbit of political economy, challenging the individualistic free market ideology of the latter, as inhuman and anti-democratic. Political economy was originally located in the ideas of liberal thinkers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who advocated laissez-faire economics based on personal and market freedoms. Radical political thinkers such as Tom Paine, William Thompson and Karl Marx turned political economy on its head, reinterpreting it as an argument for social equality based on the collectivist principles of redistribution and reciprocity. Social democracy emerged as the ideology that sought to transcend the sharp political division between capitalism and socialism in the form of a welfare state. The welfare state is not monolithic and exists in a variety of models, regimes, traits and cultural forms (EspingAndersen, 1990). However, it is underpinned by a binary distinction between residual welfare states (minimalist) and universal welfare states (maximalist). The Canadian-based scholar Ramesh Mishra (1981:100) noted in reference to this dualism: ‘In the residual model the scope of

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Introduction

state welfare is minimal. The social services (that is, other than Poor Law type of assistance) are largely undeveloped and non-statutory forms of welfare are more prominent. In the second [universal model] the position is virtually reversed- relative weight shifts towards statutory welfare’. A residual welfare state is ideologically shaped by the idea that government should play a limited role in the distribution of benefits and services. The underlying assumption is that the majority of the population should provide for their own welfare either through reliance on family, church and charity or by purchasing services in the private market (which may be supported through tax reliefs or vouchers). Services free of cost, in the logic of the residual welfare state model, should only be provided on a basis of selectivity to those unable to help themselves and may be associated with social stigma or coercive sanctions. The stigmatisation of welfare recipients produces negative stereotypes and punitive public and official attitudes designed to create a moral economy of conduct, in which welfare recipients are often constructed as undeserving, for example as ‘welfare scroungers’, ‘cheats’, ‘skivers’. Media framing plays a vital role in the promotion of these condemnatory cultural images and coercive practices in the public sphere. They are intended to: place welfare recipients outside the scope of normality and acceptability; reinforce the work ethic in society; and, through a process of ‘othering’, displace the blame for poverty onto the victim. Within this moralistic discourse the poor are socially constructed as a ‘residuum’ or ‘underclass’ (in present day language) of undeserving welfare recipients. It evokes the spectre of the deterrent Victorian Poor Law system introduced in England in 1834 and Ireland in 1838. It was dubbed by contemporaries ‘the Poor Man’s Destruction Act’ and ‘the Starvation Law’ (Jones and Novak, 1999: 114). This was certainly true in relation to Ireland. The Great Famine (1845-51) reflected the catastrophic failure of laissez-faire economics in an underdeveloped society undergoing rapid transformation into a consolidated agricultural system, based on capitalist accumulation principles. A million people died and another million were forced to emigrate in the Irish diaspora. The Irish Times (22 October 2016) noted in relation to the Irish diaspora that the US Migration Policy Institute recorded 39 million Americans as claiming Irish ancestry and the US Census Bureau similarly recorded that 33 million (just over 10 per cent of the US population in 2014) stated they were of Irish origin. The converse of the residual welfare state model is the universal or ideal welfare state regime, in which the state accepts responsibility for the provision of comprehensive social services, available to all citizens

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

on the basis of the principle of universality. This democratic model constructed the welfare state on the basis of a universal right to health, education, housing and a basic income. It was the embodiment of social citizenship, which deepened democracy and redistributed wealth (the ‘Robin Hood’ function of the welfare state) after the Second World War historic settlement. Since the 1980s, the universal welfare state model has come under sustained ideological critique from an alliance of social conservatives and neoliberals (originally called ‘the New Right’), arguing that it is both unaffordable and has created a dependent class of welfare recipients whose lifestyles, they controversially allege, are undermining the social fabric (Murray, 1986). This has led to welfare reform involving a down-sizing of the welfare state in many developed societies and an increasing marketisation of social services. Undoubtedly, the universal welfare state faces structural challenges if it is to accommodate transformative social changes since its inception in 1945, such as: an ageing population, the need for childcare when a large proportion of women participate in the labour force, higher levels of migration and the spillover effects of climate change. However, with growing evidence of market failure, following the 2008 crash and the advent of the Great Recession, the social and economic stability offered by a universal welfare state regime based on social justice, fairness and decency, may be the last best hope for democracy. It offers a positive alternative to the fear and anger currently being propagated by nativist populists in both Europe and the United States. Populists are successfully exploiting the negative impacts of deregulated markets, automation and globalisation on the living standards and social expectations of many citizens –manifested in growing social risks of unemployment, homelessness and insecurity – in post-industrial society. There are a number of core characteristics identifiable in shaping the historic path development of the Irish welfare state and its future democratic possibilities. These can be broadly summarised as the colonial context; the Irish Revolution; the ‘Church-State Alliance’; economic modernisation and development; cultural modernisation and secularisation; and crisis, austerity and democracy.

The colonial context The British colonisation of Ireland (1169–1923) left behind a bitter legacy in public memory and folklore including: the Great Famine (1845–1851); the deterrent Poor Law and the Irish diaspora that scattered the population across the globe. More positively, Ireland benefited from the first wave of the British welfare state between 1880

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Introduction

and 1914, linking Irish social policy tenuously to the Anglo-Saxon model of liberal welfare state regimes.

The Irish Revolution The Irish Revolution (1913–1923) mobilised three core elements in the struggle for freedom. First, nationalists sought a political revolution in the form of independence from Britain. Second, a syndicalist labour movement sought a social revolution based upon equality and rights. Third, women sought equality. While they all formed a common front with nationalists during the revolutionary struggle for independence, neither women nor labour were able to achieve a social revolution.

The ‘Church-State Alliance’ Irish independence was based on a two-state solution dividing the island into two sectarian jurisdictions: the Free State (26 counties), which was overwhelmingly composed of Catholic nationalists; and Northern Ireland (six counties), which was dominated by a Protestant unionist majority that wished to remain part of the United Kingdom. After independence in 1923 the Irish Free State sought to minimise the fledgling welfare state and maximise the role of the Church through the so-called ‘Church –State alliance’, which dominated both political and civil society for much of the twentieth century. The legitimacy of this sectarian arrangement was enshrined in the 1937 Constitution, which is still (in modified form) the basic law. In 1948 the Free State was replaced by the Republic of Ireland.

Economic modernisation and development Ireland was not a combatant in the Second World War (1939–1945) and did not significantly benefit from the post-war reconstruction in the form of the Marshall Plan or the second wave of welfare state reform, generally referred to as the Keynesian Welfare State. However, in 1958 Ireland did embark on a modernisation project aimed at economic development, driven by foreign direct investment. Social policy was subordinated to economic development in this model of productivist welfare capitalism. The Celtic Tiger became the defining image of Irish economic modernisation between 1997–2008. The Crash in 2008 and subsequent Bailout by the ‘troika’ (composed of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

European Central Bank) put an end to the hubris of the Celtic Tiger, with major debt repayments stretching out to 2053.

Cultural modernisation and secularisation For social conservatives, whose Catholic nationalist values were taken for granted as the pillars of the nation, cultural modernisation in the form of the emergence of an open society represented an unwelcome seismic change. The rise of the second wave women’s movement, the forging of a more fluid national identity through Europeanisation and the appearance of a multicultural society, as well as the transformation of attitudes towards homosexuality, all represent this change. An enlightened public increasingly rejected the interference of Church and State in the regulation of their sex lives. The collapse of Catholic social power in a welter of child abuse scandals epitomised the cultural transformation of Ireland into two ‘Irelands’, in which the Catholic Church still largely controls schools and some parts of the healthcare system including the yet-to-be-built new National Maternity Hospital (Irish Times, 18 April 2017), which has sparked a major debate. The other – a new liberal Ireland – articulating a more secular vision of an open society.

Crisis, austerity and democracy During the post-2008 economic crisis, austerity policies involved a descent into high levels of unemployment and emigration, sharp cuts in public services, declining living standards and a widening poverty gap. The ‘diseases of despair’, notably alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide, represented the dark underside of the economic legacy of the Celtic Tiger project. Economic revival is currently predicted by the media in the form of the ‘Phoenix Revival’ (Irish Times, 15 April 2017) – meaning a return to economic growth without borrowing. It begs the question ‘Who will benefit?’ For some sections of Irish society the purported Phoenix Revival may mean a return to relative comfort, security and even prosperity. Others are likely to see little change in their social status and economic circumstances because of structural poverty and social inequality. A new social contract is, as Social Justice Ireland have argued, essential to rejuvenate Irish democracy and combat the ‘ widespread disillusionment and disappointment’ experienced by many ordinary citizens in the lived experience of Irish citizenship and the public perception that society is organised to serve the interests of multinational corporations, share-holders and a supine political

6

Introduction

elite ( Healy, 2017:8) . A universalist welfare state is, as will be argued in this book, the only meaningful way to restore public confidence in Irish (and arguably European) institutions by putting civic virtue at the core of political life in a new social contract designed for the twenty-first century. The purpose of this book is essentially hermeneutic. It seeks to interpret ‘dominant truth regimes’ (Foucault, 1998) in Ireland and how they have shaped social policies orientated towards the provision of social protection, health, education and housing. This exploration will include the influence Church, State and Capital have exercised over the development of the Irish welfare state. What did Irish independence mean for the quality of life of its citizens? What was the new state really about? Why was a republican revolution followed by a counterrevolution, based on a secretive church–state alliance? How did this shape Irish social policy? Was the unpopular Poor Law system replaced or adapted in the emerging nationalist state? After modernisation in the 1960s did Celtic Tiger Ireland become a welfare state in the European sense or a competition state influenced by an East Asian development model? What kind of society has it created: consumerist and contractarian or one based on the principles of social justice, fairness and decency? Is the Irish political economy model sustainable following the 2008 crash? Can a residual welfare state be defended in a highly developed society or has Ireland adopted advanced liberal technologies of power that enable the state to coexist with deeply entrenched social inequalities? Does the dominance of positivist epistemologies of social science in Ireland, based on quantitative research approaches, obscure the profound ideological debates about welfare that are ultimately rooted in democratic discourse and political economy? At a macro-level, the book explores the social consequences of the triangular relationship between elites in the form of Church, State and Capital during the first hundred years of Ireland’s independence. It argues that the Irish Revolution (1913-23) was immediately followed by a counterrevolution, inspired by religious nationalism and the protection of conservative economic interests. Nativist populism became the political vernacular in which the post-civil-war protagonists continued their hostilities through tribal politics, based on legacy issues and political fictions. Social policy reflected Catholic corporatist values, with the clergy denouncing the Welfare State after the Second World War as a totalitarian ‘Servile State’ (Belloc, 2012), while endorsing authoritarian dictators in Southern Europe, such as Franco and Salazar.

7

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

Nevertheless, Cousins (1999: 50) suggests that 1930s and 1940s Ireland was not entirely inured to change: ‘the domains of life for which the state was perceived as having some responsibility were expanding’. This was to lead to a major confrontation between Church and State in 1951 regarding the principle of socialised medicine. Modernisation and Europeanisation in the second half of the twentieth century, it is contended in this book, resulted in an emerging secularisation in the form of an open society, involving relaxation of censorship followed by the legalisation of contraception and divorce. Nevertheless, a constitutional ban on abortion – the Eight Amendment –remains in force and the Church has not divested itself of the control of schools, despite major child abuse scandals in care institutions historically under its control (Powell and Scanlon, 2015). Segregated education continues, despite recent attempts to religiously integrate schools through the Educate Together initiative; while very popular, this has lacked sufficient official funding and support. However the Marriage Equality Referendum in 2015, legalising gay marriage with the support of over 60 per cent of voters, suggests Ireland now has become an open society. These developments arguably reflect the growing influence of advanced liberal rationality and cosmopolitan values in the Irish political sphere. But what about the pursuit of social equality as a core republican value, in the modern European sense of the term? If the welfare state is used as a yardstick to measure social progress, Ireland’s residual welfare state model fails the test. Social policy always involves distributional choices, in which there are ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The imposition of austerity policies by the European Commission/International Monetary Fund/ European Central Bank ‘Troika’ after the collapse of the Irish banking system post-2008 resulted in half the population depending on social transfers (e.g. pensions, unemployment benefit, family related benefits, sickness and invalidity benefits, housing assistance etc.) and 13.2 per cent (over 600,000) of the population experiencing food poverty, many of them children (CSO 2016; Department of Social Protection, 2015). Yet the Irish State, beholden to foreign direct investment (FDI), is counter-intuitively contesting in the European Court of Justice an EU ruling, ordering the Apple Corporation to pay 16 billion euros in outstanding taxes to Ireland that would solve Ireland’s homelessness crisis at a stroke. This raises the ethical concern posed by Joseph Stiglitz about the rationality of the Irish state, which he seems to regard as an offshore tax haven disengaged from its international responsibilities to be a good neighbour (The Irish Times, 31 August 2016).

8

Introduction

This book poses Karl Polanyi’s classic choice between marketisation and social justice. Polanyi argued that capitalism consists of a ‘double – movement’- the push from capital for self-regulating markets and the push back from citizens for social justice in the form of the welfare state, based on universal principles of entitlement (Polanyi, 2001). This book concludes that Ireland has not lived up to the notional (if vague) republican ideals of the Irish Revolution in which the goal of social justice, in the form of emancipating labour and women as citizens with social rights embodied in a welfare state ethos, was sacrificed in the cause of national liberation. It will argue that the counterrevolution that followed produced a form of conservative religious nationalism that became the dominant Irish truth regime for most of the twentieth century. Michelle Norris (2016) has contended that this insular conservative regime was legitimated by a ‘property-based welfare state’, orientated towards land ownership and rural social class interests and pressures for land redistribution to small-holders. Its legacy has left late modern urban Ireland, in search of self-definition in terms of its values and vision, as an increasingly globalised economy and society. The Celtic Tiger economy was invented to create a new dynamic rooted in the welfare productivist model of the East Asian Tiger economies that retained property at the centre of the Irish welfare state. Property ownership is at the root of Ireland’s welfare state path development and unique character and traits (Norris, 2016). The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, a distinguished social scientist, poet and public intellectual, in an interview with The Irish Times (17 September 2016) reflected critically on the achievements of the Irish Revolution: I have suggested very explicitly that you need to shine the lamp very strongly to find the thin flickering flame of egalitarianism within the nationalist tradition … wherefore if you were taking and working the materials that are given to us it has to be built anew so the case for if you like, the safety, the superiority, the value of egalitarian thinking has in fact actually to be made. The case has to be made. During the course of the interview, with writer and literary editor of The Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole, the President reflected on his father’s experience as a combatant in the Irish Revolution and his subsequent disappointment and ill-health that impacted very severely on the welfare of his family. His father died in the County Home in 1964. The President’s candid discussion of his childhood is in many respects

9

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

a parable for the lost hope of the Irish Revolution and the subsequent failure to build a more egalitarian society. President Higgins concludes that Ireland faces a Polanyian choice: If you have a position where one section of society is going to lock itself away in private consumption and all the rest are left to the lifeboats, thrown out and so forth? You see, we have to recover the role of an accountable democratic state … and what that means is that some people are going to have to say that the excesses [to] which people are driven after 1989, we have to come back the road and take another direction. The President’s call for a different kind of Ireland informed by more ethical values suggests that Irish social policy needs to take a more egalitarian rights-based direction, as he elegiacally puts it: ‘we have to come back the road and take another direction’. The challenge of writing a book about the political economy of the welfare state is to locate its relevance in contemporary society. We live in what Professor Anthony Giddens, in his 1999 BBC Reith lecture series, called a ‘ Runaway World’. Giddens argues globalisation, ‘risk consciousness’ and digitalisation are undermining institutional forms of solidarity, such as the family, religion and the nation state. In Giddens’ analysis these seminal institutions are losing their capacity to define the norms and values that bring stability and predictability to the experience of our daily lives, personal identities and social reality. While Giddens is cautiously optimistic about what can broadly be described as the ‘de-traditionalisation’ of the postmodern world there are many challenges in the forms of terrorism, loss of self-identity, structural unemployment, rising poverty and social inequality. We live in a historic period when the welfare state is being systematically undermined, as governments re-situate policy towards the market; this is called neoliberalism. In reality, our contemporary political experience arguably is a narrative in which oligarchy and democracy are pitted against each other in a titanic struggle to control the future. Accelerationism has emerged as a celebration of this changing world, in which technology and economics are merging in a project that is speeding up the process of globalisation in increasingly borderless states, deregulated markets and shrinking welfare states. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the emergence of neo-reactionary politics in the form of Brexit, the election of President Donald Trump in the USA and in Irish politics the use of campaign tropes that celebrate the superior

10

Introduction

virtues of early risers as opposed to welfare recipients. Accelerationism evokes the Futurist movement launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) in his ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (La Figaro, 20 February 1909). By the 1930s the Futurist movement’s support for war and fascism had led to its decline and disappearance. But its legacy reminds us of the role of populist and social movements in forging the historical narrative. Other movements viewed the future in a diametrically opposed way to Marinetti seeking to shape the future progressively through harnessing the democratic forces of social democracy, feminism and civil rights for oppressed minorities. They have left behind a literature in the form of a social media derisively called the ‘midget press’, which I have sought to harness in my book. I particularly utilise the working-class press that flourished between 1880 and 1940 and have drawn upon the archival resources of the UCC Library in Cork. I also use the mainstream press, notably the Irish Times, which for many decades acted as a liberal voice, articulating the views of minorities and challenging the secretive Church-State alliance. In addition, I reference parliamentary debates (see http://beta.oireachtas.ie/). This book takes up President Higgins’s challenge by exploring the narrative of the residual Irish welfare state, the failed attempts to reform and reconstruct it, and the case for a ‘Second Republic’, based upon a more egalitarian and inclusive social policy direction. It will argue that the latter can best be achieved through the introduction of a universal welfare state that would bring vision and values to a faltering republican ideal.

11

ONE

Why the welfare state matters The concept of a welfare state has strong normative connotations. It is conceptually associated with a commitment to both democracy and social justice. Democracy – which encompasses human rights, citizen’s voice and participatory decision-making power, freedom of information, and many other factors – is a prerequisite to striving for and genuinely accepting social justice. It is also necessary to create the societal and political coalitions necessary to achieve at least acceptable levels of social justice, and at the practical level to finance and accept the institutions, policies, and patterns that enable a welfare state to function. Gabriele Kohler, 2014: 2 Gabriele Kohler’s description of the welfare state reminds us of the imperative of preserving our democratic heritage in a global era dominated by neoliberal market values and the pessimism of postmodernists about the possibilities of human progress. It may sound dramatic but some think that the very basis of our civilisation may be at stake in the defence of the welfare state. The renowned French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1998: 24), describes it as a fight ‘against the destruction of a civilization, associated with the existence of public services, the civilization of republican equality of rights, rights to education, to health, culture, research, art and, above all, work’. This is a powerful humanist endorsement of the purpose and ethos of the welfare state, one which defines it as a set of institutionalised provisions designed to meet the social and economic needs of citizens in a democratic society. Social policy is not simply another area of governance but also the framework for modern civilised social life. The ethos that has underpinned the welfare state is the modern expression of civic humanism in a secular world governed by democratic institutions. It is the link with our past in the classical civilisation but it is also our compass for the future, if we are to protect ourselves from another Dark Ages in which we begin to witness ‘the degradation of civic virtue’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 4).

13

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

Social justice is at the core of the ideal of the welfare state, which strategically seeks to redress poverty and income and wealth inequalities. The welfare state promotes nation building by creating the concept of a reciprocal society, supported by its citizens, thus enhancing social and political cohesion. It also enhances economic progress through an active state, supporting and regulating the market and simultaneously providing the necessary investment for social and economic development, infrastructure and strategic planning. The welfare state represents a set of socio-cultural values, based on the principles of redistribution and reciprocity, that reflect democratic struggle against the acquisitiveness of the self-regulating market. In that sense, the welfare state ideal is progressive, inclusive and democratic, addressing citizens’ needs for shelter, education, healthcare and a basic income. In this opening chapter, we will explore the ideal of the welfare state with particular reference to Ireland and why it matters to us as European citizens.

Origins of the welfare state Kohler’s description of the welfare state captures its humanistic essence and political location in social rights and democratic discourse. Europeans tend to view the welfare state as a European project, reflecting the continent’s Enlightenment values, especially during the post-war reconstruction period of 1945-75. It was a progressive and peaceful project constructed on the ashes of the destruction of the Second World War, the legacy of the Great Depression in the 1920s and 1930s, and the nihilism of fascism. It offered hope and social equality. In this European narrative the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815-98) is represented as the historical architect of the first welfare state. The origins of the welfare state (‘first wave’) came during the period 1880-1945, when pensions, social insurance, child protection and industrial regulatory legislation were introduced. In political reality, Bismarck was no idealist. He viewed the welfare state as a form of social pacification while he suppressed the trade union movement and social democrats. Bismarck was driven by the cause of national unity (his real political movement) and German economic development. Likewise US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (18821942), celebrated for his ‘New Deal’ welfare policies, was seeking to combat the effects of economic depression and restore national unity. In Britain, the Beveridge reforms after World War 2 were intended to unite the country and rebuild the nation. The British model of the welfare state became influential because of the international influence

14

Why the welfare state matters

of John Maynard Keynes (1833-1946), who put social policy at the core of economic development, the Keynesian welfare state. Keynesianism was built around three goals: to sustain full employment; to achieve greater distributional justice through progressive taxation; and to provide state funded social services for housing, health and education. It is important to acknowledge that Keynes was primarily driven by the goal of post-war economic recovery. His macro-economic strategy complemented the welfare state as a pact between capital and labour. While Europeans and North American progressives celebrated the welfare state as a symbol of the assumed superior capitalist development of the Northern hemisphere, welfare states have prospered in the Southern hemisphere since the early twentieth century (Midgley, 1997; Seekings, 2012; Wehr et al, 2012; and Kohler, 2014). Sandbrook et al (2007) argue Latin America produced welfare regimes as early as the 1910s, encompassing Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Costa Rica. Kohler (2014: 1) also notes the presence of a welfare state ethos in South Asia from the late 1940s and early 1950s in India, Nepal and Pakistan. This diversity of origins suggests that the welfare state was a global project of modernity and democratisation. UN global development initiatives from the 1950s put human rights, social development and poverty alleviation at the centre of its agenda. The ‘second wave’ of the welfare state in the form of the Keynesian welfare state (1945-75), reflected an ethos of social citizenship rights and the ‘decommodification’ of labour in the form of the recognition of economic rights (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Kohler (2014: 3) argues that ‘the specific composition of the welfare state in each country ultimately differs as a function of power politics’. She views the development of individual welfare state regimes as the product of negotiations, which may result from direct action by social movements and grassroots protest or as the product of parliamentary social reform or both. Welfare states can be progressive, reflecting bottom-up pressure from trade unions, women’s movements, poor people’s movements and faith-based civil society organisations. On the other hand, welfare states may reflect top-down elite agendas (pace Bismarck) concerned with nation building, economic development or social appeasement (Kohler, 2014: 3). There is also a third possibility, that development may occur without the alleviation of poverty or may even entail a worsening of poverty (Thomas, 2000: 3) in the form of a competition state that subordinates welfare to economic growth, market values and the process of production. Sweden elected a Social Democratic-led government in 1932 and built the world’s most advanced welfare state based upon universalist

15

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

principles, in which services were open to all without a means test. It was a collectivist response to the consequences of industrialisation and mass emigration. The Swedish welfare state became linked to the ideal of building a better society, grounded in the principles of social justice. Mass democracy introduced during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries made this ambition politically possible. The Nordic model is premised on a rights-based universal welfare state, in marked contrast to Ireland’s residual welfare state. Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), in his classic study The great transformation (2001), analysed the economic and social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in which ‘there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people’ (Polanyi, 2001: 35). Polanyi was writing about an earlier historical era but his analysis is equally applicable to the age of globalisation. His observations in reference to ‘the self-regulating market’ system go to the core of global capitalism: All types of societies are limited by economic factors. Nineteenth century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself on a motive only rarely acknowledged as valid in the history of human societies and certainly never before raised to the level of a justification of action and behaviour in everyday life, namely gain. (Polanyi, 2001: 31) At the core of Polanyi’s argument is a rejection of the view propagated by Adam Smith (1723-90) and other classical economists that the economic motive of personal financial gain is a normal human characteristic, which will prosper once external regulation is removed. Polanyi represents the emergence of personal financial gain as the driving force behind industrial capitalism, as historically unique and anti-social. It is, he contends, a paradigm shift in civilization. Ayn Rand (1905-82), in her 1957 novel Atlas shrugged, celebrates enlightened selfinterest in a dystopian plot, where the elite respond to the welfare state by striking and retreating into their own utopian free market world. In the 1987 movie Wall Street the anti-hero, Gordon Gekko, expresses a similar sentiment in his slogan, ‘Greed is good’. Polanyi (2001) views the economy as ‘embedded’ in society – part of social relations – rather than a separate sphere of activity. He argues that a pure free market society would be a utopian project and, therefore, impossible to achieve because citizens will resist being commodified,

16

Why the welfare state matters

that is being turned into objects (along with land and money) to be exploited for the purposes of ‘gain’ in the form of capitalist profit. Instead, Polanyi argues that there is a constant struggle within capitalist society, which he calls ‘the double movement’, between the push for self-regulating markets that seek to commodify labour as instruments of production and a push-back for social justice that constitutes the democratic origins of the welfare state. Polanyi (2001: 80) concludes that ‘a deep seated movement sprang into being to resist the pernicious effects of a market controlled economy. Society protected itself against the perils inherited in a self-regulatory market system – this was the comprehensive feature in the history of the age’. While Polanyi was writing in 1944 before the golden age of the welfare state (1945-75), his analysis has proven to be enduringly influential. Gøsta Esping Andersen in another monumental study, The three worlds of welfare capitalism (1990), builds on the architecture of Polanyi’s analysis. The task Esping-Andersen (1990: 1) sets himself is to study the welfare state as ‘a means to understand a novel phenomenon in the history of capitalist societies’. For Esping-Andersen (1990: 5) ‘the welfare state [is] a principal institution in the construction of post-war capitalism’. He adopts the term ‘welfare state regimes’ as the organising concept of his book ‘to denote the fact that in the relation between the state and economy a complex of legal and organizational features are systematically interwoven’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 2). Esping-Andersen (1990: 3) locates his study in the tradition of political economy, arguing that a welfare state is not simply the product of expenditures: ‘Equality has always been what welfare states were supposed to produce’, albeit he recognises that ‘the image of equality has always remained rather vague’. He acknowledges that he was inspired by Karl Polanyi’s theory of commodification: ‘We choose to view social rights in terms of their capacity for decommodification’, adding, ‘the outstanding criterion for social rights must be the degree to which they permit people to make their living standards independent of pure market forces. It is in this sense that social rights diminish citizen’s status as commodities’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 3). He (1990: 15) concludes: ‘Thus Polanyi sees social policy as one necessary precondition for the integration of the social economy’. In his study, Esping-Andersen (1990: 26-27) analyses 18 welfare state regimes, which he divides into three clusters: 1. Liberal (Anglo-Saxon) welfare states characterised by selectivity and residual social provision designed to promote the work ethic, in which rules of entitlement in the form of means tests are enforced

17

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

strictly and are often associated with social stigma, minimising decommodification. 2. Corporatist (European) welfare states, while relatively generous in terms of social expenditure are conservative in ethos, protecting class and status social divisions and upholding traditional values in the form of church, family and charity, informed by the principle of subsidiarity – thus relegating the state to ‘last resort’ and minimising decommodification. 3. Social democratic (Nordic) welfare states characterised by the principle of universalism (that is, benefits are available to all citizens as social rights on the basis of need) maximising decommodification. What is clear is that there is no set of features that exclusively defines the welfare state. To think so is to make a mistake. There is not a shared set of traits that are common to all welfare states. Different political cultures shape welfare formations in diverse ways that crucially shape decommodification. Social democracy emerges as the key to decommodification. Neoliberalism has sought to dismantle the welfare state as an unsustainable cost on markets and a limitation on human freedom (Murray, 1986; Mead, 1986). The recommodification of labour has followed in the form of deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and zero hours contracts. It has resulted in the rise of populist politics that threatens the post-war political consensus. Esping-Andersen’s tripartite framework provides an overarching view of the welfare experience of citizens within (as already noted) 18 diverse regimes. He views the welfare state as historically rooted in political economy debates and devolving on two core questions: ‘First, will the salience of class diminish with the extension of social citizenship? In other words, can the welfare state fundamentally transform capitalist society? Second, what are the causal forces behind welfare-state development’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 10). The relationship between welfare and citizenship is fundamental in the process of developing social rights. Latterly, Esping-Andersen (2002) has argued the case for a ‘new welfare state’, as a third wave transformation, commonly known as the ‘social investment welfare state’. This futuristic model of productivist social policy seeks to balance social citizenship and economic growth within a new logic of marketisation. It is highly evocative of East Asian productivist welfare capitalism (Holliday, 2000).

18

Why the welfare state matters

Welfare and citizenship Citizenship can be defined in T. H. Marshall’s classic formulation as consisting of ‘a three legged stool’. First, there are fundamental civil rights, such as freedom of speech, thought and religious toleration and the rule of law in its broadest sense (equality before the law, the due process of the justice system, the right to conclude contracts as equals). Second, there are basic political rights, including the right to vote, form political parties and contest elections – in essence, democratic pluralism. Third, there are basic social rights: ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to full the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards of the prevailing society’ (Marshall, 1950: 72). The development of social citizenship rights, according to Marshall’s thesis, is the product of democracy and class struggle between capital and labour incrementally promoting an increasingly egalitarian society for the majority. The erosion of traditional social inequalities due to the impact of the Keynesian welfare states in Europe and the USA between 1945 and 1975 served: first, to compress income differentials for the working population at both ends of the spectrum; second, to create an increasingly popular and universalistic culture; and third, to establish firm links between education and occupation, based on the meritocratic ideal. A universal status of social citizenship emerged in democratic pluralist societies encompassing the majority working population during this golden era of the welfare state. In this regard, Esping-Andersen (1990: 21), in the tradition of T. H. Marshall, shares the view that ‘Social citizenship constitutes the core idea of the Welfare State … But the concept of social citizenship also involves social stratification: one’s status as a citizen will compete with, or even replace, one’s class position’. Esping-Andersen is essentially endorsing the view that social rights led to a breaking down of social class inequalities based on labour market positions. According to his decommodification theory, when social rights are added to civil and political rights, society moves away from treating people as commodities or things to a consideration of their essential humanity. EspingAndersen (1990: 11) has thus reopened an old debate: the central question, not only for Marxist but for the entire contemporary debate on the Welfare State, is whether and under what condition, the class divisions and social inequalities produced by capitalism can be undone by parliamentary democracy. It is a debate about the social

19

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

division of welfare that goes beyond access to public services to embrace occupational and fiscal forms of welfare that disproportionally benefits the better-off.

The welfare state under pressure At the core of the contemporary debate about society is the relationship between welfare and citizenship. Much of this debate has devolved on a crude distinction between individualism and collectivism. The moral and emotional meanings attached to both terms have obscured as much as they have enlightened. Inherent in the debate about these social forms lies a deeper distinction about alternate conceptions of the self, the good life and human potential and purpose. Neoliberals, inspired by the classical liberals of the past such as Adam Smith (172390), David Ricardo (1772-1823) and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), have questioned the rationale of the welfare state from the outset. Their mission has been to hollow out the welfare state, as an institution they view as anathema to individual freedom and the market values of the capitalist system. Since 1989, the welfare state has come under particular pressure from free trade, globalisation and neoliberalism, which are threatening its ethos and foundations. The revival of the liberal political economy was led by the Austrian school, developed by Carl Menger and his students, Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Bohm Bawerk. Subsequent prominent members of the Austrian school were Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. They argued that there was no middle way between capitalism and socialism and rejected the democratic ideal of the welfare state. Social democrats have cooperated with neoliberals in restructuring the welfare state at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, undermining the post-war consensus. The political consequences have been serious, leading to the alienation of the working class from post-war consensus politics as the bedrock of modern democracy. It has given oxygen to the current popularity of populism, which is opposed to political and economic elites and, in some cases (depending on ideological orientation), driven by hostility to immigrants and minority ethnic communities. Populism has pushed social democracy into a deep crisis of identity and purpose as support amongst working-class voters evaporates. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA have been the most recent manifestation of the power of populist nationalism to deconstruct social democratic politics and the concept of ‘the social’ or public sphere on which its architecture precariously rests.

20

Why the welfare state matters

For neoliberals there is no civil society, only individual enterprise and self-reliance. Hayek has contended that ‘the social’ is merely ‘something which has developed as a practice of individual action in the course of social evolution’ (Hayek, 1976: 78). For Hayek, ‘the social’ was an abhorrent concept that conjured up images of totalitarianism. In his book, The mirage of social justice (1976), he equates the pursuit of equality with tyranny. Neoliberal social theorists have challenged the normative basis of social solidarity, which they view as creating a dependent underclass (Gilder, 1981; Murray, 1986; Mead, 1986; Marsland, 1995 and 1996). Marsland (1995: 4) has likened welfare to a ‘cancer in the body politic’ and added that ‘it has also spread its contagion through more and more organs of society’. He concluded that ‘only markets can provide effectively for the range and ambition of human wants and needs’ (Marsland, 1996: 140). Neoliberal politicians have taken the welfare state debate into the public arena. They have attacked social solidarity as the embodiment of collectivism. In their zealous efforts to destroy collectivism, they have sought to deny the existence of the ‘social’. In Margaret Thatcher’s famous aphorism, ‘there is no such thing as society’ (The Sunday Times, 9 November 1988). Thatcher went on to elaborate her ideas in a controversial speech to the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, in which she asserted that it was, above all, within the family that ‘the nursery of civic virtue’ lay. She contended that the family should be the basis on which governments ought to construct their policies for ‘welfare, education and care’ (Sunday Times, 9 November 1988 ). Neoliberals have, therefore, sought to write the obituary of ‘the social’ and looked backwards nostalgically to pre-modern visions of smaller units of social responsibility, notably family and the community. The denial of ‘the social’ is, consequently, not a denial of social responsibility. It simply means that the social rights of the entitled citizen of the welfare state are replaced by the social obligations of the dutiful citizen in a reconstituted order where the market replaces society as the arbiter of values. Nikolas Rose (2007: 156-97) has explored these developments in terms of ‘the end of the social’ (as originally suggested by the French post-modernist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) ) and concluded that the social sphere, as we have understood it for a century ‘is undergoing a mutation’, which in advanced liberal societies is creating ‘novel mentalities and strategies of government of the self and others, situated within new relations of obligation in the community’. Teeple (1995: 150-1) has characterised the much vaunted triumph of neoliberalism and the global market as the coming tyranny, observing that:

21

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

Capitalism must increasingly confront the world that it has made, the results of its own expansion; seriously degraded nature, an increasingly impoverished working class, growing political autocracy and declining legitimacy, and new forms of resistance … Here, largely unfettered by political considerations, is a tyranny unfolding – an economic regime of unaccountable rules, a totalitarianism not of the political but of the economic. Other commentators have taken a more optimistic view, detecting a new complexity in which a more democratic citizenship can emerge. Michael Walzer (1983) has suggested a break with the old normative idealism embodied in collectivist and universal notions of ‘the social’ and advocated new thinking around pluralist frameworks of complex equality that involves taking democratic rights beyond traditional conceptions of citizenship. Behind Walzer’s vision is the assumption that culture and society shape the nature of government. This is true to a degree. It is essential to the vision of the pivotal role of intermediate institutions as the generative force in society put forward by Alexis de Tocqueville (180559). However, an older tradition of thought, stretching from Aristotle to Montesquieu, suggests that fundamentally the State shapes society, not the other way round. If we accept this view, we are thinking not about society in the all-embracing sense envisaged by de Tocqueville, but about the Roman virtue of civitas, that is public spiritedness, sacrifice for the community and, of course, active citizenship. But what of reciprocity and redistribution as the foundational values of a civilised society? In reality, attitudes towards the welfare state have changed fundamentally in postmodern society, redefining citizenship in terms of duties and obligations rather than the Marshallian construct of social, civil and political rights. This redefinition of citizenship in terms of pre-democratic forms has been associated with the political reassertion of market values, leading to the marketisation of the welfare state. It reminds us of the Polanyian ‘double-movement’ between self-regulating markets economically constructing social relations and the democratic imperative of social justice. What critics of the welfare state have, however, successfully identified is a structural shift in postmodern society, which has brought the dirigiste model of social democracy into disfavour, because the public no longer perceives it to be self-evidently emancipatory in intent. As Keane (1988: 2), writing in a British context, puts it: ‘formerly

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Why the welfare state matters

recognised as the main procedure for limiting the abuse of authoritarian power, democracy becomes the ally of heteronomy, and democratic socialism becomes virtually synonymous with the bureaucratisation of existence with the domains of State and society’. What Keane (2009), is seeking to highlight is the challenge of democratising democracy. Democracy is, arguably, not static but dynamic. That is an existential challenge to the welfare state. How can it link citizenship as a form of entitlement to the imperative of a participative democracy, where citizens coproduce the welfare state? The welfare state ideal has traditionally rested upon universalist assumptions of redistributionist social policy, which supports the reciprocity that has created the basis for democratic politics. Multiculturalism has redefined the ‘social’ in new and diverse ways. It has fundamentally challenged the notion of class as the basis of social inequality. Consequently, in postmodern society the one-dimensional nature of traditional social politics has been challenged by identity politics with a complex or fragmented definition of equality based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and age discrimination that confronts universalism with particularism and links equality to culture. The politics of recognition is counterpoised to the politics of redistribution (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Consequently, distinctive feminist and anti-racist approaches to social policy analysis have emerged as part of the critical school of social policy. In Ireland, Mary Daly’s Women and poverty (1989) is a classic exposition of the feminist critique of the welfare state. Both the Irish Travellers’ movement and the Dublin-based Pave Point have developed a rich body of anti-racist social policy literature in Ireland. The disability movement and gay rights have also found a voice. The successful referendum on equal sex marriage in 2015 was the product of a struggle by gay activists for equality. These new departures in social policy analysis pose major challenges to discourse in a society which has traditionally screened out alternative perspectives (Fanning and Hess, 2015). The universalism of the welfare state is challenged by particularism arising out of the replacement of class-based social inequality by a plethora of social movements, all concerned with the recognition of their identity and attendant rights. The resulting welfare rights paradigm has challenged the paternalism of the welfare state and exposed its weaknesses and limitations. Nonetheless, despite the most pessimistic predictions, the welfare state has retained popular support in liberal democratic societies, confounding the logic of its critics in election after election. In the 2016 general election in Ireland, homelessness and health inequalities

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

were key issues. By discounting democracy as a force for social change, neoliberals have severely underestimated the importance of the welfare state. They ignore the fundamental relationship between democracy and state welfare. Before democracy there was no welfare state. The welfare state is the product of democratic pluralism and the embodiment of modern citizenship. Whatever its flaws, the welfare state remains at the centre of democratic debate, which ultimately rests on what kind of society citizens want.

The Irish welfare state: myth or reality? We need to discuss the question of Irish exceptionalism in conceptualising Ireland’s position within welfare state frameworks. Is it possible to talk about an Irish welfare state? Is it a myth? EspingAndersen locates the Irish welfare state within the liberal market model. This view is shared by some commentators (Bonoli, 2000; Payne and McCashin, 2005). Others take the view that Ireland fits into EspingAndersen’s corporatist model (McLaughlin, 2001). Latterly, a vision of the Irish welfare state as a ‘developmental welfare state’ has been associated with the concept of the ‘social investment state’ (NESC, 2005). More critical commentators have suggested that, in reality, ‘the developmental welfare state’ is a ‘competition state’ not a welfare state (Kirby, 2002, 2010; Dukelow, 2004; Kirby and Murphy, 2011). Colin Scott (2014) has argued that Ireland is constituted historically as a ‘regulatory state’ that has greatly expanded as Ireland has modernised. What is clear is that the Irish welfare state is ‘hybrid’ and ‘complex’ (NESC, 2005), constituting a mixed and fluid regime that does not easily fit into Esping-Andersen’s framework. What is also clear is that Ireland has followed its own unique path development in terms of the emergence of the Irish welfare state. Michelle Norris (2016), in her recent book Property, family and the Irish welfare state, argues that the Irish case is unique because it is a welfare system that exceptionally was not shaped by the interests of the urban working class but rural tenant farmers, who became the dominant group in terms of class mobilisation in post-independence Ireland. She concludes that Ireland’s path development during most of the twentieth century was shaped by rural interests (asset ownership) and conservative values, emphasising familism and Catholic social ideology ( Norris, 2016; 2660). This produced what she recalls ‘ a property-based welfare state’, which resembles East Asian welfare regimes in its most recent configuration. Ireland’s colonial legacy and English-speaking culture has undoubtedly played a significant role in the origins and development of the Irish

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Why the welfare state matters

welfare state in the direction of the Anglo-Saxon liberal market model. But, uniquely within this cultural constellation, Ireland is a Catholic society that was dominated during the first half of the twentieth century by a conservative corporatist ideology, despite the emancipatory dreams of the Irish Revolution (1913-23) for workers and women’s freedoms. From the 1960s, Ireland embarked on a bold new project of modernisation, secularisation and Europeanisation. This represented a rupture with the past, shifting Ireland’s developmental trajectory in the direction of ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ in an increasingly open society. Ian Holliday (2000: 7-9) promotes ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ as a fourth welfare state model to be distinguished from Esping-Andersen’s Eurocentric tripartite framework: ‘the two central aspects of the productivist world of welfare capitalism are a growth orientated state and the subordination of all aspects of state policy to economic/industrial objectives’. Holliday was addressing the emergence of East Asian welfare states as a product of the Tiger economies of that region. Yet Holliday’s analysis and conceptualisation bears a striking resemblance to the Celtic Tiger economy that emerged in late twentieth century Ireland – in which state-market relations were premised on the overriding objective of economic growth. Social policy was subordinated to economic policy. Social rights were linked to economically productive activity. In this world of ‘welfare productivism’, neo-corporatism (in the form of social partnerships) revived the legacy of Catholic corporatism but in a distinctly secular form that some regarded as Ireland’s ‘third way’ project (McLaughlin, 2001: 224) The humiliating collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy undermined social partnership and led to the introduction of neoliberal austerity policies, as Ireland pursued the economic remedies prescribed by the architects of the Irish ‘bailout’ – the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – colloquially referred to as ‘the troika’. Social policy analysts take different explanatory positions in analysing the emergence of specific welfare regimes. Some concentrate on particular features: culture, economic development, state-centric accounts, leading to narrower studies. Esping-Andersen (1990: 2) has advocated a broader approach in order to understand the ‘big picture’. One of the key problems in understanding Irish social policy has been the near absence of its theorisation, apart from historic references to Catholic social teaching and the dominant official paradigm of modernisation since the 1960s. Happily, this epistemological deficit is now beginning to be addressed.

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

Understanding Irish social policy The academic theorisation of Irish social policy has been a limited and ideologically constrained activity, which can historically be explained by a combination of three elements: intellectual pragmatism in Irish social science, the institutional dominance of the Catholic Church over welfare provision and civil society, based upon the myth of charity (Kirby, 2010: 131; O’Toole, 2010: 84-5), and the emergence of a nationalistic state committed to introspective isolationism. Professor Bryan Fanning et al (2004) sought to address that gap in Irish social policy literature by publishing an innovative book, Theorising Irish social policy. It was a significant initiative in a society where academic social sciences were regarded with ideological suspicion (Tovey and Share, 2003). The establishment of social science departments (sociology, social policy and social work) in Irish universities dates from the 1970s. However, Irish social science has an older provenance in statistical inquiry, promoted by statistical societies, which date from the foundation of the Dublin Statistical Society (it quickly morphed into the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society or SSIS) during the Great Famine (1845-51). Tovey and Share (2003: 26) observe ‘the early formation of the discourse of social inquiry in Ireland occurred in circumstances where it was deemed important not only to increase the rationality of the state but also to increase its control over society’. The SSIS soon established itself within the Free State after 1922 as a potent influence over the policy-making process and the new Irish state bureaucracy. Its advocacy of economic planning played a key role in the realisation of the Irish modernisation project that began in the 1960s. This ‘nationalist’ vision of the social sciences, as providing statistical data and answers to social questions, ultimately led to the foundation of the Economic and Social Research Institute in 1959, with financial assistance from the American Ford Foundation (Tovey and Share, 2003: 26-7). Other ‘think tanks’ were to follow later, including the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) and the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF). They were to dominate the Irish social policy landscape and link it to the national objective of economic growth. Bryan Fanning and Andreas Hess (2014: 27-48) identify two strands in Irish social science of ‘Catholic’ and ‘official’ that have a shared view of the purpose of social research as being located in the pragmatic ‘real world’ of social problems ‘rather than theoretical and conceptual development’. However, the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI), now known as Social Justice Ireland, has developed into a critical voice relentlessly exposing poverty and inequality in

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Why the welfare state matters

Ireland. This poverty campaigning approach has introduced a creative tension into social policy discourse over several decades that has forced successive governments to acknowledge poverty and social exclusion as ‘social problems’ in a deeply divided society. The establishment of the progressive think tank, TASC, has further added to the development of a more critical tradition within Irish social policy scholarship. TASC, in an influential pamphlet in its ‘Flourishing society’ series, advocated a vision for change based upon the integration of social, economic and political reforms (Pentony, 2010). Other important critical voices have emerged amongst activists within civil society. The establishment of the Community Platform, a coalition of 26 community and voluntary sector groups, has proven to be a significant critical voice. Its work has been complemented within civil society by the establishment of Is Feidir Linn (We Can) a network of individuals dedicated to promoting a more equal society. Trade unions have also played an active role in the mobilisation for equality since the foundation of the Irish State in 1922, and continue to play an important democratic role despite the constraints of social partnership during the Celtic Tiger years. Within the world of academic social science there has been a growing literature offering a critical perspective on social policy. Michael Peillon (2001), in an attempt to theorise Irish social policy, applied Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ (the physical embodiment of cultural capital in our life experience) to the welfare state. He critically analysed the Irish state as being heavily influenced by the interests of economic elites, using corporatism as a strategy to play powerful interests (business and trade unions) off against each other to the detriment of democratic society. The publication of Fanning et al’s Theorising Irish social policy (2004) provided a platform for scholars to develop a debate about Irish social policy grounded in social theory. In a trenchant contribution, Professor Peadar Kirby (2001: 23-41) surveyed Irish social policy from the optic of globalisation – Ireland having reputedly become one of the most globalised societies in the world, with all the vulnerabilities that entailed. He critically asserts: ‘Instead of social policy elucidating and addressing the complex dilemmas that flow from the resituation of the Irish state, most social policy discourse is complicit in the official obfuscation of the shift taking place and its implications for the welfare of vulnerable citizens’. He continues ‘Irish social policy documents are peppered with benign discourse about “social inclusion”, “poverty elimination” “equality” and “quality public services”, while apparently blind to the growth of relative poverty and income inequality, and the

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

widespread perception of crisis in key public services (especially health and social supports to the most vulnerable)’ (Kirby, 2001: 38). In 2009, a major breakthrough occurred in the development of Irish social policy analysis. Mairead Considine and Fiona Dukelow produced an encyclopaedic text book, Irish social policy: A critical introduction (Considine and Dukelow, 2009). It has become the staple reading of students within the Irish higher education sector. In a work of more than 500 pages, the sources, landscape and influences that shape Irish social policy are masterfully presented. Their book is a very important attempt to interpret the text (and subtext) of Irish social policy, a long overdue task in a democratic society. Its exceptional success as a publication is testament to the gaping void it has addressed in the conceptualisation of Irish social policy. Considine and Dukelow have freed Irish social policy discourse from the ideological constraints of ‘Catholic’ and ‘official’ versions. Michelle Norris (2016), as already referenced, has recently produced a seminal study of the location of the Irish ‘property-based welfare state’ in asset ownership rather than human need.

Justice, decency and social obligation The clash of ideologies between the rampant free market values of the right have challenged the social democratic values (redistribution and reciprocity) of the welfare state. It occludes a deeper problem. There is a crisis of legitimacy in the welfare state. It is partly due to the declining influence of radical humanist values, traceable to the Enlightenment, that have shaped it. Xenophobia is a major factor. But, more fundamentally, the decline of the welfare state is due to a resurgent self-regulating market in a globalised economy. Personal financial gain (epitomised by the Celtic Tiger economy) has arguably undermined justice, decency and fairness as the basis of a good society. Fintan O’Toole (2010: 133) observes: ‘The generation that followed the terrible instabilities of the Great Depression and the Second World War craved the comfort of security. The next generation, whether it liked it or not, was told to value risk, to kick away the certainties of the welfare state and embrace the thrills and spills of a dynamic everchanging world’. He adds, by way of an obituary comment on the Celtic Tiger and its collapse: ‘When the rich gambled and won, they kept the proceeds. When they gambled and lost, society as a whole had to take up the losses’ (Fintan O’Toole, 2010: 133.) Social obligation was a one way transaction.’

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Why the welfare state matters

Any welfare state reflects not merely the values of a democracy but the image it has of itself as a just and decent society. The welfare state is based on the ideal of social obligation, in which the entitled citizen has a right to have his or her needs met. Increasingly, this concept has been broadened into a set of rights or expectations that some commentators argue are no longer realisable, creating a pervasive sense of disillusionment with Government. The bailout of the Irish banks (at the behest of the EC/ECB/IMF ‘troika’) while the public experienced sharp reductions in pay, pensions and welfare benefits reinforced a sense of injustice and alienation from the process of governance. The vote in successive general elections for the dominant centre right parties, coupled with the Labour Party sharply declined (Fianna Fail in 2011) and (Fine Gael and Labour in 2016). O’Toole (2010: 195) concludes: ‘They originally served the Catholic Church and then transformed their loyalties to free-market capitalism – from God to Mammon with shameless hypocrisy’. In his bestselling book Enough is enough: How to build a new republic (2010), O’Toole advocates the rebuilding of postcrash Irish society on the basis of five ‘decencies’ that devolve on a reconstructed welfare state. He frankly acknowledges that the creation of a decent society in Ireland is challenged by the pervasive influence of neoliberal ideology in the public sphere: ‘Right-wing economics of the kind that has been dominant in Ireland makes much of human nature, which is always assumed to be essentially selfish and driven by a relentless desire to accumulate riches and power’. So what can be deduced from the various critiques of the welfare state? Has it failed? Should it be abolished? Is social obligation achieved only through charity? If one accepts the neoliberal critique, then civic virtue belongs exclusively to the realms of personal initiative and the welfare state has failed and should be abolished. However, right-wing critics of the welfare state do not argue that there is any obligation to help a stranger (Murray, 1986). Rather, welfare is a matter of personal prudence, moral sentiment and religious virtue, as opposed to social rights or obligation. On the other hand, if one accepts the view of a democratic welfare state based upon a social rights paradigm as the only basis for social justice, questions arise about the finite nature of resources and the need for a contractual basis for welfare, in which individual citizens also have social obligations towards the community and will, undoubtedly, be resisted by global and local capital. How does one resolve this ideological conflict? The New Zealandbased sociologist, Ian Culpitt, has suggested a reassertion of the ideal of social obligation as a way forward. He argues that ‘the current welfare rights paradigm has no theory of obligation and has only facilitated

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

the proliferation of need claims’ (Culpitt, 1992: 34). According to Culpitt (1992: 46), ‘what any defence of the Welfare State must argue is not for a renewal of the moral imperative for individuals to care but that it is the practical recognition of mutual vulnerability that leads to a sense of obligation’. He concludes that ‘personal and social obligations that respect individual vulnerabilities are not ultimately moral demands upon the arbitrary beneficence of individuals but social demands that recognise the legitimacy of such vulnerabilities’ (Culpitt, 1992: 47). New Zealand, which introduced the welfare state in the 1930s, has subsequently abolished it, leaving the poor to the vagaries of providence. Culpitt’s concept of social obligation is important because it eschews the individual obligation concepts favoured by neoliberals in favour of a more communitarian view of welfare based on reciprocity. It links justice to decency in defining social obligation. Furthermore, Culpitt’s concept of social obligation acknowledges a close interdependence between the individual and society. However, it does not insist that this relationship must be mediated entirely by the state. There is room for welfare pluralism in a society that is just, fair and decent.

Conclusion In the reconstructed reality of postmodern society, the challenge of social policy is to respond reflexively to changing needs and demands. The challenge to a universalist welfare state based on social obligation, common citizenship and human rights is manifest. If populism is to be the shape of things to come, where does that leave the welfare state? Is it possible to have a welfare state in a polarised and fragmented social order? This is the great social, political and intellectual challenge of postmodernity. The concept of social obligation based on shared vulnerabilities has been suggested as a basis for civic virtue in postmodern society. However, it is not unproblematic given the difficulties in maintaining civic trust in a deeply fragmented and polarised society, where the fate of the welfare state has become entangled with the forces of globalisation and its consequences. Ireland is in an existential crisis. Some of Ireland’s leading intellectuals, Fintan O’Toole (2010), Michael D. Higgins as well as Peadar Kirby and Mary Murphy (2011) have concluded that Ireland needs to reinvent itself, in the totemic form of a ‘New’ or ‘Second’ republic. In order to understand Irish republicanism and its social legacy we need to turn to consideration of the Irish Revolution (1913-23) at the point of its declaration of a ‘republic’ in 1916 and the wider context of that revolutionary text.

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TWO

Revolution, culture and society IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom ... In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of freedom, of its welfare and its exaltation amongst the nation. Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 1916 Philipp Blom (2008) has called the early twentieth century ‘the vertigo years’, reflecting the scale and velocity of social and cultural change. He observes in relation to the character of the period: … then as now rapid changes in technology, globalization, communications technologies, and changes in the social fabric dominated conversations and newspaper articles; then as now cultures of mass consumption stamped their mark on the time; then as now, the feeling of living in an accelerating world, of speeding into the unknown, was overwhelming. (Blom, 2008: 2) The social and cultural changes that Blom is describing reflect, as he recognises, deeper economic changes in a world that had been reshaped by industrialisation and globalisation. The world that was taking shape during the ‘vertigo years’ of the early twentieth century was dominated by reason in the form of science and technology and the revolutionary influence of modernism on art and literature. Change was in the air. New and revolutionary ideas and movements were bubbling to

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

the surface. There were 332 domestic newspapers and news-sheets circulating in Ireland, informing an increasingly politicised public about a myriad of topics. This information revolution, which fanned a ‘demotic politics’ of ‘satire and subversion’, has been dubbed the ‘mosquito press’ (Foster, 2014: 150). But, for others, the relationship between this new modernist vision of the world and traditional society was conflictual and very challenging. Some sought reassurance in the ‘cult of unreason’, like the cultural fundamentalists and moral traditionalists of today. Blom (2008: 403) concludes: As the society of unreason was hurtling into an uncertain future, rationality aroused suspicion and the feeling of vertigo … The result was a search for ancient certainties, for mystical truth, a fascination with the unconscious, a celebration of violence and spontaneous action and of war, an anxious manifestation of manliness and virile strength. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in his poem Ecce homo proclaimed: ‘Insatiable as a flame, I burn and consume myself ’. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 was the second time a republic had been declared only ‘to slip from national consciousness’ (O’Toole, 2012: 10). It was, according to this logic, not the founding act of a new state and society but the continuation of a historic nationalist struggle for political independence that had begun with the declaration of a ‘Republic’ by the Fenian Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1867. Charles Townshend (2014: 52) characterises the Irish Republic as ‘a kind of pious opinion’ that became ‘a slogan or battle cry rather than a concrete objective’. Nonetheless, as a political vision of Ireland’s future ‘the Republic’ proclaimed in 1916 won popular support outside the unionist heartlands in the 1918 general election and was duly endorsed by the Sinn Fein MPs in a separatist parliament in 1919. It quickly grew into a ‘counter-state’ (with its own courts, police and labour relations system), enforced by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Another declaration of a republic was made in 1949, which has been dismissed by Peter Beresford Ellis (1985) as a ‘dictionary republic’. What is striking about Ireland’s annunciations of ‘republics’ is their subsequent demise in the public memory as part of a narrative that Fintan O’ Toole (2012: 1) describes as ‘the adventure and misadventure of an idea’. What O’Toole means is that Ireland has lacked a coherent republican imaginary. The Fenian language of the 1916 Proclamation is very different to the Enlightenment values of a classical democracy (USA) or Rousseau’s

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‘republic of virtue’ (France), or even the ‘Black Jacobins’ who similarly struggled for freedom from imperial oppression in Haiti. Its authorial voice addresses the imagined Irish nation, traced back through the generations of tragic historic struggle that speaks to Ireland’s past rather than its future. It was different from modernist revolutions, based on the values of liberty, equality and solidarity, because it ushered into modern history a conservative revolution (Keogh, 2005: 1; Foster, 2014: 25). God is invoked at the outset. The Irish Republic is imagined in vintage Fenian style through nationalist, democratic and religious language. Virtue in the Irish Republic was to be a metaphysical concept with God at the apex of society. Even the sacrificial insurrection that accompanied the 1916 Proclamation as revolutionary theatre contained religious iconography – ‘the blood sacrifice’ evoking Christ’s sacrifice to redeem the world from damnation. There would be no rupturing cultural or social revolution in Ireland, such as impelled many modern republics towards building rational and secular societies in which religion was consigned to the private sphere. Separation between Church and State was not part of the Irish revolutionary agenda. The Catholic Church was able to retain its control over key social assets: schools, hospitals and charities. Catholic Ireland’s traditional culture and values would not be relegated to history by the Irish Republic. Its conservative world view rooted in medieval theocracy would inform the present and the future under the hierarchical tutelage of the Church. The absence of a secular vision for post-revolutionary Ireland guaranteed a counterrevolutionary outcome in which sectarianism (ensuring the partition of Ireland into two states) and conservative political and social ideas would prosper. The new Irish state would not become a modernising bureaucracy based on the principles of the welfare or social state as the embodiment of civic virtue, in the age of popular democracy. Instead of a top-down modernisation, independent Ireland would be forged out of a parochial religious nationalism that celebrated local community at the expense of a modern urban society. Despite the lofty rhetoric of the 1916 Proclamation ‘to cherish all the children of the nation equally’ (nationalist and unionist) it was the poor who paid the price in the form of post-revolutionary austerity (see Chapter 3). The poor were the first victims of the Irish revolution, a fate they shared with women and children in the post-revolutionary order. Social emancipation was not part of the revolutionary agenda of Sinn Fein, which was concerned with creating a separatist nation state. The leaders of the 1916 Rising were determined not to be written off as a revolutionary ‘rabble’ (Ferriter, 2015). Their cause was, in their

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

republican revolutionary imaginary, ethical as well as political. This gave their sacrificial insurrection a quasi-religious aura. Professor John A. Murphy (2015), in a searing textual analysis of the 1916 Proclamation, asserts ‘it is in so many ways a 19th century document with its emphasis on national sovereignty; its nationalist (and bogus) interpretation of Irish history: its invocation of the dead generations (the most fatuous and insolent of all tyrannies, according to Thomas Paine) and its echoes of Robert Emmet and James Lalor’. Robert Emmet (1778-1803) led an unsuccessful insurrection on the streets of Dublin in 1803. James Fintan Lalor (1807- 49) was a radical campaigner for tenants’ rights, who led an abortive insurrection in 1849. Both became heroes in nationalist revolutionary mythology. They are part of a procession of heroes that can be traced back to the beginnings of Irish history. The blood sacrifice turned the 1916 Rising into the iconic event of the Irish Revolution, which stretched over the early decades of the twentieth century. In secret courts martial, ninety participants in the insurrection, drawn from the Volunteers (nationalists) and Irish Citizen Army (socialists) were sentenced to death and several thousand imprisoned. Public anger towards the destruction of Dublin’s centre (179 buildings destroyed) and serious injury and loss of life (1,351 wounded or killed) turned to outrage as the executions began. The Guardian declared that the executions were ‘becoming an atrocity’ (Beresford Ellis, 1985: 229-31). This perception transformed public attitudes towards the 1916 Rising into popular support for the sacrifice and heroism of its leaders. Foster (2014: 257) observes: ‘the gesture of sacrificial insurrection had transformed reality’. Ireland was on an irreversible course towards independent nationhood, but much of the social radicalism that informed the political backdrop to the 1916 Rising was lost. The chapter critically assesses the representation of the Irish revolution and its social context. It will contrast the modernist influences of both the labour movement and the women’s movement with the growing ascendancy of nationalism in both its cultural and political forms. Ultimately, the political set the revolutionary agenda, producing a conservative state and society, shaped by capitalism (mainly based on land ownership), religion and nationalism (Lee, 1973; Eipper, 1986). However, other key events in the Irish Revolution point to a much more complex narrative. These include the 1913 Lockout of unionised workers in Dublin, the Limerick Soviet in 1919 and the organisation of the women’s movement in a variety of forms (including the emergence of Inghinde na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900,

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Revolution, culture and society

the Irish Women’s Franchise League in 1908, the Irish Women Workers’ Union in 1911, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation in 1911 and the women’s republican organisation, Cumann na mBan, in 1914). The Irish revolutionary narrative was undoubtedly a contested space, even if its memorialisation has largely focused on the 1916 Rising and the nationalist narrative. This chapter argues that there were competing narratives of the Irish Revolution that need to be fully acknowledged in its analysis and memorialisation.

Cultural nationalism: ‘the stirring of the bones’ Roy Foster has characterised the Celtic cultural revival as ‘the stirring of the bones’. His anthropological metaphor captures the mystical cultural connection with a lost past. Cultural nationalism became a vibrant force within Irish civil society through the trinity of the Celtic Literary Society, the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) (Foster, 1985: 446). The rediscovery of Ireland’s ‘sunken culture’ (dating back to 500 BCE) is associated with Standish O’Grady (18461928). O’Grady uncovered Ireland’s heroic past in the Tain, which: … told the tales of heroes against the background of kingly wars, as Homer had told his in the Odyssey, and the unknown narrator of the Nibelungenlied. As Greek and German tales had Ulysses and Siegfried for heroes, so the Irish had Cuchulain. He was the authentic heroic figure, god born with the hero light which plays about his head when danger threatens: cunning, devious, outrageously brave and a destroyer of his enemies, whether by the help of the gods or his own skill at war. (O’Connor, 1984: 25) Douglas Hyde (1860-1947), who went on to become Ireland’s first president, was cofounder of the Gaelic League, an organisation devoted to the promotion of the Irish language and cultural revival. Hyde (in a landmark 1892 lecture, ‘The necessity of deanglicising the Irish people’, which was viewed as a seminal statement of Irish cultural nationalism) rooted its discourse in anti-materialism (Foster, 1988: 448). In Hyde’s worldview, modernisation equated with Anglicisation. Joe Lee (1973: 138-9) observes in reference to Hyde ‘the whole infrastructure of modernization appalled him, and he assumed the Irish could not survive in the modernized world. They should therefore unlike every other European people, opt out from the modernization process’. The contrast between Hyde’s dreamy nationalism and the social reality of

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The political economy of the Irish welfare state

endemic poverty, urban slums and mass emigration was stark. Hyde was to be a major cultural influence on Patrick Pearse (1879-1916), who drafted and delivered the Proclamation of 1916, as Head of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. Cultural nationalism provided the Fenian revolutionary rhetoric of blood sacrifice with an intellectual context rooted in an aspiration to reclaim an imagined heroic past, through armed struggle. Townshend (2014: xvii) observes in relation to the politicisation of culture ‘as time passed the inherent separatism of the whole cultural nationalist project became clearer’. He concludes ‘Irishness was obviously not a negative quality, but much of the Irish-Ireland movement had framed it in terms of de-Anglicization that had Englishness as the negation of Irishness and vice versa’. Douglas Hyde was to leave an indelible mark on the process of cultural revival through his prose translations between 1890 and 1894, notably ‘Love songs of Connacht’, ‘Songs of Connacht’ and ‘Religious songs of Connacht’. The extraordinary literary works of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and John Millington Synge (1871-1909) were inspired by Hyde’s rediscovery of ancient Gaelic folklore, poetry and the suppressed Irish language itself, as the defining elements of a deep and rich culture that was to restore Irish identity (O’Connor, 1984: 26-32). While these architects of Ireland’s cultural revival were largely drawn from the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, they were to lay the foundations for Irish independent nationhood. They enabled Irish people to reclaim their identity as a distinctive people with a distinctive culture. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, attesting to the world the power and originality of Irish culture. Both Yeats and Gregory were instrumental in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, which was to play a pivotal role in Ireland’s cultural revival as its national theatre. Other great Irish literary figures rejected cultural nationalism and chose to live in exile in pursuit of a more cosmopolitan world. James Joyce (1882-1941), author of Ulysses (widely regarded as the greatest modernist novel of the twentieth century) moved to Paris – then the cultural centre of world. He was not in sympathy with the focus on the past and the cult of the hero, as portrayed in Irish cultural nationalism (O’Connor, 1984: 253). George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) also departed Dublin and made his reputation in London, as one of the great dramatists of his times. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award in 1938. He also joined the Fabian socialist movement in Britain. Shaw remained a committed Irish nationalist all his life, refusing British honours. However, apart from his play John Bull’s other island (1904), in which Irish mysticism triumphs over

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English pragmatism, Shaw’s relationship with the literary renaissance in Ireland was marginal. Another great Irish playwright, Sean O’Casey (1884-1964), also departed Ireland and moved to England. He had been Secretary of the (socialist) Irish Citizen Army but resigned in disgust at its growing links with the nationalist (armed) Volunteers and the (clandestine) Irish Republican Brotherhood. O’Casey’s plays cast a critical eye on the contradictions of the Irish revolution. Perhaps more than any other writer O’Casey brought a disenchanted working-class perspective to bear on it’s failures and hypocrisies.

Slum dramas and social realism Sean O’Casey has been described as a ‘slum dramatist’ (Pierse, 2011: 51). His commitment to the emancipation of the poor was the driving force behind his work. Michael Pierse (2011: 53) observes: ‘Like Brecht, O’Casey married references to wider social upheaval in his work with subjective stories to create a sense of his class’s real role in historical change. He often juxtaposed the reality of poverty in ordinary working-class homes with the hollowness of political rhetoric outside’. In his play The shadow of a gunman (1923), O’Casey celebrates the heroism of slum dwellers in Ireland’s revolutionary struggle for liberation. The plough and the stars (1926) is built around the lives of eight tenement dwellers. Their lives are overshadowed by Patrick Pearse’s lofty revolutionary rhetoric of sacrificial insurrection. It is portrayed in sharp contrast to the insurgents’ decision to shoot looters. Pierse (2011: 54) comments: ‘… the rebels’ decision to shoot looters conveys their paradoxical contempt for the nation of real people they propose to liberate and foreshadows a sham revolution, after which Dublin’s working-class will be treated as slum lice’. In his Juno and the paycock (1924), O’Casey derides ’the fake inheritance of Irish republicanism’ (Kiberd, 1996: 219). But O’Casey’s plays are not simply aimed at the hypocrisies of the revolutionary elite. O’Casey uses the transformative influence of his art to expose power (Murray, 2006: 155). Ulick O’ Connor (1984: 369) observes ‘O’Casey’s work was of world importance. He invested his characters of the slum world with the same sort of wild wit and imaginative derision that Synge had captured in his rural dramas’. O’Connor (1984: 369) notes that the influential London newspaper The Sunday Times described O’Casey’s plays ‘as amongst the greatest pieces of tragedy since Shakespeare’. Not everybody shared this enthusiasm for O’Casey’s depiction of working-class life in Dublin’s slums and his critical representation of the Irish Revolution as a political sham. The opening night of

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The plough and the stars at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in February 1926 produced an angry public reaction. There was a riot when the audience reacted to the portrayal of a prostitute on stage in a play set against the background of the sanctified 1916 Rising. Further anger was associated with the appearance of the national flag in a public house, resulting in serious disturbances on the fourth night of the play. O’Connor (1984: 370) states that when the character of the prostitute, Rosie Redmond, entered the scene in a public house after a political meeting there was pandemonium in the audience and cries of ‘Get her off the stage. It’s a disgrace in a Catholic country. There are no women like that in Dublin‘. From the stage, Yeats reprimanded the audience for ‘disgracing themselves again’ by their cultural intolerance. He was referring to previous riots in 1907 in protest against Synge’s Playboy of the western world, which some viewed as a caricature of the Irish peasantry ‘as licentious, foulmouthed, yet childish – a version, in fact of the stage-Irishman in British commercial theatre’ (Deane, 1991: 635). Ireland was becoming enveloped in a pious Catholicism that was to lock the fledgling Irish state and post-revolutionary society into a particularly puritan form of social conservatism for most of the twentieth century. Cultural denial was paralleled by attempts at social denial amongst nationalists, who viewed independence as the panacea for all of Ireland’s problems. But the social reality of Dublin’s slums was undeniable. George Bernard Shaw attributed his hatred of poverty, which endured throughout his lifetime, to his youthful experience of Dublin slum life. He graphically recalled, ‘I saw it and smelt and loathed it’ (quoted in Holroyd, 1988: 27). In 1913, a fellow Irish writer and social critic, George Russell in an ‘Open letter to the masters of Dublin’ accused them of allowing ‘the poor to be herded together so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as a pestilence’. Russell added caustically, ‘there are twenty thousand rooms in each of which live entire families, and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed and delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are born’ (The Irish Times, 7 October 1913). The Dublin Housing Inquiry (1914: 2), established after the Church Street tenement disaster in the previous year in which three adults and four children were killed, publicly exposed for the first time the extent of deprivation in the capital city. Its report revealed that, out of a total population of 304,802 residing in Dublin, 87,305 people or 25,822 families lived in the city’s 5,322 tenements –with 20,108 families each occupying only one room (Dublin Housing Inquiry,

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1914: 3). It concluded Dublin slums were significantly worse than any comparable British city. Living conditions in Dublin’s tenements were sub-human. There was no privacy or separation between the sexes or between adults and children. Squalor was endemic. The Dublin Housing Inquiry (1914: 5) remarked in this context: … having visited a large number of these houses in all parts of the city, we have no hesitation in saying that it is no uncommon thing to find halls and landings, yards and closets of the houses in filthy condition, and in nearly every case human excreta is to be found scattered about the yards and on the floors of the closets and in some cases even in the passages of the house itself. The report concluded ‘the evidence given before us at the Inquiry clearly shows that public opinion now recognises and demands that every working-class family should be provided with a self-contained dwelling of sufficient size to prevent over-crowding and which admits separation of the sexes’ (Dublin Housing Inquiry, 1914: 20). The outcome was a personal triumph for Sarah Harrison (1863-1941) champion of the poor and tenants’ rights, anti-corruption campaigner and Dublin’s first woman city councillor. She was strongly backed by Dublin Trades Council on behalf of the labour movement, which declared ’the facts so often made public and now confirmed by the Commissioners, reveal a state of affairs that no civilised community could tolerate, and one which urgently calls for immediate and drastic action’ (Irish Worker, 11 July 1914). Not everybody agreed. The Irish Independent (18 February 1914), which was owned by the Chairman of the Dublin Employer’s federation, William Martin Murphy, took a contrary view: ‘in the past provision of sanitary dwellings by private enterprise has been handicapped by competition with insanitary dwellings, which could be let at rents which could not pay for the provision of decent homes’. But there was no denying that the social conditions in the Dublin slums were indefensible. Children were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse in the overcrowded tenement housing conditions. Ferriter (2009: 79) notes that ‘many victims of what in 1908 became a crime of incest were subjected to rape over extended periods’. Other Irish cities contained similar slum housing conditions. The Irish Worker (29 July 1914)1 commented that two local government inspectors had reported on Waterford’s tenement housing stating that,

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‘it was not fit for human habitation and, consequently, should be closed’. In Limerick, the Medical Officer of Health is reported to have condemned 681 tenement houses in the city (Bottom Dog, 10 November 1917). The squalor of Limerick’s slums led to the establishment of the Limerick City Housing Committee by a group of tenants’ associations, labour societies and the Plot-holders’ Union of Limerick. This seething citizen unrest helped to foment the discontent which produced the Limerick Soviet in 1919 (discussed further in the section on ‘The labour movement, syndicalism and popular militancy’ later in this chapter). Citizens were prepared to resist the colonial state, but much of that resistance became harnessed to the republican cause by Sinn Fein.

Sinn Fein: ‘A movement of movements’ Cultural nationalism found its political embodiment in Sinn Fein, albeit located in a lower social stratum with a very different mentality and sense of ethnic identity to the aristocratic Anglo-Irish dreamers of the Celtic revival. Ferriter (2015: 81) observes that the ‘Sinn Fein revolution was dominated by young Catholic men who could be considered middle-class, but its leadership was non-agrarian and well educated’. Peter Beresford Ellis (1985: 176) has commented that the Sinn Fein ‘economic programme appealed to the petty bourgeois classes and reflected their ideas of an independent Ireland’. Sinn Fein, unlike the literary world of the cultural nationalists, was engaged in the more prosaic world of power politics. Its political objective was a separatist Irish state divorced from English rule. Its narrative was the single-minded pursuit of separation without the social revolution advocated by the labour movement (see more in the section on ‘The labour movement, syndicalism and popular militancy’ later in this chapter). Sinn Fein skilfully incorporated and then marginalised the labour movement in the struggle for national independence. This strategy ensured the classic European left-right division along class lines did not emerge in Ireland. Populism replaced socialism as the guiding force in Irish politics. This was the Sinn Fein legacy of social conservatism, in which the nation and the community merged into a localist state with a hollow centre. Townshend (2014: 19) describes Sinn Fein as a ‘movement of movements’. Foster (2015), in similar vein, observes in reference to the 1916 Rising and its aftermath ‘the radical collection of pressure groups that made up the Sinn Fein movement were also coalescing into something like a political party’. Founded in 1904 by Arthur Griffith (1871-1922) and Bulmer Hobson (1883-1969), its name broadly

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translates into English as ’ourselves’, encapsulating its objectives of cultural and economic independence. It was composed of disparate groups of nationalists, feminists and pacifists (Connolly, 1998: 513). Griffith advocated a dual monarchy in which Ireland would become an equal partner with Britain, in a manner similar to the AustroHungarian Empire, which was ruled by a single Habsburg monarch. In the UK general election of 1918, Sinn Fein won 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats at Westminster, adopting an abstentionist policy. However, the size of its victory was deceptive: it only received 47.5 per cent of the votes cast in Ireland. Nonetheless, Sinn Fein established a separatist Irish parliament in Dublin, known as Dáil Eireann on 21 January 1919 (Ferriter, 2005: 183-4). It unilaterally declared an independent Irish Republic. Townshend (2014: xiii) comments ’ten years earlier, such an event would seemed all but fantastic’. But what were the politics of the Irish Republic that the Dáil had voted into being in 1919? Fintan O’Toole calls it ‘the republic of Vague’. He argues that this vagueness is the product of the weak role of ideology in the political culture’ (O’Toole, 2012: 28). In reality, the Sinn Fein electoral victory in 1918 was not about republican ideology but popular resistance to the widely perceived injustices of British rule in Ireland, exemplified by the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Rising and the unsuccessful attempt to impose compulsory conscription in 1918 (see this book’s subsection on The Labour Party, Syndicalism and Popular Militancy). The public had an atavistic sense that they were living in a profoundly unjust political order. Separation and liberation became synonymous in the popular mind. Townshend (2014: 55) concludes: ‘the new separatist leaders did not see it as necessary to analyse the “self ” in self-determination, or to waste many words in defining the republic that would give it practical form’. Through ideological vagueness, it was possible for Sinn Fein to represent itself as a ‘movement of movements’. The mystical quality of the nationalist vision of the Sinn Fein movement located the Irish Republic in the ordinary lives of citizens living in local communities (Townshend, 2014: 23). The elusive quality of Sinn Fein republicanism left the rest up to the citizen’s personal political imaginary. What was lacking in republican texts was more than amply compensated for by the colonial context, which was by definition unjust, increasingly coercive and undemocratic. Benedict Anderson (1991: 6-7) has convincingly argued that a nation is an ‘imagined political community’ that is constructed or invented. The localism of Irish nationalist politics was suited to a predominantly rural society. It shaped the revolutionary narrative and its political legacy

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into a parochial form, which was profoundly socially conservative. The parochial equated with the parish, as an idealised organic community shielded from the world of urban industrial society. It reflected back to the Irish people their ideal of an organic communitarian society that rejected modernisation. Townshend (2014: 53) concludes, ‘the Irish historical experience does seem to have engineered a kind of exceptionalism in the ideological sphere’. He explains this purported ‘exceptionalism’ in terms of the centrality of religion within the revolutionary narrative, ‘republicanism was unambiguously, and almost assertively, Catholic in ethos’, adding ‘one authority has called the republicanism of 1916 expressly Catholic, another has observed the meaning of the Irish community was derived from its Catholicism’ (Townshend, 2014: 57). Quite so. Each community was a parish, presided over by a priest with a hegemonic eschatological grip on civil society. Paddy O’Carroll (2002: 14) has further developed this communitarian thesis, positing the ‘irrefragable ideological unity between the nation and the community, which was an obvious rhetorical device in the building of a nationalist state’. The composition of the Sinn Fein movement militated against political and social radicalism. Sinn Fein, despite its extraordinary political dynamism was (as already noted) conservative in its economic thinking, which shaped its vision of ‘the social question’. While the socialist leader and 1916 martyr, James Connolly (1956: 131) had declared, ‘as we have again and again pointed out the Irish question is a social question’, his vision was not shared by Sinn Fein. The founder and chief ideologue of Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffith, was unsympathetic to the socialist ‘spellbinders’ and their vision of a more egalitarian society. Sinn Fein rarely discussed social issues such as housing, public health, education and land division. They were also unenthusiastic about women’s suffrage (Townshend, 2014: 22). The social conservatism of the Irish Republic was to shape the revolutionary inheritance into a politically unique communitarian architecture, with the Catholic Church providing its anti-statist ideological vision. This was Sinn Fein’s revolutionary legacy. It was based on a denial of the social realities of early twentieth century Ireland, where endemic poverty, disease and death were the everyday experience of a large section of the population living in urban slums and rural starvation.

Poverty and people According to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1910: 245), the volume of ‘pauperism’ in Ireland (the destitute poor in receipt of

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state support) nearly doubled during the second half of the nineteenth century, rising from 51,642 in 1857 to 101,183 in 1907. In 1838, the Irish Poor Law Act established a penal workhouse system based on the principle of deterrence. Those who were in receipt of poor relief were called paupers – an excluded class of outcasts without rights. The Anatomy Act 1832 legalised the use of paupers’ bodies for medical dissection, in common with those of executed murderers. This struck terror into the poor, who feared that they would be denied salvation by God and suffer the punishment of the damned by being separated from their bodies for eternity (Richardson, 1988). During the Great Famine 1845-51, many chose starvation over the workhouse. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws 1910 estimated that, by 1907, some 2.2% of the total population were pauperised. The population had also fallen to 4,458,775, down from approximately 8,500,000 in 1845. Much of the increase in pauperism was due to a belated official acceptance of the need for outdoor relief; this accounted for 57% of all paupers in 1907, compared with 10% in 1857. The evidence from contemporary Poor Law statistics suggests that poverty (an endemic problem in Ireland) was on the increase. This view was shared by the working-class press. A commentator in the Harp (27 August 1909), which was edited by Labour leader James Connolly, observed in 1909, ‘thus in 30 years while the total population of the country was running down like the sand in a sand-glass, the pauper population was running up like a tidal wave’. The working-class press attributed the existence of poverty to social inequality, which it viewed as the hallmark of the class system. Drawing on personal observation, Connolly addressed an ‘Open letter to Dublin Castle’ in 1898 in the columns of the Freeman’s Journal and Workers Republic (13 August 1898), angrily declaring: … a population steadily dwindling, driven from the land by grasping landlordism and huddling together in the towns, either to be used as a means of keeping down the wages of those already there in the interest of the landlord’s twin brother, the capitalist exploiter of human flesh and blood, or crossing the ocean to some other land, there to swell the ranks of slavery; there to become the victims of the cursed system sought to be escaped from here … In similar vein, the Irish Worker (30 November 1912), edited by trade union leader James Larkin, declared:

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Poverty … Some see and deplore the presence of this grim monster, others see it, but being too cowardly to face the realities of life close their eyes and pass on, and there are others who in their selfishness are satisfied to know that poverty exists, because they recognise the fact that as long as one class are content to endure the cruelties of poverty, just so long can they themselves enjoy to the full the luxuries of abundant wealth. The evidence from contemporary Poor Law statistics suggests that poverty was once again endemic in Ireland. The powerful imagery employed by the working-class press, combined with trenchant analysis of the causation of poverty that firmly linked it to social inequality, brought this issue increasingly into the forum of public debate. The concern for the welfare of the poor voiced in the working-class press was shared by socially conscious members of the intelligentsia. For example, George Bernard Shaw observed in a letter written in 1917 to his fellow writer and Fabian socialist H. G. Wells, ‘we must reform society before we can reform ourselves … personal righteousness is impossible in an unrighteous environment’ (quoted in Holroyd, 1988, Vol 1, 27). This powerful Shavian rhetoric was supported by a variety of pioneering studies of poverty undertaken in the early twentieth century, which applied sociological methods in order to empirically verify the scale and extent of poverty. Charles Booth, with the assistance of future Fabian leader Beatrice Webb, opened the eyes of British society to the extent of poverty in a monumental social survey in London carried out between 1886 and 1902. It revealed that one third of Londoners were living in poverty (Booth, 1902). This seminal study had adopted a subsistence definition of poverty that was largely concerned with income sufficient to support the minimum requirements to sustain life. Quaker philanthropist Seebohm Rowntree produced a more complex approach to the measurement of subsistence poverty (Rowntree, 1901). He utilised the work of nutritionists to establish a basic diet and priced it in local shops in York. Rowntree distinguished between primary poverty, where there was an absolute insufficiency of income, and secondary poverty, where earnings were sufficient but had been spent on non-essentials. According to the Spartan criteria of need adduced by Rowntree, the minimum income for a family to survive was established in the Malthusian language of subsistence. That literally meant bare physical survival – no entertainment, no newspapers, no holidays. The first systematic survey of poverty of urban poverty in twentieth-century Ireland was undertaken by T. J. Stafford, Medical

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Commissioner for the Local Government Board, who submitted his findings to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws 1905-09. Stafford studied 1,254 families in Dublin, with an average of 4.12 persons per family or 4,950 people in total. He observed in relation to this sample that ‘that the particulars were obtained from representative families and may be taken as furnishing a typical picture of the conditions under which persons residing in a labouring-class district in Dublin live’, adding it was not his intention ‘to investigate the circumstances of the very poor’ (Stafford, 1910, 147). Stafford’s Dublin survey had important implications. First, over half the working-class population of Dublin lived below the poverty line. Second, child poverty was particularly prevalent. Third, while the lion’s share of the survey population’s income went on food, few of them had an adequate diet. Fourth, after food and rent had been deducted from the weekly budget there was virtually nothing left for other essentials, such as fuel, light and clothes. Finally, it must be recalled that Stafford (as he noted) did not set out to investigate the conditions of the very poor, whose circumstances defy imagination. The disturbing facts revealed in Stafford’s survey were given popular currency by the publication of a pamphlet in 1914, Poverty in Dublin by John B. Hughes, with the imprimatur of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. Hughes declared that nearly a quarter of the population of Dublin were living below the poverty line. Urban poverty was a national problem as was revealed by MacSweeney’s 1917 study of Cork. MacSweeney investigated 1,010 working-class families consisting of 5,058 people. He adopted Rowntree’s study of York as his model, employing similar criteria. MacSweeney’s conclusions were remarkably similar to Stafford’s findings in Dublin, indicating that half the working-class population were living in poverty (MacSweeney, 1917). Rural poverty was less systematically studied. But there can be little doubt that poverty was endemic in the Irish countryside. Thane (1982: 7) has noted in reference to late nineteenth-century social conditions, ‘much of rural Ireland remained desperately poor’. Stafford (1910: 246-7) referred to the ‘notorious poverty’ which prevailed in the west of Ireland, adding ‘for scantiness of means of subsistence the general condition of the inhabitants of County Mayo could scarcely be surpassed’. The rural poor were subject to the vagaries of both the economy and climate, which in a bad year could completely undermine their tenuous hold on a subsistence standard of living. Stafford (1913: 166) observed in relation to the scale of Irish poverty:

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a broad comparison between England and Ireland, in point of weekly agricultural wages and of gross income tax assessment, gross capital for death duty purposes, and railway traffic receipts, per head of the population seems to suggest the conclusion that the average resources of the population of Ireland do not amount to more than one-half the resources of the population of England. With poverty came disease, which frequently meant death. As the Irish Worker (11 November 1911) put it ‘poverty doubles the chance of death’. The main killer disease of the poor was the dreaded ‘white plague’, tuberculosis that thrived in conditions of economic deprivation and a damp climate. Stafford (1910: 245) noted in his investigation of 1,250 families in Dublin working-class districts that tuberculosis was present in 150 families, which accounted for 12 per cent of the survey population. Infant mortality statistics, which are a particularly sensitive indicator of social deprivation, were also disturbingly high in Dublin. In 1909, the infant mortality rate per 1,000 births in Dublin was 145, compared with 108 in London, 144 in Liverpool, 119 in Edinburgh and 133 in Glasgow (Newsholme, 1910: 60). Older children were also vulnerable to early mortality. Barrington (1987: 75) has estimated that ‘deaths per 100,000 among children aged 5 to 15 years in the period 1901-1910 were near 25% higher in Ireland than England’. Overall, it is fair to conclude that Ireland in the early twentieth century was a very poor country with an unhealthy population.

Rural exodus, unemployment and diaspora While poverty was the lot of a large proportion of the working class, unemployment reduced them to destitution. The compilation of unemployment statistics was in its infancy at this time. Consequently, it is difficult to reach precise estimates. However, there are a number of social and economic indicators, which help to understand what was happening. A rural exodus, sparked by an enforced economic transition following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, moved Ireland from a system of agricultural subsistence farming, based on customary agrarian use-rights, to a modernised system of consolidated land holdings based on capitalist principle of profit-making. The ‘period of transition’ gathered pace following the Great Famine 184551. This catastrophic development accelerated the displacement of the ‘cottier’ class of quarter-acre holders, which constituted the mass of the impoverished rural population.

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Some of the displaced rural population moved to Irish cities. Only Belfast with its growing industrial base was able to absorb this. The expanding population of Belfast, which had risen to 386,947 in 1911, made it the largest city in Ireland. Dublin, in contrast a trading rather than an industrial city, coped less successfully with the influx from rural areas. As the terminus of four railway lines, Dublin was a popular choice for migrants. By 1911, the population had grown over two decades to 304,802. Sarah Harrison put the unemployment rate in Dublin at 7,000 (Freeman’s Journal, 6 April 1909). But she also recorded that, in October 1911, 14,000 men had been refused unemployment benefit by the Dublin Distress Committee (Irish Worker, 9 March 1912). The reason for this discrepancy is that many labourers – in building, transport and on the docks – were employed on a casual/seasonal basis. Unsurprisingly, most of the displaced rural poor chose to emigrate. But those who remained congregated into the cities, changing the spatial location of poverty and the visibility of the poor as a class. The poor had become an urban tribe, open to being organised by the labour movement into militant resistance against an unequal social order. As many as 2.1 million people emigrated between 1845-55: 1.5 million to the USA; 340,000 to Canada; 200,000-300,000 to Britain and tens of thousands to the antipodes (Mac Éinri, 2012; 591). The Irish diaspora continued throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century, leaving an indelible mark on Ireland’s collective consciousness, folklore and economic development. Within Irish folk memory, the Great Famine stands out as a catastrophic event. Terry Eagleton (1995: 14) has observed: ‘Part of the horror of the Famine is its atavistic nature – the mind shattering fact that an event with all the premodern character of a medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness. This deathly origin then shattered space as well as time, unmasking the nation and scattering the Irish people and history across the globe’. Smyth (2012: 5) cites James Fintan Lalor, who depicted the Great Famine as essentially a negative revolution, involving ‘a deeper social disorganisation than the French revolution – a greater waste of life – wider loss of property – with more of the horrors and none of the hopes’. Arguably, a more valid comparison would be with the Industrial Revolution in England, which also involved a transition from an agricultural economy to an urban industrial capitalist society but which was negotiated over several centuries. In Ireland this fundamental economic transition was telescoped into a few decades, without any of the compensatory rights, such as a right to poor relief, that were offered in England to

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ease the loss of customary agrarian use-rights and the upheaval caused by displacement.

The labour movement, syndicalism and popular militancy After a slow and retarded development, a distinctive labour movement (ILPTUC) emerged in Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the formation of the Irish Trades Union Congress in 1894 and the foundation of the Labour Party in 1912. The establishment of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1909 brought a new and radical force into the Irish labour movement (Boyd, 1972: 73-8; Grant, 2012: 18-47). Under the dynamic leadership of James Connolly (1868-1916) and James Larkin (1874-1947) a militant socialist platform took shape, with an unambiguously Marxist analysis of Irish society and an unequivocal demand for social justice, articulated in the working-class press. The Harp (27 August 1909), a newspaper edited and published by James Connolly, asserted that ‘socialism in its most practical form is anti-pauperism’. The labour movement’s demand for social justice arose from several interconnected issues: • The extension of the political transformation of the previous century (epitomised by the introduction of universal male franchise) to the social domain, in the form of social rights; • The achievement of greater social equality through the redistribution of wealth; • The provision of social security by the state, in the form of social insurance against unemployment and ill health, pensions in old age, housing and health services; • Inauguration of equality of opportunity in education and the opening up of careers to all talents. The full nature of these demands was summarised by the Irish Labour Party in its draft election manifesto for the 1918 general election. This proclaimed that its aim was ‘to obtain for all adults … irrespective of sex, race or religious belief, equality of political and social rights and opportunities’ (Voice of Labour, 5 October 1918). The Irish Labour Party decided not to contest the 1918 general election, purportedly in order not to divide the vote between Sinn Fein and Labour as well as between workers in the north and the south, who had divided religious loyalties (Kostick, 2009: 43-7). But the decision may also have been shaped by the Irish labour movement’s syndicalist orientation (see more on

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this in the next paragraph). Its organisational strength was located in grassroots trade unionism. Whatever the explanation, this decision was to have momentous consequences, permanently marginalising labour as an electoral force in the new state. Diarmaid Ferriter (2015: 767), commenting on the labour movement’s revolutionary role, concludes that it was absorbed into the broader nationalist revolutionary narrative and its accompanying myths. David Convery (2013: 240) caustically observes ‘the working-class for the most part has been written out of history’. The cost of not participating in the watershed 1918 general election could not have been higher. The Irish Labour Party from its foundation faced a stiff political challenge from the dominance of electoral politics by Irish nationalists. Unsurprisingly, syndicalism – a revolutionary movement advocating the seizure of control of the economy and the government through direct action, such as a general strike – proved attractive to the Irish labour movement. Syndicalism as an organising political idea was very influential between 1900 and 1914 in many European societies, including France, Spain and Italy, as well as the USA. Emmet O’Connor (1988: 1) suggests ‘as an experiential ideology which celebrated spontaneity, syndicalism was less dependent on theoretical foundations than rival tendencies in the socialist movement … Syndicalism emerged from the re-application of socialist ideas to the demands of militant trade unionism’. The importance of syndicalism in the revolutionary ferment between 1913-23 cannot be overstated. Foster (1988: 443) comments ‘for a considerable time it appeared that the critical confrontation in early twentieth century Ireland would take place not between the British government and Irish nationalists, but between Irish capital and Irish labour’. In Connolly and Larkin the Irish labour movement produced two outstanding leaders, both of whom were strongly influenced by syndicalism. James Connolly’s career consisted of three overlapping themes: electoral politics, syndicalism and armed insurrection. James Larkin’s name became synonymous with syndicalism. James Connolly had originally been inspired to build a working-class party. He founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) in 1896, and advocated its principles in the Workers’ Republic. But the political failure of the ISRP led him to become disillusioned with Irish electoral politics. Essentially, the socially conservative Irish Parliamentary Party claimed to represent labour, even if it was at times hostile to workers’ interests (Foster, 1988: 443; Ferriter, 2015: 138). Connolly spent the years 1902-10 in exile in the USA, where he was a cofounder and organiser of the militant International Workers of the World (IWW),

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known as ‘the Wobblies’ (Levenson, 1977). This experience converted him to the syndicalist cause. Following his return to Ireland in 1910, Connolly became active in trade union organisation, replacing James Larkin as leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), after the failure of the 1913 Lockout. But he once again changed his political strategy. Connolly hung a banner across the front of Liberty Hall (ITGWU headquarters), which proclaimed the labour movement’s opposition to the First World War with the words ‘We neither serve King nor Kaiser but Ireland’. Through the columns of the Workers’ Republic, Connolly began to make the case for political cooperation with nationalists. This led him to join the 1916 Rising and commit the socialist Irish Citizen Army to its revolutionary cause (Grant, 2012). However, Connolly disagreed ‘with conspiratorial Fenianism, preferring to rally the people openly to a democratic revolution’ (Greaves, 1986: 368). Connolly advocated that the Irish revolution should be a people’s revolution, which would produce a ‘popular republic’ (Greaves, 1986: 384). His cooperation with the nationalists was consistent with the intellectual analysis he offered in his writings, in which he advocated such a political synthesis within the broader parameters of Marxist theory (Connolly, 1973). However, Connolly’s advocacy of a democratic revolution did not prevent the press from attributing responsibility for the 1916 Rising to him and Larkin and to syndicalism. The press represented the 1916 Rising as ‘a communistic disturbance’ (Greaves, 1986: 418; Lee, 1989: 33). In a perspicacious comment on Connolly’s role in the most iconic event in the Irish nationalist narrative, Emmett O’ Connor (1988: 18) observes: One can detect a tragic irony here. Connolly’s heroic stature had come from a sacrificial offering on the altar of national freedom: his death had juxtaposed, not fused, the national and social struggles. Labour ideology remained geared to Larkinite direct action. It never managed to embrace a vision of national as well as industrial liberation. James Larkin, who built the Irish Transport Workers Union under the syndicalist banner of ‘One big union’, became the charismatic leader of the 1913 Lockout (Larkin, 1965: 85-112). He was the quintessential agitator, as O’Connor (1988: 2) puts it, both in his style and methods. Larkin personified Irish syndicalism, which was called ‘Larkinism’. Myth and myth-making were integral to syndicalist ideology and action (O’ Connor, 1988: 7). The 1913 Lockout provided Larkin with the stage to become the mythical hero of the Irish trade union

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movement. This was Ireland’s syndicalist revolutionary moment and Larkin its messiah. Convery (2013: 1) describes the 1913 Lockout as a ‘titanic battle’, which witnessed ‘large scale rioting, brutal baton charges from the police, the imprisonment of hundreds of union activists, the importation of strike-breakers from Britain but also substantial donations and sympathetic strike action from British workers’. The strike dragged on through 1913 into 1914 imposing colossal hardship on the strikers and their families. Ultimately, it failed because Larkin’s ‘Fiery Cross’ campaign in Britain did not gain support for sympathetic strike action. Fearful of Larkin’s syndicalist philosophy, more pragmatically minded British trade union leaders were not prepared to give their support to the Dublin workers’ resistance. The failure of the 1913 Lockout was followed by Larkin’s decision to move to the USA, where he remained until 1923. O’Connor (1988: 8) concludes: In folk memory ‘Big Jim Larkin’, hero of stage, screen and song, is the lone-ranger who single-handedly made the Irish labour movement. To some of his critics he was a demagogue and a wrecker, whose only legacy was the myth of his own greatness. A sober assessment of Larkin’s impact on Irish labour takes us beyond the personality of the man to a consideration of the force of his ideas in action. Larkin’s greatest contribution to labour lay in building the foundations for syndicalism in Ireland. This he did partly through the creation of the ITGWU, but mainly through his style and method of activism. With Connolly dead and Larkin in exile, the labour movement (ILPTUC) was inevitably greatly weakened as a political force in Irish politics. While the ‘Democratic Programme 1919’ (drafted by Labour) (Dáil Debates, 1919, 21 January) adopted the more radical rhetoric of socialism, it was dropped as a political manifesto as soon as politically convenient by an increasingly conservative revolution. Connolly’s dream of a ‘socialist republic’ was suspended. But trade unionism was flourishing in terms of membership, under the much more pragmatic leadership of William O’ Brien (1881-1968) and Tom Johnson (1872-1963). The 1918 Irish Trades Union Congress annual meeting in Waterford was attended by 240 delegates, representing 253,000 members (Grant, 2012: 84). However, despite the pragmatism of the new generation of labour leaders, militancy continued to thrive at grassroots level. Cathal O’ Shannon (1890-1969) continued to provide a leftist voice against the conservative pragmatist mainstream

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within the ILPTUC, serving as its president between 1922-23, and intermittently editing working-class newspapers, such as Voice of Labour (1921-27) (White, 2009: 936). The conscription crisis in 1918 provided the labour movement with a new cause to rally around. Conscription for single males had been introduced in 1916 to provide additional troops for the British Army that was fighting in the First World War against Germany and the Axis powers. Ireland was exempted. But after significant military reverses in 1918, it was controversially decided to extend conscription to Ireland. The position of the labour movement in both Britain and Ireland had been anti-conscription since the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. Young working-class men were the prime targets for the conscription campaign. It made sense for the trade unions and the Labour Party to oppose this policy. Opposition in Ireland was widespread. Sinn Fein was vigorous in its opposition to conscription. The Catholic Church was also strongly opposed to conscription, unifying the population at grassroots community level. A general strike was called for 23 April 1918. It was a resounding success, outside the Unionist north east. The government backed down. The Voice of Labour (4 May 1918) triumphantly declared that the general strike ‘taught the workers of Ireland, and of Europe, we hope, that when they fold their arms and stand idly by the world is theirs for the taking’. For the syndicalist-minded trade union movement, this was a heady moment. Organised labour had demonstrated its collective strength and faced down the state. While circumstances following the 1918 Armistice put ‘the national question’ back at the centre of Irish politics, labour unrest grew. Although unrepresented in the Dáil, the labour movement continued its radical evolution (Grant, 2012: 92). Between 1917 and 1921 there were twenty-eight strikes, which involved over a thousand workers in each stoppage. By Irish standards, this amounted to largescale strike action (O’Connor, 1988: 27). At grassroots level, a militant labour movement engaged in occupations, local strikes and establishing ‘soviets’2 between 191723 (Kostick, 2009). There were over 100 Irish soviets (O’Drisceoil, 2014: 13). Emmett O’Connor (1988: 44) notes: ‘In most towns administration during the strike was assumed by trades councils, who restyled themselves soviets for the occasion’. The Guardian (20 April 1919) reported: The direction of affairs passed during the strike to these workers’ councils, which were formed not on a local but a class basis. In most places the police abdicated, and the

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maintenance of order was taken over by the local Worker’s Council … In fact it is no exaggeration to trace a flavour of proletarian dictatorship about some aspects of the strike. The first soviets occurred in Dublin amongst garment workers in 1918. In January 1919, political activist and writer, Peadar O’ Donnell (18931986) organised the occupation of Monaghan Psychiatric Hospital in a successful strike over wages and conditions of service, which included a 93-hour working week. The strikers occupied the hospital, with O’Donnell acting as ‘governor’, and raised the Red Flag on the roof, symbolising the political nature of the strike. (O’Connor, 1988: 51; O’Drisceoil, 2014: 13). In this militant climate, one event has left its mark on history – the Limerick Soviet 1919. Liam Cahill (1990), in his book Forgotten revolution: Limerick Soviet 1919, has brought this significant event back into public memory. A general strike was called in Limerick by the United Trades and Labour Council in protest against the proclamation of the city as a ‘special military area’ by the British Government, under the Defence of the Realm Act. The Irish Times (15 April 1919) referred to the strike committee as the local ‘soviet’, reflecting the wider European context of workers’ revolt. The Limerick Soviet attracted worldwide attention because there was a large international press corps in the city. They were covering another event, a pioneer flight across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west by Major C. P. Wood in an attempt to win a prize of £10,000, sponsored by the Daily Mail. Bad weather delayed the flight. As a result, the press in search of a story reported on the extraordinary events of the Limerick Soviet, which provided for colourful copy. For the leaders of the Limerick Soviet to succeed they faced the existential challenge of extending their syndicalist action to other cities in Ireland. That required the backing of the national union leadership. Despite supportive gestures, William O’Brien and Tom Johnson were not prepared to generalise the strike on a national basis, which would have been a declaration of revolution. Instead a return to work was negotiated. Cahill (1990: 146) in an assessment of the significance of the defeat of the Limerick Soviet states: ‘After labour’s capitulation over Limerick, the struggle for national independence was largely left to the farming and middle classes. Labour intervened, using the strike weapon only on occasions when it seemed Britain had overlooked the requirements of democracy and humanitarianism’. There were other notable soviets in Limerick during 1920, involving the occupation of thirteen Limerick creameries, owned by the Irish

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Condensed Milk Company. The central factory at Knocklong hoisted a Red Flag and a banner which proclaimed ‘We make butter not profits. Knocklong Creamery Soviet’. After nine days, the strikers were successful in their action. Their employer Sir Thomas Cleeve conceded their key demands: a 48-hour week, 14 days’ holiday and a fair wage. However, the Knocklong plant was insured and two months later the plant was burnt down by ‘uniformed men’, undoing the strikers’ victory (Kostick, 2009: 124). In Sligo the Arigna coalmine was occupied for two months and a soviet established (O’Connor, 1988: 51-2) But, on each occasion, the labour leadership followed the pattern they had set in Limerick and were careful to ensure the protests did not escalate into a major political challenge, either to Britain or the emergent republic, which had evolved into a ‘counter-state’ (Townshend, 2014). With Connolly dead and Larkin in exile in America, there was an absence of a national leadership with the vision and courage to lead a revolutionary labour movement (Convery, 2013: 36). Labour had placed itself outside the sphere of political action in favour of a more economistic approach to organisation. This strategy was to permanently shape its role in Irish politics and society. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to organise the unemployed to engage in social protest (Voice of Labour 22 August 1925). The most dramatic example of direct action occurred in January 1922. Writer and political activist, Liam O’Flaherty (1896-1984), was Chairman of the Council of the Unemployed, inspired by the Irish Communist Party and mainly composed of unemployed First World War veterans like O’Flaherty himself. He led a small communist revolt in the centre of Dublin, occupying the Rotunda for several days and hoisting a Red Flag on the roof. The Irish Communist Party (CPI), which grew out of the Socialist Party of Ireland, was founded in 1921. Its leader was Roddy Connolly, son of James Connolly. Membership initially rose to 100 but subsequently fell away to 30 or 40 due to purges and resignations. However, despite its size, the CPI had considerable public prominence as the Irish section of the Communist International or ‘Comintern’, the international organisation advocating world communism (Kostick, 2009: 188-9). Emmett O’Connor (1988: 153), in a critical assessment of the CPI, asserts: ‘Its roll call was studded with literati, red republicans, and agitators of minor repute but the party lacked a class base. The executive contained only one member who was nearly proletarian’. The CPI further marginalised itself through internal feuding and its uncritical and ideologically naive support for the divided republican movement, taking the anti-treaty side, which opposed the partition

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of Ireland enshrined in the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921. This left the Irish soviets without a political party to champion their cause. Only 23 members turned up at the First Congress of the CPI in January 1921 (Kostick, 2009: 191). Against the recent background of war and revolution, this dismal turnout suggested a bleak future for the CPI. When James Larkin returned from the USA in 1923, he established the Irish Workers League (IWL), as a replacement for the CPI. The IWL was recognised by Comintern and the CPI dissolved (O’Drisceoil, 2014: 38). There was also unrest amongst the rural population. Kostick (2009: 124) notes popular rural struggles were creating a climate of revolutionary change much deeper than that encouraged by Sinn Fein. He states that, ‘it was rural Ireland that witnessed some of the most intense examples of class struggle in the period, with labourers forming red armies, taking over landlords’ estates and coming into conflict with white guards of farmers’ (Kostick, 2009: 221). However, there were forces constraining this rural revolt. Donal O’Drisceoil (2014: 19) comments in relation to the suppression of rural radicalism: … the conservative dynamic of Sinn Fein, and its wish to suppress class antagonism in the name of ‘the nation’ was revealed as its courts were used against landless labourers and small-holders, who had been involved in land seizures and cattle drives. In the majority of cases the courts came down in favour of landlords and property-owners and in general supported the socio-economic status quo, while the IRA was used as a police force to enforce the courts’ decisions.

The Democratic Programme 1919 The possibility of a social revolution was remote from the beginning. James Connolly had observed in 1899 that ‘the subject of Ireland which is represented to-day as a mere political question is instead an economic and social question’ (Workers’ Republic, 2 September 1899). Given Connolly’s leadership role in the Irish Revolution, it was ironic that the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 had made no reference to the basic tenets of Marxist ideology. There were not even mildly reformist demands for better living conditions for the labouring poor in Ireland. It only offered the vague aspiration to the ‘ownership of Ireland’ being vested in the people. Levenson (1977: 300) has caustically observed in reference to this revolutionary manifesto

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that, ‘the municipal socialism advocated by the Fabians was radical by comparison’. The Democratic Programme 1919 attempted to make up for this ideological deficiency. This document was originally drafted by Thomas Johnson. Following Larkin’s departure for the USA and Connolly’s execution, he shared the leadership of the labour movement with William O’Brien. The nationalist politician Sean T. O’Kelly redrafted Johnson’s document, removing some of its more Marxist content at the instigation of Michael Collins and the IRB (Greaves, 1971: 170). Nonetheless, the Democratic Programme 1919 became the most radical statement of national objectives ever passed by the Dáil. It boldly declared: ‘in return for willing service, we, in the name of the Republic, declare the right of every citizen to an adequate share of the produce of the nation’s labour’ (Dáil Debates, 21 January 1919). This statement paraphrased the Marxist radical egalitarian dictum ’from each according to his ability to each according to his need’, albeit in significantly modified language. The Democratic Programme committed the Irish nation to: ‘abolishing the present odious, degrading and foreign poor law system’. It promised to ’safeguard the health of the people and ensure the physical as well as the moral well-being of the nation’. Children were singled out for special attention: It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food or clothing or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as citizens of a free and Gaelic Ireland. The Democratic Programme 1919 was designed to attract the support of the working class so that it would get behind the revolution. As the Workers’ Republic (18 November 1922) put it: ‘it was to meet those somewhat vague and almost inarticulate demands of Irish workers and to enlist the sympathies of workers of other countries who felt the same universal class aspirations, that the Democratic Programme was formulated’. The commitment of nationalist politicians to the objectives of the Democratic Programme was from the outset equivocal. De Valera, who had taken on the mantle of revolutionary leader, told the Dáil that, ‘it was clear that the Democratic Programme, as adopted by the Dáil, contemplated a situation somewhat different from that in which they found themselves’, adding, ‘he never made any promise to

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Labour because, while the enemy was within the gates, the immediate question was to get possession of their country’ (Dáil Debates, 11 April 1919). The Sinn Fein leader, Arthur Griffith believed the Irish Revolution had gone as far as it should go (Greaves, 1971: 192). An amendment attempting to embody part of the Democratic Programme in the 1922 Constitution was rejected by the Irish government. The Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O’Higgins, declared; ‘it would certainly be unwise … at the embarking of a new State, where you must depend on the good will and hard work of all sections to make a success of the State, to embody in the Constitution what certainly looks like Communistic doctrine’ (Dáil Debates, 25 September, 1922). The Workers’ Republic (18 November 1922) wryly observed that the Democratic Programme, passed by the Dáil in 1919, had served its purpose by 1922 and was ‘being cast aside’. In similar vein, the Voice of Labour (21 July 1923) bitterly commented that the Democratic Programme had been: … forgotten by the majority of this present Dáil, and it will be interesting to see how many deputies, who in 1918 were loud in their promises to workers when the work had to be done have decided to break their pledges and cast aside their obligations when they believe that work has been done, and that Irish labour can with impunity be flung out into the wilderness. The Democratic Programme and the aspiration it represented to build a more egalitarian society was not in tune with the thinking of the new nationalist state. The women’s movement also experienced marginalisation and repression once independence had been secured.

Women, new identities and changing gender relations Philipp Blom (2008) observes in relation to a fundamental change in gender relations that was taking place in the early twentieth century: ‘For the first time in European history women were being educated en masse, earning their own money, demanding the vote, and, crucially suggesting that in an industrial age physical strength and martial virtues were becoming useless’. He argues men’s response was profoundly negative: Men reacted with aggressive restatement of the old values; never before had so many uniforms been seen on the street

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or so many duels fought, never before had there been so many classified advertisements for treatments allegedly curing male maladies and weak nerves; and never before had so many men complained of exhaustion and nervousness, and found themselves admitted to sanatoriums and even mental hospitals. (Blom, 2008: 2) Senia Paseta (2013: 17) remarks ‘Irish women experienced something of a political awakening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. The rise of the women’s movement was part of the political ferment, which gave impetus to demands for social justice and new gender identities. Feminists not only campaigned for women’s right to vote, they also brought a wider vision of equality to bear on the political debate. Margaret Ward (1995: 1) comments favourably on ‘women’s contribution to the struggle for national independence and their never-ceasing attempts to gain acceptance as political equals’. She also observed that the historical dynamic of women’s political engagement has been mobilisation in times of crisis, followed by exclusion from positions of influence once the crisis had passed. Louise Ryan (2006: 52) observes that ‘the relationship between the suffrage and nationalist movements was fraught with tensions’. Women’s concerns encompassed pacifism, nationalism, trade unionism, child welfare, education campaigns and temperance. They were often involved in several causes at the same time (Ryan, 2006: 53). Women activists also belonged to a wide variety of organisations with diverse objectives, notably the Irish Women’s Franchise League, the Irish Women Workers’ Union and The Women’s National Health Association. Feminists shared a common view with socialists of the need for a fundamental reimagining of society, if inequality and social deprivation were to be effectively tackled. There was a joint commitment to social justice on issues such as free school meals. Some feminists were also active socialists and trade unionists, such as Delia Larkin, who founded the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU). Women’s health was another common area of concern. James Connolly observed in relation to working-class women ‘overworked, underpaid, and scantily nourished because underpaid, she falls easy prey to all diseases that infect the badly constructed warrens of the poor’ (quoted in Levenson, 1977: 214). Women like Sarah Harrison made a large contribution to reenergising society and progressive politics, as we have already noted. Harrison, a committed suffragist, was instrumental in carving out a new political identity for women in Irish politics. She was described by Dublin Trades

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Council as ‘the noblest, bravest and most accomplished woman in Ireland’ (Irish Worker, 7 December, 1912). In 1905, Harrison established a labour yard in Dublin to provide work for the unemployed. This achievement almost certainly makes her the doyenne of Irish social work. A talented artist trained at the Slade School of Art in London, Harrison fought for cultural rights for ordinary working people. She championed the case for a municipal art gallery in Dublin and the location of the important Hugh Lane collection within it. Now called the Hugh Lane Gallery, it includes in its art collection some of her own portrait paintings, alongside Renoir and other great modern artists. Her portrait of labour leader, Tom Johnson, hangs in the Irish parliament. Other outstanding Irish women also made substantial contributions to promoting the interest of the poor and the marginalised. Ada English (1875-1944) combined a career in politics with her role as a reforming psychiatrist. Kathleen Lynn (1874-1955) was a pioneering paediatrician and chief medical officer to the Irish Citizen Army. She was also an active suffragist and member of the labour movement and was elected vice president of the IWWU. Successive leaders of the IWWU – including Delia Larkin (1878-1949), Marie Johnson (1874-1974), Louie Bennett (1870-1956) and Helena Molony (1883-1967) – sought to unionise women workers against great odds: many were employed in roles, such as domestic service, which did not lend themselves easily to unionisation. Yet the IWWU grew to 5,000 members, representing a quarter of all unionised women (Clarke and White, 2009: 561-2). Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1877-1946) cofounded the Irish Women’s Franchise League in 1908 and became its first secretary. Suffragists were, according to Louise Ryan (2006: 54), ‘engaged in the process of creating radical ideas and aspirations’. However, Irish suffragists were less militant than their British counterparts, and encompassed both unionists and nationalists in their ranks. Louie Bennett, founder of the rival Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, observed: ‘Probably no country has suffered more severely than Ireland as victim of purely masculine ideals’. At its height the suffrage movement claimed 3,000 members, most of whom defined themselves as feminists (Ryan, 2006: 48-9). Despite strong pacifist and socialist views, Sheehy Skeffington joined the republican movement and became its director of organisation. The nationalist view of the world attracted many woman activists. Key feminists thinkers and propagandists, such as the editors of Shan van Vocht (‘poor old woman’), Alice Milligan (1866-1953) and Anna Johnson(1866-1902) fell under the spell of mystical nationalism.

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Similarly, actor and campaigner Maud Gonne MacBride (18661953) endorsed this idealised nationalist perspective. She founded the radical Inghinide na hEireann (‘daughters of Ireland) in 1900 (members had to be ethnically Irish). Maud Gonne MacBride was committed to complete independence and was virulently anti-English. In 1908 Inghinide na hEireann launched Bean na hEireann (‘women of Ireland’), the country’s first feminist newspaper. Inghinide na hEireann is important because it brought women into the struggle for national independence. But, as the struggle moved in a more militaristic direction during the second decade of the twentieth century, women became marginalised (Powell et al, 2012: 84-7). Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) was one of the most flamboyant figures of the Irish revolution. She was the first woman to be elected to the Westminster parliament in London, on a Sinn Fein platform in 1918. In keeping with Sinn Fein’s abstentionist policy, Markievicz refused to take her seat. Popularly known as the ‘rebel countess’ following her marriage to an eastern European aristocrat, Markievicz was the only woman to hold a senior military rank during the 1916 Rising, as an officer in the socialist Irish Citizen Army, which recognised gender equality. She was sentenced to death for her role; this was commuted on the basis of her gender. Markievicz went on to become Ireland’s first Minister for Labour. Her contribution to the Irish Revolution is also associated with the foundation of Cumann na mBan the women’s wing of the nationalist movement. She opposed the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, consigning herself to the life of a political fugitive. She was elected again to the Dáil in 1927 but died later in the year, worn out by the revolutionary struggle (Paseta, 2009: 361-3). Markievicz is the iconic female figure from the Irish Revolution, often depicted in her Cumann na mBan uniform, emphasising her heroic role in the conflict. Her outstanding revolutionary contribution is the singular achievement of a remarkable woman in a deeply patriarchal society. Many other women, such as Helena Molony, played vital and courageous roles in the 1916 Rising but normally in an ancillary capacity, which the nationalists insisted upon. Senia Paseta (2013: 6) argues that both Inghinide na hEireann and Cumann na mBan, empowered women: ‘to engage in forms of political activism which had previously been almost unthinkable to them: flagburning, anti-recruitment, street-protesting, gun-running and armed revolt to name but a few’. In a more general comment on the social and political impact of first-wave feminism in Ireland, Louise Ryan (2006: 43) asserts:

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I suggest that the suffragists were engaged in a process of creating radical ideas and aspirations, challenging the male-dominated status quo, and developing new feminist identities, initially in small safe spaces but later circulating these through their alternative press, public meetings and by chalking pavements, making public speeches etc., noisily and forcefully occupying public spaces and on occasion damaging public property. Paseta concludes that feminists’ demands for gender equality is reflected in the 1916 Proclamation, which is addressed to ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ and its promise of votes for all citizens in the new republican order. However, the traditionalist tone of the document is severely at odds with women’s emancipation. The women’s movement was an important influence in promoting the democratisation of the Irish Revolution. Some women, like Sarah Harrison, campaigned for social justice and gender equality. They found common cause with the labour movement. The leaders of the Irish women workers’ movement promoted solidarity amongst women in the struggle for social and economic rights. Once again, they cooperated with socialists, such as James Connolly, in seeking to promote a social change based on equality. But, as many feminists recognised, the Irish Revolution was suffused by masculinity and militarism. This was not an easy world for women to find a role in and articulate an alternative feminist view of revolutionary transformation. Like the labour movement, women were ultimately marginalised by the political juggernaut of revolutionary nationalism. Many women joined Sinn Fein and actively contributed to the independence struggle. Countess Markievicz personifies women’s commitment to the struggle for independence, in which she played such a major role. But there was an overall lack of both unity and purpose that divided women in significant ways. Unfortunately, this diversity of forms of revolutionary participation undermined the impact and coherence of women’s political participation in the Irish Revolution and its aftermath, even if there were tangible outcomes, such as the winning of the right to vote in the new state.

Popular culture, youth mobilisation and national identity Cultural nationalism emerged as a vibrant force in popular culture, including sport and music. Nationalists sought to popularise Irish sports as a distinctive formative cultural experience for young people. The

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establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884 led to the construction of ‘a powerful rural network’ of clubs in local parishes across Ireland (Foster, 1988: 447). Gaelic games became synonymous with national identity and the cult of masculinity. Keogh (2005: 34) observes that the GAA emerged as the strongest sporting and cultural organisation in the country. Its agenda sought to wean young people away from playing ‘garrison games’ (including soccer, rugby, cricket and tennis), which were part of the Edwardian cultural preoccupation with sport. The GAA banned its membership from participation and attendance at ‘foreign’ games, a policy which lasted until 2005, when Rule 42 was finally amended. It zealously pursued this exclusionary policy against transgressors, including removing as patron the head of state, President Douglas Hyde, in 1938 (Maume, 2009: 883). Members of the British army and the Royal Irish Constabulary (police) were banned from joining the GAA, emphasising the organisation’s ‘avowedly nationalist character’ (Bartlett, 2010: 350). The Gaelic Athletic Association can be viewed as part of the growth of mass spectator sports during the late nineteenth century in Western society. But, arguably the GAA was more than just another sporting organisation. Bartlett (2010: 351) states in relation to the politicisation of the GAA ‘from the beginning it was more or less under Fenian control’. The relationship between the GAA and the nationalist struggle for independence became intertwined on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (21 November 21 1920). In response to the killing by the IRA of thirteen people (some, though not all, intelligence agents), British auxiliaries entered Croke Park (the national GAA stadium in Dublin) and shot twelve people in reprisal. Ferriter (2015: 206) has concluded that Bloody Sunday ‘cemented the GAA’s relationship with Irish republicanism’. He further comments that many GAA clubs were named after dead republican martyrs and the organisation engaged in fundraising, including games being played at Croke Park to commemorate Bloody Sunday (Ferriter, 2015: 206). While the GAA represented the intersection between politics and sport during the revolutionary struggle for independence, it also became a powerful national social organisation. Joe Lee (1988: 80-1) comments on the deeper sociological contribution that the GAA made to the formation of a national identity: ‘The success of the Gaelic Athletic Association, based on the co-option of intense local loyalties into a wider national identity, reflected a capacity for organization and a sense of communal coherence … the prevailing political culture proved able to relate local loyalties to the national issue’. Undoubtedly, the GAA was a vital catalytic cultural and social force in shaping a sense

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of national identity. By 1932, there were 1,700 GAA clubs in Ireland (Keogh, 2005: 35). The GAA was at the core of the localist culture that was to shape post-revolutionary Ireland. Its social power and cultural influence were only rivalled by the Catholic Church. Youth became a primary focus for political activists seeking to create a new sense of national identity. Ironically, they were heavily influenced by imperialist models, such as Baden Powell’s Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides and the Boy’s Brigade, in their organisational approach. The development of a youth movement in the UK was reflected in other European countries, such as the German Wandervogel. Young people in modern civil society were increasingly regarded as an ‘urban tribe’ that needed to be integrated into the political culture, so that they would make good citizens (Blom, 2008: 328-9). We have already noted the role of Inghinidhe na hEireann, which flourished between 1900-10. It sought to emphasise education and cultural activities. However, there were also classes in Irish, history, singing and drill. In addition there were political activities, such as opposition to conscription and pledges not to join the crown forces. Fianna Eireann, founded in 1909 by Countess Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson, became the nationalist version of the Boy Scouts, providing uniforms, training in scouting and military activity in conjunction with the study of Irish history and the Irish language. The evocation of the mythical Fianna warriors from Ireland’s heroic past spoke to the organisation’s purpose and ideology, which was more openly political and militaristic than Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and other uniformed organisations within the United Kingdom. In the momentous years of ‘armed struggle’ that followed the foundation of the Fianna, many of its members went on to play significant roles in the Irish Revolution. The Fianna came under the control of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which viewed its members as particularly suitable recruits to their revolutionary nationalist cause. In this context Countess Markievicz, while remaining president of Fianna Eireann, was marginalised by the IRB leadership (Powell et al, 2012: 87-92). The final strand in the linkage between nationalism and popular culture is music and dance. While youth were emerging as an ‘urban tribe’, collective forms of popular entertainment were limited because the great technological developments in mass communication (radio, television and the internet) were not yet developed. In any case, cultural nationalists did not approve of the modern mass culture that was transforming life in the city into new genres and styles. They preferred more traditional musical forms that emphasised the uniqueness of Irish culture and identity. The Celtic cultural revival did

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produce its own tradition of music in the form of the ceílí (social dance). Ironically, the first ceílí was held in London, on 30 October 1897 to mark Féile Samhan, the autumn festival also known as Halloween. The ceílí quickly spread to Ireland, where it became commercialised in a popular frenzy for dancing (Vallely, 2011: 116-7). While ceílí dancing popularised traditional Irish culture amongst the youth population and its commercialisation projected it to a mass audience, it was to fall foul of the cultural puritanism that was to follow the revolution, in terms of the Dance Hall Act 1935. However, the appreciation of Irish music continued through Feis Ceoil (music festivals), which involved the celebration of the Gaelic musical tradition.

Conclusion In this chapter we have explored the relationship between the various social movements that contributed to the Irish Revolution. We have argued that the Irish Revolution was not a singular event that happened in 1916 but a series of diverse events that occurred over the decade 1913-23. There were three key movements involved in the Irish Revolution: nationalist, labour and women. While the nationalist movement ultimately stamped its authority on the Irish Revolution, that outcome was by no means a historical certainty. The consequences for Ireland (which are felt right down to the present day) were profound. The revolution, which was political rather than social, produced against the tide of modern history a conservative revolution (arguably an oxymoron). In turn that conservative order came to be dominated by a trinity of Church, State and Capital that locked Irish society into a time warp, from which it took many decades to escape. Notes 1

2

‘Midget press’ publications do not appear in the References because articles were not signed due to the sedition laws in force at the time and because such pieces were often believed to be the work of more than one author. Soviet is a Russian word describing the pivotal role played by workers in the 1917 Communist Revolution.

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Welfare in the Free State I think we were probably the most conservative revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution. Kevin O’Higgins (Minister for Justice), Dáil Debates, 1 March 1923 Political life in the newly independent Irish Free State, even in the immediate aftermath of a revolution, reflected in obvious ways the essential conservatism of the predominantly rural Irish electorate. Law and order were rigorously maintained and the books carefully balanced. The party in power, composed in the main of elements of the Sinn Féin Party that had accepted the Treaty of 1921, quickly won the support of those sections of the Irish community most likely to benefit from stability – the businessmen and merchants, the larger farmers and shopkeepers, the remnants of Anglo-Ireland anxious for security and the kind of middle-class men and women who had earlier put their trust in respectable politicians of the Irish parliamentary party. The ruling Cumann na nGaedheal party had the support of the major national daily papers the Irish Independent, Cork Examiner and Irish Times and of the Churches. Terence Brown (1985: 45) These two portraits of post-revolutionary Ireland capture its essential conservatism. It is a view shared by other cultural commentators, who accused the new state of being ‘sectarian, utilitarian and provincial’ (Ferriter, 2005: 346). In policy terms, the Free State looked backwards to the British Conservative Party between 1895 and 1905. The Liberal reforms, which introduced a raft of social legislation after the 1906 UK general election – including the Pensions Act 1908, the Children Act 1908 (popularly known as the Children’s Charter), the People’s Budget 1909, the National Insurance Act 1911, alongside free

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school meals provision – were systematically undermined by the new Cumann na nGaedheal (later Fine Gael) government. These progressive social measures were in line with wider European path development towards a welfare state, following the Bismarckian social reforms in Germany during the 1880s. Cormac O’Grada (1995: 441) concludes, ‘the Free State also acquired some of the trappings of a proto-welfare state. Cumann nGaedheal affected a flintier attitude towards social welfare’. It sought to reverse the European tide of social reform in Ireland. Instead, as Michelle Norris (2016: 71) argues, the new state developed a ‘property-based welfare state’ through land redistribution to smallholders and the landless rural population. This chapter seeks to analyse the meaning and content of welfare in the Free State.

The 1922 Constitution The 1922 Constitution of the Free State of Ireland was cast in the liberal-democratic mould of the time. The only reference to religion was contained in Article 8, which offered the standard guarantees of liberal democratic societies in regard to freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religious observance. The Catholic Church was given no formal status in the 1922 Constitution. However, Article 8 positively declared that ‘no law may be made either directly or indirectly to endow any religion, or prohibit or restrict thereof or give any preference, or impose any disability on account of religious belief or religious status, or prejudicially affect the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending religious instruction at the school’. The prohibition on endowment meant that large amounts of money could not be given to a church for the creation or support of a school, hospital or charitable service, without violating both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. This posed a direct threat to the control the Catholic Church exercised over social and educational provision in Ireland. The secular and spiritual domains were clearly separated in the 1922 Constitution. Credit for the secular character of the 1922 Constitution should not, however, be accorded to Irish nationalist opinion, which showed little evidence of Enlightenment tolerance. Rather, it was the product of the political exigencies arising from Ireland’s dominion status within the British Empire. It was, consequently, shaped under the prevailing influence of British constitutional thought which was tolerant in its approach to religious belief.

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The influence of the Democratic Programme 1919 was evident in only two of the 1922 Constitution’s eighty-three articles. Article 10 guaranteed ‘the right to free elementary education’, which was by no means radical by the standards of the time. However, Article 11 was somewhat more socialistic, laying claim to ’all the lands and waters, mines and minerals, within the territory of the Irish Free State’. While the liberal-democratic character of the 1922 Constitution defined the Free State as formally secular, informally the position was very different. Constitutional theory differed markedly from constitutional practice in the new state. As Conor Cruise O’Brien (1974: 109), one of modern Ireland’s greatest public intellectuals, observed: ‘the affairs of the new state were not long administered in a purely secular spirit’. O’Brien believed that the partition of Ireland had in effect created a Protestant state in the north and a Catholic state in the south. Demographics supported his controversial thesis. The 1926 census revealed that 90 per cent of the population of the Free State were Catholic. In sociological, if not in constitutional, terms the Free State was Catholic. This fact was not lost on either nationalist politicians or the Catholic ‘Hierarchy of Bishops’, which moved swiftly to assert its influence. It crucially influenced the social policy of the new state, which in both style and substance took on an increasingly Catholic ethos. Social policy was determined through an informal Church-State alliance that allowed the latter to set the agenda.

Politics and society There are various ways to view what happened to society in Ireland after 1923. The country consolidated its political revolution by building a new state. A national energy system was introduced through electrification. Peace was restored at the end of a bitter and bloody civil war. A government was established and a parliament (the Dáil) began to function which, after 1927, included representatives of both sides in the civil war. In 1932, power was peacefully transferred to the defeated side in the civil war, albeit it was followed by a brief flirtation with fascism. But a functioning democracy was to endure, even if under three conditions: one populist party, Fianna Fail, (defining itself as a national movement), was to dominate the subsequent history of the Irish state; the hegemonic role of the Catholic Church suppressed democratic expression; and land redistribution created a society dominated by rural interests and rural values. The latter influence promoted, what Norris (2016: 107) calls a ‘property-based welfare system’, which she argues (while not fitting conventional definitions of social policy) ‘shared

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key characteristics of the mainstream welfare state in terms of inputs, outcomes and objectives’. At a social level, independence meant a step backwards from modernity. The island of Ireland was divided along the fault lines of cultural demographics, between the Protestant north and the Catholic south. This was to crucially shape life in the predominantly agrarian south in the image of a socially conservative corporatist Catholic worldview. Nationalist mythology fused with this Catholic corporatism by looking backwards to an imagined Gaelic past of cultural isolation characterised by racial purity and social harmony. But what of social reality? What was new about the new state? Had it become a classless society after the colonial landlords were (mostly) banished from the country, along with the colonial administration and military? The answer is ‘no’. Ireland’s post-revolutionary government, Cumann na nGaedheal, which ruled between 1923-32, was composed of conservative middle-class leaders. It was succeeded by Fianna Fail, which governed between 1932-48, representing a coalition of the lower middle class, small farmers and working-class voters. What both Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail shared in common was a nationalist and Catholic ideology that ‘fused to shape both the nature of the state and the relationship between the state and society’, that was unparalleled in Europe, with the exception of Poland (McLaughlin, 2001: 227). Religious nationalism emerged as the dominant political belief system in the absence of a coherent set of republican values. Unlike other republican revolutionary states that emerged in modern Europe, there was no attempt to seize church assets in the form of ownership of schools, hospitals, charities, childcare institutions and property. These would have been defining actions in the establishment of a secular republic. This failure to articulate a secular republican agenda, based on liberty, equality and solidarity, allowed a counterrevolutionary order to emerge and ideologically dominate the early decades of the state. Within this new conservative order, the labour movement was systematically neutralised (Girvan, 1984; Lane, 1997). Similarly, the women’s movement became marginalised in an increasingly patriarchal society (Ward, 1983; McLaughlin, 2001: 229-230). Traditional motherhood within the patriarchal family was idealised, while single parents were ostracised, frequently ending up incarcerated in mother and baby homes (Earner-Byrne, 2007). McLaughlin (2001: 228) concludes ‘the integrative ideologies of Catholicism and nationalism shaped the Irish State and national identity into an exclusive, culturally homogenous, conservative one’. Dissent was not tolerated. Trade

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unions, workers’ soviets, farm labourers’ organisations, the fascist ‘blue shirts’ and the IRA were all ruthlessly suppressed (Munck, 1985).

The first-wave welfare state The first-wave welfare state was introduced by the Westminster parliament in response to the rise of Britain’s first mass working-class party – the Labour Party. It threatened the Liberal Party with political extinction, a goal it was later to substantially achieve. In response to the Labour threat, the Liberal government elected in 1906 set about a major programme of social reform. Ireland was a beneficiary of these colonial social reforms – albeit sometimes a reluctant one. There were powerful forces in Ireland that viscerally opposed social reform, notably the Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Fein, the medical profession and employers. None of these vested interests had any sense of identification with the creation of a more collectivist society. The Church was anti-statist, nationalist politicians argued that independence was synonymous with individual rights and contractarian justice, business and the professions regarded the Liberal reforms as the thin end of the socialist wedge. Abram de Swann (1988: 255) represents the welfare state as ‘the collectivization of care’ in which ‘the state is the abstract, universal and anonymous caretaker of members of society’. In modern times, according to de Swann, the cost of care and price of empathy had become ‘infinitesimal’ in a collectivised industrial society. In this world, he argues, traditional charity has been replaced by ‘social consciousness’, which he suggests, ‘implies the silent consent to a considerable taxburden and to the redistribution of income which affects the vertical differences only slightly, but those between generations, between sexes and between the active and the non-active significantly’ (de Swann, 1988: 255). This is a vision of a modern European welfare society in which the charities, mutual organisations and friendly societies of the nineteenth century were being superseded by the collectivised welfare state, which appeared in diverse models (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The progress of the first-wave European welfare state in an increasingly democratised society seemed irresistible. Workers wanted to live in a ‘decommodified’ society, in which they ceased being cogs in the economic wheels of market capitalism and became politically engaged citizens with economic and social rights (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 35-54). However, there was, according to social conservatives, a ‘third way’ (McLaughlin, 2001; Powell, 2010). This ‘third way’ took a variety of forms that ranged from guild socialism (Britain) to

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Catholic corporatism (France, Germany). Papal encyclicals, notably Rerum Novarum (Pope Leo XIII, 1891), enunciated the Catholic Church’s hostility to the state interventionist philosophies of the ‘new Liberalism’ and socialism. The encyclical baldly stated that ‘the state had no authority to swallow either individual or family’ (Pope Leo XIII, 1891: 20). In this Catholic corporatist worldview, the principle of subsidiarity defined the family and voluntary associations as the core sources of welfare, with the role of the state confined to a last resort. Behind the rhetoric of Catholic social teaching based on subsidiarity, family solidarity and charity, lay the Church’s strategic objective of Catholic social power. It proved to be particularly successful in Ireland, shaping a Catholic corporatist society. But the nature of Church-State relations (as we shall see in Chapter 4) was complex. Sinn Fein’s ideological legacy was committed to economic austerity, which complemented subsidiarity.

The politics of austerity The Sinn Fein leaders were nationalists with little time for social reform. As Garvin (1981: 199) has put it, these early Sinn Fein leaders were ‘puritanical, idealistic and austere and were adherents of the politics of national redemption rather than of the politics of compromise, bargaining and pay-offs’. Their political philosophy was largely formulated by the Sinn Fein founder, Arthur Griffith, who advocated self-sufficiency and protectionism in economic policy coupled with austerity in the management of the national finances. The pursuit of self-sufficiency constituted the essence of Sinn Fein economics. Selfsufficiency was designed to break the economic as well as the political domination exercised by Britain over Irish affairs. Protectionism was intended to be a nationalist economic political strategy, rather like Brexit today. It was populist rather than socialist in conception. Griffith was hostile to the Irish labour movement. Prior to independence, he had opposed the Liberal programme of social reforms on the grounds that they were extravagant and inefficient. In particular, Griffith argued that the National Insurance Act 1911 was an unwarranted imposition on Irish industry. He did, however, acknowledge the need for a major slum clearance programme. But, even in this respect, he appears to have been motivated by his fear of socialism: ‘the poor were left to fester in the slums, and when out of their misery some of them have fallen victim to the Socialistic spell-binders those who left them to be their prey are horrified and amazed’ (Sinn Fein, 6 September, 1913).

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Griffith’s advocacy of economic self-sufficiency as the solution to social privation was mercilessly derided by contemporaries. Writer and commentator Oliver St John Gogarty described Griffith as ‘a six-penny Savanarola in a world of Woolworths’ and dismissed him as ‘a voice from a mathematical mad-house, from some algebraical world of minus values where everything is upside down and all the quantities are negatives’ (quoted in Bromage, 1956: 240-1). Griffith was shunned by radicals and socialists who perceived Sinn Feiners as ‘merciless grinders of the faces of the poor’ (Levenson, 1977: 300). Nonetheless, on 10 January 1922, when an Irish administration was formed under Griffith’s presidency, his economic and social philosophy took on a new potency. Despite his untimely death in August 1923, Griffith’s ideas continued to exercise a powerful influence over Irish governments for several decades. The first peacetime administration was established under the conservative leadership of W. T. Cosgrave’s (1880-1965) Cumann nGaedheal on 19 September 1923. It governed for nearly a decade, eventually losing power in 1932 to de Valera’s Fianna Fail party. The Free State administration applied Griffith’s principles to both economic and social policy with ruthless efficiency, achieving staggering economies in public expenditure. Between 1923 and 1927, public expenditure was cut back from £28.7 million to £18.9 million. Income tax was nearly halved with a reduction from 5 shillings (25 pence) in the pound to 3 shillings (15 pence) (Barrington, 1987: 99-100). This was a government whose allegiance to the promotion of the interests of the native bourgeoisie was unshakeable. Social revolution was not on its agenda. The Cumann na nGaedheal leaders were the second generation of revolutionary politicians. Pragmatism shaped their worldview. They were timid, cautious and conservative in most respects. But they did demonstrate a steely determination to impose order on postrevolutionary Ireland. Furthermore, the new government’s decision to harness the power of the river Shannon to bring electrification to the population showed considerable vision. By 1937, the Ardnacrusha power station was supplying 87 per cent of the country’s needs (Ferriter, 2005: 316). However, as Ferriter observes ‘it was a notable exception; fiscal inquiries, on the other hand, revealed a cautious government which was loath to tinker with free trade orthodoxy or scare vested interests’. A new generation of post-revolutionary politicians concerned themselves with the task of nationbuilding in line with Sinn Fein philosophy.

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The impact of political revolution had combined with a post-war depression to further destabilise the already precarious living standards of the poor. Unemployment represented the major challenge to the new state. Official estimates put unemployment at 34,007 in January 1924. These figures did not take account of the thousands of workers who were not registered at Labour Exchanges. Nor did the unemployment statistics indicate the scale of underemployment, particularly in rural areas. Furthermore, the unemployment rate must be set against an emigration figure of 33,545 for the previous year. Between 1921-25 nearly 147,000 people emigrated overseas (Reports of Commission on Emigration and other Population Problems, 1948-54: 316). The combined unemployment and emigration statistics indicated an annual shortfall of jobs in the regions of 70,000. The labour movement responded with a campaign for ‘work or maintenance’ (Voice of Labour, 24 March 1923). Following persistent questioning from Labour deputies in the Dáil, most notably Thomas Johnson, regarding the Free State government’s intentions towards the unemployed, a succession of ministerial responses indicated an unwillingness to contemplate state intervention. In October 1922, the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Joseph McGrath, declared in reference to government action on the issue, ‘we have not any plans’ (Dáil Debates, 20 October, 1922). Two months later McGrath, questioned once again on the subject of unemployment, stated ‘there is no money, the Government cannot do anything’ (Dáil Debates, 14 December 1922). His successor, Patrick McGilligan, was no less obdurate on the subject, observing in October 1924, ‘the Government or this Dáil should not be held responsible for the provision of work in the community’ (Dáil Debates, 30 October, 1924). Two years later McGulligan dismissed Labour demands to amend the Unemployment Insurance Acts so as to allow for extended benefit as an alternative ‘to trying to brand workers as paupers’ (Dáil Debates, 10 March 1926). The Minister replied: It has been suggested that there has been a return to the Poor Law Union system, and that this is a deliberate and definite policy. The question has been raised, is it desirable to return to that system rather than extend insurance benefits? ... There has been talk about the degradation of the Poor Law System. No one is going back to it as a system, but if people say that if a system is abhorrent for normal times something which might have the same taint about it should not be used in an emergency then I cannot agree. (Dáil Debates, 10 March 1926)

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The Minister for Local Government, J. A. Burke, speaking in the same debate, accused the Labour opposition of utopianism, commenting ‘we must remember that when we give relief we do so at the expense of somebody else’ (Dáil Debates, 10 March, 1926). The government’s resolute hostility to the ideas of state intervention, which was fully in line with Griffith’s principles, caused mounting anger in the ranks of the labour movement. The Voice of Labour (13 March 1926) protested: … the Ministers of Dáil Eireann have inherited the old vicious maxims of Governments which strive to break men and women and crush them into sullen submission and debased humility – mere dumb bricks with which to build up a State encased in the steel framework of a vigilant police force and a well-equipped soldiery, a machine to protect property and to facilitate rich men to amass greater wealth and greater profits from the labour power of the poor and distressed. In reference to the disbursement of food tickets by the government, the Voice of Labour (13 March 1926) asserted ‘the pauperisation of the unemployed by food tickets is in strict harmony with the worst traditions (of the famine years) ’47 and ‘48’. The Voice of Labour (27 November 1926) continued to draw parallels between the government’s policy of austerity in the face of mass unemployment and Victorian laissez-faire economics, declaring ‘the outworn shibboleths of the early Victorian age are still sound currency in Government circles in Leinster House’. The Labour leader James Larkin, who had returned to Ireland in 1923 after his long sojourn in the USA (part of which was spent as a political prisoner in Sing Sing prison), joined these protests against the Free State government. Housing and slum clearance emerged as urgent items on the Free State government’s agenda in keeping with Sinn Féin political ideology.

Property, housing, and urban development Property ownership and human welfare became intertwined in the Free State. Rural economic interests seeking land redistribution set the policy agenda. Michelle Norris (2016: 71) asserts that the 1923 Land Act established ‘property-based welfare’ in Ireland, enabling compulsory purchase and sale of land to 114,000 tenant farmers, who were not covered by pre-Independence legislation. This measure

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‘radicalised’ and ‘expanded’ land redistribution initiatives to benefit smallholders. It clearly contributed to the stabilisation of the Free State in the wake of the Irish Revolution, broadening the base of a socially conservative class of landowners. Norris (2016: 83) also notes: ‘The Free State’s early and energetic policy action on land reform was paralleled by similar action on the other key bulwark of the propertybased welfare system-home-ownership’. Conor McCabe (2011: 20) comments: ‘The First World War, the War of Independence and the Civil War had all dramatically curtailed building activity in Ireland. By the time hostilities had ceased in 1923, it had almost been ten years since Ireland had seen relatively normal levels of construction’. Housing was always at the top end of the Sinn Fein policy agenda. It reflected its ideological conservatism and a commitment to a property-based welfare system. Arthur Griffith had viewed the provision of housing as an essential bulwark against socialism both because it addressed the festering problems of slum life (a major source of popular discontent) and because home-ownership created security and appealed to possessive individualism, a powerful instinct in a land-based economy (Powell, 1992). In 1923, the Cumann na nGaedheal government launched the Million Pound Scheme, providing local authorities with funding for the construction of social housing. The largest housing construction scheme during the 1920s was the building of 1,000 cottages for workers at Marino in Dublin. It was designed in keeping with the garden city design concept of modern town planning (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 344). McCabe (2011: 21) observes: ‘Although it was social housing the entire scheme was tenant purchase’. Home-ownership was becoming enshrined within the market framework of asset ownership in a manner that would corrode the value base of the Irish welfare state. There was growing evidence of housing demand among the urban poor, who could not afford the luxury of tenant purchase and so had no choice but to rent. A 1923 survey indicated the need for 40,000 new dwellings in urban areas and found that unfit housing had grown by 15 per cent since the 1914 Dublin Housing Inquiry. This demand for a public rental sector in housing supply was largely ignored by the new state, which did not regard the interests of the urban working-class as a priority. The Cumann na nGaedheal government instead promoted the construction of private accommodation through the Housing (Building Facilities) Act 1924. This legislation has been criticised for enabling private builders to construct housing for the better-off on the outskirts of cities (O’Connell, 2007; McCabe, 2011). Overall, the record of the Cumann na nGaedheal administration in relation to

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housing construction was cautious and inadequate. Professor O’Connell (2007: 25) concludes: ‘reviewing the performance of the first decade on housing activity in independent Ireland reveals how private housing benefited to a far greater extent than local authority housing – the most likely source of housing relief for the urban poor’. The Poor Law mentality was still a guiding force in government decision-making. Its priority was the consolidation of a permanent rural smallholder class rather than the needs of the urban working class (Norris, 2016).

The Irish Poor Law legacy in national consciousness The Irish Poor Law had left an indelible imprint in national consciousness. To the Irish mind, the Poor Law epitomised the existential experience of occupation and colonisation. The word ‘pauper’ (denoting the outcast status of recipients of poor relief as people without rights) continued to strike fear into the Irish population in the early twentieth century and beyond. As noted in Chapter 1, social justice was equated in the popular mind with poor law reform and the ending of pauperism. In England, the Elizabethan Poor Law (1603) provided poor relief, a compensatory right for the poor, to offset the effects of land enclosure. There was no such policy response in Ireland, despite a brutal colonial plantation policy which dispossessed many of the native Irish poor. Instead in 1634/5 a system of houses of correction was introduced to Ireland for the incarceration of the vagrant poor (IR. Stat. 10th and 11th Charles 1 c.xvi, 1634-5). Subsequently, vagrancy was made a criminal offence. After summary justice, offenders were liable to sentences of transportation (along with felons) to the British colonies in the new world. The Whately Commission in the 1830s described the injustice of this draconian system: In order to estimate the value of the boon thus conceded to a poor vagrant, who has the misfortune to be presented, it is necessary to state that in order to ensure a conviction all the rules of law upon evidence are reversed; incredible as it may appear to the English reader, or indeed to the inhabitant of any country boasting the most distant claims to free institutions, it is never the less undoubtedly true that, upon the trial of a presentment for vagrancy, the accused is required to prove his own innocence of a charge of which he may have never heard, - to negative the truth of an accusation the particulars of which he knows not till he has closed his case. HE IS PRESUMED TO BE

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GUILTY UNLESS HE MAKES THE CONTRARY TO APPEAR. It were idle to institute a comparison between such a mockery of justice as such a trial must disclose, and one in accordance with the constitution of England; one of the first principles of which is, that every man shall be presumed innocent till a jury of his equals shall have unanimously pronounced him guilty. He has an alternative, that of finding sufficient surety to be of good behaviour: setting aside the question that this does not in the least vary the unconstitutional nature of the statute, it cannot be doubted that in any country a poor person could hardly ever obtain security not to commit a breach of laws so vague and uncertain. (Appendix (c) Part II to First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, 1836, XXX, p13a) In the late eighteenth century, legislation was passed to establish houses of industry to serve as ‘an asylum for the aged, infirm and industrious, and a bridewell for the profligate, idle and refractory’ (Ir. Stat. 11th and 12th George III c.30, 1771-2). On the ground, little was achieved. It wasn’t until 1838 that a poor law system was finally introduced into Ireland in the context of a policy of land consolidation and dispossession of smallholders. Famine was partially present during 1817 and 1830. The population was starving in many parts of the country. The Irish Poor Law Act 1838 introduced a workhouse system of poor relief based upon the deterrent principle of less eligibility (that is, conditions in the workhouse should be inferior to those of the poorest in the community so that work would remain preferable to relief). There was no provision for outdoor relief in the community. The inadequacy of the Irish poor law system (which could cater for one per cent of the population) was exposed by the Great Famine 184551. This catastrophic event is indelibly enshrined in the Irish psyche. The million people that died of hunger and disease during the Great Famine constituted a major human tragedy. Its tragic consequences were exacerbated by the colonial government’s unwillingness to intervene until it was too late. The Irish diaspora followed in the wake of the famine, scattering the population all over the world. Demographically, the famine drained Ireland of its youth and of its future in the minds of Ireland’s many critics. It also pauperised much of the population, leaving a seething sense of social injustice that was to feed militant nationalism from the middle of the nineteenth century in the form

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of Fenianism. The Fenians engaged in war and terrorism, motivated by the ideal of Irish independence and the base instinct for revenge.

Poor Law and health services The Free State government introduced Poor Law legislation in 1923 which according to Lee (1989: 124) substituted for what the Democratic Programme 1919 called the ‘present odious and foreign poor law system, an odious, degrading and native system’. The reorganisation of the Poor Law was undertaken with ruthless energy by the Free State government. In search of inspiration the native administration drew on the Vice-Regal and Poor Law Commissions of 1906 and 1909. The Local Government Acts 1923 and 1925 restructured the poor relief system. Boards of Guardians (except in Dublin) were superseded by County Council Committees known as Boards of Health and Public Assistance. Outdoor relief was renamed home assistance and its administration reorganised on a county-wide basis. The number of home assistance cases substantially increased from 14,662 in 1913 to 21,650 in 1924 (Third report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1927-28: 88). Home assistance, however, remained a discretionary benefit. The form and amount of help to be given was wholly determined by the local authority. These powers of discretion were a source of considerable concern to the austerityminded administration. The Department of Local Government and Public Health, established in 1924, observed in its third report, ‘if the administration is lax and there is imperfect investigation and supervision, the number on the assistance register will be gradually swollen’ (Third report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1927-28: 90). However, with evident satisfaction, the report noted that most of the poorest counties located in the west and north west had kept the level of home assistance under 15 per 1,000 over the previous three years, which was below the national average. Paradoxically, while Free State social policy eroded the level of welfare provision, the new regime made several conciliatory gestures towards the poor. The Free State government sought to reduce the stigma associated with the Poor Law through the Electoral Act 1923. This measure ended the voting disqualification for recipients of poor relief. The dreaded name ‘workhouse’ was also replaced by ‘County Home’, in another effort to remove the stigma associated with the Poor Law. Some workhouses were amalgamated. But these were essentially symbolic achievements that did little to counteract the subordinate status of the poor as paupers. Health policy further indicated that the

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new regime had little time for social reforms that materially improved the condition of the poor. The Free State administration reorganised the health service, which was part of the Poor Law System. It abolished rural districts and created a new administrative unit – the County Health District. County Health Districts, with the exception of urban areas, usually coincided with county boundaries. County Councils were constituted as sanitary authorities for the County Health Districts. County medical officers were appointed with responsibility for the administration of public health services including: the supervision of the implementation of the sanitary laws; child welfare and school health services; ante- and post-natal services; the organisation of the tuberculosis service; and the welfare of blind people. At primary level, the health service continued to devolve on the dispensary (or local health clinic) system. In 1925, there were 588 dispensaries in the Free State, staffed by 634 medical officers, 30 apothecaries and 656 midwives (First Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1922-25: 73). The new regime initiated little change in the dispensary medical service (Hensey, 1979: 17). Eligibility was determined by County Boards of Health, home assistance officers, and wardens appointed for the purpose. The possession of a ‘red ticket’ in theory entitled the holder to free medical care. However, following representation from general practitioners regarding abuse of the system, ‘an effort was made to introduce suitable scales of fees for persons of small means attending the dispensary [local health clinic] who were unable to pay the usual fee charged by the Medical Profession to private patients’ (First Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1922-25: 73). It is unclear whether this practice predated the inception of the state. What is certain is that it was tolerated by the Free State which also acknowledged the doctor’s right to appeal to the County Board of Health in order to have a red ticket cancelled. It would appear that the rights of public patients had not been augmented by the replacement of the colonial government. Nor was there much evidence of a commitment to building new hospitals (Hensey, 1979: 17). Furthermore, the finances of the voluntary hospital sector (which accounted for approximately 50 hospitals) were in a state of crisis. The Public Charitable Hospitals Act 1930 was introduced to resolve this. The 1930 Act awarded a monopoly to the voluntary hospitals for the purpose of promoting a lottery called ‘the Sweepstakes’ or horse races. By the middle of 1931, a sum of £1 million had been raised – most of which had come from abroad. It was a substantial sum

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in terms of the voluntary hospitals’ budget; this amounted to £400,000 in 1933, and was equal to a third of the annual expenditure of County Boards of Health and Public Assistance (Barrington, 1987: 108-9). The principle of voluntarism manifestly remained a key element in social service provision in the Free State, ensuring religious participation. Criticism of the Free State government’s reorganisation of the Poor Law had led to the establishment of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor in 1925. The Commissioners were independent of government, being drawn from the world of public service and charity. They were convinced of the need for the administrative reform of the Poor Law. As Barrington (1987: 97) has put it, ‘appointed in response to mounting criticism, particularly from the Labour Party, of the inhumanity of the amalgamation schemes in some counties and the pressure from the Department for economies in every aspect of local authority activity, the Commission had no nostalgia for the old poor law’. The terms of reference demonstrate the conflicting pressures which had led to the establishment of the Commission. The conflicting principles of adequacy and austerity were very much to the fore. The Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 16) described the reorganisation of the workhouse system as ‘drastic’ and not in the interests of the poor. The Commissioners were also critical of the policy of amalgamating and abolishing workhouses on the grounds that they had led to under-provision in some areas and had done little to reduce costs. Furthermore, the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 96) declared ‘the County Homes are not fit and proper places for the reception of the various classes we have found in them’. They also called for structural alterations and improvements in County Homes, which they argued should be reserved for the elderly and chronic invalids. The Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: paras 103-4) advocated the construction of public hospitals ‘in the most accessible centres of population’ and had little sympathy for district or cottage hospitals in small towns. With regard to psychiatric hospital care, the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 415-6) noted that provision in all but three counties was ‘either fully occupied or insufficient or unsuitable’. The Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: paras 193-4) were satisfied with the dispensary medical service, although they had some misgivings about the availability of the system in Connacht, notably Co. Mayo. Their most radical proposal (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 282-7) was for the abolition of the Boards of Health and Public Assistance

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and their replacement by officials employed and controlled by the County Councils. On the question of home assistance, the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 162) commented, ‘we see no reason for re-imposing the old absolute restrictions with regards to the granting of out-door relief, but we think discretion should be allowed as to whether assistance shall be given in an institution or at home’. This proposal suggested a tightening-up of the system. The Commissioners believed that Boards of Health were ‘perhaps acting with more liberality than their predecessors’ but also noted that they were not ‘discharging their full obligations in regard to persons eligible for relief who cannot be sent to institutions and that this applies particularly to the cases of widows with children and able-bodied men with dependent families’. There were, however, indications contained within the report of a return to a more stigmatised approach to the administrations of home assistance. One paragraph sought to empower the Minister of Local Government and Public Health to publish the names of claimants in each district. Presumably the intention was both to ‘name and shame’ and to expose defrauders of the system. Like most proposals of this kind it was likely to subject the vast majority of genuine claimants to public humiliation and additional degradation, underlining the subordinate status of the poor.

Austerity and insurance reform Modern European society created state-backed insurance schemes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to protect workers from the vagaries of unemployment and sickness. Prior to Irish independence, the UK Liberal government introduced wide-ranging insurance legislation. The National Insurance Bill 1911 established the principle of compulsory insurance for a broad range of workers. It represented the Liberal government’s very effective, albeit conservative, political answer to both the socialist demands for a ‘Right to Work Act’ and a state health service. As the President of the Dublin Trades Council, Thomas Murphy, put it, the government was guided by the prerogatives of the production of wealth and the maintenance of public order: There are two reasons why the Bill has been introduced. One is the poverty that exists amongst the poor when stricken down with sickness or knocked out of employment, which undermines the constitution of the workers’ children

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and produces an unhealthy population; and on that account the producers of all the wealth of the country are weakened. Lloyd George, being a farseeing statesman, recognises that the ever increasing army of the unemployed may become in time a danger if they were not taken into consideration, because there was no one who could expect that healthy men would starve to death in the sight of plenty and allow their children to starve also. It is against human nature to expect that. (Irish Worker, 15 July 1911) Considine and Dukelow (2009: 19) in an assessment of the National Insurance Act 1911 assert: ‘this again gave workers something to rely on as a right, outside the Poor Law, and established the beginnings of insurance-based social security’. In its administrative structure the 1911 Act was framed on the principle of contributory insurance – involving contributions from the employee, the employer and the state. This development represented a giant step beyond the insurance provided for working people by charities, mutual aid and friendly societies during the nineteenth century. However, the 1911 Act was constructed on a ‘breadwinner model’, which assumed the man was head of the household and the main source of family income. It resulted in women being treated unequally within the insurance system (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 20). There were two elements contained within the National Insurance Act 1911. The first covered unemployment, which was at the time considered to be a cyclical problem. It did not anticipate the Great Depression following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, which created massive long-term structural unemployment. The second element concerned health insurance as the result of sickness or disability. It was the more significant part of the legislation. The proposed health insurance scheme was to be administered under the supervision of ‘approved societies’, such as trade unions, friendly societies and insurance companies. In other words, the new system of statutory health insurance would be grafted on to the existing voluntary organisational structure. The labour movement was unsurprisingly supportive. James Larkin declared the proposed scheme was ‘going to do more for the working-classes of this country than any measure hithertofore introduced’ (Irish Worker, 15 July 1911). But the National Insurance Bill also had strident critics in Ireland in the press, the medical profession and, critically, met with opposition from the Catholic Church. The medical profession was concerned about remuneration and was somewhat politically naive (Barrington,

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1987). On the other hand, the Catholic Church, while acknowledging the virtues of the scheme, claimed it was not in the interests of a predominantly rural agriculturally based economy (Miller, 1973: 2745). This opposition resulted in the removal of medical benefit from the legislation in Ireland. The Irish Worker (25 November 1911) thundered in response that for ‘a paltry saving’ the employee was to be ‘deprived of all medical benefits in the Bill’. Nonetheless, by 1923 there were 413,000 insured pensioners in Ireland (First Report of the Department of Social Welfare, 1950: 99). This was about 50 per cent of all those eligible to benefit from the National Insurance scheme. The Cumann na nGaedheal government curtailed the benefits of national health insurance in the cause of austerity. The National Health Insurance Act 1924 lowered the state’s contribution to the insurance fund. Fees accruing to doctors for medical certification were also reduced. The Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, decided to question the viability of the scheme by establishing an inter-departmental committee with a remit to examine ‘the advisability of the continued maintenance of the system of National Health Insurance in its present form’ (Dáil Debates, 4 July 1924). Possible efficiencies and economies were also to be investigated. While recommending a substantial administrative reorganisation, the Committee on Health and Medical Services published an interim report in 1925 which strongly favoured the principle of a national health insurance system. The Committee published its final report in 1927. During the two years which had lapsed between the enforcement of the principle of national health insurance in 1925 and the final report, the Committee had mainly concentrated on the issue of medical benefit. While the members of the Committee agreed in principle that medical benefit should be extended to the insured and their families, the majority recommended that it be adopted only in respect of the insured worker. Financial considerations, they believed, precluded the inclusion of the insured workers’ families. In reality, the government had no interest in extending the national health insurance system. It selectively adopted only the recommendations from the Committee on Health Insurance and Medical Services concerned with the promotion of efficiency and economy; these were incorporated into the National Health Insurance Act 1929. Some of these changes were of an administrative nature; others had major social implications. The National Health Insurance Act 1929 abolished ‘sanatorium benefit’, which was instituted to facilitate the building of hospitals for patients suffering from TB. The public were sometimes hostile to TB sufferers out of fear of contagion. For example, there was

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considerable opposition from local residents in Lucan, County Dublin to the Building of Peamount Hospital (House of Commons debates, 25 July 1912). The decision to abolish this benefit took place against an extremely high death rate from tuberculosis in Ireland. According to the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948-54, deaths per 100,000 of the population between 1925-27 were officially estimated at 150 in Ireland (Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems 1948-1954, 1956 ). These were disturbingly high figures. The comparable rate for England and Wales was 93, for Scotland 104, the USA 83, Australia 58 and New Zealand 51. Furthermore, Luke Duffy, General Secretary of the Irish Labour Party, contended that the official death rates from tuberculosis were a gross underestimate. He reckoned that, while the certified mortality rate for tuberculosis each year amounted to between 6,000 and 7,000 persons, 11,750 deaths had not been certified in 1922. He further observed that 26.4% of deaths were uncertified in Ireland compared with 1.1% in Britain. He also calculated that 70% of those dying were between the ages of 15-50 and their deaths were, therefore, preventable. On the basis of these figures he was led to remark, ‘one feels strangely tempted to conclude that a substantial proportion of the uncertified deaths are due either directly or indirectly to tuberculosis’ (Voice of Labour, 22 January 1927). In view of the scale of tuberculosis in Ireland, which had reached epidemic proportions (regardless of whether one accepts the official or unofficial death rate), the government’s decision to abolish sanatorium benefit was at the very least unenlightened.

‘An attack on the old and blind’ Professor Joe Lee (1989: 125) has accused the Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, of launching ‘an attack on the old and blind’ in his 1924 Budget. When pensions were introduced to Ireland, following the Pension Act 1908, there had been reports in the British tabloid-style reports of many fraudulent claims by Irish citizens (Carney, 1985; Ferriter, 2005: 316). There was almost 100% take-up of the old age pension in Ireland when it was introduced in January 1909, compared to 44% in England and Wales and 54% in Scotland. This discrepancy largely reflected the endemic scale of poverty in Ireland. The old age pension added 1.6% to Irish national income and 4-5% in poor western counties. It has been described as ‘the most radical and far-reaching piece of legislation in Ireland in the twentieth century’ (O’Grada, 2002: 132). The old age pension was the biggest

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item of social expenditure in the Free State budget (O’Grada, 2002: 151). Amongst the more outlandish accusations was that the money was being used to support the IRA, since young people could join up in the sure knowledge their elderly parents had an income. Despite this initial controversy, the system soon settled down. The Old Age Pensions Act 1919 relaxed some of the initial disqualifications and abolished the means test, turning the statutory pension into a significant social right for older citizens. Furthermore, the pension was raised to 10 shillings per week. In the following year, the Blind Person’s Act 1920 extended the pension to ‘sightless’ persons over 50 years of age, subject to an assessment of their capability for work. A major step had been taken towards removing destitution from old age. This major social reform did not meet with the support of the Cumann na nGaedheal government, which sought to curtail the pension through a cut in its value. In his 1924 budget, the Minister for Finance cut the pension by a shilling. In an economy drive the Cumann na nGaedheal government reduced the cost of pensions from £3.18 million in 1924 to £2.54 in 1927 (Lee, 1989: 125). Fraud, particularly in relation to proof of age (which was not officially recorded until the certification of births in the early twentieth century) once again became a major focus of the government’s campaign to reduce the cost of the pension bill. The decision to cut the pension was in Ferriter’s (2005: 317) view ‘an indication of the class bias that crept into the political rhetoric of the post-civil war period’. Lee (1989: 126) suggests there was also gender bias, since 67,000 of 114,000 pensioners were women, who the government suspected would not vote. In that misogynistic calculation they were proved sorely wrong. Cumulative resentment, notably in the disadvantaged west (where claimants were disproportionately located), built up and enabled the government’s anti-treaty opponents to gain political advantage. The pension cuts were to prove a major political liability to the Free State government, underlining its hard-hearted conservatism that must have seriously disappointed many citizens in the new state.

Women’s rights, insurance and maternity benefit Nationalist Ireland was a patriarchal society. Women were generally economically and socially dependent upon men. Dependency, however, did not guarantee a paternalistic social order. On the contrary, the patriarchal quality of Irish social life often placed the dependent in a punitive position. Even those women who achieved a modicum of independence through joining the workforce found themselves in a

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largely subordinate state. Official attitudes towards women in the new state were highly conservative. The National Health Insurance Act 1929 was also regressive for working women. The National Health Insurance Act 1923 had already abolished the Women’s Equalisation Fund. The 1929 measure further eroded the position of insured women. On marriage, a woman’s insurance and membership of an approved society was ended. Henceforth, for purposes of insurance the married woman was treated as a new entrant to the labour market. In return, women received ‘marriage benefit’, a one-off payment calculated on the basis of previous contributions and subject to deductions for arrears. The implications for women’s health were considerable. ‘Maternity benefit’ provided mothers with an important payment at a time of considerable financial stress. Women had rapidly taken advantage of this provision in the National Insurance Act 1911. As early as 1915, some 44,318 Irish mothers availed themselves of maternity benefit; this accounted for nearly half of the births in the country. In some instances, maternity benefit was linked to hospital care. Luke Duffy reflected on the value of maternity benefit in 1927: The statutory benefit is 40s., but certain fortunate (approved) societies, have 50s. available. If the wife is an insured person the benefit, therefore, varies from £4 to £5. (Voice of Labour, 22 January 1927) This valuable form of family support, which had accrued to insured women, was now reduced. Maternity benefit had been of considerable assistance during confinement (health cover during pregnancy) when the lives and health of both mother and child were seriously at risk. The Third report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health (1927-28: 40) admitted that ‘the death rate among women, associated with child birth, stands at a regrettably high figure’. The average rate of maternal mortality between 1918-27 was 4.87 per 1,000 births (Fourth report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1928-1929: 46). Many more women were permanently injured or invalided as a result of pregnancy. The abolition of maternity benefit was undoubtedly a deleterious decision not only in material terms: it also represented a reversal for women’s rights. The Free State government’s curtailment of maternity benefit was directly contrary to the spirit of the Maternity Convention adopted by the International Labour Conference at Washington in 1919. This convention had declared that: (i) a woman must not be employed for six weeks after confinement; (ii) she may leave her employment six

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weeks before confinement and (iii) when she is absent, she will be paid sufficient benefit for the full and healthy maintenance of herself and her child. Germany, Austria, Poland, Norway and Czechoslovakia had ratified the Convention. But as Luke Duffy observed: So far, this country has not referred to it. Despite our proud boast that we will honour all our international obligations, nothing has been done, so far, to honour this obligation, which is designed to save the lives of over 500 young mothers annually. (Voice of Labour, 22 January 1927) Clearly, women’s rights were not on the Free State’s policy agenda.

The detention of single mothers The welfare of single mothers revealed a particularly patriarchal dimension in the deliberations of the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor, 1927. Their report advocated a series of recommendations that effectively conferred a criminal status on single women with children born out of wedlock. The position adopted by the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: paras 96, 227) did not endorse the County Home as a suitable place for the reception of single mothers. Furthermore, the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 228) observed, ‘in dealing with the problem of accommodation for unmarried mothers it must be recognised that there were two classes to be provided for, namely (1) those who may be amenable to reform and (2) those who for one reason or another are regarded as less hopeful cases’. The Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 229) included in this second category married mothers with children ‘who subsequent to desertion had children not the offspring of their husbands’. With regard to the number of women concerned, the Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 239) commented, ‘it is difficult to arrive with any degree of accuracy at the numbers that would have to be dealt with, but we find that on the 27th March, 1926, there were in the County Homes and Dublin Workhouse 629 unmarried mothers classed as first offenders and 391 women who had fallen more than once’. The Commissioners (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 229) estimated that the number of deserted women with illegitimate children was predictably ‘small’. The Commission for the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 230) advocated separate treatments to differentiate ‘first offenders’ from ‘less hopeful cases’.

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It suggested that the treatment of the former ‘must necessarily be in the nature of a moral up building and, while requiring firmness and discipline, must be characterised by and blended with a certain amount of individual charity and sympathy which can only be given when a true estimate of the character of each girl or young woman has been made by those in charge’. There was already a prototype institution of this kind, Bessborough, in Cork, opened by the Sacred Heart Nuns in 1922. The Department of Local Government and Public Health noted in its Fourth Report that Bessborough was ‘intended primarily for young mothers who have fallen for the first time and who are likely to be influenced towards a useful and respectable life’. The 75 women resident at Bessborough were trained in domestic work, cookery, needlework, dairy work, poultry keeping and gardening. Religious instruction was also a basic element in their training. The Fourth Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health (1928-29: 114) concluded, ‘there is a pressing need for homes of a type similar to that at Bessborough, and the aim should be to have these women removed from Poor Law Institutions altogether’. By 1932, little progress had been achieved apart from the opening of Shan Ross Abbey, Roscrea, which accommodated 85 young women. This institution has been made famous by the film, Philomena. The only other separate facilities for unmarried mothers in the first offender category were operated by the Poor Law Authorities at Pelletstown, Co. Dublin, and Tuam, Co. Galway. Pelletstown had provision for 85 women, and Tuam, 33. On 31 March 1932 there were in all 868 unmarried mothers in poor law institutions of one kind or another (Annual Report of the Department of Health and Local Government, 1931-1932: 129). In respect of those single mothers with more than one illegitimate child, the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor (Report of the Commission, 1927: para 128) took the view that they were incorrigible and should be subject to a period of ‘detention’. The Commissioners’ observations (Report of the Commission, 1927: paras 234-7) merit quotation in full: At present there is no power to detain a woman in any Poor Law Institution, even when it is clearly necessary for her protection. We suggest that if an unmarried woman who applies for relief during pregnancy or after giving birth to a child is willing, when applying for assistance, to undertake to remain for a period not exceeding one year there should be power to retain her for that period, in the case of a first admission. In the case of admission for a

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second time, there should be power to retain for a period of two years. On third or subsequent admissions the Board should have power to retain for such period as they think fit, having considered the recommendation of the Superior or Matron of the Home. All cases whose maximum period of residence is indeterminate should be reviewed annually. The Commissioners added: On the question of discharge, we have come to the conclusion that no woman should be discharged until she has satisfied the Board of Health that she will be able to provide for her child or children either by way of paying wholly or partially for maintenance in the Home or boarding it out with respectable people approved by the Board of Health. Discretion might, however, be left to the Board of Health to allow the woman to take her discharge without taking her child or children, if they consider this desirable from the circumstances of the particular case. The Commissioners’ proposals regarding single mothers with more than one illegitimate child were quickly put into effect. By 1932, an arrangement had been established between the local authorities and the Sisters-in-Charge of Magdalene asylums in Dublin and elsewhere for the containment of ‘this more intractable problem’ (Annual Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, 1931-1932: 129). Not surprisingly, many single mothers decided to leave the country. The Department of Local Government and Public Health, in its annual report for 1931/32, noted in this context: As the result of several complaints from English Rescue Societies of the number of girls who having got into trouble leave the Free State and go to England, a conference was arranged between representatives of the Societies interested and an Inspector from the Department … It was agreed that every effort should be made to discourage girls going to England in such circumstances and to bring them back when possible. (pp 129-30) It was a cruel and hypocritical policy by any standard. The only kindly explanation for the complete abrogation of the civil rights of single mothers with illegitimate children in Ireland at this time is to attribute

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this policy to an excessive zeal for the ideal of chastity. But there was a chilling intolerance in this superimposed moral idealism. A society that outlawed education and access to birth control methods, abortion and divorce could not, perhaps, be expected to treat this vulnerable minority with humanity. It did, however, expose a dark side to the growing influence of Catholic ethics on the formulation of Irish social policy that was to become an established pattern. Furthermore, it reinforced patriarchal values as the norm in the treatment of women within the welfare system (Earner-Byrne, 2007). Efforts to repatriate Irish single mothers were not conspicuously successful, creating a surplus of Catholic babies available for adoption in Britain (Kornitzer, 1952: 52). Such a failure cannot have been wholly displeasing to the Irish authorities since it served to distort the nation’s illegitimacy rate by artificially pushing it downwards. It was therefore possible for the Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor (Report of the Commission, 1927: Appendix, Table V) to take comfort in Ireland’s relatively low official illegitimacy rate, which stood at 2.68 per cent in 1925. The statistics provided evidence (however spurious) of the virtuous adherence of the population to the principle of chastity.

The Great Depression and populist politics The Fianna Fail victory in the general election of 1932 and the ascent of Eamonn de Valera to office marked the beginning of a new chapter in Irish politics. Fianna Fail retained power without interruption until 1948. During these years, Eamonn de Valera enjoyed an unrivalled degree of personal authority over his party and government. Born in the USA, de Valera emerged as one of the commanders of the 1916 Rising. His resulting death sentence was commuted on the basis of his American citizenship, after a vigorous campaign in the Guardian newspaper. His austere nationalism and pious Catholicism, coupled with a bucolic view of Irish society, did not promise a radical break with the policies of his predecessors. Nonetheless, de Valera had suggested an identity of interests with the Labour Party during the 1932 general election. He continued to court Labour support after winning office. Labour, which had performed badly in the election, backed the minority Fianna Fail Government between 1932-33. The newly elected leader of the Labour Party in the Oireachtas (the combined houses of the Irish parliament including the Dáil and the Seanad), William Norton, made a forceful speech to the reassembled Dáil. He indicated the social programme which the Labour Party expected Fianna Fail to follow.

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Norton demanded: work or maintenance for 80,000 unemployed men and women; the construction of 40,000 houses; a scheme to provide pensions for widows and orphans; the regulation of food prices; and an industrial development strategy in which the worker was a partner in the production of wealth (Dáil Debates, 9 March 1932). De Valera’s social philosophy was defined in terms of the modest goal of ‘frugal comfort’. The attainment of ‘frugal comfort’ in de Valera’s mind depended on the pursuit of self-sufficiency in economic policy. On the face of it, de Valera’s ascetic vision did not portend a major policy departure. But, as Ferriter (2005: 363), notes: ‘Fianna Fail, having broken the connection with Sinn Fein, also learned from the mistakes of the movement, particularly regarding Sinn Fein’s lack of attention to social policy and the failure to think in terms of a long term strategy’. The electoral victory of Fianna Fail in 1932 took place against a background of a world depression ushered in by the Wall Street Crash in 1929. The Great Depression inevitably impacted on Irish living standards. This impact was muted because of the predominantly agricultural orientation of the Irish economy. But the protectionism which the depression gave rise to did affect Irish economic interests because it represented the ascendency of nationalism over internationalism in world trade. In Britain, the National Government adopted emergency powers, known as the ‘Doctor’s Mandate’, to erect tariff walls. De Valera’s economic philosophy was deeply rooted in the Sinn Fein ideology of self-sufficiency. Economic nationalism unquestionably appealed to him. As Tim Pat Coogan (1966: 600) has put it: ‘far more so than its predecessor, the de Valera administration was protectionist, seeking to build up industries in the shelter of tariff walls and discouraging foreign investment’. The first Fianna Fail budget was mildly redistributionist in character, raising the standard rate of income tax from 3s.6d. to 5s. in the pound, which was worth about 0.7 of a euro. It also introduced an extensive system of tariffs including some 43 new duties. It was likely that these protectionist measures would provoke a response from Ireland’s main trading partner, Britain. Another decision by the incoming de Valera administration further exacerbated Anglo-Irish fiscal tensions. On taking office, de Valera immediately put into effect a populist election pledge not to transmit land annuities owing to Britain as a result of the ‘Bright Clauses’ in the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870. Subsequent Land Acts expanded on this original measure. As a result of the Land Acts, landlords had been bought out by the state and their former estates distributed amongst the tenantry. In return, the tenantpurchasers were required to make annuity payments for an extended

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period to defray the costs of the settlement. In 1923, the Free State had undertaken to collect and transfer the annuity payments to Britain. There was considerable resentment at what was regarded in Ireland as an unfair financial imposition. De Valera’s repudiation of annuity payments was accompanied by several other highly populist gestures, the most notable being a decision not to contribute towards funding the pensions of former Royal Irish Constabulary officers. De Valera’s populist policies in the protectionist climate of the time provoked severe economic sanctions from the British government which introduced duties of 20 per cent on major Irish agricultural exports. Moreover, the British imposed an import quota on Irish cattle. Inevitably, the Irish government retaliated by imposing duties on British imports (Coogan, 1966: 601). The resulting ‘Economic War’ had a devastating effect on Irish trade, costing the country £48 million by 1938. During the first year of the Economic War, Irish trade slumped dramatically. Imports were reduced from £42.5 million to £35.75 million and exports fell from £27 million to £19.5 million (Coogan, 1966: 601). The decline in trade led to a severe agricultural depression, imposing considerable hardships on the rural population. However, the Economic War needs to be set in the wider context of the world climate of protectionism and the economic nationalism of the Fianna Fail government.

Unemployment and social assistance While the Great Depression did not directly affect Irish unemployment rates on the scale experienced by more developed industrial societies, it did have consequences for the size of the workforce. Net emigration slowed down to an annual rate of 17,000 persons per annum between 1936-46. However, set against a net emigration rate of 16.3 per 1,000 average population between 1881-91 the comparable figures for the decades 1926-36 and 1936-46 were small, being 5.6 and 6.3 respectively (Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Matters, 1948-54: 116). No doubt the changed political circumstances also helped to reduce emigration by giving people hope of a new and better future in Ireland. Unfortunately, social conditions were not promising in Ireland during the 1930s. For example, in 1933 Sarah Harrison, the veteran political activist and social campaigner, observed in reference to Dublin, ‘the conditions of many of the poor in this city are almost unbelievable’ (Irish Workers’ Voice, 11 February 1933). The advent of protectionist measures had resulted in a dramatic increase in the level of employment. In December 1931, there were 29,331 people on

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the live register of unemployed. By December 1932, this figure had nearly quadrupled to 102,619. Two years later, in December 1934, unemployment stood at 128,084 (Annual Report of the Department of Industry and Commerce, 1935: 32-33). Several unsuccessful attempts had been made in the 1920s to organise the unemployed to engage in social protest (Voice of Labour, 22 August, 1925). The 1930s unemployment crisis produced the loosely organised Irish Unemployed Workers’ Movement (IUWM). It was clearly inspired by Wal Hannington’s Communist National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Britain. This poor people’s social movement was to prove a considerable embarrassment to the Fianna Fail administration throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Its use of direct action tactics added an incendiary extra-parliamentary dimension to de Valera’s problems. While de Valera had succeeded in attracting the bulk of the workingclass vote and out-manoeuvring the Labour Party, he had not quelled the more radical elements on the political left. The IUWM formed part of the Republican Congress founded in 1934, which included radical republicans, communists, militant trade unionists and tenants’ leagues amongst its membership. George Gilmore (1978: 28) one of the founders of the Republican Congress, described its purpose as follows: ‘the thing to do, therefore, was to confront the forces of capitalism and imperialism with a congress of the Ireland of the poor’. In keeping with Sinn Fein ideology, the main thrust of the Congress’s social action strategy was directed towards slum housing. Nevertheless, its leading members, notably Peadar O’Donnell, also regularly spoke on IUWM platforms. Support for the unemployed extended far beyond the militant left. In Dundalk a local priest, Father Stokes, was the prime mover in organising a branch of the IUWM. However, Father Stokes’ involvement appears to have been primarily motivated by a desire to protect his flock from what he clearly regarded as pernicious political influences (Irish Workers’ Voice, 16 March 1935). In Cork, the Labour Party was the main inspiration behind the organisation of the unemployed (Irish Workers’ Voice, 16 March 1935). Consequently, while the IUWM had its roots in social protest and direct action giving it much in common with the far left, it attracted interest from a variety of sources. There can be no doubt that its existence posed a threat to public order which ultimately led the government to adopt coercive measures against it. But, for a while, the official line was placatory. Existing social legislation proved unequal to the unemployment crisis. Unemployment insurance had several major limitations. First, its coverage only encompassed a fraction of the workforce. Those

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engaged in agriculture were excluded from this form of provision. Second, eligibility depended on a record of previous contributions, for example, it was necessary to have six weeks’ contributions in order to receive one week’s benefit. Third, unemployment insurance benefit was available for only a limited period not exceeding 26 weeks in any single year. Home assistance was only available to the ‘destitute’. From the claimant’s point of view, there was the additional problem of Poor Law stigma associated with the receipt of home assistance. The Minister of Industry and Commerce, Sean Lemass (1899-1969), was led to observe in this context, ‘there is associated with it a taint of pauperism which has deterred many persons entitled to that assistance from applying for it’ (Dáil Debates, 22 November 1933). Lemass’s comment was made while introducing the Unemployment Assistance Act 1933 to the Dáil. This measure represented Fianna Fail’s principal initiative to deal with the unemployment crisis. It was, as its critics noted, a substantial development. In social policy terms, it was claimed to surpass comparable British legislation in the scale of generosity (Seanad Debates, 31 October 1933). The Unemployment Assistance Act 1933 provided financial assistance, popularly known as ‘the dole’ for persons not in receipt of unemployment insurance benefit, who were fit and available for work but unable to find it.

‘Invasion of industry by women’: Conditions of Employment Bill 1935 In 1932, Fianna Fail introduced the marriage bar, which required women in teaching and the civil service to retire from work once married (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 33). The Conditions of Employment Bill 1935 permitted the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Sean Leamass, the power to prohibit the employment of women or to fix the proportion of women to men in any industry. It had widespread support. The Leader of the Labour Party, William Norton, declared in a parliamentary speech: Faced as we are with a growing invasion of industry by women, and with the fact that, consequent upon that invasion, it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, for men to retain their hold on industry … I do not think there is any case to be made for permitting the present invasion of industry by women to go unchecked. (Dáil Debates, 27 June 1935)

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Margaret Ward (1983: 234) estimates that, in 1926, 60 per cent of the 329,000 women in work were either in farming or domestic service, while less than one in ten worked in industry noting, ‘between the years 1926 and 1936, women’s share of the industrial workforce rose from 20 per cent to almost 23 per cent, as the result of the establishment of new light industries’. Most of these jobs were unskilled in areas such as clothing, food, drink and tobacco, where female workers were traditionally concentrated. Most of the women concerned were under the age of 25 years. Nonetheless, the Conditions of Employment Bill empowered the Minister of Industry and Commerce to impose a blanket ban on women workers, if he so wished (Ward, 1983: 2345). This was draconian legislation by any international standard. The measure, which also purported to improve the conditions of the working-class population, was blatantly discriminatory against women workers. But it had considerable popular support. In a rather patriarchal sounding comment on the import of the Conditions of Employment Bill 1935, the Irish Press (9 May 1935), which was supportive of the Fianna Fail government, asserted: … The worker comes before profits and dividends. To him must go, first of all, a fair wage and Christian conditions of labour. If he is a young person the hours of work must be fitted to his capacity to stand the strain. Women workers must receive particular consideration. The Bill provided for a 48-hour week for industrial workers and six consecutive days’ annual leave with pay. A 40-hour week was introduced for young workers, who had not reached adult years. The shorter working week for young industrial workers and the guarantee of annual leave with pay were humane innovations. But the 48-hour week for adult workers simply brought employment legislation broadly into line with industrial practice. Moreover, agricultural workers, domestic servants, miners and those employed in the commercial and catering industries were excluded from these improvements in employment conditions. In essence, a large fraction of the workforce were not to benefit. An even more disturbing aspect of the Conditions of Employment Bill 1935 was that it conferred on the Minister of Industry and Commerce, Sean Lemass, power to control (or limit) women’s employment. The implications for women’s right to work in industry were considerable. The Irish Workers’ Voice (6 July 1935) perceived it as an attempt by the Fianna Fail administration to distract attention from

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the underlying causes of unemployment through an appeal to ‘the deep-seated prejudices of many male workers by saying that women cause unemployment and by their competition lower the wages paid to men’. The government’s resort to gender discrimination in its attempts to reduce the country’s labour surplus had responded to the demands of the vigorously anti-communist Male Workers’ Emancipation Association. At a meeting in Dublin Mansion House in 1933, this organisation had called for the removal of women from the work place (Irish Workers’ Voice, 6 July 1935). Fianna Fail had manifestly struck a popular chord in pandering to male prejudice. The Bill was passed by the Dáil and the Seanad (Senate) with only token resistance. As a consequence, Ireland was blacklisted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), which represented about a quarter of the country’s 20,000 women trade unionists, reacted with understandable anger towards the measure: Legislation which deprives one section of the community of their free rights as workers is a form of tyranny that no self-respecting citizen can tolerate, and is a step backwards to serfdom. The IWWU refuses to accept for women a position which leaves their economic position open to exploitation. (Irish Workers’ Voice, 27 July 1935) Prominent feminists voiced their disgust at a meeting held at the Dublin Mansion House on 20 November 1935. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington ‘denounced Lemass as a fascist and declared that any men who would displace women under such circumstances were nothing short of blacklegs’ (Ward, 1983: 235). This view was shared by others. Betty Sinclair, a leading member of the Communist Party, endorsed the charge of fascism arguing that the Bill ‘is only a step towards the carrying out of the slogan of Hitler, who, when he came to power, told the women of Germany that the place for them was the home, the Church and the children’ (Irish Workers’ Voice, 29 June 1935). This connection to the notorious Küche, Kirche and Kinder slogan of the Nazi Party in Germany was harsh given that Fianna Fail, unlike the Fine Gael opposition, had absolutely no association with the fascist movement (Manning, 1970). But Fianna Fail was a populist party exploiting chauvinistic popular prejudice. Ireland was a deeply traditionalist society, increasingly influenced by Catholic social teaching which consigned women to the domestic sphere. Inglis (1987: 208) has commented that, ‘faced with the threat of an economic

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individualism associated with urban industrialisation’, the Church sought to perpetuate ‘a notion that women had a natural vocation as housewives and mothers’. Unquestionably, Fianna Fail policy was deeply infused by a traditionalist Catholic perception of women’s role in society. The 1937 Constitution made Fianna Fail’s traditionalist attitude towards women’s rights explicit (see Chapter 4). Ultimately, however, the government was, undoubtedly, influenced as much by political opportunism as traditional patriarchal attitudes in their decision to introduce this discriminatory legislation, which set women’s rights back at least a generation. There were votes in gender discrimination!

De Valera’s demographic project: children’s allowances and family poverty The introduction of ‘children’s allowances’ in 1944 on the other hand was a major step on the road to the welfare state. It took social provision beyond the selectivist schemes which had characterised its development to date. Children’s allowances were to be made available on a universalist basis without a means test. Nor was the introduction of children’s allowances tied to contributions from the wage packet. The cost was to be met entirely from the Exchequer. The concept of family or children’s allowances first emerged in France in 1932. Its main purpose was to augment a population severely depleted by the First World War. The scheme was further elaborated with the Code de la Famille in 1939. In Britain, Eleanor Rathbone had argued, in her 1924 book The disinherited family, for ‘the endowment of the family’. A White Paper entitled ‘Family allowances’ was published in May, 1942. It strongly favoured the payment of an allowance to mothers for the maintenance of children. In December 1942, the influential Beveridge Report endorsed the principle of a non-contributory graduated payment for each child; this was based on Rowntree’s 1936 measure of subsistence (Rowntree, 1941). The British perceived the family allowance as an antidote to child poverty. Family allowances became law in Britain in 1945. In Ireland, a similar development occurred. The term ‘children’s allowance’ was employed rather than ‘family allowance’, emphasising the pro-natalist function of the scheme. Demographic considerations were of crucial importance in the Fianna Fail government’s decision to introduce children’s allowances in the 1940s. McKee (1986: 160) has observed in this regard, ‘during the [war-time] Emergency De Valera had shown a persistent interest in social policy, particularly where it appeared to have a bearing on the vexed question of population’. The natural increase (excess of

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births over deaths) in the population had evinced an erratic character throughout the century. Between 1901-10 the natural increase had averaged 5.6 per 1,000. It fell to 4.9 in the following decade, recovered to 5.8 during the 1920s, and dropped again to 5.2 between 1931 and 1940. In 1942, the natural increase jumped to 8.3 per 1,000 but fell back slightly in 1943 and 1944 (Report of the Department of Health, 19451949: 11). The natural increase was insufficient to offset the overall decline in population due to emigration throughout the century. The Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948-54: 23) remarked in this context, ‘an abnormally low rate of natural increase and a high rate of emigration have set the Twenty-six counties in sharp contrast with other European countries with which comparisons can be readily made’. It was against the background of this demographic crisis that de Valera decided to introduce children’s allowances. While de Valera had the support of the Catholic Church, which viewed the children’s allowance measure positively, it was opposed by more fiscally conservative elements within his government. Children’s allowances were also popular with women and had been promoted since the 1920s by the Irish Women’s Citizens and Local Government Association. However, contrary to the women activists’ view, the payment was made to the husband as purported head of the household (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 36-37). It would seem de Valera was primarily influenced by demographics in bringing forward what he viewed as a pro-natalist measure but others thought was a major step down the road to a welfare state.

Conclusion Independence (as noted in Chapter 2) had not brought about a social revolution in Ireland. On the contrary, the political gains achieved prior to decolonisation in the context of the growing labour ferment and the widening of the franchise were eroded. The People’s Budget (1909) was replaced by a taxation policy which redistributed wealth to the middle classes. Pensions were cut. Home assistance, which grew in line with burgeoning unemployment, was a source of concern to the new administration. Despite changes in nomenclature and cuts in the level of provision, the Poor Law remained in its degrading form. The promise of the Democratic Programme 1919 to further extend social rights had fallen on barren ground in the new nationalist state. It was a conservative Catholic state geared towards the interests of

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the urban bourgeoisie and rural Ireland. Radical land redistribution was to help mollify rural militancy. Lack of compassion towards the poor was accompanied by a rigid puritanism that not only involved intolerance of divorce but the punishment of women who violated the ideal of chastity. In short, the Free State established in 1922 was a socially conservative regime rooted in traditional Catholic values and wedded to the interests of the land owners, the professional classes and businessmen, who supported Cumann nGaedheal. It was unlikely that post-colonial Ireland could have been other than conservative since the Free State lacked an industrial base and a militant, organised labour movement. The great labour leaders of the early twentieth century, Connolly and Larkin, were either dead or in exile, and the labour movement, despite its impressive parliamentary performance in the Dáil, was essentially a minority interest. The Fianna Fail party, which claimed to speak for the dispossessed (both urban and rural), had been formed in 1926 from the ranks of the moderate AntiTreaty members of Sinn Fein. In 1932, they were elected to office. With Fianna Fail came new promise. The hope of social reform had been rekindled after ten years of dormancy under Cumann na nGaedheal. Fianna Fail was successful in constructing itself as a popular movement. In reality, it was a populist ‘catch-all’ party that was skilled in exploiting nationalist and chauvinist sentiment, ethnic loyalty to Catholicism and the ‘dangers’ of alien culture, including socialism.

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FOUR

Religious nationalism, sectarianism and anti-semitism Corporatism was originally advocated by the Catholic Church in the 1930s as a way of upholding traditional society in an unfolding capitalist economy. It was argued if people are integrated into an organic entity built on partnership and solidarity the twin dangers individualism and class conflict, could be avoided. Kieran Allen (2000: 38) The new Irish Free State sought to generate social integration by reorganising the cultural architecture of Irish society. This was a deeply counter-intuitive political strategy. The promotion of Catholicism to the official religious belief system did build on the existing subconscious architecture of the Irish mind. Gaelic and Catholic became synonymous. Less realistically, the new regime sought to look backwards over millennia to an imagined Celtic ancestry with its own distinctive customs and lifestyle. A sense of community was to be constructed through the rediscovery of a cultural tradition based upon myths, songs and – above all – language. Cultural traditions are normally handed from parents to children. The language revival movement in Ireland was confronted with the elemental problem that the Gaelic language was effectively dead and English was the vernacular of the home. Fintan O’Toole, grasping the irony behind the revivalist project, has commented: ‘More broadly, the nationalist desire to replace one culture with another came up against the Irish habit, when faced with incompatible alternatives of choosing both’ (The Irish Times, 10 September 2016). In a project of daring social engineering, the government set about using the school to reacculturate Irish society. Brown (1985: 47) comments: ‘the government did in fact strenuously commit itself in such unlikely conditions to one radical policy – the apparently revolutionary policy of language revival’. He further notes that ‘the gaelicization of education encountered little opposition – only a few voices were raised to suggest that this demand that children should shoulder most

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of the burden of language revival might prove counter-productive’ (1985: 52). It was indeed to prove counterproductive because it was essentially counter-intuitive. The Irish government was seeking to create an exclusionary national and ethnic identity, what is currently termed ‘cultural essentialism’. However, it underestimated the inherited disposition to emulate parents and peer groups and to participate in popular (English-speaking) culture, for example, football, music, dance and film. Cultural essentialism, so fundamental to the project of Irish nation building, foundered on the rock of popular cultural resistance. While it was possible to construct a rigorously Catholic society defined by nationalism, corporatist values, sectarianism, censorship and moral and racial exclusivity, it was not possible to gaelicise Irish society. The process of Entzauberung – disenchantment or literally ‘demagification’, which sociologist Max Weber regarded as one of the defining characteristics of the modern world – was too advanced for gaelicization to succeed. Moreover, urban society was far from reconciled to this project. As a policy initiative, it has been derided by its critics as the ‘Green Elephant’ (Blanshard, 1954: 140). This chapter examines the efforts of the nation builders of a new Ireland to construct a socially integrated culture. This would be shaped into a socially conservative communitarian form inspired by Catholic corporatism, cultural nationalism and rejection of modernity.

Religion, education and cultural policy J. H. Whyte (1980: 16) in his seminal study of Church-State relations observes, ‘the interpenetration of church and state is seen most clearly in the field of education’. We have already mentioned schools as being central to a cultural policy of reacculturating Irish youth. From the outset, Irish schools were established along denominational lines. John Coolahan (1981: 5) asserts that, from the establishment of primary education during the 1830s, the system ‘became increasingly denominational in fact’. Religiously segregated education has continued to the present day, with 93 per cent of primary schools still controlled by the Catholic Church. Coolahan (1981: 53) further notes that after the establishment of the Free State in 1922, apart from some changes in the financing of education, secondary schools ‘continued as purely private denominational institutions’, provided they complied with the rules laid down by central government. As Whyte (1980: 36) has put it: ‘Ministers were products of the same culture as the bishops, and shared the same values’.

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From the inception of the Free State in 1922, the Irish language became a compulsory part of the school curriculum. A partnership between Church and State emerged within the education system, as part of a broader Church-State alliance that defined the governance of Irish social policy. It promoted ‘Irishness’ in the formation of new Irish identity. Cultural nationalism infused the curriculum with an emphasis on Irish history and geography in order to ‘develop the best traits of national character and inculcate national pride and self-respect’ (Coolahan, 1981: 40). Similarly, religious teaching permeated the curriculum and school ethos. Many of the teachers were members of the clergy. The overall objectives of the partnership between Church and State were to fulfil three core tasks: a sound religious education; the promotion of cultural nationalism through the gaelicisation process; and the preparation of young people for clerical and professional occupations (O’Donoghue, 1999: 89). It wasn’t until the 1960s that the curriculum was modernised (Powell et al 2012: 17). Foster (1988: 534) views the new state as essentially Catholic: … the new regime was in a very real sense confessional. From its origins, the Free State government had carefully lined up the Roman Catholic hierarchy on its side, consulting bishops on constitutional matters and receiving in return powerful support in the edgy days of the civil war … In time, the Church made its line clear on social policy. The control of education and the care of children were off-limits to the state in terms of service delivery and ownership. Surprisingly, there was a virtual silence within civil society, including the Protestant minority, who were having some of their worst fears of a sectarian society confirmed. Ferriter (2005: 340) suggests that Protestants were made to acquiesce by a raft of repressive legislation to regulate cultural expression and free speech introduced by the Free State. In a sectarian society, Protestants were permitted to provide their own schools with funding from the state. But they were discriminated against, with antiMasonic sentiment fuelling prejudice against Protestants during the 1920s as a clannish economic elite (Whyte, 1980: 40-1). Jews were not treated with open hostility during the first decade of the new state (Keogh, 1998: 79). However, Keogh (1998: 92) also notes that Jewish people in Ireland during the 1930s experienced ‘an undertow of hostility and in some cases naked hostility’. Public libraries became a focus for religious zealotry and sectarianism. These important cultural facilities were accused of containing on their

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shelves ‘a flood of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity’ (Ferriter, 2009: 205). A serious sectarian episode occurred when a Protestant was appointed Mayo County Librarian in 1931. Opposition emerged in the form of a local boycott on the basis that it was inappropriate for a Protestant to be in charge of the reading facilities for a predominantly Catholic population and particularly (as Eamonn de Valera pointed out in the Dáil) the reading habits of children (Dáil Debates, 17 June 1931). Mayo County Council, which had approved the appointment, was prorogued by the government and the county librarian transferred to another post before peace was restored. There was no debate during this sordid sectarian affair about the cultural rights of Protestants (8 per cent of the population in the 1930s); national politicians did not regard these as seminal to the controversy (Whyte, 1980: 44-7). Nor was there any public recognition that such behaviour amounted to persecution. The 1922 Constitution (Article 8) defended religious toleration, asserting: ‘Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen’. Article 8 also outlawed the endowment directly or indirectly of any religion; this was clearly at odds with the dominant position of the Catholic Church in the governance of welfare and education in the new state. The liberal values of the 1922 Constitution posed a fundamental challenge to the primacy of the Catholic Church in the Irish polity. This led to its replacement by the 1937 Constitution. This brought constitutional theory into line with constitutional practice in a sectarian state (as discussed later in this chapter).

Religion, culture and identity Religion in Ireland has been historically multi-layered. It is visible in its various public manifestations in Irish culture through the ages: • Its Palaeolithic origins in rock art, burials and cultural symbols and practices; • The Christianisation of Irish society during the Dark Ages; • The later emergence of folk religious practices, manifest in the belief in the magical properties (for example, healing powers) of shrines, holy wells and religious objects and the importance of public ritual in patterns/festivals, wakes and dancing in the celebration of life and death; • The emergence of the institutional Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, which ushered in the ‘devotional revolution’ –

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involving the imposition of a rigid Victorian sexual ethic on Irish society and the outlawing of folk religious practices, as ‘pagan’ ritual; • The Catholic Church’s entry during the twentieth century into a central role in the invisible governance of the country through the Church-State alliance that allowed it to set the ethical agenda for Irish society, including the formulation of social policy. In practical terms, modern religion refers to prayer, worship, meditation and pilgrimage. In this sense, religion is a personal experience that enables the believer to escape the one-dimensionality of the present and connect with an imagined past and potential future. That is the ‘message behind the message’ of religious belief (Ellwood, 2008). However, religion is not simply a personal experience. It is also a sociological phenomenon. Religious participation involves group membership, which may range from isolated ‘cults’ or ‘sects’ to the great world religions, such as Islam, Buddhism or Christianity. Within Christianity, Catholicism is its most traditional and most popular denominational form. Membership of a group also confers identity, which is not simply about membership of a religious group but may also include membership of a local community or nation state. Ethics – the rules which guide the organisation of society – are often shaped by religious beliefs. Only secular societies that separate Church and State are free from these cultural influences (and often not entirely so). That was the purpose behind the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which sought to replace religion by reason. It has also formed the ideological basis of secular republican revolutions in the modern world. Ireland did not directly experience the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as a popular cultural phenomenon. Instead the Penal Laws, which sought to suppress Catholicism, created a powerful bond between the oppressed population and the Catholic Church. This experience impacted heavily on the formation of Irish identity as a nation state. Catholicism and nationalism fused in the Irish mind, creating a mystical identity in social policy formation and governance within the new state. Religion and religious membership were to prove highly influential. While religious identity is equally shared by men and women, the sociological reality has been that women experience religion differently because of their exclusion from the power structures of Catholicism. The all-male hierarchy of bishops prescribes the ethical agenda for all members of the Catholic Church – male and female. As the family is central to the Catholic worldview, women’s role has been traditionally

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prescribed as a mother in the home. Patriarchy and domesticity combine to define women’s place in society. Paul Blanshard published a searing critique of the role of religion in Ireland in 1954, in a book entitled The Irish and Catholic power. He justified his intellectual endeavour, observing ‘the extent of Irish Catholic power would be of little concern to the non-Catholic world if Irish Catholicism happened to be a purely devotional phenomenon … what takes Irish Catholicism out of this protected reservation and makes it a fair subject for political analysis is that it has become a great political as well as religious phenomenon’ (Blanshard, 1954: 29). In Blanshard’s (1954: 30-2) view the power of the Catholic Church in the invisible governance of the Irish state represented a wider threat to Western democracies. The liberal 1922 Constitution had guaranteed the rights of religious minorities but it was replaced in 1937 by a Constitution that embedded Catholic power in the governance of the state. Article 44 recognised the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church (see the section titled Education, sectarianism and cultural segregation). Text and context merged into a denominational state apparatus that was to suppress individual freedoms and human rights through a process that Blanshard (1954: 83) called the ‘etiquette in a clerical state’.

Education, sectarianism and cultural segregation The promulgation of the papal decree Ne Temere in 1907 had proven to be highly divisive. This decree ordained that children in ‘mixed marriages’ (that is, between Catholics and Protestants) must be brought up as Catholics. It was to prove a major influence on the decision to partition the island of Ireland between north and south, because Ulster Protestants viewed it as ‘the apocalypse on a biblical scale’ (Bartlett, 2010: 373). They equated Ne Temere with attempts to gaelicise the education system, cutting Protestants off from their ethnic identity as British citizens. Bartlett (2010: 374) asserts that Protestants believed they would be ‘swiftly overwhelmed by Gaelic speakers brandishing Ne Temere decrees’. The Protestant population went into a gradual decline that was to marginalise it demographically, falling 3 per cent in the Free State in the 1920s (Foster, 1988: 534). Between 1946 and 1961, the Protestant population declined nearly five times faster than the population as a whole. At the end of the 1960s, the Protestant population in the Republic of Ireland stood at just 130,000. As a community, its decline was visible in school and church closures across the country (Ferriter, 2005: 582). The implications for the ideal of a pluralist ‘republican’ state

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were very serious. It had become a vanishing possibility – strangulated at birth by religious nationalism. Ireland was emerging as a monolithic sectarian society, with the Catholic Church in a powerful position of cultural dominance that shaped both policy and politics. The papal encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI, Christian education of youth (1929), set out the core principles of Catholic education. It asserted that Catholic children were not permitted to attend nonCatholic secular or inter-denominational schools and that their school’s curriculum should reflect the values of the Church. The Minister of Education, according to Paul Blanshard (1954: 125), in a public address at Carlow in 1938, declared ‘that in no country in the world does the national system of education approach the Catholic ideal system as in the Free State’. Blanshard (1954: 128) argues that there was a shared acceptance of segregated education: ‘The assumption behind both the Protestant and Catholic theories of education in Ireland is that Catholics and Protestants will remain culturally segregated for their whole lives’. Cultural segregation also applied to Jews, who were provided with state-funded Jewish schools in Dublin and Cork. Lifelong cultural segregation was viewed positively by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. The decision by the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, in 1944 to ban Catholics from attending Ireland’s oldest university, Trinity College Dublin (founded in 1592), on the basis it was ‘Protestant’ was illustrative of the growing sectarianism in education. McQuaid decreed: ‘Any Catholic who disobeys this law is guilty of a mortal sin and while he persists in disobedience is unworthy to receive the sacraments’ (quoted in Cooney, 1999: 167). The ‘ban’ on Catholics attending Trinity College was accompanied by a prohibition on Catholic children attending non-Catholic schools (Cooney, 1999: 168). While McQuaid’s jurisdiction initially only applied to Dublin, in 1956 his edict became the national position of Catholic bishops (Cooney, 1999: 319). The ban on Catholics attending Trinity College Dublin was not relaxed until 1970, and then only because the large number of Catholics attending the university made it ‘an embarrassing remnant from a past age’ (Cooney, 1999: 412). Student numbers ‘soared’ (Cooney, 1998: 552). Given the closure of Protestant schools due to population decline, the Catholic Church was adamant about stopping Catholics accessing Protestant schools. This policy continued to be rigorously imposed. The issue of sectarianism in the Irish educational system was also highlighted by a 1957 boycott of Protestant businesses in Fethardon-Sea, a small town in Co. Wexford. The boycott arose when the Protestant wife of a Catholic man decided to defy the local priest by

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not sending her children to the local Catholic school. She disappeared with her two children. Her husband did not give in to the intimidation. The incident became an international news story. A Protestant bishop referred to the case as ‘denominational apartheid’. But the Catholic bishops continued to remain silent ‘about this shameful incident of open sectarianism’ (Ferriter, 2005: 582). Eventually, Eamonn de Valera repudiated the boycott stating: ‘I can only say, from what has appeared in public, that I regard this boycott as ill-conceived, ill-considered, and futile for the achievement of the purpose for which it seems to have been intended …’ (quoted in Keogh, 2005: 247). The children returned with their mother and were schooled at home. The family did not receive an apology from the state until the late 1990s (Ferriter, 2005: 582). Nonetheless (as already pointed out), the Irish school system continues to be largely divided along sectarian lines (with the exception of a small minority of Educate Together schools).

Anti-semitism, refugees and asylum policy Dermot Keogh (1998: 192), in his book Jews in twentieth century Ireland: Refugees, anti-semitism and the holocaust, estimates the number of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in war-time Europe and accepted for asylum by the Irish government may have been as low as 60. Ireland’s official response to the Holocaust was supportive of Jews, but not to the extent of intervening on their behalf. While the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Eamonn de Valera, responded positively towards Jews in danger of extermination and consideration was given to accepting two large groups of child refugees, no official action was taken to enable their relocation to Ireland (Keogh, 1998: 191). The remarkably small figure of 60 refugee admissions reflects the prevailing level of antisemitism in Ireland. It also reflects the intransigence of asylum policy within the Department of Justice (Keogh, 2005: 130-1; Ferriter, 2005: 387). Keogh (1998: 165) observes that ‘the ungenerous nature of the county’s alien and refugee policies had left many members of the Jewish community dejected’. He cites numerous cases of harsh and indifferent treatment of Jewish people in need of support by the Irish authorities. The Catholic Church and populist politicians contributed to a climate of xenophobic intolerance towards Jews. John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin during the Second World War, was opposed to Jewish-Christian dialogue (Keogh, 2005: 173), essentially suppressing the Pillar of Fire Society that had been set up in response to evidence of the Holocaust in Europe. The populist right-wing politician Oliver J Flanagan, contesting the 1943 general election, declared: ‘There is

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one thing that Germany did and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout them out of this country it doesn’t matter a hairs breath what orders you make’ (quoted in Keogh 1998: 172). Dermot Keogh (2005: 132) records that ‘there were vulgar displays of anti-Semitism during the war’. Longford County Council unanimously agreed a petition to the Irish Government asserting that there were too many foreigners in Ireland (particularly Jews) having their names changed to names of Irish ethnic origin in a display of ‘repugnant sentiment’ (Keogh, 2005: 133). Racism was at the root of Irish asylum policy in which Jews were represented as a minority that could not be assimilated and so threatened the ethnic purity of the Irish population. It wasn’t a new cultural phenomenon. The ‘Limerick pogrom’ in 1904, when the Jewish sector of the city was attacked resulting from ‘dogmatic, revivalist and inflammatory preaching’ by a Catholic priest, demonstrates that anti-semitism was deeply ingrained in the Irish psyche. The priest suggested that Jews were ‘sucking the blood of other nations and must not be allowed to do the same in Ireland’ (Ferriter, 2005: 90-1).

Public morality, youth and sexuality J. H. Whyte (1980: 24-5) comments that, at the inception of the new state, the Church was deeply concerned with a decline in public morality, notably in the area of youth and sexuality. The modern mass media – the cinema, radio and British Press – were constructed as a major threat to public morals. Dancing was a central theme in cultural politics and identities as Barbara O’Connor (2013) has demonstrated in her book The Irish dancing: Cultural politics and identities, 1900-2000. The clergy roundly condemned dances imported from outside Ireland, such as jazz. Bishop Doherty of Galway in his 1924 Lenten Pastoral declared: ‘The dances indulged in were not clean, healthy, natural Irish dances. They were, on the contrary, importations from the vilest dens of London, Paris, New York, direct and unmistakable incitements to evil thought and evil desires’ (quoted in O’Connor, 2013: 41). The Public Dance Hall Act 1935 was intended to outlaw ‘degenerate dancehalls’. It served to suppress local dancing in community halls and people’s households. The state’s entry into the regulation of public dancing had a paradoxical impact. It gave rise to commercial dancehalls that changed the nature of innocent rural social life. The Ken Loach film Jimmy’s Hall (2014) encapsulates the repressive cultural environment of Free State Ireland. It is based on the real life story of James Gralton. A labour organiser returns to Ireland from the

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USA in 1932. Gralton reopens a dancehall in his local community for young people. He is driven out by the parish priest and the IRA, which symbolically burn the dancehall. He becomes the first Irish citizen to be deported to the USA. The beating of a free-spirited girl for laughing at the local priest encapsulates the morally repressive atmosphere.

Censorship and women’s subordination A raft of legislative measures was introduced during the 1920s, designed to impose a rigid code of morality reflecting ‘the puritan streak in Irish Catholicism’ and its obsession with the control of sexuality (Whyte, 1980: 29). The Censorship of Films Act 1923 appointed a film censor with the power to both cut and ban films. It was followed by the infamous Censorship of Publications Act 1929 that established a Censorship of Publications Board with the power to ban any book deemed to be indecent or obscene. This measure was introduced following an inquiry by the Committee on Evil Literature in 1926. Its advocates included the Catholic Truth Society and Knights of Columbanus, representing the Church’s voice in civil society. Censorship of books was opposed by some of Ireland’s greatest writers, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty and George Russell (Ferriter, 2005: 342). Many of the greatest literary achievements of Irish authors, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, were banned. Other repressive social measures severely impacted upon women. Divorce was outlawed in the Irish Free State regardless of religious denomination. Women were denied free legal aid in the court system. A wife could not exclude her violent and abusive husband from the family home. Her husband could disinherit her and had the right to sue any other man she formed a partnership with (McLaughlin, 2001: 231). The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935 (section 17) which prohibited the sale and importation of contraceptives, reinforced female subordination and domesticity, as well as the right to control over her fertility. This measure had been shaped by the Carrigan Committee (1930), which examined the state of public morality with particular reference to juvenile prostitution. The Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (JCWSSW) was established in 1935 and set out to address the sexual exploitation of young women. The JCWSSW was chauvinistically dismissed by Cecil Barrett of the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau (CSWB) as ‘run by a very small group who met in the afternoon, when other people were working’ (cited in Ferriter, 2009: 228).

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The 1937 Constitution and family solidarity The 1937 Constitution enshrined women’s subordination in the basic law of the country. Eugene McLaughlin (2001: 230) comments in relation to the cultural politics of this constitutional change (which replaced the more liberal and secular 1922 Constitution): ‘women’s fears about the state and the Catholic Church were confirmed when de Valera unveiled the 1937 Constitution’. The 1937 Constitution has variously been described as creating ‘a theocratic state’ (McLaughlin, 2001: 230), containing ‘strong theocratic implications’ (Foster, 1988: 544) and addressing ‘the needs and aspirations of a Catholic nation (Bartlett, 2010: 446). While Article 44 of the 1937 Constitution endorsed ‘the special position’ of the Catholic Church (revoked in 1972), it did not impose a ‘theocracy’ on Ireland as a formal system of government (Ferriter, 2005: 409). However, its ethos was closely in line with Catholic social teaching, replacing what de Valera regarded as the ‘pagan’ 1922 Constitution with a system of values that were clearly and demonstrably ‘Christian’ (Bartlett, 2010: 446-7). The future Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), has been described as the ‘co-maker’ of the 1937 Constitution (Cooney, 1999: 94). His influence over Article 41 containing the ‘social policy principles’ in the 1937 Constitution is evident: 41.1.1 The State recognizes the Family as the natural, primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights antecedent and superior to all positive law. 2. The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State. 41.2.1 In particular, the State recognizes that by her life within the family home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. 2. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home. Leading feminists, such as Louie Bennett and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, vigorously protested against Article 41. The British-based women’s

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rights lobby campaign, the Six Point Group, denounced Article 41 as embodying ‘a fascist and slave conception of women’ (Bartlett, 2010: 450). But the principle of family solidarity had triumphed as part of de Valera’s Christian social state.

The Catholic social movement and organic community J. H. Whyte (1980: 66-7) argues that the Catholic ‘social movement’, which was very strong in continental Europe, developed late in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s. The ideas exposed by social Catholicism have deep roots in European society, personified by Leon Harmel in France and Franz Brandts in Germany. Bismarck’s first tentative steps in Germany to create a welfare state, through his social insurance programme, was in part inspired by the Catholic social movement (Hutton, 2002: 64). Victorian friendly societies in Britain and Ireland mirrored continental engagement with mutualism. The Scottish industrialist and utopian socialist, Robert Owen, found strong support for his cooperative principles amongst the Irish Catholic hierarchy. He was invited to speak at the Irish Catholic University, Maynooth College, where his ideas were warmly received. Behind social Catholicism was the concept of organic community ‘in which property-holders accepted obligations to the common ideal – and that work in particular should not be exploitative’ (Hutton, 2002: 65). Catholic concerns with poverty have been very real, arising out of a strong sense of mutual obligation that goes to the heart of a Christian community, where rich and poor are organically linked by social bonds. However, social Catholicism parts company with the egalitarian principles espoused by modernist political movements – most notably socialism, but also feminism. The modernist preoccupation with social revolution is anathema to the conservative social Catholic vision that emphasises continuity with the past. Hostility to socialism has been the hallmark of Social Catholicism. An appeal against socialism was made by a Dublin Catholic priest, Fr O’Loughlin, in which he darkly warned ‘take heed to yourself and to the whole flock, for ravenous wolves will enter in among you, not sparing the flock’. Fr O’Loughlin was preaching to an inflamed working class, which had been radicalised by the 1913 Lockout in Dublin, the most momentous event in Irish labour history. He continued: There is no gainsaying the fact that the Catholic worker is ‘right up’ against Socialism. Principles distinctly Socialistic in their character are being slowly and steadily disseminated

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amongst them, and not a few have been insidiously cajoled into the belief that practical Catholicity and Socialism go hand in hand together. Poor ignorant dupes! How easily they are befooled and carried away by the clap-trap of selfseeking agitators, and how blind and deaf they are to the truth. Once and for all, let the Catholic worker understand that no-one can be a good practical Catholic and at the same time be a Socialist. The two things are incompatible. Nay, I will go further, and I will say, with the utmost deliberation, that the deadliest opponents that Christianity, and consequently Catholicity, have to contend with in the world today are Socialist Labour Leaders. Christianise the Labour movement and it will be worthy to live and flourish. De-Christianise it, banish religion from the movement altogether – that is what the Socialist wants, and disaster is spelt for a movement otherwise full of grand possibilities for the uplifting and welfare of the workers. (The Liberator, 4 October 1913) This statement makes clear the political divisions between Christianity and socialism in the battle for the hearts and minds of working-class people. Social Catholicism became the hallmark of Eamon De Valera’s Fianna Fail party first elected to office in 1932. In 1937, a new Constitution was introduced based upon Catholic social principles. By the mid1930s, socialist hostility to the new regime was apparent in its reaction to the Unemployment Assistance Act 1933. An editorial in The Irish Workers’ Voice (17 March 1934), ‘A mockery of the unemployed’, is illustrative: This is the total of unemployed achieved by the Fianna Fail government in the third year of the building of the Christian Social State. Fianna Fail’s estimates for 1934 include an additional £1,500,000 for the Unemployment Assistance Act which comes into operation at the end of the month. That’s an average of 5s. per claimant for each of the 80,000 not now getting benefit. The new Bill, as we said from the first, is a sham. Married men with families will get less in the big towns. Single men can be denied benefit under the “means test”. Men with pensions will be much worse off. Slave labour camps can

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be started. The Bill is purposely honeycombed with snags. Everywhere the unemployed thousands should be roused against this cruel mockery. Demand full Labour Exchange rates and no means test! Social Catholicism clearly competed with socialism. But it was an essentially conservative movement. It found a voice in Christian democracy that linked it firmly to the emergence of mass democracy. However, other Christian conservatives looked to corporatism as a bulwark against the rising socialist tide. The appeal of corporatism was that it sought to silence the clamorous demands of class politics. Essential to the corporatist vision of society was the concept of ‘subsidiarity’, rooted in Catholic social thought.

Social Catholicism, corporatism and vocationalism The concept of subsidiarity reflected the influence of corporatist ideology in 1930s Ireland. It sought to undermine the class appeal of socialism through an alternative system of vocational organisation. The corporate State achieved its strongest endorsement in fascist regimes, notably Italy and Germany. But it was also influential in authoritarian conservative Catholic countries, including Spain, Portugal and France (under the Vichy regime). Ireland, with an ostensibly democratic constitution, had incorporated ‘vocationalist’ 1 elements into its governance. The structure of the Irish Senate (Seanad), established under the 1937 Constitution, was explicitly vocationalist. However, this enthusiasm for corporatism must be viewed within the context of Ireland’s intense loyalty to Catholic social teaching. The concept of subsidiarity was at its core. Subsidiarity refers to a principle of government endorsed by Pope Pius XI in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (Forty Years) promulgated in 1931: It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order, for a larger and higher association to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower societies. Of its very nature, the true aim of all social activity should be to help the members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb them. The State … should leave to smaller groups the settlement of business of minor importance, which otherwise would

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greatly distract it; it will thus carry out with greater freedom, power and success the tasks belonging to it alone. The more faithfully this principle of subsidiary function be followed … the greater will be both social authority and social efficiency, and the happier and more prosperous the condition of the Commonwealth. (paras 79-80) Fr Jerome O’Leary, a Catholic sociologist and prominent exponent of the concept of subsidiarity in Ireland, defined it in simpler terms, stating ‘a larger and higher association should not arrogate to itself functions which can be performed with reasonable efficiency by smaller and lower societies’ (O’Leary, 1954b: 321). He also stated: … if we accept, then, as we must, this principle of subsidiarity as being of universal validity, it follows that the State, like any other society, has a specific function of its own and is not entitled to take on any function which it pleases or any function which a misguided electorate may think fit to try to foist upon it. The implications of the concept of subsidiarity for the social policy makers in Ireland were abundantly clear. The state should not assume responsibility for social service provision if help could be alternatively provided through individual initiative, family assistance or voluntary association. As Fr O’Leary put it, ‘State intervention should always be regarded as merely a first-aid measure’ (O’Leary, 1954a: 61). Proponents of the concept of subsidiarity grounded its rationale in an appeal to public opinion based on a fear of the totalitarian powers of the State. ‘During the last century the spirit of Individualism or Liberalism was in the ascendant’, wrote Fr O’Leary, adding, ‘during this century the inevitable reaction set in and, as is common with all reactions, the pendulum swung violently to the other extreme, the extreme of totalitarianism’ (O’Leary, 1953: 552-3). Fr O’Leary believed, ‘this overstressed the second truth, that man needs the State, and openly denied the compensating one that the State exists for a man with the result that the individual was reduced to the status of a unit in a herd or cog in a machine’ (O’Leary, 1953: 552-3). In Fr O’Leary’s view, ‘sane Sociology’ must ‘regard the State as a social organism but not as a social octopus’. His ecclesiastical colleague Dr Cornelius Lucey, Bishop of Cork, observed in similar vein in an essay condemning state control of industry, ‘the reason is that the bigger the enterprise (and nationalisation makes State enterprise a veritable

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colossus) the greater the danger that each person working in it will be treated as a more cog or a cipher’ (Lucey, 1947: 24). Dr Lucey believed that personal independence and private enterprise were too precious to be bartered for ‘a socialised mess of pottage’ (Lucey, 1947: 24). He unequivocall, stated the Catholic position, ‘we want social reform, but we want it the Papal Encyclical’s way, not the Marxist-Leninist way or the Monopoly Capitalist way’ (Lucey, 1947: 24). The highly politicised views expressed by these clergymen reflect the broad thrust of Catholic social thought in Ireland at the time, which was well organised. The inauguration of the Christus Rex (Christ King) Society in 1941 established a framework to disseminate these ideas amongst the clergy in parishes throughout Ireland. The ideas originally instilled during clerical training at Maynooth College were to be followed up and developed by the newly formed society. Socially active priests were to be kept in touch with the Church’s teaching on secular affairs with a view to preserving orthodoxy. The society hoped, through its quarterly journal Christus Rex and an annual Social Studies Conference, to promote awareness amongst priests of developments in Catholic social thought mainly deriving from papal encyclicals. The direct influence of papal encyclicals, notably Quadragesimo Anno, can clearly be detected in the pronouncements of the members of the Christus Rex Society. A demand for the adoption of vocational organisational principles in Ireland was expressed in two important social documents published in the 1940s. One was official, the Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation, 1943. The second was published in 1945 by Dr Dignan, Bishop of Clonfert, and entitled Social security: Outlines of a scheme on national organisation (Dignan, 1945). The public significance attached to Bishop Dignan’s pamphlet, which took on a status akin to a government White Paper, was indicative in itself of extensive clerical influence over the policy-making process. Bishop Dignan’s authority was not, however, purely ecclesiastical. He had accepted the chairmanship of the newly created National Health Insurance Society in 1936. This made him not only the Catholic Church’s natural spokesman on social policy but an important figure in the secular sphere in his own right. Moreover, Bishop Dignan’s scheme addressed the application of vocational principles in a specific area of government activity, unlike the Commission on Vocational Organisation which had taken a global view of public policy. The distinction between the temporal and spiritual spheres was further blurred by the appointment of the forceful Bishop Browne of Galway as chairman of the Commission on Vocational Organisation.

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The Commission on Vocational Organisation identified bureaucracy as the principal problem in Irish government (Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation, 1943). But it did not advocate a return to laissez-faire. It acknowledged that the growth of state intervention was ‘for the most part demanded by the public for the protection and promotion of the common good’. However, the report contended that ‘bureaucracy is not identical with State control’, concluding, ‘it is but one form or method of State control’ (Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation, 1943). The Commissioners advocated the establishment of a National Vocational Assembly that would be comprised of a variety of vocational interests (Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation, 1943). It was to be the pinnacle of a complex framework of lower vocational bodies that formed a hierarchical structure. Separate representation for labour was conspicuous by its absence. In the corporate scheme of things, there was no place for class conflict. The Commission’s proposal did not meet with political approval. Varley and Curtin (2002: 28) have noted: ‘For a time, in the 1930s, the Fianna Fail-controlled state seemed to be sympathetic to the idea of re-organising society and governance along vocationalist lines, but it ultimately took fright at the radical implications of the proposals of The Commission on Vocational Organisation’. A similar lack of approval was evident in response to a plan to reorganise the health services along vocational lines. Devised by Bishop Dignan, it epitomised the struggle for national hegemony between Church and State. Bishop Dignan’s pamphlet included a comprehensive welfare reform plan. Barrington (1987: 150) has observed in reference to this plan: ‘Dr. Dignan’s recommendations applied some old and some new ideas to the problems of the 1940s, expressed in the moral language of Catholic sociology’. The Bishop sought to address the 1942 Beveridge Report, which had provided the blueprint for the creation of the British welfare state. He dismissed the British welfare state, on the grounds that the British were ‘not noted for their Christian spirit, as they were materialistic in their conception and merely palliative in their results’ (Dignan, 1945: 7). With equal dogmatism, Dignan asserted that social policy in a Catholic country should be informed by the Church’s social teaching, ‘built on the strong foundations of Christianity and not on the shifting sands of ‘economics’ nor should they erode family responsibility’ (Dignan, 1945: 36). Bishop Dignan’s plan was boldly vocationalist in orientation. The Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation (1943) dismissed the Dignan Plan as a paper exercise, which would be heavily

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dependent on state subventions. But this aspect of the Bishop’s proposals had a populist quality. Criticism of this kind was likely to rebound. Barrington (1987: 151) has noted that ‘while the discomfiture of Dr Dignan at the hands of the Fianna Fail government may not have upset his fellow bishops unduly, the heavy-handed way in which his proposals were dismissed could be construed as a sign of the bureaucratic mentality and arrogance of central government’. Bishop Dignan had lost the vocationalist argument, but he had succeeded very publicly in putting the reform of the welfare system at the top of the political agenda. His populism was to find echoes in the communal populism of local clergy. In this sense, ecclesiastical interests were far from vanquished by the State, which was palpably on the defensive. Civil society provided the Church with an alternative theatre for its vocationalist ideas.

Muintir na Tire and rural community development Muintir na Tire (People of the Countryside) was founded in 1931 by a Catholic priest, Canon John Hayes (1887-1957), whose strong personality dominated the organisation. It was launched at a meeting in the Commercial Buildings, Dame Street, in the centre of Dublin. Muintir na Tire originally promoted itself as a cooperative organisation dedicated to promoting rural renewal. Its initial identification with an economic orientation was symbolised in the commercial title, Muintir na Tire Limited. Politically, Varley and Curtin (2002: 28) have argued that Hayes’s ideas were consistent ‘with a certain radical populist strand of Irish anti-colonial nationalism that was suspicious of the large-scale developmental tendencies of the modern world’. He was also influenced by European corporatism, having studied at the Irish College in Paris. The first abortive phase was Fr Hayes’s attempt to establish an agricultural producers’ cooperative for farmers and farm workers. The organisational structure was a devolved one, with Muintir na Tire Limited acting as an umbrella organisation for various rural community organisations. While it might have been expected that Muintir na Tire Limited would have acknowledged the parentage of Sir Horace Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), founded in 1889, Hayes never made any public reference to Plunkett in his speeches or writings (Devereux, 1988: 43). By 1937, Muintir na Tire was ready to reinvent itself. Quadragesimo Anno was to provide the philosophical template for the organisation’s future development. However, Hayes was to put his own individualistic

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stamp on Muintir na Tire’s future organisation. He was an energetic and charismatic leader, whose childhood views had been shaped by the Irish Land League’s tradition of social agitation and the Gaelic Revival. He was also more cosmopolitan than many of his clerical colleagues, opening up Muintir na Tire to all Christian denominations. This ecumenism was undoubtedly forged during his experience working in Liverpool, England. Like many charismatic leaders, Hayes encountered personal hostility from other organisations and clergy, who didn’t appreciate his style, which they sometimes regarded as domineering (Devereux, 1988: 15; Varley, 1991: 69). Muintir na Tire was consequently concentrated in the southern region of the country, where Hayes’s influence was greatest. Yet despite Muintir na Tire’s apparent conversion to vocationalism, it instead adopted primarily spatial units as the basis of organisation. In Muintir na Tire’s terms, a ‘guild’ was intended to be a collection of the many vocational or occupational groups in a Catholic parish given equal representation on a Parish Council. The Parish Council (which evolved into the Community Council) was Muintir na Tire’s most lasting contribution to the Irish countryside. It became a cornerstone of rural community development in Ireland. This was Hayes’s ‘big idea’ to promote rural renewal and it represented an organisational change in Muintir na Tire. It is very difficult not to view Muintir na Tire as a philosophically conservative organisation. But it was also socially idealistic. Its uncompromising rootedness in rural life, nationalism and Catholicism suggest a very conservative worldview. The equation of the parish with the community was a distinctly religious concept. The notion of guild (effectively ignored by Hayes in favour of a spatial concept of community) introduced a modern dimension to the language of Muintir na Tire. Muintir na Tire also evinced a high degree of social idealism. Hayes was seeking to tackle rural social breakdown, albeit through the idiom of Catholic social thought. This idealism led to an element of self-delusion based upon the belief that it was possible to create a rural utopia. Hayes was not alone in this aspiration. It was shared by de Valera, the dominant political voice of the period. Lee (1989: 187) has described de Valera’s vision in similar terms and noted the lack of popular support for this austere idealism: De Valera yearned for a self-sufficient, bucolic, Gaelic utopia. He detested contaminating economic contact with a certain neighbouring island race, who, through some unfortunate oversight in divine regional policy, had been

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located within smelling distance of the chosen people. But his prime aim of frugal self-sufficiency, bucolic bliss and growing population were logically incompatible. The Irish people, for better or for worse, were not prepared to accept the level of frugality that a primarily agricultural society imposed on them. Likewise, as Devereux (1988: 59) has concluded, Muintir na Tire’s vocationalism made unrealistic assumptions about communities’ willingness to participate in the vocationalist organisation. This lack of public interest sent Muintir na Tire into decline. It sought to reinvent itself once again along more modern democratic lines during the 1950s (Forde, 1996: 9-10). But like King Canute, it was seeking to defy the incoming tide of modernisation.

Urban social protest and political activism Modern protest movements have been very much an urban phenomenon. The relationship between ideas and action is a complex one. For example, in post-independence Ireland, socialists, trade unionists and republicans provided the intellectual impetus behind urban protest. But at popular levels the issues were not ideological, rather they were about wages, unemployment, tenants’ rights and slum housing conditions, poor relief, and other practical issues that reflected the daily concerns of people living in poor communities. While the leadership hoped that their left-wing ideological perspectives would filter down, compromise was the political and social reality. Protest usually took the form of strikes, demonstrations and marches. Action was organised rather than spontaneous. The intellectual leadership sought to impose discipline, as well as ideology, upon a natural sense of injustice felt by poor people. The unemployment crisis of the 1930s produced the loosely organised Irish Unemployed Workers’ Movement (IUWM). This poor people’s social movement was to prove a considerable embarrassment to the populist Fianna Fail administration. The IUWM’s use of direct action tactics added an incendiary extra-parliamentary dimension to de Valera’s problems. While de Valera had out-manoeuvred the Labour Party, he had not quelled the more radical elements on the political left. The IUWM formed part of the Republican Congress (founded in 1934). In the urban slums, the Congress was active in organising tenants’ leagues, which campaigned for rent reductions and against evictions. The Dublin working-class suburb, Inchicore, was a vigorous

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centre of tenant action. An article in the Irish Workers’ Voice (11 March 1933) records, ‘a largely attended meeting of Dublin tenants was held at Inchicore, under the auspices of the Municipal Tenants’ Association to protest against the tenant purchase scheme’, which was proving to be beyond the means of the tenants. Councillor Jim Larkin (junior), who spoke at the meeting, congratulated the residents for being ‘the most militant section’ of the tenants’ movement and ‘urged the tenants to support the committees in the new campaign now to be launched for the abolition of the tenant purchase scheme’ (Irish Workers’ Voice, 11 March 1933). Tenants’ leagues helped to provide alternative accommodation. The organisation of the tenants’ leagues led to the formation of the Property Owners’ Association in Autumn 1934. The Irish Workers’ Voice described this as a ‘crusade of cupidity’, adding for good measure: The greedy, griping rapacious fingers of these harpies have plundered us for generations. But today the workers cry “Halt”! and fling in the face of the Property Owners’ Association the demands of the Congress Tenants’ Leagues. (Irish Workers’ Voice, 3 November 1934) The IUWM threw its active support behind the campaign against slumlandlordism, picketing the homes of those threatened with eviction. The organisation of tenants’ leagues undoubtedly politicised the slum population, who were prepared to resist what they regarded as unfair impositions. For example, a rent strike was organised by the tenants of Liberty Flats in Dublin during 1939. During the wartime Emergency, demands were made for the stabilisation of rents at pre-war levels and the granting of a moratorium to the unemployed. A hunger march from Cork to Dublin in 1934 further underlined the commitment of the unemployed movement to direct action. It received a strong endorsement from the Irish Workers’ Weekly (9 June, 1934). The long trek of the unemployed Hunger Marches from Cork to Dublin, and the backings they have received along the road and from the Dublin working class, is the first big blow of the unemployed thousands against the Fianna Fail Government’s new act. The Cork marchers, with their revelations of the way in which the Unemployment Act has been designed to attack the unemployed workers under the pretence that they are

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being assisted, have exposed the sickening hypocrisy of the Free State Government. The existence of a spirit of militancy amongst the poor and the role of the revolutionary left in developing poor peoples’ movements, such as the tenants’ leagues and the IUWM stands in marked contrast to the growing conservative influence of Catholic social thought in the mainstream theatre of Irish politics.

Intellectual dissent and social policy The poet W. B. Yeats was amongst the most prominent voices of dissent against the growing body of legislation that imposed a rigid moral code on Ireland through censorship, the outlawing of divorce and the imposition of Catholic values (Foster, 2003). Yeats was a member of the Protestant ascendancy classes and served as a senator in the new state. In a Senate debate on divorce, Yeats declared ‘once you attempt legislation on religious grounds you open the way to every kind of intolerance and every kind of religious persecution’ (quoted in Foster, 2003: 296). Other critics of the regime emerged on the republican side. Peadar O’Donnell’s novel Adrigoole (1929) depicted the real life story of a family that had literally starved to death in the Free State. O’Donnell launched a critical journal, The Bell, in 1940. Sean O’Faolain (19001991), one of Ireland’s preeminent writers, became its editor. The Bell was both a literary journal and a forum for discussing social policy issues in all their diversity and complexity. It served as a counterpoint to the monolithic control of public expression by the new social order. The Bell discussed a wide variety of social issues including the power of the church, women in politics, poverty, orphaned children, and social services. Its most singular contribution was to challenge the silence in public debate. O’Faolain (1947) declared in an article entitled ‘The priest in politics’ in The Bell that ‘what has given the Catholic clergy their social prominence today is their political influence, and without that influence the priest would no more take the centre stage in Irish life than does the parson in English life’. In the artistic world, Mainie Jellet (1887-1944) sought to introduce Cubism to the Irish public at the Dublin Painters’ Exhibition in 1923. Her paintings were virulently attacked in the media as ‘two freak pictures’ and she was lampooned as a late victim of ‘artistic malaria’ (Irish Times, 3 January 2015). Her fellow Cubist and lifelong friend Evie Hone (1894-1955) (whose stained-glass window from St Mary’s

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Church, Kingscourt, Co. Cavan adorns the cover of this book) shared Jellet’s enthusiasm for modern art but gradually moved in the direction of religious art, epitomised by her famous stained-glass windows, decorating churches, chapels and schools in Ireland and Britain (Arnold, 1991).

Conclusion This chapter has explored how the new Irish Free State embarked upon an ambitious cultural policy in which the school curriculum was shaped by a nationalist and Catholic idiom. Critics derided this initiative as a ‘Green Elephant’. Young people were targeted in this post-revolutionary climate of social and cultural conservatism. The education system was used to promote cultural segregation. Dancing was outlawed. Censorship and women’s subordination dominated the cultural landscape, with reproductive rights and divorce being suppressed in an increasingly patriarchal traditional society. The 1937 Constitution enshrined the new social policy principles in the basic law of the country. Vocationalism was promoted as an alternative form of governance by the Catholic social movement. In the end, the state bureaucracy proved resistant to openly changing Irish governance. The impact of Catholic corporatism was more subtle. In rural Ireland, Muintir na Tire sought to promote Catholic social ideals in a valiant attempt to conserve rural Ireland against the perceived dangers of modernisation. But change was in the air. Urban protest by the unemployed and the organisation of tenants in the slums revealed the other side of Irish life. The conservative social vision of the clergy and nationalist politicians was about to be challenged. The case for a welfare state was becoming very attractive as the manifestation of a modern democracy. Note 1

Vocationalism was Irish parlance for corporatism, which proposed the reorganisation of society along the lines advocated in the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Irish corporatism sought to replace parliament with vocational structures, which would supersede political parties. De Valera did not welcome the idea of a vocational/corporate state and parried it with delaying and diversionary tactics (Lee, 1989: 271-277).

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FIVE

The welfare state debate 10 October 1950 Dear Taoiseach The Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland at their meeting on October 10th had under consideration the proposals for a Mother and Child health service and other kindred medical services. They recognise that these proposals are motivated by a sincere desire to improve public health, but they feel bound by their office to consider whether the proposals are in accordance with Catholic moral teaching. In their opinion the powers taken by the State in the proposed Mother and Child Health Service are in direct opposition to the rights of the family and of the individual and are liable to very great abuse. Their character is such that no assurance that they would be used moderation could justify their enactment. If adopted in law they would constitute a readymade instrument for future totalitarian aggression. The right to provide for the health of children belongs to parents, not to the State. The State has the right to intervene only in a subsidiary capacity, to supplement, not to supplant. It may help indigent or neglectful parents; it may not deprive 90% of parents of their rights because of 10% necessitous or negligent parents. It is not sound social policy to impose a state medical service on the whole community on the pretext of relieving the necessitous 10% from the so-called indignity of the means test. The elimination of private medical practitioners by a State-paid service has not been shown to be necessary or even advantageous to the patient, the public in general or the medical profession. The Bishops desire that your Government should give careful consideration to the dangers inherent in the present proposals before they are adopted by the Government for legislative enactment and

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therefore, they feel it their duty to submit their views on this subject to you privately and at the earliest opportunity, since they regard the issues involved as of the gravest moral and religious importance. I remain, dear Taoiseach, Yours very sincerely, (SGD) James Staunton Bishop of Ferns Secretary to the Hierarchy This assertion of Catholic ideological power in Ireland in a letter to the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) from ‘the Hierarchy’ (the Orwellian title the Catholic Bishops had adopted to establish their hegemony over civil society and the state) clearly sets out the limitations of Irish democracy. Ironically, Ireland had formally declared itself to be ‘The Republic of Ireland’ in 1948. At the core of the republican concept of statehood is the rejection of traditional forms of hierarchical domination (notably monarchy, aristocracy and clerical power) in favour of liberty, reimagining the citizen as a free agent in a democratic society. This epistolary statement is rooted in a medieval concept of sovereignty that defines the clergy as a spiritual aristocracy with a divine right to rule – or at least rule the rulers! The illegitimacy of the clerical exercise of power in a country that twice declared itself a republic during the twentieth century (1916 and 1948) is underlined by its secretive nature. An insistence on the privacy of its communication by the Hierarchy underscores the informal and opaque nature of Catholic ideological power wielded over Irish governance; both Church and State conspired to keep this secret. This informal pact came to be called the ‘Church-State alliance’ by its critics. Peter Lennon’s 1967 documentary film, The Rocky Road to Dublin, portrays a society dominated by a Church-State alliance but with strong undercurrents of resistance and conflict. The term ‘Church-State alliance’ was first mooted by Sean O’Faolain (1947: 22) in an important essay on ‘The priest in politics’. O’Faolain was editor of The Bell between 1940-1945, a dissident journal that sought to address social and cultural topics. A leading Irish writer and intellectual, O’Faolain had his book Bird alone (1936) banned because of its criticism of Catholic hegemony in post-revolutionary Ireland. He was deeply disappointed by this unexpected censorship of his work and sought to restore critical debate to the public sphere through The Bell. Other critics of the state of Irish democracy took a more apocalyptic

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view. Paul Blanshard (1954), an American visitor to Ireland during the 1950s, portrayed the country as being in the grip of a clerical tyranny that posed a threat to Western democracy. Blanshard’s depiction of Ireland as a ‘clerical state’ is supported by the evidence of the Hierarchy’s letter, which constructs the relationship between Church and State in stark and unambiguous terms. However, as Blanschard (1954: 67) also points out, 1950s Ireland was different to authoritarian regimes such Spain and Portugal: ‘the Church-State alliance’ in Ireland was unofficial and much more informal than that in either Portugal or Spain. Indeed, the alliance was far weaker than some of the more vocal members of the Catholic clergy would have liked (as discussed later in this chapter). Ireland was formally a democracy in which the two wings of the nationalist movement (Fianna Fail and Fine Gael) rotated in government. However, Ireland was a deeply traditional society, whose politics became, as Fintan O’Toole (2010) has persuasively demonstrated, rooted in clientelism, weakening its democratic ethos. The combination of Catholic ideological power and the political culture of clientelism and localism were major traditionalist constraints on the development of a welfare state and an open society. In so far as there was a left-right divide in Ireland, it was along cultural lines – dividing the hegemonic religious right from the secular left. Social policy was the faultline of Irish democracy in the long revolution towards liberty, equality and democracy. In 1965, Fine Gael adopted a ‘Just Society’ programme, authored by Declan Costelloe (1926-2011). This broadly embraced the ideal of the welfare state in the form of a free medical service, educational opportunity and higher expenditure on housing and social amenities. Costelloe’s progressive politics were very much at odds with the traditional conservatism of Fine Gael but successfully captured the public imagination (Manning, 1999: 357-77). Post-war Europe created a new political settlement called the welfare state. Tony Judt, in his influential study Postwar (2005: 360), has observed that ‘the 1960s saw the apogee of the European State’. The second-wave welfare state symbolised a new consensus about the benevolent role of state interventionism, driving up public expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product to over 40 per cent in West Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (Judt, 2005: 361). Irish social expenditure (outside the education and housing sectors) remained comparatively low, reflecting a duality in Ireland’s modernisation strategy that placed economic policy above social policy (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 44-5). Post-war Ireland did not define itself as a welfare state. A leading Irish social policy academic,

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Anthony Coughlan, is reported to have described Irish social security expenditure in comparison to 1960s Britain as ‘ludicrously low’, while the health service continued to be skewed according to income and class (Ferriter, 2005: 595). Gøsta Esping Andersen’s (1990) historical-institutionalist analysis of welfare regimes suggested three models (see Chapter 1). Ireland was somewhat arbitrarily allocated to the Anglo-Saxon regime type. The foundations of the Irish welfare state took place in the form of the popular British Pensions Act 1908 and the much resisted (by vested interests) National Insurance Act 1911, when Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom. However (as argued in earlier chapters) Ireland underwent a profound policy rupture after independence in 1922. The Irish Revolution produced a form of religious nationalism that shaped social policy. Ireland, may consequently, fit better with the Mediterranean/Southern European model of welfare state, typified by Italy, Spain and Portugal. The emergence of a fourth welfare regime model (informed by a specific welfare culture, welfare institutions and socio-structural effects) has built upon Esping-Andersen’s original typology (Rice, 2013). The Irish welfare state (as this book shows) is fluid. This fluidity has arguably enabled the early decades of the Irish welfare state to be repositioned within the peripheral European welfare states that shared a common Catholic corporatist ethos (see figure 5.1). But it is important to acknowledge that these are ‘ideal/typical’ models that camouflage the hybridity of welfare regimes in social reality. Ireland is no exception: its liberal capitalist economic model and linguistic culture share much in common with the Anglo-Saxon world. Chapter 7 discusses the ‘hybridity’ and ‘complexity’ of the fluid and changing Irish welfare regime narrative and landscape. It is in my view reasonable to argue that during the period after the Second World War, when the Keynesian welfare state flourished, Ireland resembled a version of corporatism manifest in Southern Europe. That was certainly the view of some conservative commentators at the time (see subsection titled Welfare state or ‘servile state’). This chapter analyses the post-war evolution of a welfare state in Ireland. It explores the tension between traditionalist influences (clientelism, localism and religion) and the modernising forces of social democracy that were reshaping civic culture and the idea of citizenship into what T. H. Marshall (1950) has called a ‘three-legged stool’ of civil rights, political rights and social rights (as discussed in Chapter 1).

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The welfare state debate Figure 5.1 A typology of welfare state regimes Social Democratic

Liberal Capitalist

Nordic Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway)

Anglo-Saxon world (UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand)

Continental Europe (Germany, France, Austria)

Peripheral Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland)

Conservative Corporatist

Catholic Corporatist

Secular humanism, civil virtue and social reform In the post-war climate, the paradox of enshrining human rights at a historical moment, when the idea of moral universalism was deeply compromised, was evident. Hannah Arendt (1958) argued in her influential book, The origins of totalitarianism, that, stripped of civic and political rights, human beings lose their essential humanity. The significance of the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been summarised by Michael Ignatieff (1999: 58): ‘Human Rights has become the major article of faith of a secular culture that fears it believes in nothing else … the drafters put their hopes in the idea that by declaring rights as moral universals, they could foster a global rights consciousness among those they called “the common people”’. The promotion of human rights has largely been carried out by the United Nations and civil society through a variety of voluntary or nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Anti-Slavery Society and others have revitalised voluntary endeavour. It is possible to dismiss NGOs, dedicated to promoting human rights in the age of economic globalisation, as simply representing the agency of a new global middle class, liberal-minded and committed to doing good globally. But there are more profound issues at stake. Human rights were at the core of a new global cosmopolitanism. Humanism was revived in the post-war era. It was to become civilisation’s moral politics, democratised. Humanism promotes the philosophy that the proper study of humankind is humanity itself and its moral universe. Historically, humanism originates in the fifth century in Athens – the cradle of Western civilisation. Medieval Christianity and feudalism undermined classical humanism. However, it re-emerged in the fifteenth century during the Renaissance, when classical values were rediscovered. Civilisation was reborn. Modern humanism developed during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its development was closely linked to Enlightenment rationalism and the scientific revolution that

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undermined traditional Christian beliefs. Humanists view the human condition in progressive terms as a striving, evolving process towards higher states of being. They believe that human beings are endowed with the creative potential to solve problems confronting individuals, communities and governments. Humanists promote international cooperation, human rights and the protection of the planet from the destructive forces of war and modernity. The humanist ethic is based on a commitment to the realisation of both individual and social possibilities within the context of mutual responsibility. In the post-war world, humanism became linked to the pursuit of democracy. In ancient Athens, democracy had been confined to the city state. Its rebirth during the eighteenth century linked it to the newly formed nation state. But now in post-war conditions, social movements began to link the deepening of democracy to the future of humankind through mass association. These causes became global, including peace and the environment. Women viewed themselves as half the human race but one which somehow formed only a minor part of the political power equation, and vowed that the world must change. Black people found an eloquent voice in Martin Luther King Jr. Others soon followed. The nature of democracy was changing and civil society was becoming the instrument of that change. Conservatives like to link civil society exclusively to the human rights struggle against communism. They ignore the powerful movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the West, such as the civil rights movement in the USA that preceded the ‘velvet revolutions’ in Eastern Europe in opening up a critical debate about ‘democratizing democracy’ through the pursuit of human rights (Fox Piven and Cloward, 1979). Civic virtue rests on a virtuous state that ideally places equal value on the welfare of each of its citizens. That is the ideal. The reality invariably falls short of that ideal. Interests compete for the attention of the state. The more powerful the interest, the more likely it is to succeed in its goal of influencing the direction of policy. Since the origins of humanism in ancient Greece, policy making has represented a deeper and more complex strand of governance than the art of politics, with all its venal associations. Civil society provides an ethical framework for good governance because it represents the active voice of citizenship. Social policy is deeply rooted in that ethical framework, as the expression of the need for civic virtue in governance. Here we see the varying dimensions of citizenship interacting in the process of democratic governance. It is the legacy of humanism that is traceable back to ancient Greece. The distinction between ‘welfare’ and ‘unwelfare’ states, as raised by Veit-Wilson (2000, 2002), has seminal

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meaning if connected to this philosophical value base. Social policy as an academic discipline is the product of secularism, civic republicanism and social democracy. While it has been shaped by modernity, its legacy is in humanism, giving social policy its distinctly Western character. The deeply rooted support for the welfare state in public opinion is rooted in identification with those values. While opinion polls tell us what citizens in Western democracies think and their preferences in policy terms, civil society actively expresses those concerns through the participative democratic process. We now need to turn to an exploration of the origins of the Irish welfare state in modernity. In doing so, we will begin to see civil society as part of a democratic subjectivity – one concerned with political equality, social justice and the creation of associational spaces in which citizens can debate the process of ‘democratizing democracy’ from the perspectives of class, gender and ethnicity and so on. That is the noble ideal. Traditional Irish politics based upon clientelism, localism and Church power was far from this.

Modernisation, clientelism and social rights Ireland’s road to modernisation has been a long and troubled one. A persistent traditionalism of thought has weakened the effects of formal social citizenship rights, which have gradually been granted in law, politics and society; opportunities objectively granted have not been fully realised subjectively. Powerful social, cultural and political interests are deeply rooted in a traditionalist vision of Ireland, and these have sought to hold the country in a state of semi-modernity. Clientelism is based on politicians lobbying government bodies on behalf of citizens in return for votes, and so involves the political distribution of public goods (housing, jobs, benefits). Social policy has been particularly susceptible to this form of political corruption, because it is largely based on the disposal of public goods. Localism remains influential in this process. Local politicians have attempted to manipulate the allocation of social housing and the granting of planning permissions (as shown in an RTE report on local councillors, broadcast on 8 December 2015). Clientelism has allowed financially well-oiled local and national political machines to develop and dominate at a very considerable cost to democratic politics, civic culture and social rights. It has enabled politicians to establish themselves as mediators between the citizens and the state. The large number of independents elected to the Dáil during the 2016 election is testament to the continuing influence of clientelism and localism. If press speculation is to be believed, the deals

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that were essential to forming a government pitted local interests against the national interest in ‘pork-barrel politics’. Clientelism has become part of the fabric of Irish representative democracy. It has created considerable tensions between community groups and local politicians, who view participative democracy as a fundamental threat to local patronage and the dominance of traditional political party structures (Powell and Geoghegan, 2004). Modernisation has failed to change these traditionalist political practices while at the same time making them increasingly meaningless. Fintan O’Toole (2010: 42-3) observes: ‘Most of the representation by TDs [legislators] falls into one of three categories of uselessness. It is either (a) improper, (b) misdirected, or (c) unnecessary’. He cites politicians trying to influence the justice system in favour of child rapists, assume duties ‘properly the function of local government’ (such as road repairs and housing allocations), and provide information already available from hundreds of information and outreach centres around Ireland (O’Toole, 2010: 43-4). As early as the 1960s, the evidence was that politicians were engaged in ‘imaginary patronage’, since the welfare state had become the effective system for the distribution of benefits. This reality did not prevent local politicians from acting as power brokers in the exercise of illusory and manipulative ‘dark political arts’ (O’Toole, 2010: 44). O’Toole’s analysis of Irish clientelist politics demonstrates a structural tension between a traditional political culture (often based upon myths) and the rationality of modernisation. Irish modernisation as a developmental process was both assisted and accelerated by membership of the European Union from 1973, offering investment in infrastructure and enabling the advent of an open society. The project of modernisation had begun at the beginning of the 1960s after Eamonn de Valera relinquished the position of Taoiseach, taking the largely ceremonial role of President. Modernisation was to transform Ireland from a predominantly rural agricultural economy into an urban industrial society over a very short period of several decades. Other countries had made this transition over several centuries. Ireland’s path development to a modern capitalist economy and welfare state was exceptionally rapid by European standards. But in the immediate post-war years there was little appetite for change (Bartlett, 2010: 474). Moreover, modernisation during the 1960s and 1970s was very much led by economic development, with Ireland’s social transformation following rather than leading the process of transformation (Daly, 2016). Nevertheless, the post-revolutionary conservative cultural consensus began to slowly crack under the structural pressure of modernisation.

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But what sort of state was Ireland becoming? Would Ireland finally embrace a modern welfare state? Were religion and modernisation reconcilable?

Religious cosmologies and welfare states Deborah Rice (2013: 95) has analysed European welfare states’ path development in terms of the diverse influences of Catholicism and Protestantism: ‘to begin with, empirical differences among modern-day welfare states are in part the result of the Catholicism-Protestantism divide in religious history of Europe because the two faiths espouse different images of the human being and different ideas about the role of the state in society’. She argues that Catholic societies espouse moral differentiation not only between the sexes but also between societal sectors and classes and subsidiarity that devolves responsibility for welfare provision to the family and community. She cites Southern European countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal as examples. In these Mediterranean societies, the family was the key producer of welfare and the Catholic Church promoted corporatism rather than ‘etatism’ (state control) (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Ferrera, 1996; Korpi, 2006). Rice contrasts the Catholic ethos with Protestant societies. Drawing on other work (Grimm 1986; Kahl, 2005; Kaufmann, 1986; Mannow, 2002), she argues that Protestantism ‘brought secularizing and individualizing tendencies in its wake, albeit with heterogeneous outcomes’ (Rice, 2013: 96). According to Rice, at the core of Protestant welfare tradition, which produced the Anglo-Saxon welfare model, are the English Poor Law (1601) and the ‘New’ Poor Law (1834). These placed ‘a strong emphasis on the individual’s inherent self-worth, individual responsibility and communal self-help’ that was potentially ‘universalistic’ (Rice, 2013). The Poor Law in England made a strong distinction between the ‘deserving poor’ (the sick, old and children) and the ‘undeserving poor’ (the unemployed, vagrants, beggars and prostitutes). The former were deemed ‘deserving’ of support, while the latter ‘undeserving’ were subject to corporal punishment, badging (as a symbol of their stigmatised identity) and incarceration (Flora and Alber, 1981; Powell, 1992; Bonoli, 2007). This moral economy of welfare defined its institutional evolution. Rice (2013: 97) also compares and contrasts the Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean models with Nordic welfare regimes characterised by ‘co-operative etatism’ and ‘relational social equality’ and with the European continent Despite considerable religious fragmentation, the

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continental model ‘produced a cultural and political mix’ founded on familism and corporatism, coupled with more economically redistributive welfare states, based on a unique brand of ‘social capitalism’ (see also van Kersbergen, 1995; van Kersbergen and Manow, 2009). Rice’s contribution supports earlier arguments for a fourth welfare state model (located on the Southern/Mediterranean periphery of Europe, as represented by Leibfried (1992), Ferrera (1996) and Castles (1998) ) adding to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) original three. Where does Ireland fit into this welfare regime analysis? The answer is very complex. For a start there are, as Conor Cruise O’Brien (1972) argued ‘States of Ireland’: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland has remained part of the United Kingdom and has a majority Protestant population. The Republic of Ireland (following the 1916 Rising) has formed an independent state (see Chapter 2). Both states, however, have a shared social policy history. The English Poor Law 1601 was not introduced to Ireland. Instead in 1634-5 a system of punitive houses of correction were established and in 1838 a deterrent Poor Law system (based on 130 workhouses) was imposed on Ireland by the British government, coinciding with the Great Famine (1845-51) (Powell, 1992). After independence both states followed their own unique developmental paths in terms of welfare state formation. Religion played a very important and divisive part in this narrative. Northern Ireland was religiously/ethnically divided approximately 60:40 between Protestants (unionists) and Catholics (nationalists). The Republic of Ireland was over 90 per cent Catholic. These cultural differences were formative. But the political reality that Northern Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom ensured that it benefited from the British welfare state. Many of its southern neighbours in the Republic of Ireland looked enviously to the North with its comparatively elaborate welfare state. But the welfare state in Northern Ireland had a dark side: sectarianism.

The British welfare state in Northern Ireland Northern Ireland, to become notorious for sectarian conflict during the final decades of the twentieth century), was ‘a great wee place’ after the Second World War – at least in the minds of the Protestant Unionist population (Bartlett, 2010: 484). How could such a repressive sectarian regime that denied basic civil rights to its minority Catholic population be described in these positive terms? The answer was simple. After 1945, the British welfare state was introduced, conferring social rights undreamed of south of the border.

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Although the Northern Ireland economy flagged during the post-war era, with unemployment remaining stubbornly high, ‘key educational, social security and health provisions of the British welfare state undoubtedly took the sting out of economic downturn’ (Bartlett, 2010: 485). Northern Ireland benefited from the National Health Service (NHS, offering universal free healthcare), comparatively generous social security and an education system based on equal opportunity and including free university education. These measures were complemented by an ambitious plan to build 100,000 new homes over a ten-year period. Northern Ireland was modernising but sectarianism continued to thrive beneath the surface. There were rows over the funding of Catholic schools, at least one Catholic religious order had difficulty in fully participating in the NHS, bishops denounced ‘socialist’ medicine and new housing threatened the sectarian balance of local politics (Bartlett, 2010: 486-7). As one Unionist councillor put it ‘no Catholic pig or his litter will get a house as long as I am here’ (The Irish Times, 12 December 2015). By the 1960s, deep fissures in the social fabric of Northern Ireland became manifest. A new Catholic intelligentsia emerged as the by-product of greater educational access. The studentled People’s Democracy movement emerged at Queen’s University Belfast, linking into the wider international student revolution of 1968. Earlier, in 1964, middle-class Catholics had set up a campaign for social justice that focused on the problem of religious discrimination in Northern Ireland. It grew into the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967, composed of socialists, left republicans, trade unionists and Catholic middle-class professionals. NICRA was inspired by the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, even adopting its anthem ‘We shall overcome’ (Bartlett, 2010: 48497). The high idealism of the civil rights movement met with a similar reaction to its counterpart in the USA. Out of the fears of the ordinary unionist emerged the demagogic voice of the firebrand clergyman, the Reverend Ian Paisley, preaching the gospel of sectarianism and ethnic hatred (Moloney and Pollak, 1986). Conflict became inevitable, with Protestants fearing a rerun of the 1916 Rising as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) took on the ‘armed struggle’ (meaning terrorism), purportedly on behalf of the Catholic population. There was to follow several decades of futile bloodshed, which shrouded the achievements of the welfare state in Northern Ireland. It also highlighted the complex relationship between religion and social policy that was also to shape the welfare state in the newly formed Republic of Ireland.

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Welfare state or ‘servile state’: the making of the Irish ‘third way’ J. H. Whyte (1980: 165), in his magisterial study Church and state in modern Ireland 1923-1979, has sardonically observed ‘one can learn something of the tendencies in a society by observing on which particular fringe of it the lunatics break out’. He was commenting on the Catholic right. The Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, identified himself publicly on Radio Eireann (Irish State Radio) with the crusade against communism (Whyte, 1980: 166). But it was at a domestic level, notably in relation to social policy issues (such as the Church’s opposition to legal adoption, alcohol consumption and contraception), that ‘suspicions arose that there must be occult pressures at work’ (Whyte, 1980: 193). This was a reference to the informal Church-State alliance that informed Irish governance. Catholic social organisations like the St Vincent de Paul, the Catholic Truth Society and the Knights of St Columbanus (an influential secretive lay Catholic society) were promoting a Catholic social movement (Whyte, 1980). The adoption of the title ‘Republic of Ireland’ in 1948 suggested a more progressive turn in Irish politics that would usher in a new era of democracy by the newly elected ‘inter-party government’. In these changed circumstances, the welfare state became a central focus in the debate about Ireland’s road to modernity. It was vigorously resisted by the Catholic Church, which sought to transform the debate about the welfare state (Anglo-Saxon model) into a discussion about the virtues of Catholic corporatism in Southern Europe (Mediterranean model). Both Catholic ideology (that is, the principle of subsidiarity) and the Church’s social power (based on its role as a major charity provider of health and social care services) were at stake. Fundamentally at issue was the relationship between Church and State, which was deeply threatened by the secular value system and the augmented role of democratic governments, envisaged by the ideal of a welfare state. The stakes were high! The ideological battle was joined in a debate mainly waged in the journals Christus Rex (Catholic) and The Bell (secular). In the post-war years, as de Valera’s first period in office (19321948) drew to a close, the idea of the welfare state had gained popular currency. The incoming inter-party government was led by Fine Gael, but also included a left-wing element consisting of Labour and the newly formed Clann na Poblachta (‘people’s’) party. In social policy-making ‘the new government proved to be more adventurous than Fianna Fail had been during its last administration’ (Rumpf and Hepburn, 1977: 143-4).

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The inter-party government’s modestly reformist approach to social policy issues was to bring it into direct conflict with Catholic social teaching, which had defined the role of the State as a subsidiary one. According to an editorial in The Bell (Editorial c’omment, 1943: 5), while Catholic social philosophy viewed negative state interference (that is, police action) as permissible, it regarded positive state action (that is, welfare) as unacceptable. The appearance of the Beveridge Report in Britain in 1942 advocating a welfare state led Irish social reformers to pose the question, ‘in general surely, State Control is to be welcomed when it transfers the responsibility for all public troubles – say Hunger, Poverty, or Disease – to the shoulders of Government, i.e. to us, the public, through our representatives?’ (Editorial comment, 1943: 5). Catholic sources retorted that social reform along the lines envisaged in post-war Britain would lead to ‘the ultimate error or false philosophy of which the Servile State (the State which acknowledges in its subject no natural rights) is a logical deduction’ (Doolan, 1947: 5). The battle lines between social reformers and the Catholic Church were drawn. Paul Blanshard (1954:195) comments: ‘In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that a movement towards fascism and the narrow antiSemitic and anti-Masonic Catholicism of Spain should develop … The Irish bishops and priests still reveal many pro-fascist tendencies and many high Irish clerics praise Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships in extravagant terms. Salazar’s Christian dictatorship is held up as a model for Irish Catholics’. He also notes that ‘the Irish Catholic press is full of flattering allusions to Franco and during the Spanish Civil War it was almost hysterically pro-Franco’ (Blanshard, 1954). To his credit, Eamonn de Valera resisted foreign policy pressures from the Catholic right. But in social policy the principle of subsidiarity enabled Catholic opinion to lead the debate by posing a Catholic ‘third way’. The doctrine of subsidiarity (as noted in Chapter 4) reflected the influence of corporatist ideology in the 1930s, which sought to undermine the class appeal of socialism through an alternative system of vocational organisations. The corporate state achieved its strongest endorsement in fascist regimes, notably Italy, Portugal, Vichy France and Spain, which adopted their own unique approach to social policy informed by traditionalist Catholic values. Eric Hobsbawm (1995: 114) noted the apparent contradiction between the corporate state and Catholic hostility to totalitarianism: ‘Yet the doctrine of the ‘corporate state’ most fully exemplified in Catholic countries drew on the Catholic tradition’.

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In reality, the Catholic Church largely directed its opposition towards totalitarianism at communist states. It shared much in common with the conservatism of fascist states, which it viewed as bastions against communism, atheism and modernism. Nazi Germany was the exception, because of its open disregard for human life and crass paganism (Burleigh, 2000). Corporatism also influenced the political structures of several other European states in varying degrees, including Ireland, where Catholic social teaching held sway. There was a considerable overlap between fascist ideology and Catholic social thought. Both shared a common revulsion towards socialism, and advocated vocational organisation as its antidote in the form of a corporate society. Some prominent members of the Irish Catholic clergy openly endorsed corporate states. For example, the future Bishop of Cork and Ross, Dr Cornelius Lucey wrote in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record approvingly of the Salazar regime in Portugal at the height of the Second World War in 1944: Salazar is frankly a dictator. But he is a dictator with a difference. His regime is authoritarian not totalitarian; his outlook is Christian, not materialistic or pagan. He acknowledges that the government (of which he is the embodiment) is as subject to the moral law in its conduct of affairs as the individual is in his private life … He is a perfect dictator if there ever was one. (quoted in Blanshard, 1954: 195) Dr Lucey concluded, ‘there is nothing very original, nothing very spectacular in all this, you may say; it is but a way of translating our Catholic social principles into practice along authoritarian lines’ (quoted in Blanshard, 1954: 195). The Jesuit priest, Fr R. S. Devane, likewise endorsed the Salazar regime and recommended it to Irish politicians: ‘may one respectfully suggest that the leaders of our Irish political parties would be well advised to watch closely and study carefully the political and economic development of Portugal which, though it is not stated explicitly, yet sets before itself, as does the Irish Free State through its new Constitution, the idea of establishing a truly Christian State’ (quoted in Blanschard, 1954: 196). The main popular organ for the promotion of Catholic social teaching, The Standard, also ‘showed a distinct tendency to corporatism’ (Whyte, 1980: 71). In general exponents of corporatism in Catholic countries, such as Franco, Petain, Mussolini and Salazar, were approved of by leaders of Irish Catholic opinion. However, Nazism was rejected because of its

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social policy, which undermined Catholic charities in Germany, its atheism and violations of the right to life of vulnerable social groups (quoted in Blanshard, 1954: 196). Professor Michael Burleigh (2000: 772) asserts that a Catholic corporatist ‘third way’ was emerging in Europe in response to the perceived socialist threat: … many Catholic intellectuals gave their support to authoritarian regimes in Austria, Poland, Portugal and Spain, partly because of the threat from atheistic and anticlerical parties or regimes, such as the Spanish Republicans, partly in pursuit of a Catholic corporatist ‘third way’ between liberal individualism and totalitarian fascism and Marxism, a way briefly realised in Dolfuss’ Austria and in the time warps of Salazar’s Portugal or De Valera’s Ireland. Catholic Europe was seeking to forge its own distinctive social philosophy. Ireland was part of this reaction to modernity. The concept of a ‘third way’ was not a new one. It had been advocated in Britain in the form of a romantic medieval ‘guild socialism’ by intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and G. D. H. Cole (1889-1959) from the early twentieth century (see Powell, 2010: 154-7). Catholic corporatism was another anti-modernist variety of this search for a model between capitalism and socialism. Despite this support for the corporate state, open espousal of fascist ideology was rare amongst the ordinary clergy who were more in tune with their flocks. The most notable exception was Fr Denis Fahey who founded an extreme right-wing social movement known as Maria Duce (‘under Mary’s leadership’) in the mid-1940s. Maria Duce contained only a small cadre of members (though it was able to attract large crowds to its public meetings) and its appeal was mainly limited to the discontented lower middle classes (Whyte, 1980: 165). Politically it was unimportant, but as an organ of Catholic supremacist aspirations it was significant. In a statement published in The Irish Times on 7 March 1950, Maria Duce’s secretary J. P. Ryan outlined the organisation’s position on religious tolerance: For a Catholic, religion is a matter of dogmatic certitude. For him there is only one true religion. In consequence, all non-Catholic sects, as such, are false and evil, irrevocably so … What then must be the attitude of Catholic states, such as Spain and Ireland, towards Protestantism and non-Catholic

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sects in general? ... The ideal … is that the Catholic State, which extending full liberty and official recognition to the Catholic Church also, should not only not connive at the proselytism of non-Catholic sects, but should suppress them as inimical to the common good. This attitude is quite logical, since for the Catholic State the vitality of Catholic life is the chief good of society. Such intolerance of error is the privilege of truth. Catholic periodicals such as the Catholic Bulletin, the Catholic Pictorial (later the Catholic Mind) the Irish Rosary and the Standard assiduously promoted a Catholic worldview. Moreover, as J. H. Whyte (1980: 165) points out, Maria Duce ‘cannot be dismissed as of trivial importance’. While its core membership was in the hundreds, associated membership rose to the thousands and the circulation of its periodical Fiat ‘went into five figures’ (Whyte, 1980: 165). It also had ‘ambivalent’ support from the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid (Cooney, 1999: 239-240). Such explicit statements of Catholic supremacist ideology were unusual. In reality they caused embarrassment to the Catholic hierarchy. John Charles McQuaid, in his capacity as Archbishop of Dublin in 1954, effectively suppressed Maria Duce forcing it to change its name to Firinne (Truth). Whyte (1980: 165) notes that Firinne and Fiat survived until the beginning of the 1960s, concluding this movement was ‘perhaps only a lunatic fringe …but it was still of interest as a symptom’. While Maria Duce’s opinions were very much on the fringe of the Irish political spectrum, they represented the voice of a Catholic social movement in Ireland. Moreover, there were influential intellectual voices supporting the Catholic social movement. Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, President of University College Cork (UCC), wrote prolifically in the Standard, a weekly newspaper promoting Catholic social teaching. O’Rahilly was a strong advocate of corporatism and devoted much of his commentary to social policy issues. But he also discussed ‘wider political matters’, for example, an issue with the heading ‘Catholic Statesmen Seek Peace Order’, was accompanied by portraits of Petain, Salazar and Franco (Whyte, 1980: 71). Proponents of the doctrine of subsidiarity as a ‘third way’ grounded its rationale in an appeal to public opinion based on a fear that the welfare state was totalitarian. Sociologist Fr Jerome O’Leary (1953: 552-3) asserted: ‘During the last century the spirit of Individualism or Liberalism was in the ascendant’, adding, ‘during this century the

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inevitable reaction set in and, as is common with all reactions, the pendulum swung violently to the other extreme, the extreme of totalitarianism’. The Catholic critique ignored the fact that the idea of the welfare state was the product of social democracy, which replaced revolution by evolution and constituted a democratic third way. It was left to O’Leary’s editorial collaborator on Christus Rex, Monsignor McKevitt, to deal with Fabian social democracy directly. McKevitt declared, ‘when tried out in practice, socialism has proved the truth of the old prophecies that freedom would be the first casualty of universal state planning’. But the most vitriolic attack on the idea of the welfare state came from leading Irish theologian, the Reverend Felim O’Briain. Fr O’Briain described the welfare state as ‘the Silken Tyranny’ in a series of articles published in the Irish Independent during November, 1952. In these articles, he characterised the welfare state as ‘a variant of the cruder methods of Nazism, Fascism, Communism’, and referred to ‘welfare totalitarianism’ and the ‘dehumanitization that State paternalism is bound to achieve’ (quoted in Blanshard, 1954: 203). The overtly politicised role which the Catholic Church had adopted in Irish society was seen as appropriate by some of the clergy. Bishop Browne of Galway stoutly defended the clergy’s right to concern themselves with social and economic questions. In 1947, he asserted that the Church: ‘has interfered and declares that it intends to interfere in politics and international affairs whenever and wherever they infringe on her sphere; and she claims that she has the right to determine what is religious and spiritual’ (Browne, 1947: 4). The ringing declaration of the Church’s authority to intervene in secular matters was endorsed in the following year by Cardinal D’Alton, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. D’Alton (1948: 3-4) commented in his 1948 Lenten Pastoral that the Church rejected demands to separate the spiritual from the temporal realm: ‘the Church refused thus to restrict her activities, and declared her right to lay down the principles of Moral Law in the economic as well as in other spheres’. The Cardinal added that: ‘it is the aim of the Church so to form men’s characters that they will conform to the spirit of Christian teaching in their dealings with one another, and seek not only their own advantage, but the common good’. He made it clear in the rest of his Lenten Pastoral that by ‘Christian teaching’ he meant Catholic social philosophy as laid down in papal encyclicals, in this instance Rerum Novarum (1891). These assertions of the Church’s right to ideologically circumscribe the democratic role of the State did not go entirely unchallenged in Ireland. Amongst intellectuals there were vocal dissidents. The Bell

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mounted a forceful critique. The Irish Times, which at the time voiced the opinion of the Protestant minority, also questioned the Catholic Church’s right to regulate the secular sphere. This provoked a strident rebuke from Bishop Browne of Galway, who declared, ‘for all who have not faith the Church was a human institution merely, and all the gradations of bitter hostility that she evoked from the fury of the Orangemen of Sandy Row, to the venom of the Irish Times and the rancour of the Bell, all derived from a refusal to see in her the divine’ (O’Faolain, 1951b: 16). Sean O’Faolain, in response, commented, ‘His Lordship appears to propose the extraordinary doctrine that the Catholic Church, being divinely appointed, is beyond and above criticism. His Lordship seems to propose that not merely is the Catholic Church thus divine but that all its members are divine – which a child at school knows not to be in accordance with the facts’ (O’Faolain, 1951b: 16). The Bishop of Galway’s censure had been occasioned by a series of articles in The Bell on the role of the State and the toleration of minorities. He had also been particularly angered by The Bell’s support for the controversial Mother and Child Scheme (discussed in the section on health). Sean O’Faolain (1947: 24) endorsed (English) Cardinal Newman’s remark that Ireland contained ‘a population of peasants ruled over by ‘a patriotic priesthood, patriarchically’. O’Faolain added, ‘and the significant word there is ruled’. Editorials in The Bell also fearlessly attacked the contradiction inherent in the Catholic right’s position on the State which, as already noted, approved of its negative policing role but denied it a positive caring role. Paul Blanshard (1954: 204) warned: ‘A submissive population, trained in the ways of moral and religious immaturity, is natural prey of authoritarian rule in politics and economics. The Church makes effective use of submissiveness now; fascism could tap the same fund.’ George Gilmore (1951: 12)’ a leading member of the left-wing Republican Congress, had opined in The Bell that: ‘there is a movement which aims at creating the idea of a Roman Catholic nation in the place of the traditional idea of the Irish nation containing within it the various religious sects into which the Irish people are divided’. Such expressions of dissent were, however, the exception rather than the rule. Both the public and the politicians were largely accepting of ecclesiastical domination in word, if not wholly in deed.

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The politics of health The first post-war test of Ireland’s commitment to a welfare state came quickly with the 1948 general election. The inter-party government, formed in 1948 by Fine Gael, Labour, Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan, faced high expectations from a population disappointed by Fianna Fail’s conservatism. Within this ideologically kaleidoscopic coalition, Clann na Poblachta was the radical voice. Its leader was Sean McBride (1904-88), son of Maud Gonne McBride. Sean McBride (later to win both the 1974 Nobel and 1977 Lenin Peace Prizes) seemed like the embodiment of a new and more progressive politics. However, it was another member of his party, Dr Noel Browne (1915-97) who adopted the progressive mantle after becoming Minister of Health at the age of 32. Dr Browne had trained as a doctor at Trinity College Dublin. His personal charisma and passionate espousal of social justice (having grown up in poverty) put him on a collision course with both Catholic Church and political establishment. His Mother and Child Scheme sought to introduce socialised medicine to Ireland. It was a bold and ambitious step that sought to redefine Irish social policy as a progressive egalitarian project. Noel Browne’s biographer has described his impact on the political landscape as momentous: ‘for half a century, from the age of confessionalism to the age of post-denominationalism, the story of Noel Browne and the Mother and Child Scheme has exercised its unique grip on the public and political imagination of Ireland’ (Horgan, 2000: 91). A contemporary visitor to Ireland, Paul Blanshard, captures the enormity of Dr Browne’s ambition: ‘a burning dynamo of energy and idealism, the young cabinet minister set out to eliminate the major disgrace of Irish life, the nation’s high infant mortality rate – one of the worst in Europe’. His detractors (‘revisionists’) take a different view of Browne’s iconic status. Gene Kerrigan (1986: 6) observes: ‘the revisionists have long been at work on the mother and child scandal. The agreed line was that Dr Noel Browne was a crank who mishandled a routine piece of social reform, that he wanted to wreck the coalition government, that he was obsessive and nasty and destructive, that he was at best naïve’. Browne’s record in government points in a very different direction. He took on the challenge of tuberculosis (TB, also known as the ‘white plague’), which he eradicated through investment in new drugs and hospitals (sanatoria). TB was principally a disease of the poor, contracted in over-crowded and unhygienic living conditions. His success in eradicating TB contributed to Browne’s mythical status

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as a mouldbreaker in Irish society (Kerrigan, 1986: 6). He brought a very broad vision to his health ministry, seeking to promote public health, mass screening through x-rays, new hospitals and the provision of up-to-date drugs. It was a total break with previous health policy, which essentially rested on sharp social divisions between services for the poor (the dispensary system) and private healthcare for the betteroff. Browne sought to challenge Ireland’s two-tier health system by reforming it. He also sought to challenge its sectarian structure of hospitals by bringing them under democratic control (Wren, 2003: 36). His reforming vision posed a revolutionary challenge to the status quo of Irish social policy and its conservative value system. Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme was clearly intended to lay the framework for a socialist health service. The Irish Times (31 March 1951) reported that the Irish Trade Union Congress fully backed the scheme and was concerned it would be diluted. The Mother and Child Scheme provided for free GP care, free specialist consultant and hospital provision if required, free visits from midwives to patients in their own homes if required, and free dental and optical treatment for the public. The scheme rested on four basic principles: there was no compulsion to use the services; there was no means test: there were no charges; and it was directly funded by the Exchequer. Dr Browne (1986: 150) has argued that ‘the Irish scheme would have been even more advanced in its basic principles than the (British) Bevan Health Scheme’, adding ‘our scheme would have produced genuinely socialist redistribution’. There can be little doubt that the Mother and Child Scheme, while limited in scope, represented a major step down the road to socialised medicine. As such, however popular with the public, it was likely to attract determined opposition from powerful vested interests in Ireland notably the medical profession and the Catholic Church. The Church was likely to experience a major erosion of its position in the health service. The doctors also felt threatened because they believed socialised medicine would ultimately destroy private practice, something the Irish Medical Association (IMA) was determined to resist. While doctors had ‘generally admired Dr Browne’s work against tuberculosis, relations began to worsen in July 1950 as a result of the Mother and Child Scheme’ (Whyte, 1980: 205). The IMA held a referendum amongst its members which included the loaded question: ‘Do you agree to work a Mother and Child Health Scheme which includes free treatment for people who are able to pay for their own medical care?’ Of the respondents, 78% declared themselves opposed to the scheme and only 22% in favour.

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But only 53% of the IMA membership balloted had bothered to respond (Barrington, 1987: 2007). This suggests that nearly half the IMA membership was apathetic or supportive of Dr Browne. The IMA notified the Catholic Hierarchy of Bishops and the other churches regarding the results of its referendum (Barrington, 1987). The forces of opposition were being marshalled. Following the autumn meeting of the Catholic Hierarchy, a letter was sent to the Taoiseach stating the Church’s opposition. The key points are set out at the beginning of this chapter. In essence, the letter informed the democratically elected government that the Catholic Church strongly disapproved of introducing the Mother and Child Scheme. Furthermore, the Hierarchy insisted upon the confidentiality of its communication. The informal and unspoken Church-State alliance should be kept confidential from the people (in the view of the Bishops) since it clearly exposed the undemocratic nature of Irish governance. Church and State were on a collision path. The Taoiseach, John A. Costello, sought a compromise solution. Dr Browne refused to yield on the core principle of a universal scheme. Abandoned by his political colleagues (including Sean McBride), Dr Browne was forced to resign but not before he had courageously published the secret correspondence with the assistance of the editor of The Irish Times, R. M. Smyllie. Reflecting on his actions 35 years later, Dr Browne (1986: 185) had no doubt that he had pursued the correct course of action: In spite of their best efforts to conceal this fraudulent reality of mock power, the Cabinet’s influence and submission to Rome was proven without doubt by Cabinet Ministers themselves in their own correspondence, behaviour and speeches. It was my decision to publish such confidential state correspondence to end the fiction of representative democracy in Ireland. That decision, I well knew, ended any prospect I might have had of ever again serving as a Cabinet Minister in an Irish government. I was pilloried for my failure to respect Cabinet and Church confidentiality. But the pretence of a Cabinet to be the supreme instrument and authority in the State, when in fact it was subject to an outside non-elected pressure group, was to me the supreme deception. Mine, easily, was the lesser breach of trust. In fact, had I suppressed that revelation about the reality of government in the Republic I would have become a guilty partner in the deceit.

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The forced resignation of Dr Browne, and the subsequent replacement of his Mother and Child Scheme by an alternative model based on a means test, led to protests in the more enlightened organs of public opinion. The Irish Times commented (12 April 1951) that the Catholic Church was the effective government of Ireland. The inter-party government collapsed in a welter of criticism. The exposure of the secret correspondence between Church and State illuminates the behind-the-scenes dialogue that constituted the informal Church-State alliance. For the first time, the public became privy to the interior workings of the Irish State and the inescapable fact that it was a dual government, with the Church determining the social policy agenda and the relationship between clergy and politicians. The two chief protagonists were the Minister for Health, Dr Browne, and the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. Dr Browne’s position is set out in a memorandum that offers a reasoned defence of the Mother and Child Scheme. Archbishop McQuaid’s tone in setting out the Hierarchy’s response on 5 April 1951 repeats the dogmatic position originally enunciated in the Church’s letter of 10 October 1950. It was clear that neither would compromise. The Taoiseach, John A. Costello, and the leader of Clann na Poblachta, Sean McBride, emerge in the correspondence as deferential and unprincipled. Their vacillation on the core principle of the protection of the integrity of democratic governance from powerful vested interests cost them political power. Sean O’Faolain wrote in The Bell on the implications of the Mother and Child Scheme controversy for Irish democracy. He observed, unlike other churches, trade unions, and various representative bodies: The Maynooth (Church) Parliament holds a weapon which none of the other institutions mentioned holds: the weapon of the Sacraments. The Church of England cannot wield the power of the Catholic Church because it does not hold this weapon. If a Prime Minister of England were informed by the Archbishop of Canterbury that a proposed law would be condemned by the Church of England he would deplore it, but he would not be afraid of any efforts other than political effects. If your Taoiseach were informed thus by the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin he would measure the effects in the same way. And likewise with most other institutions, religious or secular. But when the Catholic Church, through its representatives, speaks, he realises and the Roman Catholic public realises, that if they disobey they

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may draw on themselves this weapon whose touch means death. (Most of us feel, I think, that it is unfair to use this weapon on political occasions; and that is putting it mildly.) There is, therefore, no use in talking blandly about ‘comment’, or ‘advice’. The lightest word from this quarter is tantamount to the raising of the sword. That is why it is just to speak of two Parliaments. The Dáil proposes; Maynooth disposes. The Dáil had when up against the Second Parliament, only one right of decision; the right to surrender. That is what made the Browne affair so interesting and so dramatic. It revealed to the people of the Republic that if this is a Democracy it is a form of Democracy unlike any other in the world. That is to say; the supreme power is not here, in practice – which is what matters – vested in the people’s Parliament. It is vested in the Second Parliament. (O’Faolain, 1951a: 6-7) The political storm also damaged the popular standing of the Catholic Church. The British Ambassador, in a confidential report on the sociopolitical implications of the Mother and Child Scheme, observed, ‘since the core of the hierarchical objection was to the absence of a means test, there are signs of a degree of underground criticism of the attitude of the bishops among the poorer classes of the country, which is far from usual’ (cited in Cooney, 1986: 27). Peadar O’Donnell (1951: 6), writing in The Bell, pointed out that the Mother and Child debate was likely to feed into the conspiratorial tradition of Irish history, with damaging consequences for public confidence in politicians. On the face of it, Ireland did seem to be a deeply traditional society in a state of total subordination to Catholic power, at least in the social sphere. The defeat of the Mother and Child Scheme and the collapse of the inter-party government suggested a complete rout for the proponents of a welfare state. But Ireland was not about to embrace a full-blown theocratic state model. In reality, the defeat of the Mother and Child Scheme represented a watershed in Irish path development towards a slow progression to a more open and pluralist society. Ireland was about to reimagine itself as an open society in which the Church would become peripheral to the governance of the country (see Chapter 6). The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, speaking in 2015 at the graveside of Dr Browne commented: ‘Those who sit here and reflect will be making a testament that an ethical view, or a radical dream of

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equality, does not end with one’s physical passing’ (The Irish Times, 19 December 2015). The President’s tribute to Noel Browne’s legacy portrays him as a key actor in the cause of a more secular Ireland, built on the principles of social justice and equality. He became for many people a folk hero, who spoke truth to power. His political fate was permanent exclusion by the governing elite, who did not welcome his radical ideas. But he had succeeded in opening up a space for critical political debate and the possibility of social change by remoulding political debate and public consciousness. In his article on ‘The priest in politics’, Sean O’Faolain (1947: 22-3) had concluded: ‘A Church overtly or tacitly, deliberately or unwittingly, in alliance or conjunction with the State, must sooner or later become identified in the public mind with the State, and must cease to be an inner sphere’. The Mother and Child Scheme controversy had finally exposed the Church-State alliance and the lack of democratic legitimacy upon which it was founded in the conspiratorial sphere of secrecy. Change was in the air. Dr Browne had put the welfare state ideal at the centre of the political stage. Historian Lindsey Earner-Byrne concludes: ‘Fundamentally the shape of the health services, but also the premise on which the welfare state is based, was settled by the [Mother and Child Scheme] controversy. It was settled against a universal system and in favour of a neo-liberal model’ (Earner Byrne, 2017).

The health debate: defending inequality and residualisation Peter Kaim-Caudle (1967: 25) observed ‘the provision of health services is almost in every developed country the subject of political controversy’. The provision of a comprehensive service became a major issue in the 1965 general election. Ireland had a two-tier health system. The dispensary service, which originated in the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1851, was renamed the General Medical Services in 1953. It provided a residual service for the poor. Approximately 30% of the population, were in receipt of (means-tested) free medical services from the local district medical officer (GP). (The figure was much lower in Dublin.) They were also entitled to free medicines. The Health Act 1953 provided free hospital and specialist services for 80-90% of the population (Kaim-Caudle, 1967: 26-8). The administration of the health service was devolved to local authorities, with funding evenly shared between national taxation and local rates. In addition, the costs of 50 public voluntary hospitals (mainly denominational) and a portion of all hospital deficits was met by the Hospital Trusts Board, funded

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by the sweepstake – a lottery system linked to horse-racing (KaimCaudle, 1967: 29). Kaim-Caudle (1967: 26) estimated that expenditure on health services in the Republic of Ireland in 1963/4 was £10 per head, equivalent of 3.4% of gross national product. The Minister for Health, Sean MacEntee, strongly defended the health service during the 1965 general election, declaring: There has been evidence at the all-party select committee to show that the existing health services met in a reasonable and fair way and at a reasonable cost the essential needs of our people for medical care and attention. This was not to say that the services were perfect. Experience has shown that certain changes to detail might be desirable … He clearly envisaged only minor changes in the existing system: When the Dáil Eireann meets to form a new government on April 21st I shall have ceased to be Minister for Health. It may be opportune, therefore, to say that wide study and the experience of eight years (as Minister for Health) have convinced me that the structure of our medical services and the principles on which they are based ensures for the generality of our people, medical care and attention, the equal of which is not to be found outside this island. And the reason for this is that medicine here is a free profession. It has not been brought as elsewhere under the control of the State … (The Irish Times, 30 March 1965) The Minister’s confidence was not shared by the main opposition parties. In its election manifesto, Fine Gael robustly criticised the inadequacies of the health service: Apart from Finland, Ireland is the only country in Western Europe which, at the moment under its Health services makes no provision for the general body of wage earners and persons of limited means in relation to the expenses of general practitioner medical care, and of necessary drugs, medicines and medical appliances … one of the results of the present system is to cause serious and unnecessary overcrowding in hospital … There are no proper facilities for home nursing, no facilities for home help … there is no adequate ambulance or car service to enable a patient

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to come to hospital for daily or weekly treatment and go home afterwards. The result is that many patients will be admitted to hospital when they could stay at home ... In the sphere of mental health there is an insufficient number of out-patient clinics resulting in patients being kept unnecessarily in hospital and the clinics that do exist are, in some instances, very much under-staffed. (quoted in Kaim-Caudle, 1967: 31) Fine Gael proposed replacing the existing health system with an insurance-based scheme that would provide coverage for 85 per cent of the population. Labour favoured a similar comprehensive insurancebased health service, free from the unpopular (and often inequitable) means test, that would cover the entire population (Kaim-Caudle, 1967: 32-3). In the event, Fianna Fail won the election, ensuring that a two-tier service would continue into the twenty-first century. In 1956, Voluntary Health Insurance (VHI) was introduced in a state-sponsored scheme offering insurance on a non-profit basis to higher income earners. It copper-fastened the public-private mix that underpinned the Irish healthcare system and its tiered structure (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 256). Wren (2003: 17) comments in reference to this two-tier system: ‘Private medicine is booming. Never having attempted to offer equitable access to health care, Ireland has been moving inexorably to an American style system, where money decides access, where doctors earn very large incomes indeed from private practice and a minority may even hope to add to their earnings by becoming share-holders in state-subsidized private hospitals’. This is a fair characterisation of modern Irish medicine and the development of healthcare since the 1950s. With Fianna Fail back in power, the new Minister for Health, Donogh O’Malley, published a White Paper in 1966, ‘The health services and their further development’. Despite O’Malley’s reputation as a reforming minister, Barrington (1987: 261) notes that the White Paper at its outset made the ideological position of the Fianna Fail government very clear – asserting that the State did not have ‘a duty to provide unconditionally for all medical services free of cost for everyone’. The core recommendations were translated into policy by the Health Act 1970, including the replacement of the dispensary system by the General Medical Scheme (GMS). It also resulted in the replacement of the dispensary doctor by a ‘choice of doctor scheme’. However, as Barrington (1987: 25-7) has pointed out, the scheme had many deficits, including: the failure to promote group practices

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amongst GPs in modern premises or good record keeping, excessive competition for patients, and an emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. While the role of local authorities (including funding) was phased out and later replaced by a system of eight regional health boards, (which subsequently morphed into the present-day Health Services Executive – HSE), potential opposition to these reforms was successfully neutralised. Medical consultants were offered greater opportunities for private practice within the state system in a public-private mix. In the case of voluntary hospitals, under the denominational control of the Catholic Church, reassurance was offered in terms of the preservation of a Catholic ethos through the imposition of Catholic ethics on medical practice (Wren, 2003: 50). This concession was to have considerable implications in terms of patients’ rights, especially reproductive rights. Women’s access to contraception, pregnancy screening for foetal abnormalities, and abortion was severely curtailed. The publication of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 further entrenched clerical opposition to contraception.

Human rights, mental health and community care Community care became an important concept in the post-war world. A world that was slowly coming to grips with the implications of the Holocaust, which questioned the basis of popular conceptions of progress towards a more civilised and just social and political order. Reports from the Soviet Union, popularised in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, exposed the existence of gulags, where non-conformists and political dissidents were incarcerated in horrific conditions, and the practice of mass extermination against enemies of the state. Gradually the public became engaged with the terrifying implications of these atrocities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 sought to outlaw such tyrannical behaviour in the future. In its 30 articles the original declaration sought to lay down a structure for universal human rights. While politicians have selectively interpreted its articles, the concept of human rights contained in the document related to the totality of human existence: spiritual, intellectual, political, social and economic freedom. These were viewed as indivisible parts of the whole. The politicisation of community care was brought about by social reformers and human rights activists, who sought to put the politics of conscience on the public agenda. In the increasingly liberal climate of the 1960s and early 1970s, this humanitarianism resonated with the public mood of confidence and optimism about the future. But

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there was also a powerful element of economic realism. Politicians and administrators perceived an opportunity to marry conscience and convenience by closing expensive institutions, using as justification the rhetoric of community care. Few initially expected that the cost of community care would be substantially borne by the family, and specifically women carers, such was the flush of enthusiasm. In retrospect, this enthusiasm is easy to understand in the context of the post-war legacy. During wartime conditions vulnerable groups had been pushed into the background. Little changed in the immediate aftermath of the war, when reconstruction and the welfare of non-disabled people became the dominant policy concern. However, the benign nature of the welfare state increasingly came to be questioned because of its treatment of vulnerable groups. Evidence of abuse perpetrated against defenceless people in institutional care began to grow. The abuse of the rights of those in psychiatric care – through physical abuse, psycho-surgery, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), neglect and isolation – shocked public opinion. It became apparent that even in democratic societies ‘the vulnerable’ are liable to cruelty and inhumanity. Institutionalisation was identified as the culprit, making prevention and community care key policy goals. The ‘rediscovery’ of child abuse during the 1960s also pushed the state towards taking a more active role in protecting the rights of vulnerable populations in the community, redefining the role and talk of community care in the protective language of advance liberalism. In Ireland the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Mental Illness (1966) began the process of community care and deinstitutionalisation by recommending a combination of community care and hospital care. It emphasised active treatment and rehabilitation for patients in long-term institutional care. It also advocated the integration of mental health services with general medical provision within the community. A variety of community-based mental health services began to emerge around the country in the form of hostels, day centres, day hospitals and sheltered workshops. The reorganisation of the health service into eight regional health boards in 1970 further accelerated community care, which was defined as a specific programme. Between 1966 and 1981 the psychiatric hospital population was reduced from 17,694 to 12,500. The publication of a policy on psychiatric services, Planning for the future (1984), accelerated the process of deinstitutionalisation, reducing the psychiatric hospital population to 9,000 by the early 1990s (Leane and Powell, 1991: 11-13).

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Ireland’s hospitalisation rate for mental illness had been double that in England (Wren 2003: 65). While deinstitutionalisation was manifestly a progressive and humane policy, the quality of community care would be dependent on investment by the state and support for vulnerable citizens in the community. Maeve-Ann Wren (2003: 77) has commented that often closure of hospital beds was the product of public expenditure cuts rather than good intentions; without adequate community care services, some patients in the community became reliant on relatives for support or were simply left destitute as part of the homeless population. Enhanced social rights advocated by the community care movement are fundamentally compromised by these social realities.

Social service councils: the Catholic Church and voluntarism The dogmatic opposition of the Catholic Church to the welfare state fundamentally changed following the social liberalism of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s. But there were already signs of change in the 1950s. The collapse of the inter-party government in 1951, following Church-led opposition to Dr Browne’s Mother and Child Scheme, represented the high watermark of clerical domination over social policy. In Irish political life, Dr Noel Browne had been turned into a martyr. The Church had put itself in the position of being perceived as a threat to Ireland’s fledgling democracy. It was clear that it was centrally involved in the political process. The clergy’s interference in the affairs of the State became henceforth increasingly controversial. In this changed climate, the Church’s opposition to the welfare state diminished and was replaced by cooperation in a mixed economy of welfare. As the Church increasingly disengaged from government, it focused on its role as a welfare actor and service provider. The Catholic Church began to redefine itself as a voluntary organisation rather than an arm of government, a common phenomenon in developing societies (Berger, 2006). Since the Charitable Bequests Act 1844 the Catholic Church had become a major provider of health and social care services in Ireland. The Society of St Vincent de Paul was first introduced into Ireland in 1844. Many hospitals, orphanages, Magdalene asylums, residential care facilities were under the management of religious orders. For well over a century the State funded the Catholic Church to run a substantial component of health and social care services in Ireland. By the end of the twentieth century, suffering from acute shortages of religious

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personnel and a welter of child abuse scandals, the Church is in the process of disengaging from this role. But the Church-State axis has created a strong tradition of voluntary-statutory cooperation. This legacy was evident in Section 65 of the 1953 Public Health Act, which made provision for grant-aiding voluntary and community organisations to supply services ‘similar or ancillary to those provided by the Health Authority’. In the wake of the 1951 Mother and Child Scheme controversy, it was a welcome step in the direction of democratising the Irish social services. Ruddle and Donoghue (1995: 15) note ‘the role of the voluntary activity began to change from playing the lead part in welfare provision to the role of either complementing or providing an alternative to the State system’. A further development, arising from the recommendations of the Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on the Care of the Aged (1968), was a proposal that social services councils be established to coordinate community care services as a partial alternative to residential care. Its recommendations were followed by ‘the huge growth of voluntary Social Service Councils and Care of the Aged Committees throughout the country’ (Ruddle and Donoghue, 1995: 16). In 1971, the National Social Service Council (later Board) was established to coordinate the voluntary and community sector. There followed the National Federation of Social Service Councils in 1975. It called upon the government to acknowledge the role of the third sector in developing a comprehensive national community care programme. However, it was unsuccessful (Stewart and Cawley, 1991: 173). This may have been due to an uneasy relationship between Church and State, which lay at the core of social service councils. Old conflicts were reignited, especially when some socially conscious clergy began to practise the Marxist gospel of liberation theology (see subsection titled ‘Homelessness and housing action’ in this chapter). Ruddle and Donoghue (1995: 17) have detected a waning of government support for the third sector from the late 1970s noting: ‘in 1981 the National Social Services Council was reconstructed as a Board and given a statutory basis in 1984 but in 1988, following an abortive attempt by the Government to disband it altogether, its functions were cut back to supplying the provision of information services and advice on the ‘social services’. The role of the Catholic lay religious organisation, the St Vincent de Paul, which has 1,000 branches in Ireland and approximately 11,000 members, in providing welfare and various financial services was acknowledged by the Green Paper on ‘The community and voluntary sector and its relationship with the State’ (Department of Social Welfare,

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1997: 31) as operating a ‘shadow Welfare State’. This is an extraordinary admission in an official report. On the same page, the Green Paper makes its position clear by stating that ‘the Government greatly values the vital role played by these various organisations and acknowledges the enormous contribution made by them in assisting individuals in need, the communities in which they live and work and society as a whole’. This statement is a powerful testament to the enduring power of the religious in Irish society – and the role of the voluntary sector in maintaining that power. Given the enormous recent allegations of breaches of trust and abuse of power by the Catholic clergy, notably in the residential childcare sector (Powell and Scanlon, 2015), the government’s ringing endorsement of its role would seem somewhat inappropriate. It also sits uneasily alongside the Green Paper’s (Department of Social Welfare, 1997:24) assertion that ‘an active voluntary and community sector contributes to a democratic and pluralist society’. The Catholic Church was not democratically accountable. Indeed, it is open to the charge of undermining Ireland’s fledgling democracy through the informal Church-State alliance and opposition to an open society. This lack of accountability raises questions about a democratic deficit in a voluntary sector where it is probable, though this is not disclosed in the Green Paper, that the bulk of charity funding has traditionally been allocated to the Catholic Church. Furthermore, it is difficult to see how pluralism can be achieved within a denominationalist framework that is its very antithesis. The Green Paper (Department of Social Welfare 1997: 31) opines that ‘the role of religious organisations in relation to the voluntary and community sector is changing’, citing a decline in vocations and the ‘withdrawal of religious personnel from some services’. These developments might be seen as symptomatic of a trend in which the Church surrenders institutional control to the State. However, that would be a simplistic analysis. The Green Paper (Department of Social Welfare, 1997: 31) notes that ‘religious personnel have increased their role in, for example, community based services and are reassessing their mission’. The Church had repositioned itself in relation to the State, while retaining its control over schools. While the Church’s role in the voluntary sector has declined, radical elements within it have taken on a major advocacy role on behalf of the poor. Social Justice Ireland is the most vocal champion of the rights of the poor. Its conferences, publications and budget submissions to the government provide a critical analysis of social policy that has become a vital democratic ingredient in public debate. Many other

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Catholic organisations, such as St Vincent de Paul, offer a vital lifeline in a society that remains highly ambivalent about social expenditure. As the section on the housing crisis shows, the Catholic Church has also become a champion of homeless people. But much of this activity (which is enormously beneficial in advocacy terms) has been taken on by individual campaigning priests and nuns, rather than the institutional Church itself. While these clerical actors (mainly from religious orders such as the Vincentian Partnership) could act as ‘the conscience of society … the institutional church remained deeply implicated in the structure of power of this society, in fact an essential pillar of the established society’ (Peillon, 2001: 63).

Education, segregation and modernisation The modernisation strategy had considerable benefits for education policy. Rising public expenditure augmented social provision, leading to many new initiatives which were long overdue. In no area of social provision was this more true than education, which has been described as a ‘much vaunted policy objective of this period’ (Conference of Major Religious Superiors, 1988: 111). Employment needs required that the role of the educational system be re-examined, not in terms of the previous emphasis on religious, moral and intellectual development, but in its contribution to economic growth. The economic impetus coincided with a growing political awareness of the importance of education in Irish development. This economic imperative coincided with a wider demand for educational reform, which was inspired by social and political objectives. The educational reform debate did not include desegregation of the school system (Alvey, 1991). Over 90 per cent of primary schools in the Republic of Ireland continued to be controlled by the Catholic Church, as well as most of the secondary sector, with a small number of Protestant schools providing the only alternative. While desegregation of the education system in the USA during the 1960s was driven by the civil rights movement and became a major focus of attempts to bring diverse ethnic groups together in the public schools system, there was virtually no acknowledgement of educational segregation as a divisive force in Ireland. Northern Ireland also had a civil rights movement, led by Catholics protesting against religious sectarianism Yet, there was little support for desegregation in the south, apart from the journal Church and State. Few politicians, apart from Dr Noel Browne, spoke out on the issue.

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The publication of Investment in education (1966) fundamentally reorientated educational policy in Ireland. The choice of title symbolically emphasised the Fianna Fail administration’s determination to link the educational and economic systems. The report contained two key themes which would provide the framework for the educational reforms of the 1960s. First, it linked education and the employment requirements of the economy that highlighted the importance of the efficient use of educational resources. The production of a labour force geared towards the needs of an advanced industrial economy was identified as a principal objective of the State. Only the State could provide the level of investment required to do this. Second, it identified a correlation between socio-economic status and educational participation and performance, exposing sharp inequalities in the education system. Investment in education provided detailed empirical data on the scale of social inequality within the Irish educational system. The report highlighted the low level of participation in second- and third-level education by children from working-class families. Children from social groups A, B and C, which accounted for 45 per cent of the population, were heavily over-represented in secondary schools and the universities. There was also evidence of significant geographical inequalities (Investment in education, 1966: 154-72). The Minister for Education, Donagh O’Malley, recognised Investment in education as the blueprint for educational reform (Dáil Debates, 6 December 1966). O’Malley had a reputation as an energetic and reform-minded minister. He set in motion a series of policy initiatives which were intended to increase access to the educational system, reduce social and geographical inequalities and reorient the curriculum from its heavy academic emphasis towards practical instruction or vocational training. Fees for vocational and comprehensive schools were abolished and replaced by government grants. Secondary schools were invited to join the system. The school transport scheme was extended and assistance was offered towards the cost of, in the Minister’s words, ‘books and accessories’ for the student ‘on whom it would be a hardship to meet all such costs’. Third-level education also benefited from the reforming spirit. The Report of the Commission on Higher Education, published in 1967, revealed sharp inequalities in access to third-level education. Students from manual working-class backgrounds comprised less than one tenth of the university intake. Farmers’ children fared little better, accounting for one fifth of university students. The remaining 70% was drawn from the middle classes. The Commission on Higher Education recommended that student grants be introduced to encourage able students from less well-off backgrounds to participate

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in third-level education. The government complied with this recommendation and the Local Authority (Higher Education Grant) Act was passed in 1968. By 1986-87, the number of grant holders in third-level education had reached 33.5%. However, since there was no consistent policy determining the level of grant awards, the income of grant holders has gyrated over time (National and Economic Social Council, 1988a: 80). Moreover, mature students, often drawn from socially deprived backgrounds, were at a severe disadvantage in applying for grant awards, especially as part-time participation was not supported within the grants system. In the decade 1963-64 to 1973-74, according to the National Economic and Social Council (1986), the share of public educational expenditure (which accounted for 80% of all educational expenditure) rose from 3.45% to 6.29% of gross national product. The number of full-time pupils at all levels increased from 642,000 (22.4% of total population) to 816,000 (26.4% ) during this decade. In the same period, the complement of full-time teachers, in first and second level education expanded from 21,900 (2% of the labour force) to 32,000 (2.9% ). The increase in public expenditure was only partly due to the displacement of private educational expenditure. A significant increase in state investment had taken place. Breen et al conclude: ‘following the rapid growth in educational expenditure in the 1960s, government expenditure as a share of GDP, remained roughly constant over the 1970s and 1980s at around 6%. The growth in participation rates and student numbers between 1963/4 and 1984/5 was from 642,252 to 961,575, with the percentage rise amongst 19 year olds engaged in third level education rising from 8.8 to 23.6%’ (Breen, et al 1990: 129–130). However, despite this undoubted achievement in educational expansion, critics of the system suggested that state investment has produced socially regressive results discriminating against the less well-off. Tussing has fundamentally questioned the redistributive effects of ‘free’ education, concluding ‘while presented as a technique to improve access to education by the less advantaged, it distributed resources in ways often favouring the more advantaged’ (Tussing, 1978: 34). Redistribution in education is realised through a system of state subsidisation of each year in education. The longer a student remains in education, the greater the level of subsidisation since costs rise sharply. Many working-class young people were almost completely excluded from third-level education. Class, cultural capital and social mobility became closely interconnected. Many educationally disadvantaged young people felt alienated from the system. Emigration seemed like their best last hope of a better life.

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Youth culture, emigration and modernisation Cultural perceptions of the British welfare state, notably its impact on the quality of working-class social experience, were different in Britain and Ireland. Michael Pierse (2011: 108) observes ‘while angry young men like Sillitoe, Osborne and Braine and others criticise the social mobility of the British welfare state as a sham. For Irish writers the escape to Britain offers a modicum of mobility that their protagonists never realize at home’. Plays such as James McKenna’s The scatterin’ (1959) explored the lives of four young Dubliners as they debated the pros and cons of emigrating to England. Between 1956 and 1961, the average annual net emigration statistic was 42,200. Between 1961 and 1966 (following the modernisation of the economy) the rate fell to 16,121. It declined further between 1966 and 1971, to 10,781 (Kenny Report, 1974: 10). The scatterin’ is located in the heart of Dublin’s working-class Northside in June 1958. The youths are represented as ‘teddy boys’ (mimicking the upper-class Edwardian dandy) in their dress style. But this is not a play about Baudrillian stylisation of ‘dirty dressed up gangsters’. It is a narrative of poverty and police brutality that reveals the subjection of Dublin’s working-class youth (Pierse, 2011: 76). The dream of a better life in another place is captured in James McKenna’s poem Oxford Street is long, which dreams of the scale and possibilities of London’s cityscape. Michael Pierse (2011: 84-5) concludes ‘when the other young men of the play [The scatterin’] sail away, metaphorically they are sailing home. Irish culture is illiberal, doctrinaire, anti-urban and anti-working class … By contrast, foreign cultures are vital and uninhibited’. The cultural repression of young people’s sexuality is captured in The scatterin’ as a push factor in emigration. There were real life examples of young people, such as Philomena Lee – a single mother who was subjected to a ‘forced adoption’ of her son to the USA. She emigrated to England and built a successful life within the British welfare state, as an NHS nurse manager (Sixsmith, 2006). Her story exposes a culture of ‘shame and hide’ in which up to 30,000 young women and girls were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries for being unmarried mothers (Ferriter, 2005: 538). McKenna captures the doomed possibilities of social mobility for urban working-class youth in Ireland. Emigration offers an alternative life for Irish young people ‘caught in a “rat trap” of conformity’ (Pierse, 2011: 109) even if it turns out to be a flight of fancy. Other playwrights, such as Lee Dunne in Goodbye to the hill (1976) and Henno Magee in

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Hatchet (1972), take up this existential dilemma of urban working-class youth in Ireland. The Boomtown Rats, in one of the first Irish rock songs to top the British charts, Rat Trap (1978), convey the anger of urban youth, Billy seeking to escape poverty from the ‘traps [that] have been sprung long before he was born’ by ‘kick[ing] down the door’. Modernisation during the 1960s was to change the lives of young people in Ireland. The social power of the Catholic Church began to erode under the pressures of modernity, prosperity and cosmopolitanism. The launch of RTE (Radio Telefis Eireann) in 1962 provided a domestic television channel for the first time – and in many parts of Ireland the first experience of television. Youth culture in the form of dance and music, especially rock and roll, introduced a new atmosphere of cultural liberation. The Irish show band phenomenon emerged. The Beatles performed in Ireland for the first time in 1963. It was estimated that in the early 1960s there were up to three-quarters of a million young people out dancing in a society that was undergoing profound cultural change (Power, 2000; Powell et al, 2012). The symbolic and material treatment of youth by Irish society in general, and the institutions of Church, State and civil society more specifically, reflect broad social and cultural shifts. In a historical context, it may seem that young people’s autonomy and freedom to choose had increased significantly as the Irish welfare state developed, the Church’s grip on society loosened and Ireland opened up to the world. However, it is important to recognise that increasing choices available to young people in terms of lifestyles and consumption did not necessarily imply more freedom. Young people’s ability to negotiate their lives in a market society depends on multiple factors, such as economic, social and cultural capital, which remained unequally distributed (as noted in reference to access to third-level education). An alienated section of the youth population has continued to experience subjection through what Pierse (2011: 109) calls: ‘subtle forms of oppression, through culturally inscribed domination and socially alienating elitism … in a cerebral, emotional and deeply personal manner’. Similarly, societal anxieties regarding young people in the form of moral panics about youth culture and behaviour remain as valid in public and policy discourses today as ever before, perpetuating deficit constructions of young people from urban working-class backgrounds. Such constructions continue to frame and reframe social policy, as seen in the recent re-orientation of youth services towards targeted youth projects aimed at behavioural change and crime prevention (Powell et al, 2012: 150-71). But the post-war generation of young people had challenged the social power of the Catholic Church through

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the sexual revolution as Ireland was transformed from a rural backward land-based economy into a modern urban society, albeit with a political culture that proved impervious to change.

Housing crisis, urban policy and land speculation The alienation of Irish urban working-class youth reflected deeper forces within the flawed project of Irish nation building. While modern revolutions were urban-led (Ireland was no exception), reaction was based in rurality. The equation of the local rural community with the nation state after the revolution meant that a social hierarchy emerged in Ireland locating the urban working class at the bottom of Irish society. Professor Cathal O’Connell (2007: 17) has observed that the nation was ‘defined primarily through a rural idiom … This sentiment was unsurprising given the natural constituency of the Catholic Church was the strong farmer class and they instinctively reflected one another’s conservative values’. In reference to those outside the property-owning class, O’Connell (2007: 17-18) concludes: ‘the only recognition for the urban working-class and the rural property-less was one based on distain for their lack of roots in the land’, adding, ‘At the bottom of the national hierarchy, if they were recognised at all, were the urban working-class who had neither a claim to property nor, in the eyes of many nation-builders, a claim to membership of the national community’. The consequences for the poor were that they were viewed as responsible for their own predicament due to a lack of moral fibre, which was not the responsibility of the state. Historian Joe Lee (1988: 124) asserted ‘the cabinet waged a coherent war against the weaker elements of the community. The poor, the aged and the unemployed must feel the lash of the liberators’. Quite so! But hostility to state interventionism in the light of the UN Convention on Human Rights (1948) was no longer tenable in a society that purported to be democratic. Modernisation proved to be the agent of change because modernisation meant urbanisation. Michelle Norris (2016: 137) observes in relation to this transformation: ‘the rural population declined significantly during this period, while the population in urban areas expanded to the extent that, for the first time in the history of the state, the majority of the population lived in towns and cities – 53% in 1956’. Urbanisation required a major initiative in housing construction, leading to a property boom. This objective posed a substantial challenge to the policy makers. O’Connell (2007: 40) comments:

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‘The policies of industrialisation and economic development pursued from the end of the 1950s as strategies to modernise the country and rescue the independence project from impending failure, brought their own pressures on the ability of the housing system to meet the accommodation needs of the population’. A White Paper on housing (1964) estimated that 98,000 new homes were required between 1964-70, 14,000 per annum. High-rise blocks in city suburbs (such as Ballymun in Dublin) became emblematic of the Soviet-style modernist construction methods to build mass housing (O’Connell, 2007: 401). The 1960s and 1970s witnessed prodigious efforts to construct a new urban Ireland in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway. During the 1960s, the population simultaneously grew from 2,818,000 to 2,978,000 and shifted from the countryside to urban areas. The urban population expanded from 1,299,000 in 1961 to 1,556,000 in 1971. The latter 1971 statistic accounted for 52.2% of the population living in urban areas, compared with 35.5% in 1936 (Kenny Report, 1974: 10). The marriage rate increased from 5.1% per 1000 in 1957 to 7.3% per 1000 in 1969. Between 1961 and 1966, the increase in married couples was very significant. The increasing numbers living in urban areas produced strong upward demand pressure on housing and drove up land values (Kenny Report, 1974: 10). Norris (2016: 7) estimates that home-ownership in Ireland during the 1950s was the highest in Western Europe and 75% of new dwellings received public subsidies. Housing became inextricably linked to land speculation. The government responded by establishing the Committee on the Price of Building Land which produced the Kenny Report in 1974. It analysed in detail the problem of land speculation. One example cited in the Kenny Report (1974: 9) was in relation to a working-class area of Dublin: ‘In 1963 land in Ballyfermot Upper was sold by A to B at a price of £195 per acre. In 1964, B sold them to C and Company Ltd. at £258 per acre and in September 1970 C and Company Ltd sold them to M at £6,480 per acre’. The Kenny Report (1974: 77) recommended that local authorities be empowered to acquire land required for housing development, based on its existing ‘use value’. Clearly, the implementation of this recommendation would have put an end to land speculation. Presumably the failure of successive governments to implement this vital recommendation has been produced by the lobbying power of vested interest, citing property rights in the 1937 Constitution. The segregation of urban working-class populations on peripheral estates produces major social alienation (Hourigan, 2011). The French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1998), has advanced his concept of

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‘habitus’, which means ‘durable, transposable dispositions’ acquired by individuals in response to the social forces within their environments, such as class, religion and education. Both Michael Pierse (2011) and Cathal O’Connell (2011) draw on the concept of ‘habitus’ in their urban analysis. Michel Peillon (2001: 32), in his book Welfare in Ireland, draws heavily on Bourdieu, defining habitus as representing ‘the point of crystallization of the structure of domination and of the play of power’. O’Connell (2011: 239) similarly asserts the ‘hollowing-out of welfare and the city leads to undermining of the public sphere whereby people who are neglected by the state in turn reject the state and its agencies’. It is a view that clearly applies in 2016. But it was also true of 1950s Ireland, where there was despair. Lee Dunne’s drama Goodbye to the Hill, demonstrates the exasperated fatalism with regard to the advancement of urban working-class youth in Ireland through the character Paddy, who angrily describes the stifling atmosphere of the Hill as ‘a fucking instant slum, it should have been pulled down a fortnight before it was built. Its kip to me’ (quoted in Pierce, 2011: 100). Urban planning was seriously neglected in housing development, which was driven by speculative forces. Yet the period of modernisation during the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by ‘the drive against slum housing’ (O’Connell, 2007). The government claimed new houses built had risen from 2,631 in 1963-4 to 5,502 in 1967 and propagandistically pointed out in its defence, ‘few other local authorities in Europe, if any, have done as much to house their people as Dublin Corporation’ (quoted in Ferriter, 2005: 591-2). The housing crisis was compounded by the reality that 60,000 occupied houses were deemed unfit for human habitation, with 32,000 (27,000 in rural areas) deemed beyond repair (Ferriter, 2005: 591). Historian Dermot Keogh (2005: 277) notes that there were serious environmental costs: ‘The capital city, unable to cope with the housing crisis, had been deformed by a boom in property speculation which replaced landmark buildings with ugly office blocks’. He sardonically adds, ‘the modernisation of Dublin had been good for some people. A number of new entrepreneurs had done very nicely out of the building boom and they had every reason to feel grateful. Fianna Fail began to accept large donations and out of that was born Taca’ (an Irish word meaning support) (Keogh, 2005: 278). Essentially, Taca was a corporate funding strategy, which offered access to ministers in return for political contributions (Ferriter, 2005: 560-1). It was to become the object of rumour and scandal as a ‘payola racket’ associated with future Fianna Fail Taoiseach, Charles Haughey (Hanley and Miller, 2009: 98, 120). Haughey, reputed founding patron of Taca, was publicly

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represented as the ultimate ‘Taca boy’, who allegedly worked closely with property developers in return for political donations (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 120-1). New office blocks were, according to Whyte (1980: 357), springing up in the capital, often close to areas of poor housing. This perceived connection with property speculators was to fuel the emerging housing protest movement and further poison Fianna Fail’s relationship with the left republican movement.

Homelessness and housing action In Bourdieu’s framework, welfare recipients may adopt resistance strategies (Peillon, 2001: 32-4). The foundation of the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC) in 1967 represented a strategy by left republican activists, socialists, communists and other radicals to involve the homeless in a campaign of direct action against the state (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 88-9). The moral authority of the DHAC was significantly enhanced by the participation of the Jesuit priest, Fr Michael Sweetman (1914-96) (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 89). He was publicly attacked in the Dáil by the Minister of Local Government, Kevin Boland (Dáil Debates, 8 May 1968). Fr Sweetman spent much of his life working as a priest in inner city Dublin and in Ballymun amongst the most socially deprived citizens of the city. He lived amongst the poor experiencing their appalling social conditions directly. His willingness to speak out on behalf of Dublin’s tenant and homeless population in an openly critical manner brought him into conflict with the government (McVerry, 2009: 189). Other priests, including Fr Austin Flannery and Fr Sean Carron, joined Fr Sweetman in criticising the Fianna Fail government for the failure in housing policy and the destructive consequences for family life (Whyte, 1980: 351). The DHAC campaign represented a significant attempt to organise a social left against a state increasingly viewed as hostile to the urban working class. Modernisation had produced a property boom from which the poor were excluded. Hanley and Millar (2009: 89), in reference to the militant tactics of the DHAC, assert that their campaign began with the picketing of landlords’ homes, demonstrations during Dublin City Council meetings demanding the Fianna Fail government ‘build houses not office blocks’, and then escalated into the occupation of vacant properties. By early 1968 the DHAC was assisting homeless people in squatting. The DHAC also supported families from Inchicore in resisting relocation to Ballymun by barricading themselves in their homes and resisting eviction. Police intervention in the Inchicore protest followed, in what

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became known as the ‘battle of Sarah Place’ (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 97). Further direct action followed in the affluent suburb of Ballsbridge, where two large properties had been occupied on Pembroke Road. Over 100 Gardai were involved in the forceful removal of the squatters in what became a violent confrontation. It turned out to be ‘the last hurrah’ of the DHAC (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 203). Increasingly, the militant tactics of the DHAC began to backfire, as other homeless people on the housing list of Dublin Corporation began to view squatters as ‘queue jumpers’. Public opinion was not sympathetic to the use of violence. Moreover, the Forcible Entry Act 1971 had increased Garda powers and enhanced penalties in a move to end squatting. By 1971, the DHAC had once again changed its strategy and tactics back to resisting evictions and assisting displaced Catholics fleeing from sectarian violence in Northern Ireland (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 240). The employment of violence had undermined the moral authority of the Dublin Housing Action Committee. Furthermore, the outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, in which republicans became centrally involved, provoked a republican split over the perceived primacy of nationalist politics over social agitation. A new party emerged, the Socialist Party of Ireland, which included several leading figures from the Dublin Housing Action Committee. Outside Ballymun its influence was greatly diminished (Hanley and Millar, 2009: 241). But homelessness continued to pose a major social issue. Gradually, the voluntary and community sector took up the cause of homeless people. For example, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy founded Focus Point (now Focus Ireland) as a campaigning organisation for homeless people, restoring the moral authority of the housing action movement. Madge Fagan (1923-2017) founded the Marrowbone Lane Tenants’ Association in 1966, which played a central role in the formation of the National Association of Tenants’ Organisations (NATO). In 1972, NATO organised a rent strike resisting a government proposal to charge 4 pence on each room in a local authority house. It attracted the support of over 100,000 tenants and lasted 18 months. Madge Fagan and other women leaders were prominent in resisting evictions resulting from the rent strike (The Irish Times, 4 March 2017). The Simon Community, inspired and led by social campaigner Brendan Ryan, proved to be a publicly visible and successful organisation, providing shelter and support for homeless people as well as raising public awareness of the conditions of the many rough sleepers that populate the streets of urban Ireland. Other organisations, such as Threshold founded in 1974 by Archbishop Dermot Ryan, emerged in a highly effective campaign in the voluntary and community sector to

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keep homelessness in public consciousness and on the political agenda. The campaigns organised by these voluntary organisations were notable for their ethical approach, in contrast to the militant tactics of the DHAC. They represent activism in social policy in their commitment to turning ideals into practical social justice.

The ‘ad hoc’ development of the social welfare system The Commission on Social Welfare (1986: 25) observed ‘the historical link with Britain has undoubtedly had an impact on the development of the system in Ireland. Thus, some of the early schemes, such as old age pensions and national insurance, are directly attributable to that link while the influence of the Poor Law continued up to the mid-1970s’. It was notable that the advent of the British welfare state in the 1940s had led to the end of the unpopular Poor Law. The Beveridge Report (1942) in the UK had received widespread public attention in Ireland. Its proposals for replacing the Poor Law with a social security system that connected needs to rights had a progressive appeal. Nonetheless, the Irish Social Welfare Act 1952 excluded farmers, farm labourers and relatives assisting on farms, amounting to 45.2 per cent of the population (Norris, 2016: 269), on the grounds that farmers objected to paying employers’ contributions into a universal social insurance scheme (Carey, 2007). The absence of an ideological commitment to a rights-based welfare state in Ireland ensured the continuation of a Poor Law mentality into the 1970s, when the community care movement (see earlier section) and growing recognition of women’s rights finally changed the system into a more rights-based approach. The Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (1972) and EEC Directive (79/7/EEC) in 1978 pushed the Irish government into implementing the principle of equality of treatment between men and women within the social security system. The women’s movement had turned poverty into a feminist issue. Many poor families were one-parent families, in which women struggled to provide for their children in a society that was profoundly unequal. Class and gender intersected in this social equation. The Commission on Social Welfare (1986: 61) concluded ‘the development of the Irish social welfare system, largely on an ad hoc basis, has been due to a variety of influences over several decades’. The establishment of the Department of Social Welfare in 1947 was followed by a sharp increase in the numbers of claimants of social welfare benefits – between 1947-86 the average annual number of recipients rose by 145%, from 294,674 to 724,162. Furthermore,

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between 1966 and 1985, the total number of social welfare beneficiaries (that is, recipients and adult and child dependents) more than doubled, from 566,442 to 1,138,115 – from one fifth to one third of the total population (Commission of Social Welfare, 1986: 56). Expenditure on social welfare rose sharply from 4.6% of GDP in 1951, to 7.6% in 1970 – rising to 12.9% in 1985 (Commission on Social Welfare (1986: 60). Changes in eligibility were the key factor in this growth in reference to old age pensions, children’s allowances and unemployment benefit, coupled with ‘transfer ratios’ (that is, the ratio of the average payment for beneficiary to per capita GDP) and the unemployment rate (Commission on Social Welfare, 1986: 61).

Conclusion This chapter has explored how modernisation in Ireland gradually produced an ‘ad hoc’ welfare state. The term ‘welfare state’ was attacked by moral conservatives, who viewed it as a ‘totalitarian’ institution. They called it a ‘servile state’ or ‘silken tyranny’. It is notable that there was an absence of ‘rights talk’ in the Irish welfare debate, in terms of the growing European post-war consensus around the centrality of human rights in defining moral and social relations in a civilized society. That was the purpose of the welfare state (Marshall, 1975). This unwillingness to grapple with human rights discourse was to produce some very ugly back stories (for example, historic child abuse) that became major issues in the twenty-first century. But Ireland’s position after the Second World War (during which it was neutral) was characterised by deep cultural and political resistance to modernity. An informal Church-State alliance made social progress very difficult. The Church, citing the principle of subsidiarity, regarded etatism (state control) as a social heresy. Dr Noel Browne’s abortive Mother and Child Scheme sought to challenge this traditionalist consensus amongst the elite in Irish society. His failure and subsequent exposure of the Church-State alliance, through publishing correspondence between the Catholic Bishops and the inter-party government, revealed the limitations of Irish democracy and the ruling elite’s contempt for the poor (especially the urban poor) – the 10 per cent of the population referred to by the Bishops in the letter cited at the beginning of this chapter. In this conservative climate, Dr Browne was politically constructed as a social heretic by the elite but became a folk hero for society at large. He had spoken up for a welfare state. Browne grasped the importance of social change through the construction of a more secular society, as a democratic imperative.

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Ultimately, a welfare state did appear. The term was largely eschewed in public debate because of the Church’s belief in its hegemonic right to define and control the social sphere; this was to deeply compromise the emergence of an ethical civil society. Clientelism and localism further distorted civil society and the democratic process. In public policy, notably housing, unregulated land speculation spawned property bubbles, a problem that was to lead to Ireland’s crash in the early twenty-first century. Health evolved into a two-tier (class-based) system. Major investment in education was successful at upskilling the labour force and reducing emigration but many young working-class people were marginalised. The Irish welfare state is often categorised as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon model (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Clearly, there is evidence to support this view. Social security was architecturally influenced by Britain (Commission on Social Welfare, 1986). But Ireland’s ideological orientation (driven by Catholic social teaching in the form of the principle of subsidiarity) and an informal ChurchState alliance suggests the Irish welfare state had more in common with the Mediterranean countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy) than other parts of the English-speaking world (whether these were welfare states or ‘diswelfare’ states under Franco and Salazar is open to debate). Nonetheless, a shared language and popular culture did influence the public imaginary concept of the ideal of a welfare state and similarly shape public demands for higher levels of social expenditure. Managing these expectations was a key task of the political elite. Fianna Fail (the dominant political party) skilfully adopted a conservative populist stance on social policy. The political alternatives (Fine Gael and Labour) were somewhat more open to a social democratic agenda (epitomised by Fine Gael’s 1960s ‘Just Society’ programme). In government, however, they were less adventurous and differed little in reality from Fianna Fail. Nonetheless, gradually an ad hoc Irish welfare state emerged. New social movements were to unlock Irish democracy in new and challenging ways from the 1960s; these were ultimately to undermine the ‘Church-State alliance’ through the creation of an open society.

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SIX

Poverty and social inequality In Annagry, a small village outside the town of Dungloe in the beautiful wilds of West Donegal there is a craft shop selling the usual attractions of such an area – handknit Arans, hand made lace and mairtins. The craft shop has a sign outside saying ‘Carrickfin Crafts’ and it is known in this Gaeltacht area as Comhaircummann na Rossan Teo – the Rosses Co Operative Ltd., it is a co-operative in the true and original sense of the word. Such a craft shop is by no means an unusual sight in the Gaeltacht areas. For it to be controlled, as a co-operative, by the local hand-knitters, is indeed unusual. It originated in the frustrations and feelings of exploitation that the hand-knitters of the area experienced each time they sold their hand knits to the local ‘agent’. The agent supplied the knitters, mainly women, with wool and paid them per ounce, to knit Aran garments for the home and foreign market. The ‘agent’ was a local business man with no defined territory – he made his own contract with the knitters and standard rates did not exist for workers. The system was highly exploitative. The knitters of the Rosses were highly dissatisfied with both the incomes they received and their contract of work. Out of this discontent and following an article entitled ‘Exploitation claim by knitters’ in the Sunday Press, the West Donegal Community Project, a project of the National Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty in Ireland, got together with a group of the local knitters and started the knitters co-op. In addition to increasing the income of the knitters, the coop has provided a valuable social outlet for the women, in what can be quite an isolated area. They have come to assert themselves through the experience of the co-op, committee and have gained confidence in their ability to manage their own affairs independent of men and particularly of the agent. Dublin City News Magazine, 1981

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This account captures the essential relationship between poverty and social action. It is a profoundly democratic activity that enables poor people from marginalised groups and areas to take charge of their own lives. But such efforts to deepen democracy engender hostility and are often perceived by those in power as subversive. The then Irish Prime Minister, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, speaking at the Kilkenny Conference on Poverty on 6-8 November 1981, noted this problem, asserting: ‘the terrible complacency surrounding poverty will have to be dispelled – and in the ordinary sense of the word, our society will have to be subverted, if it is going to change sufficiently’. Dr Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm for combating poverty is unusual amongst the governing elites, which too often view attempts to assist the poor as tantamount to an attempt to subvert the State. Oligarchies of power and wealth do not normally welcome efforts to deepen democracy, and strive to curtail them. In the four ensuing decades neoliberalism became the animating idea in global political economy, advocating the roll-back of the welfare state. This policy departure, championed by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK during the 1980s, undermined attempts to combat poverty and compress social inequality through the social effort of the Keynesian Welfare State (Piketty, 2014: 350). Ireland emerged in this transformed policy landscape as an archetypal example of a stratified society. Drawing on the revealing Central Statistics Office Finance and Consumption Survey (published in 2015), Social Justice Ireland noted that the nation’s net household wealth amounted to €364 billion with the top 20% of the population owning 40% of all wealth, the same share as the bottom 60% (Healy et al 2017: 71). This chapter is about the emergence of new ways of seeing poverty: its redefinition and conceptualisation. It is also about anti-poverty strategy and the role of community development in the pursuit of social justice. In the USA, this process was grandly called the ‘War on Poverty’. The war was ultimately one of ideas and values. Right-wing critics have latterly called it ‘America’s domestic Vietnam’ (Murray, 1986). The situation in Ireland reflected these debates and, ultimately, the power of the rich to curtail the rights of the poor. Social policy and the widening gap between rich and poor emerge at the core of anti-poverty strategy in a society moving sharply in that direction. The welfare state is very much consigned to the shadows of this debate, reflecting its ideological marginality in Irish political discourse.

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The meaning and scale of Irish poverty The 1960s was a decade of modernisation and development led by economic growth in Ireland. It was also a decade of social and political unrest across the Western world. Protest at both the scale of social injustice and the lack of democratic participation became a vibrant form of countercultural expression. With it came a growing sense of awareness that something needed to change in society, if the meaning of democracy (in the modern sense) was to be sustained. The core values of modern democracy, rooted in Enlightenment humanism and the French Revolution, were liberty, equality and solidarity. Poverty was rediscovered during the 1960s in the midst of affluence. In 1962, Michael Harrington published his classic study, The other America. It exposed the persistence of largescale poverty in the richest and most developed economy in the world. Harrington demonstrates that there was no necessary linkage between economic growth and poverty eradication. Similarly, in Britain in 1965, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend published a meticulous study of poverty, The poor and the poorest, which explored the limitations of the post-war welfare state. These studies redefined poverty in relative terms. Earlier research had conceptualised poverty in absolute or subsistence terms, essentially a biological definition of poverty based upon the minimum necessary to sustain life (Booth, 1902; Rowntree, 1901). This concept of poverty is still applied in ‘Third World’ conditions, where poverty and famine continue to be everyday features of life (Sen, 1981). Both Harrington (1962) in the USA and Abel-Smith and Townsend (1965) in Britain argued the case for the re-conceptualisation of poverty in relative terms. The relative concept of poverty soon entered Irish discourse. Professor Robert Holman (1978: 13-14) defined relative poverty in the following terms: The inadequacies of the subsistence concept have contributed to the formulation of an alternative – the concept of relative poverty. From this perspective, the poor are not defined as those who fall below a fixed subsistence level but as those whose incomes are considered too far moved from the rest of the society in which they live. In short, the poor are identified in relation or relatively to other people. Relative poverty replaced absolute or subsistence poverty in the postwar ‘affluent society’. It was a challenge to Irish society, which lacked

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a universal welfare state, because relative poverty was likely to expose the alarming scale of Ireland’s social inequality. There was unsurprisingly an official decision during the 1990s to move to a different model of poverty measurement in Ireland – consistent poverty. This was intended to facilitate the achievement of the National Anti-Poverty Strategy targets, which promised sharp reductions in Irish poverty (see more on this later in this chapter). The current Irish government has adopted a national social target for poverty reduction, which aimed to reduce consistent poverty to 4% by 2016 (interim target) and to 2% or less by 2020, from the 2010 baseline rate of 6.2%. The term consistent poverty describes someone whose income is below the relative/at-risk poverty threshold and who cannot afford at least two of eleven deprivation indicators (European Anti- Poverty Network press brief, 2017): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Two pairs of strong shoes; A warm waterproof coat; Buy new not secondhand clothes; Eat meat, chicken, fish or a vegetarian equivalent every second day; Have a roast joint or its equivalent once a week; Had to go without heating during the last year through lack of money; 7. Keep the home adequately warm; 8. Buy presents for family and friends at least once a year; 9. Replace any worn-out furniture; 10. Have family or friends for a drink or meal once a month; 11. Have a morning, afternoon or evening out in the last fortnight for entertainment. The government has clearly failed to achieve these poverty reduction targets, even by its own very limited standards: • The percentage of Irish people living in consistent poverty in 2015 was 8.7% up from 4.2% in 2008; • The consistent poverty rate for the unemployed in 2015 was 26.2%, up from 9.7% in 2008; • Children remain the most vulnerable age group with 11.5% living in consistent poverty in 2015; • Consistent poverty in single parent households continues to rise increasing from 17.8% in 2008 to 26.2% in 2015.

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The longer an individual or family remains in poverty, the more likely they will be considered to be in consistent poverty. (European Anti-Poverty Network press brief, 2017) Consistent poverty sought to minimise the scale of poverty in Irish society, and was intended help the government to achieve its antipoverty targets by making poverty more static and reducing its relational dimensions. It evokes Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of subsistence poverty in York in its prescriptive and moralistic conceptualisation of poverty. The spectre of the Poor Law is never far away from the eleven deprivation measures of consistent poverty. By reducing the relational aspects of poverty conceptualisation and measurement, the Irish government was (as already suggested) also seeking to break the causal link with social inequality. However, since 2003, the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) has helped to bring Irish poverty measurement and data collection back into line with the rest of the European Union and reflect its systemic reality (see more later in this chapter). It has led to a more frank acknowledgement by the State of the lived experience of poverty. The Department of Social Protection (2015: 40) acknowledged the impact of austerity on poor people’s lives: Food poverty and financial exclusion have emerged as social policy issues in recent years. Food poverty (as measured by an enforced lack of one of three food deprivation items) was experienced by 13.2% of the population in 2013 amounting to 624,000 people, many of them children. 11.8 per cent of households experienced financial exclusion (i.e. did not have access to a bank current account) in 2013. These revealing statistics indicate that a significant proportion of the population were hungry in 2013. The proliferation of food banks in the midst of austerity underlined the problem of food poverty in twenty-first century Ireland.

The Irish poverty debate: structural versus trickledown theory The publication of the first systematic Irish study of poverty in the late twentieth century, A law for the poor by Seamus O’Cinnéide (1970), set in train a renewed interest in Irish poverty. A major conference

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on poverty was convened by the Catholic Bishops’ Council for Social Welfare in 1971 at Kilkenny. This conference, attended by activists from most of the voluntary and community sector in Ireland as well as researchers and academics, has been described as ‘the focal point for the reawakening of public awareness of the existence and extent of poverty in Ireland’ (Combat Poverty, 1981: 13). Seamus O’Cinnéide delivered a paper, ‘The extent of poverty in Ireland’, arguing that between 24 and 30 per cent of the Irish population were living in poverty. There followed a flurry of debate. The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), hosted a conference on ‘Poverty in Ireland: Research priorities’ in April 1972. The findings were published the following October (Walsh, 1972). In November 1972, the Catholic Bishops’ Council on Social Welfare published a Statement on social policy, which advocated administrative reforms and greater financial expenditure on poverty, arguing that ‘it is high time that the public in general were made aware of their obligations to our poorer brethren (1). A second Kilkenny conference was convened in 1974: ‘the general consensus was that things were no better than in 1971’ (Combat Poverty, 1981: 14). There are fundamental divisions within the public mind regarding the causes of poverty. Those favouring a more just society advocate a structural view: The structural model of poverty recognises not only economic inequality but also powerlessness on the part of the poor people. The problem is visibly an economic one but the solution is ultimately political. Poverty will be tackled when poor people realise that the problem is economic and come together to press for changes in economic conditions. (Combat Poverty, 1981: 7) Demonstrably, the structural model of poverty envisages radical social change based upon a redistribution of power and resources in favour of the poor. In a traditionally conservative society, it is a minority perspective. A prominent Progressive Democrat politician (an economically liberal party), Michael McDowell, fundamentally challenged the view that greater social justice could be gained by a more even spread of wealth, achieved through state-regulated transfers of resources from rich to poor. In a thought-provoking speech, delivered on 31 July 1988 to the Annual Social Studies Conference, McDowell argued:

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The reality of an increasingly divided society has focused attention on two political concepts – poverty and inequality. For many, poverty and inequality are much more than concepts – they are grinding, dehumanising and hopeless realities. For the underclasses, there are, in reality, no choices as things stand; choice and the market economy are the preserve of others. The economic life of the country goes on without them and indifferent to them. They are at one remove from the mainstream of society – culturally, politically and economically – connected only by the tenuous sinews of the State’s redistributive function … In a market economy, the only long term means of achieving social justice, however that is defined, is to ensure the participation of the greatest number possible in the economic life of the country. Maximising dependency is obviously not the means of achieving social justice. A political stance that is predicated on maximizing intervention by way of redistributive transfers and subsidies is at odds with the ethos of liberalism, political or economic. (McDowell, 1988) McDowell went on to critically assess the role of the voluntary and community sector in promoting greater social justice for the poor. He contended that, in seeking to promote a more inclusive civil society, they were undermining economic growth because their perspective was incompatible with market economics and civil liberties. McDowell argued: The have-nots in Irish society, in general terms and with some lamentable exceptions, are given votes of equal power to the haves. Which is not to ignore the real and unequal influence of economic power in the party political and legislative field. There are also countervailing forces outside the party political set up which can act in the interests of the poor. I refer to voluntary bodies, concerned clergy, some parts of the media and other agencies such as the Combat Poverty Agency. But it is an error, in my judgement, to compartmentalise voices in the debate on poverty and inequality too rigidly. Compartmentalised thinking gives rise to incomplete analysis and simplistic argument.

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If I can express a slightly critical view on the contributions made by some of the countervailing agencies on behalf of the have-nots, it is that they fail to take into account the dynamics of the market economy. The redistributive impulse is strong and commendable but it must be put in the context of the creative principle of the market economy. A static view of resources which looks at their allocation divorced from their creation or which calls for socialisation of the means of creating wealth, is inherently flawed if it is patently incompatible with the market economy and a liberal political order. It is possible without recourse to extremism or ideological rigidity to view liberal society and its needs in a holistic way; to relate freedom of speech to freedom of work, to relate freedom of choice in a ballot box to freedom of economic choice in the market, to relate the long term survival of civil liberties to a liberal order and a market economy. A few weeks later, at the MacGill Summer School, McDowell returned to his theme. According to a newspaper report, he stated, somewhat apocalyptically: The market economy was an essential part of social justice and of a liberal, social and political order. If a liberal society in political terms is sought, there must be a liberal economic order underpinning it. Where economic decision-making is centralised by the State as a matter of ideology or convenience, liberal politics and civil liberties could not survive. (The Irish Times, 20 August 1988) Underpinning McDowell’s analysis is a belief in a trickledown theory of poverty, based upon permanent economic growth. The trickledown theory of poverty is essentially based upon an erroneous assumption that economic growth will solve the problem of poverty by, in J. K. Galbraith’s phrase, ‘lifting all boats’ in the resulting tide of prosperity. That is not how it works: poverty elimination depends on the redistribution of wealth not the trickledown of wealth (Nolan and Callan, 1994: 3). Essential to this trickledown perspective is a deeply unsettling logic, summarised in a number of core points in the final report of the National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty (Combat Poverty, 1981: 76):

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• The non-poor will not voluntarily share with the poor if this means that they will get less; • The poor will not be strong enough to achieve a fairer share by force, which is undesirable anyway; • Economic growth will enable the non-poor to become richer, but this will not result in an ‘overspill’ or ‘trickledown’ to the poor, who will only benefit from the increased affluence in the society relatively; • Thus while gaps between rich and poor may actually widen, the poor will have the consolation of being relatively better off than their ancestors, who face starvation in a subsistence economy; • Total economic and social equality are not realistically or desirable goals in a liberal market economy. The limitations of the logic underpinning the trickledown theory of poverty was comprehensively demonstrated by Professor Peter Townsend in his monumental 1979 study Poverty in the United Kingdom. Townsend demonstrated that economic growth, far from being the panacea for poverty, created it. He noted that there were many more people ‘nearly poor’ than had been assumed by experts and that new groups were continuously falling into poverty as a result of marketled economic policies. Townsend also cast doubt on the capacity of states to eliminate poverty through existing social policies. Poverty is a controversial topic. Poverty lines have become battle lines in an ideological debate. Some social scientists (as discussed later) have pointed to the relatively narrow approach that has been taken in measuring the extent of poverty in Ireland. They argue that undue attention has been given to the simple headcount measure of the number of households/families falling below the ‘official’ line chosen. Anti-poverty campaigners have also queried the figures. Sr Stanislaus Kennedy suggested in her book, One million poor? (1981), that 30% of the population were poor. She based her estimate on the number of social welfare recipients, suggesting 30% of all households were poor. This figure was open to refutation, since not all social welfare recipients were dependent on social welfare for their principal long-term source of income and there were no figures available for the number of people resident in poor households. Nonetheless, Kennedy had drawn attention to the fluidity and subjectivity of approaches to measuring poverty. The Commission on Social Welfare (1986) lent support to Kennedy’s estimate, concluding that up 1.3 million Irish citizens were beneficiaries of social welfare programmes.

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The truth is that poverty lines have varied across time and space. Official poverty lines have merely reflected consensual views, which may not be shared by the less well-off in society. Moreover, which ‘official’ poverty line should be accepted? In 1986, approximately 37% of the population were eligible for medical cards, that is, free healthcare. Eligibility was based on need. This figure once again suggests that 1.3 million in Ireland were living on low incomes in that year. In the wake of Kennedy’s challenging assertion that a million Irish citizens were living in poverty, there was a hiatus of nearly eight years before a major study of poverty was undertaken in Ireland. In 1988, the Combat Poverty Agency commissioned the most ambitious and methodologically sophisticated study yet undertaken of poverty in Ireland, encompassing 3,300 households and 8,200 individuals (Combat Poverty, 1988). The report concluded that, in 1987, between one eighth and one third of Irish households were living in poverty, depending on how it was measured. The researchers employed three ‘objective’ poverty lines based upon the average after-tax household income in 1987. They concluded that, if the poor were to be regarded as those with less than 60% of the income of the average household, then approximately one third of the population were poor. However, if the definition of poverty was restricted to those households with less than half the average income, then approximately one fifth of households were poor. A further restriction of the poverty line to those households with less than 40% of average income, would reduce the level of poverty to one eighth. The 60% poverty line is widely accepted as the authoritative poverty line by experts within the European Union. Social Justice Ireland claim that ‘without welfare payments more than half of Ireland’s population would be living in poverty; such an underlying poverty rate suggests a deeply unequal distribution of income’ (thejournal.ie, 5 July 2016). The evidence broadly supports this shocking assertion. According to the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), which is a household survey, if all social transfers were excluded from income, the ‘at risk of poverty’ rate for 2004 was 39.8% . It peaked at 50.7% in 2011 and had slightly declined to 49.3% in 2014. SILC concluded that the real income ‘at risk of poverty’ rate in 2014 was 16.3% and the consistent poverty rate 8%. Those most vulnerable to poverty were those living in rented housing below the market rate or rent-free accommodation and unemployed individuals (Central Statistics Office, 2015: 5). The statistical debate about poverty exposes the complexity of ‘post-truth society’. In this regard the role of the media has been important in framing the poverty debate, albeit there has been relatively little focus on the benign and

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cohesive role of social transfers. Instead the focus in populist media representation has been on the negative aspects of redistribution, such as social welfare fraud, which constructs the poor as ‘cheats’ and ‘scoundrels’.

The media, poverty and ‘fake news’ The rediscovery of poverty in Ireland had prompted a response from politicians, academics, clergy and social activists. However, the debate associated with the issue of poverty had little impact on public consciousness. The Irish Times, 19 December 1988, observed: The statistics of poverty appear to have little impact on public consciousness. And as those who comprise the advantaged section of the community begin to rise somewhat out of the economic trough, it is almost as if many of them become blind to the plight of those who, for whatever reason, are not participating in the benefits of recovery. Other newspapers took up the topic also. The Sunday Tribune, on 25 September 1988, published an editorial entitled ‘The poverty epidemic’, which commented: Surveys conducted in the Dublin region document poverty as a widespread phenomenon in the new sprawling conurbations, notably in the north and west of the region, where unemployment rates of over 60% are not uncommon. This is coupled with a chronic absence of basic social amenities, such as shopping, health and community centres (look at what has happened in Tallaght). Poverty is growing and intensifying because of two factors. The first is because of the growth in the numbers of long term unemployed – these and their dependants are the worst afflicted by poverty because of the pitiable level of social welfare assistance. The second reason is because the driving forces in our society deepen social divisions and inequalities. This is most noticeable in the areas of education and health public expenditure. Although the stated policy objective of these massive expenditures is to effect a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, in fact they, at least, fail to achieve that and, arguably, do the reverse.

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While the more liberal press lamented the problem of poverty, other newspapers took a less sympathetic line. The mass circulation Irish Independent, on 2 June 1988, in a front-page headline proclaimed ‘Woods acts on welfare cheats’, adding: Welfare Minister Michael Woods is to act to plug newlyrevealed loopholes in the Social Welfare payments system that are costing the tax payer millions. But his plan of action falls far short of wide ranging recommendations on the abuses in a report commissioned by his Department … as the results of the investigation became public last night Mr. Woods said wide-ranging deficiencies revealed would lead to an overhaul of operations to clamp down on spongers. The social construction of the poor as ‘cheats’ and ‘spongers’ not only undermines sympathy towards welfare recipients, but also reconstructs them as deviants in need of punishment and correction. It creates a climate of public opinion that is hostile to the poor because it perceives them as undeserving of assistance and poverty as a non-issue. A recent official campaign against welfare fraud that proclaimed ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’, has been described as a ‘hate campaign’. The Social Welfare and Pensions Bill 2017 includes provision to publish the names, addresses and penalties of people who have been convicted of welfare fraud (Irish Times, 16 May 2017). In an article entitled ‘Social Welfare: The Real Fraud’, the website Indymedia Ireland (30 May 2011) concluded in relation to the welfare fraud issue: ‘It is an appalling but clever tactic to avert the gaze of people from the causes of economic crisis and savage cutbacks that are causing so much hardship and poverty ... The media, as on so many other issues, are willing accomplices in keeping this narrative of “widespread fraud” circulating, while refusing to properly question or analyse the accuracy of the claims being made’. Modernisation and a development strategy based upon market-led economics, designed to promote growth and wealth creation, were transforming Ireland into a deeply polarised society. This was an ironic development, given Ireland’s history of poverty and oppression, a reality that was not lost on some anti-poverty advocates: While Ireland had experienced a long and bitter history of poverty, deprivation and oppression, the growing affluence of the late fifties and sixties afforded an opportunity for many Irish people to conveniently wipe this experience

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from their minds, forgetting even to the point of denial that such social evils were still present. The fearful stigmatisation and powerlessness of the poor themselves ensured that they remained silent – thus reinforcing the myth that poverty and the poor were no longer a problem in Irish society. (Combat Poverty, 1981) However, there were discordant voices prepared to challenge this culture of complacency. The women’s movement argued that poverty was a feminist issue, giving voice to the concept of the ‘feminisation of poverty’. The Irish Times, on 3 October 1988, reported on a tribunal organised by Women’s Action Against Poverty: A Tribunal on women’s poverty in Dublin on Saturday listened to the personal and collective evidence of women living in poverty, and found Irish society guilty of discrimination against women and shackling them by poverty. Some 400 women from around the country filled the meeting room of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Eustace Street, now owned by the Irish Film Institute. Cut-outs representing the medical profession, religion, education, the legal profession, the media and a jackass “representing the Irish government” lined the back of the room, behind a jury of 12 women who sat in the one-time elders’ wooden galleries and heard the evidence. The anti-poverty strategy emerged as an official response to public campaigns for greater fairness in the distribution of wealth as the solution to poverty, often led by faith-based groups, such as Social Justice Ireland.

The birth and death of a poverty programme: ‘A tuppence halfpenny committee?’ In 1973, a change in the political climate saw the election of a national coalition government consisting of Fine Gael and the Labour Party. Labour had established a working party on poverty in 1972 (which reported in 1973), boldly defining poverty as ‘the lack of what may be considered as the basic human rights in the socio-economic sphere’ (quoted in: Combat Poverty, 1981: 15). The new government pledged itself to the ‘elimination of poverty and the ending of social injustice’

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(Combat Poverty, 1981). The domestic foundations for an Irish poverty programme had been laid. Ireland’s entry into the European Union (then EEC) was an essential influence in shaping the Irish poverty programme. On 8 May 1974, Frank Cluskey, a Labour Party member appointed to the junior portfolio in the Department of Social Welfare, launched the National Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty with the following mandate: Poverty is an aspect … of inequality in the social and economic system … Inequality appears to be an inherent aspect of the socio-economic system which has been built up over the years. Expanded public services – in social welfare, health, education and housing – can lead to substantial improvements. They can provide a foundation for greater equality of opportunity. However, it is clear that the roots of inequality are deep in the economic organisation of society … Poverty can only be ended if the structures and institutions of our socio-economic system are altered profoundly. This is a policy goal which is radical and long term. It will call for policies in economic, fiscal, and broad social fields. The present priority for action – represented by the project we are launching to-day – is an attempt to concentrate the attention of the Community on the phenomenon of poverty and a planned effort, in selected areas or among selected groups, to effect real advance. (Frank Cluskey, speaking at inaugural meeting of National Committee on Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty, 8 May 1974) The first Irish poverty programme, officially called the National Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty and popularly simply known as Combat Poverty, had five core objectives (Combat Poverty, 1981: 82):

1. To develop new and innovative strategies and techniques for dealing with poverty. 2. To provide greater participation of the poor. 3. To contribute to the evolution of effective long-term policies against poverty. 4. To increase understanding and public awareness of poverty and its causes.

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5. To bring about practical intervention in areas of deprivation or among groups in need.

Four pilot projects were envisaged, on welfare rights and home assistance, and a community action-research project, and a social service council project. EEC (EU) funding was sought in 1974 for these initiatives. In 1975, funding was granted by the EEC (EU) for three of the projects, excluding the social service council project. A six-year life span was permitted to the poverty programme, which lasted until December 1980, with the Irish government acting as co-funder. The government established a national committee to oversee the programme. It originally consisted of 26 members, including the Chairperson and the Director. Nine were civil servants. The remaining members consisted of academics, clergy, trade unionists and social service managers. It proved to be an unwieldy committee that had real difficulty in providing leadership and support for the programme. This problem manifested itself in several fundamental ways, vividly recorded by contemporary news magazine, Strumpet (Dublin City News Magazine). Its insights are very revealing. First, the national committee proved to be structurally unwieldy in terms of decision-making: The management committee itself was a major stumbling block to progress. The Committee itself had no autonomy of its own and was always just an advisory sub-committee to the Department of Social Welfare. Its members sat in a voluntary capacity and had full time jobs elsewhere. It became very difficult for the committee to have an effective system of decision-making, with the result that many of its members opted out and were not replaced by the Fianna Fáil government. Within the committee itself there were many different perceptions of the major objectives of the project, the proposed strategies, the management of the programme etc. Such issues were not debated in sufficient depth or at sufficient length in the beginning. This led on the part of some members to a hidden reservoir of reservations concerning the project and its direction. Because of the reservations of many committee members it became very difficult indeed for the committee to come to any unified decisions regarding certain issues. In time the situation became one where previously agreed decisions were allowed

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to be reversed or modified on the intervention of individual members, at subsequent meetings – this led, in many cases to a breakdown in procedures and planning. (Dublin City News Magazine, 1981: 8) Second, because of its internal difficulties, the national committee was unable to develop a positive public profile for the programme: Due to the lack of agreement on so many issues the committee actively discouraged media coverage. This was to lead to a lack of publicity and indeed public support throughout the life of the project. Thus when the committee needed media coverage and public support it wasn’t theirs to call on. (1981: 8) Third, the divisions within the national committee created major difficulties in its relationship with the programme’s staff: The existence of such tension within the committee prevented it from being a guiding force to workers on the ground. From the early stages there was suspicion of the committee by the project workers. Initially, field workers were attracted to the project, because of its stated philosophy and the methods it proposed to use to bring about social change. It was natural therefore that many of the staff employed had strong views on poverty and social change. Such personalities were quickly to come into conflict with those members of the committee who had quite different perceptions of the aims of the poverty project. These different perceptions gave rise to tension, that was to cause an almost total breakdown in communication in the later stages. With this breakdown in communication the committee felt it had to intervene more directly in the day-to-day operations of the project. As it thus became immersed in matters of detail, the committee found itself paying less attention than was required to the overall role of National Co-ordination and to such aspects of the project as education and research. (1981: 8) These tensions with the staff came to a head in February 1977, when the committee decided to dismiss the director in what The Irish Times

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described as one of the ‘grubbiest rows in a Government sponsored organisation for some years’ (The Irish Times, 7 February 1977). Fourth, the national committee did not inspire confidence with the key powerbrokers in Irish society: From the very start, the Committee’s relationship with politicians and established institutions, including the Church, were never smooth. The projects rejected a benevolent attitude towards deprived and minority groups. The major aims of most teams was to work with people and not ‘for’ them. While local people gained confidence in their ability to organise and work together at the organised group level the already old established local power groups began to raise objections. In many instances local business people made verbal attacks on team workers; it was suggested that Combat Poverty workers had a financial gain from the many co-op ventures. In West Donegal a local Fianna Fáil politician wrote to the Minister of Health and Social Welfare requesting a meeting to discuss the threat of the newly established knitting co-op [cited at the beginning of this chapter]. He complained that the national industry would be ruined by any attempt to ‘cut out the middle man’ and pay the knitters more. (Dublin City News Magazine, 1981: 8) The experience of the knitting co-op in West Donegal underlines the difficulties in engaging in community development, where powerful vested interests are opposed, epitomised by the gombeenman (middleman). But the national committee also suffered from an inability to persuade the government of the democratic benefits in terms of participation arising from the programme: The committee in its final stages had made the fatal tactical mistake of hardening to an uninterested government, while the much needed mobilisation of ground support and media support to the work of the project was neglected. (Dublin City News Magazine, 1981: 8) Yet the benefits of participation were visible, if politically unwelcome. It was clear that participation was working on the ground:

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The poverty project has shown that with the necessary resources disadvantaged people can manage their own community affairs in a manner that does not rob the individual of his own dignity or self-respect. And that they can participate effectively and provide new insights into accepted practices. However the experience has also shown that participation by disadvantaged groups does not happen overnight and that challenges to traditional leadership and practices are not welcome, especially by those vested interest that are deeply rooted in Irish society. (1981: 8) Finally, the national committee had a limited appreciation of the problems experienced by the fieldwork staff on the ground. They had to wrestle with a political culture where clientelism made community development and welfare rights work extremely difficult: Furthermore the role of the local Irish politician could be drastically changed if people knew their rights and got what was rightfully theirs without a TD’s [MP’s] aid or assumed concern. The traditional role of the Irish politician, including the local councillor, was one of assisting in the processing of applications for individual and group right entitlements. If a person were to be awarded a local authority house, a social welfare benefit or a grant for a locally based industrial project, it was usual for them to receive, at the same time a letter from the local politician informing them of this and in many instances claiming credit for the award. The work of the poverty projects encouraged individuals and groups to process their applications with the backing of their own skills and resources, by-passing in the process the local politician. Politicians from all political parties, including the Labour Party were equally aggrieved by this development. (Dublin City News Magazine, 1981: 7) While Frank Cluskey remained responsible for the poverty programme, a good working relationship was, at least, retained with him. However, in 1977 he lost office and the coalition government was replaced by a Fianna Fáil government. The result was a sharp deterioration in relations with the government that sealed the programme’s fate: Meanwhile the committee were in conflict with the central government and more particularly with the Department of

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Health and Social Welfare. There were certain restrictions imposed on the work of the committee from the very beginning. However the members managed to maintain a close relationship with the then Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Frank Cluskey. 1977 saw a change in government and the new minister, Charles J. Haughey, was clearly not in support of the work of the Combat Poverty scheme. Referring to the committee at one stage as a ‘Tuppence Halfpenny Committee’ the Minister’s attitude and even contempt for the work of the projects, stifled any progressive developments in the latter years of the Committee’s term. At one stage the publication of the Interim Report of the committee was held up by the Department of Social Welfare, as a result of objections to the suggestions contained within it, that the causes of poverty in Ireland were structural and structural changes in Irish society were needed if poverty was to be combated. Other publications were held up due to similar objections as was finance for certain projects. (Dublin City News Magazine, 1981: 8) It led to the closure of the Irish poverty programme. Its structural analysis of poverty and people power made it politically anathema. So was the programme a failure? The answer must be ‘no’. There was a failure of leadership, which is explicable in political terms. On the ground and in terms of anti-poverty strategy there was considerable achievement. The final report (Combat Poverty, 1981: 5-6) prophetically commented in its own obituary notice: However, at each twist in its history, exactly the ‘right’ combination of influences prevailed to give the poverty programme life. The idea of the ‘birth of the poverty programme’ is an appropriate metaphor. When such a social programme is given life, it is like something organic – it grows and develops and may not strictly ‘end’ when funding is cut off. If a programme has made an impact, this impact may continue after the programme has officially ceased to be. In 1986, after considerable delay, it was replaced by the Combat Poverty Agency with a severely curtailed brief. It too was abolished in 2009.

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The National Anti-Poverty Strategy and the politics of poverty measurement In 1997, the Irish government established the National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS). As already noted, a new Irish model of poverty definition and measurement, consistent poverty, had been adopted. It essentially combined absolute and relative definitions of poverty, overcoming a tendency in the relative approach to measurement, which can show (as in the Irish case) the level of poverty remaining static or rising during a period of intense prosperity. The problem with consistent poverty was its credibility in a society dominated by the notion of the Celtic Tiger, which propagandistically represented Ireland as one of the richest countries in the world, in per capita income terms. There was a deep contradiction at the core of Ireland’s response to poverty. Consistent poverty had the hallmarks of poverty denial in the midst of exceptional affluence. It lacked credibility. But it was noticed abroad by poverty revisionists seeking to renegotiate its meaning and measurement. For example, the Irish model of consistent poverty impacted upon a debate in Britain, where the New Labour government was seeking to pursue ambitious targets in terms of the reduction of child poverty. It was reportedly attracted by the Irish consistent poverty model. But the London-based Independent (27 August 2002) noted that the British government was advised against adopting a redefined poverty measurement model because it was likely to lead to allegations of ‘manipulating the figures’ and have the effect of ‘eroding public trust in government statistics’. Many will remember how UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, reduced unemployment. She redefined it! Poverty, as the Guardian (29 August 2002) noted in an editorial, is ‘a moving target’. This sets official targets up for failure. Governments are, understandably, drawn towards the redefinition of poverty in terms that make their targets more achievable. But in doing so they may, in the long term, leave themselves open to public cynicism. Evaluating the NAPS is a complex task. Kirby and Murphy ((2011: 97) asserted in relation to the impact of NAPS: ‘Deprivation-based consistent poverty was adopted as the key indicator … This dropped from 9% of households in 1994 to 4.1% in 2006 for the 50% poverty line. The lowest poverty line at 40% of median income, reflecting the most vulnerable, remained quite constant (increasing from 2.4% to 2.5% over this period)’. They concluded that ‘progress [in poverty reduction] can largely be attributed to decreases in unemployment (from a high point of 17% in 1994 to a low point of 4.1% in 2006)’.

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Powell and Geoghegan (2004: 107-13) on the basis of a national survey of community activists’ views about the effectiveness of the NAPS, noted the responses indicated some perceived progress in the alleviation of poverty in urban areas but little optimism about any improvement in rural communities. NAPs at best had a limited impact on poverty reduction. It also had a problem of credibility given its adoption of consistent poverty as a measurement instrument that was more likely to obscure than reveal the truth about the scale of Irish poverty. Certainly, it would be less than credible to rely on NAPS selfassessment tools when judging its success or otherwise. NAPS relied on the analytical framework provided by the consistent poverty measurement, and avoided the thorny subject of relative poverty. Being a more realistic indicator of how a society treats its citizens, relative poverty is thus potentially more politically, culturally and socially challenging. Consequently, the Irish state was arguably – at a time of Celtic Tiger hubris –extremely keen to avoid the use of relational indicators, notwithstanding their EU-wide acceptance as the most telling indicator of how poverty and inequality manifests itself in a society. Bertie Ahearne, the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in his speech to launch a review of the NAPS, revealingly commented: Consistent poverty will continue to be a key poverty measure for the purposes of this Strategy. It involves the use of indicators of deprivation as well as income, and, as such, was chosen in the original Strategy as a better guide to inadequate resources and exclusion. This continues to be the case. The target in this Strategy is to seek to eliminate consistent poverty, reducing it at least to below 2% … I am conscious that the levels of relative income poverty, particularly over a period of time, are very useful as an indicator of the risk of poverty. It is also used as a crossnational comparison and I am aware of our EU obligation in this regard. Consequently the progress in relation to the proportions falling below relative income lines will be monitored closely over the period of this Strategy. However, a wide range of factors influence the levels of the pattern of relative incomes at any given time – for instance, earnings levels, patterns of household formation, the direction of tax and welfare policies, employment and unemployment levels. The relative impacts of these can change, not all are amenable to direct intervention by the State. However under this strategy we will monitor these trends and seek to

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learn the appropriate policy lessons, in the context of the definition of poverty which is at the heart of NAPS [that is, consistent poverty]. (Ahearne, 2002) This adherence to the consistent poverty indicator was in the context of serious questioning of its efficacy by social scientists. Perhaps most notable amongst these questioning voices were ESRI researchers and commentators on poverty. For example, Professor Brian Nolan cautioned: While this poverty measure was developed by my colleagues and I at the ESRI, we have argued that for medium to long-term targeting purposes it should be combined with the objective of reducing the numbers below relative income poverty lines. The Review [of the NAPS] contains a commitment only to “monitor” progress in relation to the proportion falling below relative income lines … In developing and updating the consistent poverty measure, my colleagues and I have been explicit throughout that one would expect the set of indicators needed to capture generalised deprivation to change over time as expectations and perceptions of what represents an adequate standard of living change. Successfully capturing these changes in measuring poverty is then a challenge, but it is important to note that the way the target is framed does not seem on the face of it to leave open this possibility. (Nolan, 2002: 14) In addition to the critique of the technical limitations of the consistent poverty indicator, a more politicised critique also emerged. Orla O’Connor, a policy analyst for the National Women’s Council of Ireland, writing on behalf of the Community and Voluntary Pillar, argued: The failure of the Government to establish a target for relative poverty is one of the most significant inadequacies of the revised NAPS. Some C&V [Community and Voluntary] Pillar organisations believe that the absence of such a target represents a public acceptance of the continuation of income inequalities in Irish society and raises a serious question regarding the overall effectiveness of the strategy. Its absence also ignores the key issues raised in a substantial proportion of the submissions and representations submitted to the

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Government as part of the review process. (O’Connor, 2002: 8) This concern was also echoed by the Director of the Combat Poverty Agency, Helen Johnston, who commented, ‘one weakness in the NAPS construct of poverty was the absence of a relative income poverty target’ (Johnston, 2002: 5). Clearly, the sociological conceptualisation of poverty measurement in Ireland was being subordinated to the wider concerns of political economy in a society that was becoming increasingly unequal. While the politics of poverty measurement was complex, even more opaque was the quantification of Irish wealth. Professor Peadar Kirby (2010: 56) notes in relation to research on poverty and redistribution, ‘even less is known about the distribution of wealth in Ireland’.

Social inequality and the distribution of wealth Thomas Piketty, in his widely acclaimed 2014 study Capital in the twenty-first century, explores the long-term evolution of social inequality, the concentration of wealth and the prospects for economic growth, which are at the core of political economy. While Piketty concludes that the Keynesian welfare state has enabled Western society to avoid the apocalyptic decline into the total immiseration of the population predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, it has failed to change the deep structures of inequality. He further observes that the main drivers of inequality – the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth – threatens to generate extreme inequalities that foment dissent and undermine democratic structures. The rise of populist nationalism in the form of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as US President during 2016 support Piketty’s gloomy thesis. TASC (2014) adopted Piketty’s approach in a policy brief analysing the distribution of income and wealth in Ireland. TASC (2014) asserted that Ireland is moving in the same direction as other capitalist economies, with increasing evidence of growing inequality: ‘trends over recent decades show increasing inequality, with the top 10% now taking over a third of all income (35%) and the top 1% taking 10%’. The TASC policy brief further noted: ‘as the economy grew in Ireland from the early 1990s, the share of all income earned by the top 1% Ireland rose very quickly. At the same time the proportion of income earned by the top 10% also rose’. TASC 2014 concludes: ‘this means that the vast majority of people – the bottom 90% – of the population

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lost a tenth (10.5 %) of their share of national income, down from 71.4% in 1975 to 63.9% in 2009’. The undemocratic suppression of the Occupy movement camp in Dublin, which had emerged outside the Central Bank in 2011 in response to the austerity policies imposed in post-crash Ireland, is indicative of the privileging of wealth. In a Social Justice Ireland study, Healy et al (2017: 53) estimated an increase of 144,174 people living in poverty since the onset of the recession in 2008 – asserting 783,383 are currently living in poverty. The Director of Social Justice Ireland, Fr Sean Healy, has commented that ‘more than 57% of those [living] in poverty are not connected to the labour market; they are people who are retired, students, people in caring roles or people who are ill or people with a disability’ (The Journal.ie, 5 July 2016). SJI also noted that 18% of adults living in poverty are employed, which it called the ‘working poor’ and that weekly assistance rates paid to single people are 30 euro below the poverty line (The Journal.ie, 5 July 2016). In a publication to mark the centenary of the Irish Revolution, TASC tackled the issue of social inequality in relation to children. Cherishing all equally: Children and economic inequality in Ireland (TASC 2016) provides evidence ‘of worrying levels of child poverty in Ireland along with structural inequalities which disadvantage children from birth’. SJI asserts that almost one in five children are living in households with incomes below the poverty line. A report from the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal survey of children posed the question ‘do we in fact,’’… cherish all the children equally’’? ... regrettably the answer must be ‘’No’’ ’ (Williams et al, 2016: 294). This research shows that children are not, on average, born unequal. It is economic inequality that lays the foundation at a young age for huge inequalities that emerge later in education and life. TASC (2016) asserted that even employing the very limited instrument of consistent poverty as a yardstick indicated that child poverty had almost doubled from 6.3% in 2008 to 11.2% in 2014. Furthermore, over one third of children (36.1%) experience deprivation, double the 2007 rate of 15.9%. TASC further noted that, using the Eurostat measure of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion, at 27.6% in Ireland was above the EU average of 24.4% (TASC, 2016). Social Justice Ireland have asserted: ‘In many ways Irish society is one of contrasts. We have high and persistent rates of poverty and deprivation yet there is significant resistance to taxing wealth in one of the wealthiest countries in the world’ (Healy et al, 2017: 15). This paradox portrays the Irish social landscape in colours of unsettling starkness. Social Justice Ireland forcefully conclude: ‘a strong guiding vision of a just society is required’ (Healy et al, 2017: 16).

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Conclusion Poverty was rediscovered in the 1960s. In Ireland it had never gone away. But in the climate of greater prosperity that accompanied modernisation, it was assumed that poverty would go away. Those who sought to campaign for greater social justice discovered a lack of public interest. Nonetheless, the spur to tackle poverty could not be ignored. Anti-poverty strategy became a core feature of Irish social policy during the 1970s and 1980s, driven by Europeanisation, and continued into the new century. The national pilot schemes to combat poverty (‘Combat Poverty’) utilised a community development model to further a structuralist anti-poverty strategy between 1974-80. This foundered largely on its own internal contradictions. But it was also the victim of political hostility – dismissed as ‘a Tuppence Halfpenny Committee’. The shallowness of political support for anti-poverty strategy was further evident in a lack of official action on tackling social inequality. It reflected ambiguity in public attitudes towards poverty. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that government felt comfortable with reviving the idea of anti-poverty strategy in the form of the National AntiPoverty Strategy (NAPs). It has relied upon a strategy for achieving its targets that involved the controversial concept of consistent poverty. Essentially, against European norms, the Irish government sought to revert to a more static and subsistence-based concept of poverty. Relative poverty, the accepted European measure, was replaced by consistent poverty, a blended version of absolute and relative poverty better suited to the Victorian Poor Law era or ‘Third World’ social and economic standards. But it enabled the Irish government to claim that it was eliminating poverty, whilst the gap between rich and poor continued to widen. The scale of social inequality and child poverty in present day Ireland clearly shows a lack of progress in eliminating poverty in Ireland. It suggests a systemic failure by the Irish welfare state to address poverty and social inequality.

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Liberty, gender and sexuality Whatever your views on religion or on the role of the Churches, this is a hugely significant thing to say about a society like Ireland’s: that its main source of moral direction for the last 1,500 years has become, by and large, incomprehensible to the society. And remember, this is argued from inside that system of beliefs, not from the outside. Modern thinking, on the other hand, works in an utterly different way. It accepts that different people have different ideas of perfection, and that no agreement on what is absolutely and permanently ideal is possible. It looks to build a morality, therefore, on a minimal agreement about what is necessary for people to live together without tyranny. Fintan O’Toole (1994: 146-7) Modernisation produced a collision of incompatible ways of life in Ireland. The resulting ‘cultural collisions’, as Keohane and Kuhling (2004) have put it, between local and global, modern and traditional, religious and secular, urban and rural – and most significantly personal and political – have arguably produced a profound cultural transition, based on a search for liberty. In the final years of de Valera’s Ireland, the Church-State alliance, legitimated by a conservative narrative of the Irish Revolution, began to be challenged by a progressive counternarrative in the form of new social movements. The rise of new social movements during the 1960s and 1970s unleashed demands for greater personal liberty in the form of a relaxation of moral codes (notably in relation to the control of sexuality), of censorship and of restrictions on personal freedom. This chapter explores the role of new social movements as agents of change and transformation, and examines how they contributed to a more open society.

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Modernisation, identity and modernity The project of modernisation involved a reimagining of Irish identity. In 1977, The Crane Bag, a new journal edited by philosopher Richard Kearney and educationalist Mark Patrick Hederman, sought to undertake the intellectual task of interpreting the complex relationship between modernisation, modernity and cultural identity. It tackled myths about Irish identity. For example, Liam De Paor (1979: 660), in an article in The Crane Bag, observed: Looking back, we can now see that de Valera’s Ireland was quite impossible because the world’s technological and other revolutions simply will not permit the necessary measure of isolation. It is not possible to build a wall, paper or otherwise, around Ireland and to maintain here a kind of frugal republican virtue, while the outside world indulges in an orgy of greedy affluence. De Valera’s historical project stood accused of being a Canute-like attempt to ‘arrest’ the march of history (McCormack, 1991: 665). Fintan O’Toole (1985: 654-8) explored in The Crane Bag the restraining influence of an anachronistic rural ideology on modernisation. He argued that the sentimentalising of rural culture was impeding the progress of modernisation in transforming Irish society. He concluded: For the last hundred years, Irish culture and in particular Irish writing has been marked by the dominance of the rural over the urban, a dominance based on a false opposition of the country to the city which had been vital to the maintenance of a conservative political culture in the country. (O’Toole, 1985: 654) The intention of this mythology of Ireland as an imagined rural community, according to O’Toole, served to obscure the fundamental change that was taking place in both the city and countryside. It enabled Ireland to deny that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), membership of the European Union (then EEC) and the growing Americanisation of culture under the influence of the modern media were really happening. While the intellectual elite pondered the profound issues thrown up by the structural forces of modernisation and the cultural influences of modernity on consciousness and identity, the emergence

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of new social movements campaigning for radical social reform reflected the impact of human agency on the process of ruptural change. The conjuncture of structure and agency began the process of creating a more open society and unleashing the deconstructive force of modernity, finally detraditionalising Irish society. Maire Leane and Elizabeth Kiely (2013) have argued that recent social, cultural and political changes have transformed the way Irish society understands and thinks about sexuality. It involved a profound struggle that began to take shape in post-war Ireland.

The emergence of an open society The 1951 Mother and Child Scheme controversy ushered in a period of relative clerical ‘quiescence’ (Whyte, 1980: 331-61) that enabled the first tentative steps to be taken in building a more open society (or in the Irish vernacular ‘pluralist’). Ireland was destined to shake off the politics of ‘economic isolationism and cultural self-regard’ during the 1960s and 1970s, allowing the country to regenerate the national project (Brown, 1981: 241-7). Professors J. H. Whyte (1981: 361) and Oliver McDonagh (1968: 121) have separately advanced a general theory of Irish path development since the Great Famine (1845-51), which suggests that each generation has produced sudden transformative changes. The two decades following Eamonn de Valera’s retirement from government were certainly ruptural in terms of Irish historical path development. Power largely passed to a new generation of leaders who were more pragmatic. Professor David Thornley (2008: 183) wrote on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising (1965) an influential Tuairim (opinion) pamphlet called ‘Ireland: The end of an era’ in which he suggested ‘we are for the first time at the threshold of a delayed peaceful social revolution’. He added: ‘But one thing seems not hypothetical but certain: the day of the movement of the charismatic leader [Michael Collins and Eamonn de Valera] is for better or worse dead’ (Thornley, 2008: 184). Ireland was entering a new era in which an open society, driven by collective popular action, would begin to emerge. Like all ruptural change it was contested, with traditional Ireland resisting the incoming tide of cultural modernisation (Tovey and Share, 2003: 3436). Thornley himself was elected to the Dáil in 1969, as (aspirationally) part of a shift away from traditional civil war politics – in his case for a Labour Party promising a ‘new republic’. In 1969, the Labour Party was defeated by the ‘practical socialism’ (populism) of Fianna Fail. While there has been generational change

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in political leadership, the civil war parties have continued to dominate Irish politics up to the 2016 general election, when their combined vote had shrunk to approximately half the votes cast. While the policy differences between the two civil war parties have become increasingly difficult to discern, ‘legacy issues’ from the civil war continue to divide Fianna Fail and Fine Gael – leaving the public mystified and effective political leadership greatly weakened in the centenary year of the Irish Revolution. Traditional nationalism (with its atavistic appeal to tribe) is not dead yet, at least in the view of the civil war parties. Fifty years earlier, in 1966, the psychological and economic conditions for a fundamental rupture with the past were evident, driven by the growing investment in the education of the population. Terence Brown (1981: 257) concludes: ‘What the new sociological studies of Irish society revealed in the 1960s and 1970s was that Ireland was undergoing rapid transformation. The modernizing virus was producing all kinds of symptoms which warranted close observation’. The demographic shift from a predominantly rural agricultural society to an urban industrial society – from 32% in 1926 to 52% in 1971 – produced profound transformative change during which the Irish population adapted to the norms of advanced industrial society (Brown, 1981: 257-60). As Tovey and Share (2003: 345) put it: ‘Urbanisation is more than a shift in regional population balance and the concentration of population around Dublin. It is a state of mind.’ Ireland’s shifting demographics and increasing liberalisation, or what Daniel Faas calls ‘normalisation’ (Guardian, 17 February 2016) are producing a more open society. The 2011 census shows, while most of Ireland’s 4.5 million citizens still described themselves as Catholic, 277,000 (or 6%) classified themselves as atheist, agnostic, lapsed Catholic or of ‘no religion’. Migration has led to increases in the numbers of people identifying as Muslims, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Hindu and Buddhist. However, it is important to acknowledge that Poles, Ireland’s largest minority ethnic community, are overwhelmingly Catholic. The Irish Times (23 May 2016), in an editorial comment, asserted ‘institutional Christianity in Ireland is in crisis. All our main churches are experiencing similar patterns of ageing congregations and clergy, falling attendance at liturgies and diminished presence of the working class. They … are becoming the preserve of the middle class and the elderly’. The editorial supported its assertions with statistical data, noting in relation to the Catholic Church, a 2012 Ipsos MRBI poll recorded that only 17% of 18- to 34-year-olds attended mass weekly and that the overall attendance rate for all age groups was 34%. It further

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noted that, in 2016, mass attendance in Dublin had fallen to 20-22% and in working-class parishes was as low as 2-3%. It is projected that these figures will fall by more than one third over the next 15 years. The number of priests has also fallen by 43% in the 20-year period up to 2015, when there were 2,019 with an average age approaching 65 years. The number of trainee priests has also fallen from 526 in 1990 to 80 today (The Irish Times, 23 May 2016). There is an apparent reversion to nineteenth-century patterns of religious attendance and continental practices of using religion to preside over rites of passage – births, marriages and funerals.

Social reform and clerical resistance While the sharp fall in religious attendance statistics in recent decades suggests a sudden rupture (driven by factors such as clerical child abuse), it was after 1951 that the power of the Catholic Church began to decline in Ireland. Three examples illustrate this. First, the Adoption Act 1952 which had been long in gestation brought Ireland into line with the modern practice in child welfare. Catholic opinion had been opposed to adoption (at least at episcopal level) based on ‘a fear that, if adoption were legalised, Protestants who had got control of the illegitimate children of Catholics could force the latter to surrender them’ (Whyte, 1980: 190). While the fear that adoption would facilitate proselytism in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, might appear as farfetched, it nonetheless exercised the minds of members of the episcopacy. They were, however, circumspect in their criticisms. Whyte (1980: 192) suggests that the position of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, was more ‘nuanced’ than outright opposition. After all the Catholic Church was allegedly involved in facilitating ‘forced’ adoptions from mother and baby homes, as the tragic Philomena Lee case has exposed (Sixsmith, 2006). In the event, the Adoption Act 1952 was passed on the basis that adoption was restricted to illegitimate or orphan children between the ages of six months and seven years. Second, during the more liberal 1960s climate, censorship was another area where there was a relaxation of puritanical legislation. A more liberal film Appeals Board for the censorship of films was appointed in 1964. The impact was significant. In 1964, only 18 films had been brought to the Appeals Board (of which only 6 were allowed). When exhibitors brought 69 films to the appeals Board in 1965, 37 appeals were accepted. The censorship of books was also relaxed. Between 1557 and 1966, the Catholic Church famously had its list of banned books known as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (‘the

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Index’), which included many of the greatest scientific and literary publications over four centuries. It was intended to arrest the progress of modern thought. Its abolition in 1966 opened the way for a relaxation of censorship in Ireland. This resulted in the public release of over 5,000 titles, with few rebannings (Whyte, 1980: 343-4). James Joyce’s Ulysses finally became available to the Irish public. Predictably, there was clerical condemnation. The Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, denounced the relaxation of the censorship laws at a meeting of the National Film Institute, asserting: ‘Our good, ordinary people demand from the civil authority that we shall be protected from the public activities of those who neither accept nor practice the natural and the Christian moral law’ (The Irish Times, 18 April, 1965). His episcopal colleague, Dr Cornelius Lucey, Bishop of Cork, called for stricter censorship laws and the prosecution of publishers (Sunday Independent, 8 May 1966). The bishops’ opinions were, however, moving against the tide of public sentiment, which was very much on the side of liberalisation and personal choice as the basis of an open society. Third, the Report of the Committee on the Constitution, 1967, made a series of recommendations for social reform. It recommended an end to the constitutional ban on divorce. This was strongly opposed by Cardinal Conway and Archbishop McQuaid, as well as other members of the Hierarchy and was not proceeded with by the Fianna Fail government (Whyte, 1980: 348-9). However, the Committee’s proposal to abolish Article 44 of the 1937 Constitution, which enshrined the ‘special position’ of the Catholic Church in Ireland was not opposed by the Hierarchy. Cardinal Conway stated: ‘I personally would not shed a tear if the relevant subsection of Article 44 was to disappear’ (The Irish Times, 23 September 1969). He was, as it turned out, reflecting the collective view of the Hierarchy, which was ‘indifferent’ to this constitutional provision. It was removed, following a referendum in 1972 (Bartlett, 2010: 508). However, the battle lines were being drawn for a more profound dispute between the Church and the forces of cultural modernisation.

The media and sexuality The flamboyant conservative politician Oliver J. Flanagan (1920-87) famously observed ‘there was no sex in Ireland before television’ (cited in Tovey and Share, 2003: 259). Flanagan was a tireless campaigner against the ‘permissive society’ and the ‘liberal agenda’, which he attributed to the malign influence of the modern media. For his

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services to the defence of traditional Catholic values, Flanagan was made a Knight of the Grand Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul I in 1978. It was the high point in the career of a rightwing populist politician, who served as the Fine Gael Minister of Local Government (1975-6) and Minister for Defence (1976-7). In many respects, Flanagan personified traditional and Catholic values, opposing the legalisation of contraception in 1974 and defending the role of the Church in education against ‘Godless schools’. Oliver J. Flanagan was, of course, wrong about sex being discovered by the modern media. It was discursively changed by the media and reclaimed for debate in the public sphere, where it became a site of struggle, power and control (Foucault, 1980). Prior to modernisation, the Catholic Church had a monopoly over sexuality and used sexual morality to enforce its ideological power. Sociologist Tom Inglis (1987: 141-2), observes: In nineteenth-century Ireland … sex became a serious subject and the Church developed a monopoly of knowledge about it. Shame and guilt about sexual practices were instilled in each individual, privately, in a hushed manner, in the dark isolated space of the confessional. Sexual morality became a major issue, but it was wrapped in a veil of silence. When it was talked or written about, it was a vague abstract formal language which prevented the laity from developing any communicative competence about it. The control of sexual knowledge was crucial to the maintenance of the Church’s power. Inglis views the inquisitorial power as embodied in the act of confession, as the primary instrument used by the Catholic Church to enforce its control over the populace: Confession played a crucial role in sexualising the body. The confessional was where the activities of the body were examined and suitable penance distributed. The modern Irish Catholic soul became constituted through a discipline of the body created and maintained by a rigorous system of examination, supervision and punishment. The body was seen as a major source of evil. Under examination in the confessional, it was confined to a dark space, hidden from the public view, from the confessor, and from the penitent himself. Sex became problematical and privatised. A sense

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of private guilt and public shame was inculcated through an investigation of the penitents’ sexual practices. (Inglis, 1987: 140) The control of women’s sexuality was at the core of the Catholic Church’s moralisation mission in Ireland. Inglis (1987: 150) asserts: Sex was portrayed as a disease which lurked deep within the recesses of women’s bodies. Unless it was controlled, it might awaken the most grotesque animal passions … The Church was presented as the only means by which women could be saved from themselves. Sex was a sickness that could never be cured. It could only be monitored and controlled by the priest. The power of the confessional was bolstered by the sermon, which propagated church rules and regulations, issued public warnings against individuals and groups, and was sometimes delivered in the fiery language of public condemnation (when the occasion was perceived as warranting a ‘strong sermon’). Newspapers and pamphlets constituted an influential Catholic press. The control of civil society and the school system further embedded Catholic social power and its view of morality and civility (Inglis, 1987: 155-65). Inglis (1998: 148) observes that, following modernisation, the Irish media have reconstructed the discourse of sexuality in the public sphere through ‘news reports, feature articles, documentaries, panel discussions and talk radio’. There are now two competing discourses of sexuality: traditional Catholicism inveighing against contemporary manifestations of sexuality in the forms of materialism, consumerism and liberalism, as opposed to a modern, secular non-judgemental view of sexuality that supports individual choice in the moral sphere (Tovey and Share, 2003: 261). Unsurprisingly, women’s reproductive rights have emerged at the core of these conflicting discourses – in tandem with the decriminalisation of homosexuality – representing a struggle for liberty in the private sphere of people’s lives and intimate decisions.

Gender, poverty and abuse Michael Pierse (2011: 116), referencing the plight of working-class women in independent Ireland, asserts ‘the twin despotisms of social and domestic abuse, as enabled by church doctrine and androcentric statutory control, made life a living hell for many working-class

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women’. The denial of access to contraception resulted in large families, ill-health and premature deaths, a reality contested by the Catholic Church. In line with Church thinking, the State also took a pro-natalist view of reproduction (Reports of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems 1948-1954 (1956)). Tom Garvin (2004: 216) noted the sharp class divisions in family size and the proportionately larger size of working-class families, which he argued was one of ‘the central reasons for Irish under-development and poverty. Pierse (2011: 116) concludes that ‘working-class women were also more likely to be entirely reliant on a husband’s income, leaving them particularly vulnerable to manipulation and abuse’. Yet Bishop Cornelius Lucey, in his submission to the 1956 Emigration Commission, declared that Irish women’s prodigious child-bearing had a ‘salutary rather than deleterious effect on their mental health’ (cited in Pierse, 2011: 116). The treatment of women from deprived working-class backgrounds underlined the dark underside of the Church-State alliance. Patriarchy underpinned the social policy agenda of the Irish State. As Michael Pierse (2011) has demonstrated working-class women were largely invisible and silent (or silenced) in a world suffused by poverty and abuse. Roddy Doyle’s novel, The woman who walked into doors (1996), exposed the grim reality of female oppression. Family law was unsupportive (there was no divorce) in a world where for many women ‘marriage became a trap’ (Pierse, 2011: 115). Unwanted pregnancies could not be terminated in the absence of legal abortion, unless women went to the UK. Working-class women particularly lacked a voice. As Michael Pierse (2011: 110) notes: ‘Fiction about working-class women is relatively plentiful, but fiction by them is not, with the notable exceptions of Maura Laverty and Paula Meehan.’ Unsurprisingly, many women sought refuge through emigration. When the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (which had only two women members) deliberated between 1948-54, the preponderance of female emigrants became one of ‘the problems’ discussed. Ferriter (2005: 474) observes: More interesting was the widespread contention that young women leaving was humiliating the country … Some critics of emigration wanted to ban women under the age of 22 from emigrating, seeing their departure as a threat to the population’s proportion of women of marriageable and child-bearing age; but both Church and State recognised

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this would represent an unacceptable invasion of civil liberties and be repugnant to moral law. Modernisation challenged the treatment of women as second-class citizens. Women found a voice in the form of feminism, which began the process of ideologically challenging patriarchal power through the agency of the women’s movement.

Modernisation and liberty The right to life and choice in the moral sphere became major political issues in Ireland during the 1980s. Modernisation inevitably meant gradual secularisation, ushering in a period of greater personal freedom. Private morality has been increasingly defined in terms of personal choice in areas such as contraception, divorce, abortion and homosexuality. The legalisation of divorce had been represented as a civil right denied almost uniquely in Ireland amongst the international community of nations. The Catholic Church has reacted to this pressure for a more liberal society with two strategems. In the public realm, they have adopted a largely secular form of discourse, pointing to the purported negative consequences of contraception, divorce, abortion and homosexuality for the social fabric. Often these arguments have been presented in the public arena by moral issue campaign groups such as Family Solidarity, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) or the Pro Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC). In the religious realm, the Church has relied on its traditional moral authority over a predominantly Catholic population. In this arena, the ‘magisterium’ or teaching of the Church was incontestable. The movement towards the acceptance of secular humanistic values has been widely associated with Dr Garret Fitzgerald’s tenure as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) during the 1980s. Fitzgerald, a politician of liberal views with a distinctly tolerant cast of mind, sought to end sectarianism in Ireland (north and south) through his ‘constitutional crusade’. Sectarianism and the intolerance it spawns have been at the root of the violence which has long divided the island of Ireland. Fitzgerald declared in 1981, ‘we need to review our Constitution for our own sake – to give us a Constitution which would reflect the pluralist ideal which underlies all true Republicanism’ (The Irish Times, 10 October 1981). The Victorian moralisation and sexualisation of Irish society has become deeply rooted in the Irish psyche (Inglis, 1987: 168-86). The demand for change in terms of greater tolerance in the exercise of moral

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choice required a political culture which was profoundly at variance with the socialisation experience of most of the Irish citizenry. A populace that experienced the psycho-terror of Victorian social mores grafted onto a largely denominational education system could not be expected to easily accommodate to a secular humanist values, based on personal rights discourse. The issue was complicated by the ‘new right’, a neo-conservative political phenomenon, which spawned a powerful reaction against secular humanist values throughout the developed world – making the personal highly political. The new right developed around an ideological synthesis between cultural conservatism and free-market liberalism. Given the self-evident contradictions between authority and freedom, the remarkable nature of this conjuncture of political forces and its widespread popular appeal cannot be overstated. Moral issue campaigns have proven to be a particularly potent method of expression for what is widely referred to as the repressive puritanism of the new right. Emily O’Reilly alleges, in her book Masterminds of the right (1992), the opaque role of the new right in setting the moral agenda in Ireland. In many respects, the Irish debate reflected culture wars in other parts of the world – notably the USA. But it also revived concerns about the secretive Church-State alliance because of the allegedly opaque system of lobbying politicians by secretive organisations (O’Reilly, 1992). Ironically, the liberal climate following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) facilitated a relaxation in the Catholic Church’s moral teaching on matters of personal ethics. In the mid-1960s, a commission appointed by Pope John XXIII decided in favour of altering the Catholic Church’s ban on contraceptives. In a momentous decision in 1968, Pope Paul VI overruled the Birth Control Commission in an encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae, which opposed all forms of artificial contraception. The obvious ambiguity in the Church’s position enabled many Catholics to ignore papal teaching and take responsibility for their own decisions in this most intimate of areas of human behaviour. The perception that the Catholic Church had accepted the principle of birth control through natural family planning but continued to oppose artificial forms of contraception clearly undermined its moral authority in the eyes of the laity. It was no longer an issue of principle, simply an argument about method. To the informed Catholic mind, no basic moral precept was at issue. The secularist journal Church and State (1986: 2–3) asserted that, in social terms, large families had become ‘incompatible with urban life for a working class which aspires to be more than a breeding ground for an underclass’. Social change

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and rising expectations dissipated residual doubts about the moral consequences of using artificial methods of birth control.

New social movements and Irish cultural politics Linda Connolly and Niamh Hourigan (2006: 5), in their book Social movements in Ireland, explain what social movements mean and why their complexity and diffuseness make it hard to capture and define their existential contribution to transformative change: In general social movements are hard to define. By nature, they are an elusive phenomena with unclear boundaries in time and space. Movements generally mobilise in several different centres (often in both institutional and noninstitutional contexts) at the same time and the impact on activism is typically diffuse, pervasive and uneven at structural and cultural levels … By conducting internal dialogue, debates and workshops, for example, activism becomes associated with personal development and change at individual level. Movements may also unleash creativity and powerful symbolism through protest songs, murals and political art. New social movements are a form of collective popular action within civil society to promote change at a cultural level and ‘democratise democracy’. Cultural politics reveals an intersection between civil society and welfare that is usually overlooked. Official versions of civil society seek to frame the normative relationship between it and social policy in terms of the role of the voluntary and the community sectors. Kaldor (2003: 9) observes that, according to this ‘neoliberal’ version, ‘civil society consists of associational life – a non-profit, voluntary “third sector” – that not only restrains state power but also actually provides a substitute for many of the functions performed by the state’. Cultural politics in the shape of new social movements provides what Kaldor (2003: 8) calls an activist version of civil society that resembles the ‘velvet revolutions’ in Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. It is a radical version of active citizenship that seeks to occupy new political spaces outside mainstream politics, with a view to radicalising democracy. In Ireland, the role of new social movements has resembled the ‘Arab spring’ of 2011, because it challenged an undemocratic Church-State alliance that exercised hegemonic control.

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Chapter 2 argued that social movements (cultural, labour, nationalist, feminist) shaped the Irish Revolution 1913-23. New social movements provide a connecting thread with that struggle for liberty, which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Church-State alliance during the first three decades of the Irish State. New social movements embody, as Professor Thornley argued, a peaceful social revolution. They redefine the political agenda from the bottom up through a multitude of political actions. Ossified elite structures, such as the Church-State alliance, are destabilised by the campaigns of new social movements. The women’s movement was to prove seminal in reframing the discourse of Irish politics by democratising the lives of ordinary people, their personal relationships, beliefs and expectations (Connolly and Hourigan, 2006: 7).

The rise of the women’s movement: ‘second-wave feminism’ The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a rebirth of the women’s movement, which had been largely culturally suppressed since 1923. This development had major implications for social policy. The foundation of the Irish Housewives Association (IHA) during the 1940s had laid the foundation for ‘second-wave feminism’. This initiative mutated during the 1960s into a liberal feminist movement that catalysed and coordinated women’s networks and feminist campaigns, as well as international links. An ad hoc group emerged in 1968, providing an umbrella campaigning front for this burgeoning women’s movement (Connolly, 2003: 60). These organisations included: the Irish Housewives Association; Association of Business and Professional Women; the Irish Country Women’s Association (ICA); the Irish Nursing Organisation (INO); Dublin University Women Graduates Association; the National Association of Widows; the Soroptimists’ Clubs of Ireland, Women’s International Zionist Organisation; Irish Council of Women; Association of Women’s Citizens and the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (Connolly, 2003: 94-5). This women’s mobilisation produced (after intense lobbying and campaigning) the Commission on the Status of Women, which was established by the Taoiseach in 1970 (Connolly, 2003: 95). The Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (1972) recommended an end to the discriminatory treatment of women in the Irish workplace. It forced ‘the government to begin to dismantle the discriminatory architecture of policies towards women’ (Considine and Dukelow: 2009: 52). The Report of the

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Commission on the Status of Women was followed in 1973 by key official actions: the establishment of the Council for the Status of Women and the Employment of Married Women Act 1973, which removed the marriage ban on women’s employment in the civil service, local authorities and the health service. The ‘deserted wife’s allowance’ (1973) and the ‘single women’s allowance’ (1974) were introduced. These government measures had important consequences in terms of addressing women’s inequality in the Irish welfare state and combating poverty. The Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (1972) also had a wider social impact. It led to the debate on women’s rights being taken up by campaigning feminist organisation, including the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) founded in 1970 and Irish Women United (IWU) established in 1975. The latter included communists, socialists and left republicans (Connolly, 2003: 13-14). These organisations were prepared to adopt radical strategies and tactics on women’s rights and engage in direct action. Diverse strands of opinion within the women’s movement were agreed on a broad policy forum that encompassed: home-ownership rights; legal equality; fair treatment for widows, deserted wives and single parents; and equality of educational opportunity (Considine and Dukelow: 2009: 53). Reproductive rights (including contraception and abortion) also emerged as key feminist concerns. The women’s movement was part of a wider global, post-war liberation movement that was to significantly impact upon the normative assumptions that had shaped the architecture of social policy. New social movements have facilitated the interrogation of the traditional ideological basis of the welfare state which rests on notions of ‘simple equality’ between rich and poor and replaced it with ‘complex equality’ that embraces identity in terms of gender, race and sexuality. Walzer (1983) has suggested a break with the old normative idealism embodied in collectivist and universal notions of ‘the social and advocated new thinking around pluralist frameworks of complex equality that involves taking democratic rights beyond traditional conceptions of citizenship’. Feminists seek to harness this critical social thinking by interrogating women’s role in a ‘gendered’ society. They point out that the welfare state is concerned with social reproduction, that is, the physical, emotional, ideological and material processes involved in caring for and sustaining both children and adults. They also point to the gender division of labour, which places a low value on caring – traditionally the female role in society. Second-wave feminists during the 1960s began

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to campaign for repositioning women’s place in society by critiquing the institutions of patriarchy and domesticity. Women’s consciousness in an increasingly globalised world began to take shape in a largely invisible civil society of women’s groups in local communities that achieved public recognition through the global voice of the women’s movement. Reproductive rights were at the centre of this debate.

The politics of reproductive rights In the early 1960s, Ireland’s population characteristics appeared to reflect those of the UK, with similar birth and death rates. The birth rate in Ireland (per thousand of the population) was 27, compared with 19 in the UK. But there the similarity ended. In Ireland in 1962 the average number of children born to a married woman was twice that in England and Wales – 252 legitimate births per thousand married women aged between 15-45 in Ireland, which compared with only 125 in England and Wales. That meant each year one in every four women in Ireland in the age cohort (15-45) had a child, compared with one in eight in England and Wales. The reason for this apparent discrepancy was that only half the Irish age cohort (of women aged 15-45) were married, compared to two-thirds of the same group in England and Wales, with half of all Irish women marrying in 1962 being over the age of 25 compared with a quarter in England and Wales (Kaim-Caudle, 1967: 14-15). These statistics reveal a remarkable combination of population characteristics – a high fertility rate, a low marriage rate and a comparatively late marriage age – which were seriously at variance with other European countries. Why? Professor Kaim-Caudle (1967: 15) suggests an answer to this phenomenon of consistently high fertility rates: ‘Catholic teaching about family planning certainly explains this constancy’. He also noted (allowing for changes in the age structure) the Irish fertility rate had remained consistent for forty years. Irish fertility rates were not only unchanged over time but out of step with European trends. That was about to be altered by the structural impacts of cultural modernisation, combined with the agency of the women’s movement. Just over 2.4 per cent of births were outside marriage in 1916 compared with over one third in 2012 (Central Statistics Office, 2016). The Church-State alliance, which had become an open secret after the Mother and Child Scheme debacle in 1951 (see Chapter 5), was under growing pressure from the women’s movement. In these changed circumstances, the patriarchal structure of the Catholic

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Church, increasingly appeared at odds with the changing times and social reality. The capacity of the all male ‘Hierarchy of Bishops’ to dogmatically pronounce on moral issues was increasingly challenged. Sexuality, which had been the cornerstone of the Church’s moral teaching, became a major focus for public debate. The personal became highly political, driving a wedge between the Church and State and undermining what Tom Inglis (1987) has called the Church’s ‘moral monopoly’. The tectonic plates of cultural hegemony were beginning to shift. The personal had been politicised in a secular vernacular challenging dogmatic theology at its core. The reproductive rights debate was led by feminist radicals through the contraceptive action programme and engagement in various forms of direct action. The ‘contraceptive train’ in May 1971 typified this militant approach. The protest involved a group of radical feminists importing contraceptives (the sale, importation and advertisement of which had been banned in 1935) from Belfast, arriving at Connolly Station Dublin and flamboyantly marching through customs. This action attracted enormous media attention and international publicity. However, it divided the women’s movement and led to the resignation of some supporters (Connolly, 2003: 121-2). Less militant activities emerged in the form of voluntary and community work, leading to the establishment of women’s support organisations, such as the Well Women Centre, Women’s Aid, Adapt, the Rape Crisis Centre and Cherish (Considine and Dukelow, 2009: 53). The provision of these self-help services highlighted major deficiencies within the Irish welfare state. However, it was the issue of contraception that captured the public imagination. Contraceptives were not legally available in Ireland until 1979, when the Fianna Fail Minister of Health, Charles Haughey, introduced the Health (Family Planning) Act. This legalised contraception for married couples, provided they obtained a medical prescription. Lee (1989: 498-499) has described this measure as an example of Haughey’s ‘nubile political skills’. In fact Haughey described the measure in sardonic terms, calling it derisively his ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ (Lee, 1989: 498). While Lee suggests it involved a skilful reconciliation of interests, the 1979 measure made the medical profession the arbiter and custodian of moral values – the traditional province of the Church – and continued to infantilise the population. In practice, Haughey’s Act was an unworkable piece of legislation that was much too restrictive in its scope. It was ultimately bound to be replaced. In symbolic terms, however, it marked a turning point in the debate on reproductive rights in Ireland.

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Haughey’s 1979 family planning legislation had followed the McGee case in 1973, when a Catholic woman had successfully contested the ban on contraceptives in the Supreme Court. When the Fine Gael-Labour coalition introduced legislation intended to legalise contraception the following year, it was defeated in the Dáil. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the episode was that the Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, crossed the floor and voted with the Opposition against legislation sponsored by his own government. This singular gesture at the highest political level sharply exposed the continuing power of the Catholic Church ‘to inoculate minds against the introduction of any legislation which is contrary to its interests’ (Inglis, 1987: 76). Few could doubt after Cosgrave’s decision that the process of secularisation would be slow and painful. It was not until 1985 that contraceptives were made freely available to adults in Ireland following Barry Desmond’s amending legislation. Desmond, a Labour Party minister in the Fitzgerald administration, took a courageously secular stance on the issue, refusing to yield to conservative pressure to limit access to married couples only. During the debate on the 1985 Bill the Bishop of Limerick, Dr Jeremiah Newman, reminded ‘all politicians who profess to be Catholic that they have a duty to follow the guidance of their Church in areas where the interests of the Church and State overlap’ (cited in Inglis, 1987: 78). It is a tribute to the independence of mind of the majority of legislators in the Dáil that they did not succumb to this open expression of Catholic power. The recent release of the State Papers for the period reveals that the Vatican intervened by putting pressure on the government to withdraw the legislation through the Department of Foreign Affairs. The names of the then Archbishop of Dublin, Kevin MacNamara, and Bishop of Limerick, Jeremiah Newman, were recorded. An unnamed civil servant noted: ‘Their assertion that Catholic legislators should always follow the direction of the bishops in certain matters would mean that either we would have a totally confessional, Catholic State, where the minority have no rights, or Catholics would have to withdraw from government’ (Irish Times, 31 December 2015). He suggested that Dr MacNamara’s thinly veiled suggestion that Catholics might alter their voting patterns if the government introduced the Health (Family Planning) legislation, ‘was breaking very dangerous ground’ (The Irish Times, 31 December 2015). In a file from the Office of the President, Dr Patrick Hillery, there is a record of hundreds of letters and telegrams urging him not to sign the Health (Family Planning) Amendment Act, 1985 into law, on the basis it would corrupt the young by making the purchase of

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contraceptives freely available. The Correspondent to the President complained: ‘This Bill is totally opposed to the whole concept of unborn life because it closes the door to the right of unborn life to be conceived’. She reminded President Hillery of the ‘pernicious effects’ in other countries that had legalised contraception and listed them as including ‘broken homes, shattered families, deprived and abuse women, promiscuity, lives of decent people threatened in the streets and even in their homes’ (The Irish Times, 31 December 2015). In the event, President Hillery signed the legislation into law on 12 March 1985. The alternative would have required the President to refer the legislation to the Supreme Court, which would almost certainly have deemed it constitutional, since there were no obvious grounds for regarding the purchase of contraceptives as repugnant to the Constitution. By 1987, some 70 per cent of pharmacies stocked condoms (Ferriter, 2005: 714).

The Kerry babies case: ‘a modern-day witch-hunt’ Professor Tom Inglis, in his book Truth, power and lies: Irish society and the case of the Kerry babies (2003), analyses the 1985 tribunal into the deaths of two infants in Kerry. A 24-year-old woman, Joanne Hayes, became the subject of intense investigation that had (for its critics) the hallmarks of a medieval witch trial (Inglis, 2003: McCafferty, 2010). Secret pregnancies were part of the traditional Irish moral landscape. Child deaths were covered up and unbaptised children buried at night by male relatives in cillini – unmarked and unconsecrated graveyards – where illegitimate children, their mothers, the mentally ill and those who had committed suicide were buried alongside unidentified bodies washed up ashore, their religion unknown (The Irish Times, 23 April 2015). Unbaptised children were, according to Catholic theology, condemned to a state of limbo up to the 1960s, a state of permanent exclusion from heaven. Anne Enright (2015: 11) comments: ‘Cillini are often situated between one place and another, at the limit of things. After the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, allowed burial rights for the unbaptised, the Cillini, along with the idea of limbo fell out of use.’ During the 1980s, child pregnancies and infanticide became public issues. The death of a 15-year-old, Anne Lovett, in childbirth in a grotto at Granard, County Longford, became a major media event, with many women recounting on the radio the stories of their own secret pregnancies. The resulting discussion opened up to public exposure

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aspects of previously suppressed intimate facts of life and the existence of ‘hidden Irelands’ (Ferriter, 2005: 715). Traditional Ireland had been reinforced by a visit from Pope John Paul II in 1979. The phenomena of moving statues, exemplified by the grotto at Ballinspittle, County Cork, suggested that folk belief was still very much alive in Ireland. It became a media story, in which the supposed cultural backwardness of rural Ireland was relentlessly mocked. In reality, popular devotional religion was in decline during the second half of the twentieth century ‘with fewer people making pilgrimages, participating in novenas, putting up religious icons in their homes and villages, saying the rosary and venerating saints’ (Inglis, 2003: 129). The Kerry babies case exemplified the ‘transitions and tension’ in a society that was becoming secularised (Inglis, 2003: 130). Joanne Hayes concealed the birth of her illegitimate baby and was subsequently accused of causing the deaths of two infants in Kerry – in conflict with the scientific evidence and geographical distance. A 77-day public inquiry ensued that seriously cast doubt on the state’s case against Joanne Hayes and her family. An extraordinary theory of ‘superfecundation’ was advanced to explain the difference in blood types between the two babies; this was dismissed by an expert as ‘so exceedingly rare that one rules it out’ (quoted in Inglis 2003: 75). The case remained unresolved with many unanswered questions (Tribunal Report, 1985). The Kerry babies case became a major public issue because of the perceived attempt to demonise a young woman for allegedly engaging in transgressive sexual behaviour. Nell McCafferty (2010), in her book A woman to blame: the Kerry Babies case (first published in 1985), represents the treatment of Joanne Hayes by a public tribunal as misogynistic and ‘medieval’. Inglis (2003: 236), in his sociological analysis, argues that the case represents a watershed for women in Irish society. He concludes ‘that the truth about the Kerry Babies case is as much about discovering the truth about Irish people as it is about establishing the facts’ (Inglis, 2003: 243).

The abortion debate The Abortion Referendum (Eighth Amendment) campaign in 1983 led to a constitutional reassertion of the primacy of traditional values and a qualified endorsement of the potency of Catholic power. Abortion was already illegal in Ireland under the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act. A protracted contest between the Pro Life Amendment Campaign (PLAC), representing conservative Catholic opinion, and

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the Anti-Amendment Campaign (AAC), which was composed of an alliance of feminists, left-wing and progressive forces, took place in the early 1980s. Lee (1989: 652) has observed in reference to the abortion issue that, ‘if the nominal issues involved were not so tragic a one, the referendum could best be treated as a vulgar farce’. The reality is that at least 161,514 Irish women sought abortions in Britain between 1980 and 2014 (Irish Examiner, 16 March 2016). The emergence of the Women’s Right to Choose Group in Ireland in 1980 in the wake of the burgeoning feminist movement in the 1970s provided PLAC with a pretext to start a moral issue campaign on abortion. The resulting Constitutional (Eighth) Amendment proclaimed, ‘the State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees to respect, and as far as practicable by its laws to vindicate that right’. A poster proclaimed ‘the abortion mills of England grind Irish babies into blood that cries out to heaven for vengeance’ (Ferriter, 2005: 717). The Eighth Amendment was carried by a 2:1 majority, but only 55 per cent of the electorate voted despite intense moral pressure to endorse traditional Catholic views. In Dublin, the electorate was evenly divided. This was not a resounding victory for conservative Catholic values. Diarmaid Ferriter (2005: 716) has described the 1983 pro-life amendment debate as ‘one of the most poisonous witnessed in twentieth century Ireland’. It was also needless and pointless. Nonetheless, the ramifications of the Eighth Amendment for women’s rights were enormous. As Barry (1988: 59) has put it, ‘Irish women have been recategorised to be equal to that which is not yet born’. Clearly, it is asymmetrical to give an unborn foetus all of a formed person’s civil rights without any counterbalancing social responsibilities. It would seem to be a legally absurd practice to ascribe a full partner-to-contract relationship between a potential human being in the womb and a citizen who is part of the community. If the putative baby’s rights are equal to the mother’s, then she must be restrained from any activities which threaten the child’s welfare, such as smoking, drinking, drug abuse and other risky health practices. The implications are disturbingly draconian. Indeed, some of the consequences of the 1986 ‘Hamilton decision’ in the High Court have been draconian. In essence, this decision limited abortion information, including nondirective counselling, making it more difficult for women to procure abortions in England. At a more fundamental level, the Hamilton decision has set ‘the right to life of the unborn’ above ‘the right to information’. The implications for civil liberties in Ireland are very serious.

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Undoubtedly, the extremism of the pro-life stance has led to an unattractive resurgence of Catholic supremacist aspirations and a curtailment of civil liberties. It is a position shared by cultural conservatives in many parts of the world (notably the USA) that promotes deep divisions in public opinion. However, the tide of public opinion has fundamentally changed since the introduction of the Eighth Amendment in 1983. A Red C opinion poll, published in 2016, indicated that 87% of the population wanted access to abortion expanded and 72% wanted abortion decriminalised. More than half the respondents agreed that Irish abortion laws were ‘cruel and inhumane’. The repeal of the Eighth Amendment was an important issue in the 2016 Irish general election, with left-wing parties strongly advocating a referendum to remove it from the Constitution. It continues to be a touchstone issue in Irish cultural politics. The refusal of the women’s movement to accept an ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ by seeking abortions in Britain outside Irish jurisdiction was legitimated by the ‘X case’ in 1992, when a 14-year-old girl, pregnant by rape, was refused permission to travel to Britain for an abortion. A legal appeal to the Supreme Court led to a reinterpretation of the 1983 Pro-life Amendment, as also protecting the right of life of the mother, which was given precedence if there was a threat of suicide. The Irish Times (18 February 1992) published a cartoon portraying a young girl clutching a teddy bear in the middle of a map of Ireland with a caption ‘the introduction of internment in Ireland: for 14 year old girls’. The unviability and inequity of the Irish abortion regime was further highlighted by the Savita Halappanavar case’. Halappanavar, a 31-yearold dentist, died in 2012 at University College Hospital Galway due to complications during her pregnancy. It was widely discussed in the media that her death could have been prevented and was the product of Ireland’s restrictive laws on abortion. The Savita Halappanavar case led to demands for law reform. The Fine Gael-Labour coalition government’s response was the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013, which restates the prohibition on abortion but allows a termination when there is a real or substantial threat to the life of the mother. A highly punitive approach to breaches of the legislation includes provision for a 14-year prison sentence. Following an inconclusive general election in February 2016, prochoice campaigners are likely to struggle in their quest for a repeal of the Eighth Amendment, which is opposed by a formidable combination of conservative legislators, including rural independents. The campaign group Terminations for Medical Reasons Ireland (TMFRI) is seeking

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a change in the law to facilitate termination in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities. A Private Member’s Bill, to allow for abortions in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, failed to gain majority support in the Dáil in July 2016 (The Irish Times, 8 July 2016). The Attorney General had advised that the Bill was unconstitutional, splitting the government. A more liberal abortion regime in Ireland would appear to be only achievable following the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. A ‘citizens’ assembly’ on abortion became the government’s favoured option for diffusing this debate in the short term. However, a ‘march for choice’ in Dublin on 23 September 2016 underlined the mood for change with the slogan: ‘Not the Church, not the State, women must decide their fate’. Abortion is a very live issue in Irish politics with very strong pressure for its legalisation in a viable form – which in effect means women’s right to choose. That means a liberal abortion regime. It is difficult to see how women can be denied abortion on demand in an increasingly open society.

Divorce and family politics The Divorce Referendum in 1986 was to prove equally contentious. Secularist forces, notably the Divorce Action Group (DAG), took the initiative in 1980 to campaign for the legalisation of divorce. Public opinion was initially highly favourable towards the principle of legalising divorce. The opposition once again came from conservative lay Catholic organisations, notably Family Solidarity, ‘but this time with the support of a more militant Catholic hierarchy’ (Breen et al, 1990: 111). In a statement entitled ‘Marriage, the family and divorce’, which was widely circulated amongst the electorate, the Bishops presented a lucidly argued case heavily supported by empirical data indicating that divorce was a threat to the social fabric. The Hierarchy claimed that ‘marital breakdown in many countries has become a massive social and national problem’. They noted that in contrast, ‘it can scarcely be denied that the absence of divorce has an important element in fostering stability in marriage in the Republic of Ireland’ and concluded ‘the community’s general understanding of marriage as a lifelong institution provides a strong basis for positive public policies of support for marriage’ (Irish Catholic Bishops, 1986, para 44-5). The well-organised campaign against divorce was not matched by the Divorce Action Group. Emily O’Reilly (1992: 108) described the DAG campaign as ‘shambolic – run on a co-operative basis poorly funded, with the message by and large directed at the converted

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rather than the volatile middle ground’. The Anti-Divorce Campaign (ADC) on the other hand was highly organised and very professional in its organisation. It very efficiently destabilised the case for divorce legislation by appealing to the fears of the electorate and exploiting economic argument against divorce by suggesting it would result in the loss of the family home. A group calling itself the Family Rights Council (1986) declared in an election leaflet that divorce would cost the taxpayer £200 million per annum, ‘that is £600 per year or £12 per week’. It added that ‘the government may also cut employment allowance to help pay the bill for divorce’. Women were particularly targeted by the Family Rights Council which claimed, ‘divorced wives will lose all succession rights, pension rights, the family home and tax allowance rights’. In a society where many women are economically dependent upon men this was potent rhetoric. The Family Rights Council also accused the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government of totalitarian aspirations, stating that ‘if the divorce amendment is carried the government will proceed with further anti-family legislation, such as the compulsory adoption of the children of poor families’. In another election leaflet, Family Solidarity (1986) described divorce as a ‘social evil’, adding, ‘remember limited divorce is about as possible as Limited Nuclear War … It cannot be contained’. It also asserted that ‘divorce would destroy a wife’s right to succession’ and put ‘the family home or farm at risk’, combining a reminder of women’s economic insecurity with an appeal to possessive individualism. Family Solidarity included in this leaflet a remarkable statement, ‘let us vote to maintain the family’s rights above all political legislation’. O’Reilly (1992:109) notes that the ADC campaign made an effective use of street posters to instil fear, such as ‘A divorced woman is like a second hand car – someone else’s headache’ and ‘Does divorce work: ask Liz Taylor’. These conservative moral issue campaigners appear to view modern society as essentially amoral, as lacking in the traditional religious values which they view as the cornerstone of civilisation. This is a classically Manichean view of the world and essentially harmless. However, accusations from conservatives of bad faith and totalitarian intent on the part of the State have a disturbingly incendiary quality. To damn a political regime in order to prevent the adoption of one of the most common social practices, one in no way life-threatening, seems like a considerable overreaction. Nonetheless, the remarkable success of the anti-divorce lobby in turning public opinion around and defeating the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, must be regarded as a tribute to their campaign.

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Once again, the majority in favour of traditional Catholic values was nearly 2:1. The secularly minded journal Church and State (1986:2) in an editorial comment observed: Everybody expected that, as divorce was a less sensitive issue than the right to life, there would be a massive majority for liberal reform in the Republic. But, in fact, only 3% more voted for divorce … This constituted a massive defeat for the secular movement. The 1986 referendum was followed by the assertion of an uncompromising sexual ethic in public policy. The constitutional bans on abortion and divorce were part of a whole constellation of controls aimed at policing family life. These included bans on sterilisation and artificial insemination enforced in some hospitals by unelected ethics committees, ensuring the compliance of the medical profession. However, by 1995 public opinion had changed in relation to divorce. Society was more affluent, social reality was less deniable. Citizens were more sophisticated. Women were increasingly involved in the labour force. The position of the Church was weakening. While Garret Fitzgerald was pusillanimous during the 1986 referendum campaign, John Bruton – as Taoiseach 1995-97 – was prepared to show stronger political leadership on the divorce issue, enabling a referendum to be narrowly carried. Divorce legislation was enacted in 1997. Ireland, according to a recent EU-wide survey, had the lowest rate of divorce within the EU at 0.6 per 1,000 compared with an overage of 1.8 per 1,000 across the EU and 2.8 per 1000 in Britain (Irish Examiner, 2 March 2015).

Gay rights and the decriminalisation of homosexuality Modernisation was changing attitudes towards homosexuality across the Western world. ‘Gay Pride’ became the unifying slogan of a movement seeking greater diversity in people’s sexual choices and practices. In a climate of growing toleration attempts to decriminalise homosexuality in Ireland were successful, following a decision by the European Court of Human Rights in 1988 that the prohibition of homosexual acts between consenting males in Ireland was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. This ruling was the culmination of a campaign by Senator David Norris to legalise homosexuality in Ireland, which had commenced with the establishment of the Homosexual Law Reform Campaign in 1975. In 1977, Senator Norris filed a

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constitutional case against the state in the High Court. In 1980, the Court ruled that his constitutional rights were not infringed by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 that had made homosexual behaviour between males a criminal offence. An appeal to the Irish Supreme Court was rejected by a 3-2 verdict in 1983, leaving Senator Norris with no other legal option but to go to the European Court of Human Rights. The Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) was founded in 1974. It sought to create a space for gay people to associate and socialise and achieve the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the law, as a human rights imperative (Rose, 1994: 11-12). In terms of law reform, the gay rights movement sought to repeal sections of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which outlawed sexual relations between men. The objectives of the gay rights movement – undoubtedly composing a significant, if still largely hidden, minority group in the Irish population – have been eloquently stated by the liberal-minded Senator Shane Ross: Surprisingly, the gay community’s primary concern is not so much with repeal of the law which brands them as criminals as with more subtle forms of discrimination. They resent society’s … attempt to make them feel guilty. They resent the censorship of their culture … They resent many popular but current myths. (Sunday Tribune, 31 July 1983) The moral fortitude displayed by Senator Ross in explaining the painful realities of the gay rights movement’s social predicament and their aspiration for equal citizenship is notable for its rarity amongst Irish legislators. Kieran Rose (1994: 35) notes that ‘in 1977, Dr Noel Browne was literally laughed out of the Dáil when he asked the Minister of Justice to reform the law [on homosexuality]’. In a majority Supreme Court decision in April 1983, it was determined that the criminalisation of homosexuality was not repugnant to the 1937 Constitution. The grounds for this majority ruling were the Christian nature of the State, the immorality of homosexual behaviour, the risks to public health and the threat to marriage (Rose, 1994: 36). However, in 1989, the government accepted amendments to the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Bill that offered protection to homosexuals and Travellers (Rose, 1994: 4). The AIDS epidemic has helped to add a further layer of moral disapproval and sustain traditional prejudice against the homosexual

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population in Ireland. Homosexuals, in the view of the US AIDS activist Larry Kramer (1990), have become one of society’s ‘disposable populations’ at a point when they are at a historic moment in their emergence into full citizenship. This tragic paradox turned the LGBT population into an ostracised group easy to vilify and condemn. Opponents of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland have campaigned in a receptive climate of public opinion. Family Solidarity (1990: 59) in a pamphlet entitled ‘The homosexual challenge’, declared: ‘We must remember that the purpose of David Norris’ court action was to challenge the constitutional norm, and thereby to open the door to further changes. The removal of the criminal sanction in the present law would be a beachhead of legality, the first step toward complete approval’. The logic behind this case would appear to rest on the assumption that the legalisation of homosexuality would lead to a decadent society and the corruption of morals. The Manichean idiom adopted by Family Solidarity is indicative of the angst felt by traditionalists that has accompanied the sexualisation of Irish society in recent decades. Conservatives have sought to harness moral panics concerning social problems, notably child sexual abuse and pornography, in order to win support for a return to more traditional social attitudes and codes of moral behaviour. Homosexuality has been presented as antipathetic to traditional family values which Family Solidarity described as ‘Judaeo-Christian norms’. Family Solidarity (1990: 44) concluded in this regard: If the laws against homosexuality acts were repealed and the age of consent were made the same for all, then the lawmakers would give a clear message to the young: Homosexual behaviour is normal and acceptable and society does not mind which alternative you choose. In fact, Ireland was alone with the Soviet Union, Romania and Cyprus in retaining the complete criminalisation of homosexuality. France has had a common age of consent of 15 for heterosexuals and homosexuals since 1791; Spain, a common age of 12 since 1822; Italy, a common age of 14 since 1889; and Poland, a common age of 15 since 1932. All of these are culturally Catholic countries. None of them evince any noticeable decline in the moral standards of the populace. The suggestion that the decriminalisation of homosexuality would lead to the corrupting of the young was undoubtedly intended to influence public opinion decisively against law reform in this area.

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At another level, this argument was likely to put the increasingly visible homosexual population on the defensive in public. A relatively powerless section of society was consequently publicly condemned, not merely on the basis of its sexual behaviour, but also because of its allegedly pernicious moral influence. The campaign for the decriminalisation of homosexuality was finally successful in 1993. The Minister for Justice, Maire Geoghan Quinn, announced the abolition of the discriminatory legislation against the LGBT population. In 2015, a referendum on ‘gay marriage’ (as it was popularly referred to) resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of this equality measure. Those in favour amounted to 62% (or 1.2 million), with 38% opposed. It was the first referendum on equal marriage in the world. The strong endorsement it received from the voters was powerful evidence of how fundamentally Ireland had modernised.

The politics of change In November 1990, Mary Robinson, Ireland’s most distinguished human rights lawyer and feminist, was elected President of Ireland. She was not simply the candidate of the political left. Robinson personified the ideals of modernisation and secular humanism. At a symbolic level, her victory inflicted a major reversal upon the recrudescent forces of traditionalism, putting the ‘new right’ in Ireland on the defensive. The fantasy that Irish Catholicism was a unique agency of spiritual purity in a fight against the bestial impulses of global modernisation was dispelled at a stroke. The apocalyptic rhetoric of the 1980s, which presented abortion, divorce and homosexuality as the incarnation of sexual indulgence, was transformed into echoes and images of an intolerant past. President Robinson’s victory finally contextualised the meaning of modernisation in Irish society. The demonisation of secular humanist values and the advocacy of a sexual ethic based on fear and renunciation began to appear peculiarly recondite in the changed political and social climate. The parties of the left moved with understandable haste to make political capital out of President Robinson’s victory. It was, after all, the first time the left had won an election in the history of the State. But their critics on the centre-right moved with equal rapidity to highlight the indisputable fact that President Robinson’s victory had a much deeper significance, which transcended party politics. Her candidacy had changed the political and social agenda in Ireland and all parties

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sought to respond to the new mood for change. It crystallised cultural modernisation into a transformative political process. The politics of change, which resuscitated the spirit of secular humanism in the 1990s, were as much a product of new social movements as of conventional political parties. Mary Robinson’s election was both a triumph for the women’s movement and for the Labour Party – both of which nurtured her political development. The promised decriminalisation of homosexuality was indubitably a personal coup for Senator David Norris. But at a deeper level it was a victory for the gay rights movement, which had the courage to ‘come out’ and proclaim the rights of homosexuals to equal citizenship. The politics of change elevated the personal to the centre of the political agenda. It redefined inequality from a class-based concept to include a gender dimension, though not as yet a race dimension. The politics of change would appear to be deeply rooted, reflecting the growing influence of urbanisation and industrialisation as well as a burgeoning sense of cosmopolitanism amongst an increasingly globalised population. An opinion poll published in the Irish Independent (28 December 1990) revealed a clear identification with the politics of change amongst the electorate. Of respondents, 65% believed that religion would have less impact on their lives during the 1990s; 49% thought that less strict attitudes towards sex would prevail, compared with 31% who envisaged stricter attitudes prevailing. Notably, 49% also believed that the family would be more important in the 1990s, compared with 33% who saw its influence waning and 12% foreseeing no change. The apocalyptic views of traditionalists regarding the consequences of a more liberal social climate were beginning to be rejected by the public. Family life in the eyes of most of the Irish population can take varied forms and retain its authenticity. This is a demonstrably modern view of the family, which indicates a growing sense of cosmopolitanism undoubtedly wrought by Ireland’s cultural modernisation. Other signs of fundamental change in social attitudes and behaviour are also visible. The widely acknowledged rejection of Catholicism by large sections of the urban working class is one clear example. In some urban working-class communities in Dublin, weekly mass attendance became as good as defunct – rejecting ‘the shared interests of capitalism and the Catholic Church’ (Pierse, 2011: 25). This development evinced a growing alienation from established social institutions by an increasingly marginalised section of the Irish population. Paradoxically, at a point in history when the Church has made the championship of the poor a basic element in its mission, the poor here rejected its

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spiritual authority. It may be that its highly published opposition to contraception, abortion and divorce have overshadowed its equally passionate, but less publicised, condemnation of poverty in the midst of affluence. Undoubtedly, public scandals arising from clerical child abuse and its ‘cover-up’ have been deeply damaging to the reputation of the Catholic church (Powell and Scanlon, 2015). On the other hand, the causes may be deeper, arising from the major changes in the social structure wrought by modernisation. Industrialisation and urbanisation, the economic and social consequences of modernisation, have invariably been accompanied by a decline in traditional forms of religious worship throughout Europe. It would be surprising if Ireland proved to be exceptional in this regard. In this context, the moral agency of the Church will have to be redefined. Effective constitutional separation between Church and State will become inevitable. What is most striking about the politics of change is the preoccupation with personal liberty. There has been little attention to the plight of the poor and the need for more redistributive social policies. President Robinson openly identified with the problems of the unemployed and those forced to emigrate, promoted Travellers’ rights and presented herself as a ‘voice for the voiceless’. She went on to become UN Commissioner for Human Rights. While libertarian issues capture the attention of the media because they impinge upon the interests of the majority, egalitarian concerns receive less publicity – particularly when they address the needs of the poor and marginalised.

The politics of secrets: the child abuse scandals The darkest secret that has confronted modern Ireland has been institutional and clerical child abuse. Revelations of clerical child abuse began in 1994 with the ‘Father Brendan Smyth affair’. Smyth was a priest who pleaded guilty to 72 charges of indecent and sexual assault against children and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The affair took on political significance when it emerged that the Irish state had failed to extradite Smyth to Northern Ireland in relation to a warrant for his arrest on charges of child abuse. It resulted in a scandal that brought down the Fianna Fail/Labour government. This was the first time clerical child abuse had been acknowledged in Ireland (Powell and Scanlon, 2015: 89-90). There followed a media campaign, alleging widespread clerical child abuse in Ireland including TV documentaries ‘States of Fear’ (1999) and ‘Cardinal Secrets’ (2002). The result was the commissioning of a series of high-profile inquiries: the Ryan Report (2009), the Dublin Report

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(2009) and the Cloyne Report (2011). There had been earlier inquiries into institutional childcare standards, the Cussen Report (1936) and the Kennedy Report (1970). Neither revealed any evidence of child abuse, albeit the Kennedy Report recommended the closure of the clerically run industrial and reformatory school system. Virtually all childcare institutions were under the control of the Catholic Church, including mother and baby homes. The Ryan Report became an international news story, exposing systemic child abuse in the reformatory and industrial school system. However, the Irish state also emerged as culpable, because of its failure to regulate these institutions, which it funded on a per capita basis, ensuring the maximisation of capacity by the Church (Powell and Scanlon, 2015: 127-59). The Dublin Report (2009) further contributed to public outrage, alleging a systematic ‘cover-up’ of clerical child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin over many years. It implicated four archbishops and a series of auxiliary bishops in the alleged cover-up. There followed highly critical media coverage of the Catholic Church’s management of child abuse, including criticism of the Vatican. During 2017, there has been confirmation of reports that nearly 800 bodies of young children in a mother and baby home in Tuam were buried in a septic tank. There are concerns that similar practices may have occurred in other mother and baby homes in Ireland. The Irish Times (7 March 2017) reported that the United Nations had sanctioned Ireland for its failure to fully investigate Magdelen laundries and mother and baby homes. An inquiry is investigating the mother and baby home in Tuam. These reports deal with deception and self-deception, and truths hidden under the surface of Irish society. They address horrific cruelty that blighted the lives of many children and young people in Ireland over many decades. The moral standing of the Catholic Church was fundamentally undermined by a loss of public trust and respect for its moral authority. But arguably the most lasting legacy was the exposure of the Church-State alliance in Ireland as corrupt because it allowed the exploitation of deprived children in institutional care, who were denied human rights and personal respect. The consequences for the Catholic Church were evident in declining attendance at mass and a loss of moral authority. However, its ongoing control of publicly funded schools and support for religiously segregated education remains largely unchallenged.

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Conclusion Political independence had been accompanied by cultural and gender oppression in a traditional hierarchical society, presided over by a patriarchal Church – the Catholic Hierarchy. Women had no voice in this oppressive society. Working-class women were particularly oppressed, bringing up large families in extreme poverty. Modernisation produced a more open society in Ireland. But this is not simply a narrative of structural change. Human agency was at its core. Sexuality dominated the debate about the creation of an open society. While traditionalists viewed sexuality as the product of modernisation, it was in reality a discursive change championed by new social movements in which citizens sought freedom over their reproductive rights and lifestyles. Traditionalists fought back through the insertion of the Eighth Amendment in the Constitution which outlawed abortion, and their strenuous opposition to contraception, divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. With the exception of abortion (which remains an unresolved political issue), fundamental change took place, spurred on by a new and outward looking generation of Irish youth that was prepared to campaign for personal rights and an open society. In this process of change, the hegemonic control exercised by the Catholic Church over Irish civil society began to crumble. It was a transformation that brought democracy into the public sphere in a way that heretofore had been denied by the secretive Church-State alliance. The 2015 ‘gay marriage’ referendum set the seal on the demise of the ideological hegemony of the Catholic Church. However, despite the scandals of clerical child abuse, the Church’s control over the publicly funded school system remains largely intact.

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EIGHT

The marketisation of the welfare state Ireland has no guiding vision. The lack of such a vision has led to a lack of coherence at the core of public policy, i.e. a failure to integrate policy developments across many areas of government policy ranging from education to health from infrastructure to social services from economic development to fiscal policy. There are many who dismiss the need for such a guiding vision arguing that at best it is irrelevant and at worst a total distraction from what should be the major focus of governments and public policy makers, i.e. the development of relevant policies to address current issues of concern. There are others however who argue that without a guiding vision policy development will at best be haphazard and at worst be working at cross purposes with itself. Sean Healy, Brigid Reynolds and Michelle Murphy (2014: 25) This statement, delivered in a conference paper compiled by Social Justice Ireland (Healy et al, 2014, including two of Ireland’s most respected anti-poverty campaigners over several decades), is a profound indictment of the Irish welfare state. The case made rests on an absence of a coherent vision and set of values, such as justice, decency and fairness, with which to underpin Ireland’s social architecture. Fr Sean Healy and Sr Brigid Reynolds had previously referenced this theme at the social policy conference in 30 September 1988 (Reynolds and Healy, 1988), warning against a growing social divide and the consequences of models of development driven by economic growth and wealth creation at the expense of social equality. This approach has, arguably, produced a residual welfare state. In this process, social citizenship and public welfare are disconnected, with the poor forming a residual class in a consumer society, where wealth and privilege increasingly define citizenship and entitlement. This is despite the

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official rhetoric of social partnership, which dominated the policy agenda between 1987 and 2007. Ultimately, what Healy et al (2014) are referring to is the developmental consequences of promoting a competitive market model, rather than the widely accepted Keynesian welfare state model. Michelle Norris (2016: 203-60) has characterised this developmental phase as the ‘marketisation’ of the Irish welfare state. Her description captures the uniqueness of the Irish model in Europe and its resemblance to East Asian welfare state models (Norris, 2016: 266). Karl Polanyi (2001: 76-7) identified a ’double movement’ within industrial capitalism composed of two opposing forces: the push from capital for a self-regulating market that facilitates the accumulation of wealth and the push back by a countermovement of citizens for social protection and redistributive justice. This was the post-war political context that inspired the creation of the Keynesian welfare state in many European countries. It was a compromise in the form of a social pact between the interests of capital (accumulation of wealth) and labour (redistribution of wealth). According to Polanyi, the promotion of personal gain as a basic human characteristic is unique to industrial capitalist society. This is a highly dystopian view of the nature and purpose of the modern capitalist system. In the Polanyian view, the capitalist world order is deeply socially destructive and anomic: … ultimately, that is why the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence for the whole organisation of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct of the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system. (Polanyi, 2001: 60) The influence of reciprocity and redistribution, characteristic of earlier societies (including market-based societies) is ruptured by industrial capitalism. Exchange values replace human values in the process of integrating society into the market system of welfare productivism that commodifies labour. Polanyi’s analysis is particularly apposite as a tool for making sense of modern Ireland. This chapter seeks to unravel the Polanyian enigma of the Irish welfare state and expose the tensions between marketisation and redistribution within the Irish development trajectory. It is a challenging task for a number of reasons:

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• The ‘hybrid’ and ‘complex’ nature of the Irish welfare state (National Economic and Social Council, 2005) and the resulting absence of an integrating institutional architecture; • As several academic commentators have pointed out (Donnison, 1975; Considine and Dukelow, 2009; Kirby and Murphy, 2008; Kirby, 2010) a resistance to discuss within the public sphere secular values, such as redistribution and reciprocity, that underpin the welfare state ideal as a humanist project; • The rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger economy (O’Riain, 2014) and its influence in shaping a social policy that subordinates the social to the economic sphere in a manner evocative of the East Asian ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ model (Holliday, 2000); • Ireland’s cultural location within the English-speaking world, which has corroded the idealism of the welfare state and replaced it with a neoliberal model based on profit and social division. There is a consequent political unwillingness in Ireland to embrace the welfare state as a secular ideal of a ‘good society’ and address fundamental normative issues (such as the distribution of wealth in society, the challenges posed by the resulting social inequality and endemic poverty, as well as the democratic imperatives of justice, decency and fairness). There has also been a failure to grasp the fluid meaning of citizenship in modernity. Instead, the Irish public is presented with media coverage of topical welfare deficits and institutional voids (for example, homelessness, historic child abuse, waiting times in healthcare, school class sizes). This is valuable and informative – though inevitably piecemeal and sometimes sensational – but has no reference to the consideration of their structural causation. This ’human story’ approach to media analysis has decontextualised and marginalised the debate about the existence and need for an Irish welfare state. The term ‘welfare state’ is notable by its absence in Irish public discourse. The democratic consequences of this absence are fundamental. It weakens the Polanyian ‘countermovement’ for social protection from the vagaries of free market capitalism in the form of a tangible structural response that the public imagination can take ownership of and respond to as a democratic imperative. Instead (as this chapter will show) there have been a series of sometimes bewildering, overlapping and often contradictory policy initiatives. This policy enigma belies EspingAndersen’s (1990) classification of the Irish welfare state, as an example of the liberal democratic model. Furthermore, the governance and purpose of the Irish welfare state makes it difficult for the public to grasp

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the centrality of the welfare state in their everyday lives. The chaotic state of the Health Services Executive (charged with management of the national health and social care service) is illustrative of the absence of a welfare state ethos based upon redistribution and reciprocity.

The residual welfare state, market values and institutional voids Ireland’s welfare system is shaped by a variety of cultural influences: European, Anglo-Saxon and Asiatic. These divergent influences help to explain the kaleidoscopic character and formlessness of the Irish welfare state. The European social model is based on a narrative of a pluralistic democratic state, predicated upon a coordinated market economy, social inclusion and corporatist structures. Ireland is a member of the European Union and has adopted social partnership in keeping with the European social market model. The Irish model also resembles the Anglo-Saxon welfare state model, characterised by a liberal market economy, in its residualised and dualistic class hierarchical form (Hall and Soskice, 2001). But it diverges from both its European and AngloSaxon counterparts in its adoption of productivist welfare capitalism as a developmental model. The resulting productivist social policy regime (discussed later in this chapter) clearly evinces characteristics of the East Asian Tiger model – the fourth welfare state of Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea (Holliday, 2000; Norris, 2016). This unique and socially divisive policy mix underlines the importance of describing the Irish welfare state as ‘complex’ and ‘hybrid’. It reminds us that, in Polyanian terms, we are addressing a social policy framework that is subordinate to the goal of economic development and societymarket integration. Welfare productivism, asset ownership and social inequality constitute the reality of the residual Irish welfare regime. Civil society is expected to compensate for institutional voids in the Irish welfare system, which has historically facilitated Catholic social power and enabled the maintenance of hierarchical class structures based on property ownership. Norris’s property-based welfare state thesis helps to explain this dystopian social reality (Norris, 2016). In 2005, the National Economic and Social Council (NESC), in its analysis of the Irish welfare state during the hubristic era of the Celtic Tiger economy, identified a number of core problems in its structure and capacity. These included the residualisation of public sector services and the deepening class dualism (two-tier structure) within the system. This seminal NESC analysis (National Economic and Social Council, 2005) remains highly relevant, since there has been no policy change

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other than retrenchment following the introduction of austerity policies after the 2008 crash (see Chapter 9). Residualisation is the defining characteristic of the Irish welfare state, as NESC (2005: 162-3) clearly demonstrates in a series of critical comments that highlight the interplay between institutional voids and social inequality within the service delivery system: • In health, a growing proportion of the population are using private hospitals and private facilities within public hospitals, partly to avoid the long waiting times and more crowded facilities associated with public health provision. At the same time, a significant proportion of consultants’ time is devoted to private practice (even though they receive full-time public sector salaries), while a declining proportion of GPs’ time (whose status is self-employed) is devoted to public patients as the percentage of the population eligible for a medical card has declined. • Within education, a growing number of parents are taking advantage of higher incomes to choose fee-paying schools for their children where that alternative exists. A large proportion of students, by international standards, continue to be enrolled in privately managed schools. • Within housing, local authority dwellings have declined significantly as a proportion of the national housing stock. As tenancy of these dwellings became increasingly associated with severe social disadvantage, better-off tenants have redoubled their efforts to quit the sector and home-owners have become more determined to avoid proximity to public housing. Satisfaction with housing and neighbourhood conditions is particularly low among local authority tenants. • Within transport, there has been a continuing – and losing – struggle to move commuters from reliance on the private car to public transport. Quality bus corridors, in some instances, and Dublin light rail system (LUAS) show small areas of success, but other groups of public transport users believe they have experienced a deterioration in the service. • As employment mobility increases and, with it, the demand for further education and training, private employment and training services are being used increasingly in preference to public services, which are associated with a more disadvantaged clientele and poorer results.

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NESC (2005: 163) warned that the deepening dualism in Ireland’s welfare system is resulting in social polarisation. A growing majority are supplementing public provision by purchasing additional services, and a minority (who are largely dependent on public provision) are receiving a residualised service that evokes the spectre of the Poor Law stigma. NESC illustrates the challenge resulting from this social class dualism with three examples of institutional voids within the Irish welfare state (2005, 164):





1. There is growing private social spending and less dependence on public provision, as more people come to rely on tax subsidies (for example, occupational and personal pensions, private health insurance) or social protection which is work-based (for example, access to childcare, health insurance) or wholly unsubsidised (for example, school fees, private tuition, neighbourhood security) for themselves and their families. The universal benefits available to them out of general taxation (for example, child benefit, medical treatment in public wards) and even their PRSI-based entitlements (for example, unemployment benefit, the contributory pension) are insignificant to them and scarcely feature in their planning for themselves and their families. 2. The proportion of working people who experience the universal benefits and flat-rated insurance benefits to which they are entitled as significant bulwarks to their personal security grows smaller. So does the proportion in receipt of some form of means-tested support (for example, a medical card, local authority housing) because their earnings are not low enough to qualify for benefits targeted on those with very low incomes. 3. There is growing identification between being in receipt of means-tested social supports and being reliant on universal public services. This reduces the effectiveness of public services in helping people to overcome social marginalisation and secure satisfying work.

Furthermore, NESC (2005: 165) questioned the public sector’s capacity to resolve these problems on its own: Public services are labour intensive and particularly prone to see their costs rise faster than the rest of the economy

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(‘Baumol’s disease’) as innovation occurs disproportionately in manufacturing and wherever processes are standardised; the difficulty of measuring improvements in service quality can make the rise in relative cost appear greater than it is. Public bodies can inherit and transmit a risk-averse and conservative culture where predictability and financial accountability within short time frames are valued to the detriment of innovation. Public bodies can have had their efficiency and effectiveness reduced by past political interventions that, alternatively, influenced the level and quality of recruitment, caused a dearth of funds seriously undermining service provision (LA housing in the early 1990s), or occasioned a surge in funding that ran ahead of their absorptive capacities (health spending after 1997). Public bodies may be called to respond to social needs where no prior experience exists in the public sector for dealing with them (refugees and asylum seekers) or which spill across boundaries more rapidly than innovation takes place in ways of working jointly. NESC had diagnosed the structural problems of the Irish welfare state but offered no credible solution. Instead of addressing the problems of institutional voids, residualisation and dualism, NESC (2005: xxiii) futuristically advocated a ‘recasting of the Irish social debate’ and an activist strategy based on a third-wave social Investment welfare state model (discussed later in this chapter).

Path development, European integration and social partnership Ireland’s path development during the post-war era was complex, not least because it was not a combatant. It therefore stood on the margins of post-war recovery, which was led financially by the Marshall Plan (US aid to Europe), politically by the goal of European integration via what became the European Union, and socially by the Keynesian welfare state. The mass mobilisation associated with Second World War gave European citizens leverage to negotiate a social pact in its aftermath that created the second-wave welfare state. This was based upon the ideal of social citizenship, deepening democracy into an inclusive form of polity. There was a hiatus before Ireland began to participate in this new policy reality. From the mid-1950s, traditional nationalist advocacy

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of economic protectionism and cultural isolationism (the preferred policy of independent Ireland) was on the wane. The Irish standard of living was 40% of the UK and 50% of the EU in 1960 (Fitzgerald, 2017). Mass unemployment and demographic decline pushed Ireland in the direction of a fundamental policy change. Successive Irish governments were increasingly drawn towards opening the economy up to free trade by attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), as a replacement for the failed nationalist strategy of self-sufficiency. Ireland embraced internationalism by applying for Marshall Aid. In 1958, the Secretary of the Department of Finance, T. K. Whitaker, produced his blueprint ‘Economic development’, which was followed by a series of programmes for economic expansion. Whitaker has been characterised as a ‘conservative revolutionary’ (O’ Toole, 2017). Arguably, he was the Irish Metternich (an influential statesman in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), seeking to save traditional Ireland by modernising it. A devout Catholic, he did not envisage cultural modernisation and favoured cuts in social spending, as a prerequisite for economic growth. Despite these limitations, he is regarded as Ireland’s greatest ‘mandarin’ and saviour of the nation from failure as an independent state project (O’Toole, 2017). Ireland applied for EEC (now the European Union) membership in 1961 and joined in 1973. Between 1961-69, 350 new foreign enterprises were established in Ireland aided by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). Ireland began to achieve high economic growth rates by European standards of 4% per annum during the 1960s and 1970s, halting emigration and stimulating economic growth (Foster, 1988). Investment in educational access and infrastructure futuristically underpinned Irish economic development as the embodiment of productivist social policy and the route to social mobility (Investment in Education, 1966). Less positively, a housing boom was promoted by the state through tax reliefs for speculators, as well as mortgage-holders, accompanied by easy credit in a largely deregulated banking system. The hunger for land that characterised an earlier era was replaced by a thirst for property ownership in the form of bricks and mortar (Norris, 2016). This was ultimately to lead to the property bubble that caused the 2008 crash. Ireland’s two-tier health system also promoted private health markets, which are the avenues to early and timely medical treatment. While the tide of prosperity was temporarily reversed during the 1980s, Ireland was clearly on a new development path. Europeanisation was fundamental to Irish modernisation. The European Union provided substantial transfers of wealth in the form of structural funds, orientated towards social and regional development. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) raised farm incomes and

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supported the development and modernisation of the Irish food industry. Social partnership emerged as Ireland’s domestic version of the European social market model. The social partnership era (19872007) in Ireland represented a return to the corporatist roots of the Irish social model that had dominated the 1930s and 1940s. In this sense, the more things changed, the more they remained the same. However, Irish corporatism was tempered by the liberal pluralist legacy of British policy influence. In terms of corporatist projects in Europe (for example, in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Sweden), Ireland stands out as distinctly different. Moreover, as Joe Larragy (2014: 15-16) notes: ‘the timing of Irish social partnership from the late 1980s, coincided not with the golden age of welfare states but with a period of welfare adjustments and increased market liberalisation … and at a time when social corporatism appeared less resilient in its greatest bastions’. Rather, the Irish social partnership project coincided with the rise of the Celtic Tiger economy, putting the emphasis on the development of productivist welfare capitalism as opposed to the EU policy goal of social cohesion. Ireland was embracing globalisation in a ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) that was fragmenting the post-war world order and increasing social polarisation between rich and poor.

Welfare productivist capitalism and the knowledge economy Professor Gøsta Esping-Andersen (2002: 15) has observed: ’The welfare model of Ireland and the UK like the American seeks to actively sponsor market solutions. It pursues this via a double strategy of encouraging private welfare provision as the norm, and by limiting public responsibilities to acute market failures’. In 1958, the Irish state embarked on a development project designed to build a dynamic and competitive knowledge economy. Ireland embraced welfare productivist capitalism as its social policy model. This became the Irish state’s core governance mission. It sought to adapt Irish society through economic modernisation in a development strategy designed to enable citizens to satisfy their welfare needs primarily in private markets or through civil society structures, notably the family, church and community. As a policy idea, the productivist social policy approach can be traced back to 1930s Sweden, where Alva and Gunnar Myrdal advocated a ‘productivist’ perspective in which public welfare was viewed as an investment rather than a cost (Morel et al, 2012: 2-3). Productivist social policy in the twenty-first century is associated in Europe with

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the social investment welfare state (discussed later in this chapter). The social investment welfare state seeks to reconcile equality with efficiency, while shaping macroeconomic performance through investment in human capital formation. East Asian Tiger economies are current exemplars of the productivist welfare capitalist ‘fourth model’ of welfare. It is politically premised on the assumption that growing prosperity will diminish workers’ resistance to labour market rationalisation and automation. In some respects, the macroeconomic orientation of productivist welfare capitalism in linking social policy to economic growth is comparable to the Keynesian welfare state. But it is less preoccupied with preserving existing solidarities and rights and more orientated toward the futuristic priorities of human capital development and investment in upskilling the labour force. It is also important to note that productivist welfare capitalism diverges from neoliberalism, which views the welfare state as an unsustainable cost on the market. Productivist welfare capitalism envisages a role for the state, whilst retaining a belief in the efficacy of the market as the key driver of development (Morel et al, 2012). It therefore does not share ‘the negative state theory’ of the neoliberals, who seek to dismantle the welfare state or at least to reinvent it on the basis of market principles: privatisation; contracting-out; and the quasi-markets which are part of their ‘Big Society, Small Government’ project. For neoliberals, the welfare state offers major opportunities for investment and capital accumulation. Ideologically, this marketisation project also enables the market to undermine the humanistic values of redistribution and reciprocity, transforming public consciousness into its own acquisitive image. From the mid-1980s, neoliberalism increasingly shaped European social policy in the form of the Single European Act 1986 and, in 1999, the introduction of the Economic Monetary Union (EMU). Anton Hemerijck (2012: 44) comments: A number of academic observers saw the single market and EMU policy package as a Trojan horse for a fully- fledged neoliberal policy shift across the member states of the EU, believing this would trigger a vicious cycle of deflationary “beggar thy neighbour” strategies of internal devaluation through social dumping and competitive wage moderation. These predictions came to pass after the 2008 crash, when peripheral economies, notably Ireland, Greece and Portugal, were ‘bailed out’

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on the basis of: penal debt repayment arrangements (evocative of war reparations); draconian austerity policies designed to dismantle national welfare states; the forcible expropriation of state assets (sold off to international capital at grossly devalued prices); and the impoverishment and immiseration of the populations in debtor nations (for example, the need for food banks). All this came at the price of democratic stability. The divisive nature of these policy responses has put the future of the European Union in doubt and contributed to the emergence of populist nativist politics in many member states. European social policy has been adapting to a more productivist welfare capitalist development model since the dawn of the twenty-first century, in the form of the Lisbon Agenda, which seeks to promote a knowledge-based economy within the EU. Does this mean the abandonment of neoliberalism and the rediscovery of the welfare state in a third wave of its evolution? The answer is complex. EspingAndersen (2002) argues the case for the adoption of a productivist social policy regime on a pan-European basis. This model is called the ‘social investment welfare Sstate’. Critics are sceptical. For example, Jane Jenson (2012: 63) calls it a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. She concludes: ‘social investment as an idea is ambiguous in its simultaneous backward and forward gaze’ (Jenson, 2012). This model is discussed later in the chapter, in relation to the Irish version of the social investment welfare state, which is known as the ‘development welfare state’. First we need to map out the trajectory of the Irish development project by examining the Celtic Tiger, social partnership and the impact of neoliberalism.

The Celtic Tiger economic boom The Celtic Tiger economy dominated the Irish development landscape between 1987-2007. Kirby and Murphy (2011: 72) have summarised the Celtic Tiger period as consisting of three phases: • 1987-92: a growth phase, in which a right-of-centre political coalition brought the country’s fiscal crisis under control and positioned the economy to benefit from wider international developments, such as the completion of the European Single Market and the beginnings of the US expansion into Ireland of the 1990s; • 1992-97: a developmental phase, in which a left-of-centre political coalition brought a focus on equality and on the development of a dynamic indigenous software sector;

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• 1997-2007: a competition phase, in which a right-of-centre political coalition focused on reducing taxes and stimulated a property boom through state subsidies and tax breaks. The apparent success of the Celtic Tiger economy, which became an international success story, has been questioned by Kirby and Murphy (2011: 75-7). They view the Irish development model as essentially flawed for three reasons: • Its dependence on foreign direct investment (FDI) rather than the production of sustainable domestic industries, allowing profits to be repatriated (notably to the USA) and state investment in research and development to be commercialised in the private sector; • The weak links between economic growth and social outcomes, arising from a lack of investment in social services, as opposed to generous tax breaks with populist appeal; • The role of the state was orientated towards low-cost solutions, shaping ‘a deeply dualistic economy’ and a weak welfare state. After the 2008 crash, the media castigated the Irish state for its perceived supervisory and governance failures, notably in the area of banking. But the logic behind the Celtic Tiger economic development models was based on linking globalisation and growth in a regime characterised by ‘light governance’. But the Celtic Tiger economy was also based upon what Fintan O’Toole (2010: 111-28) calls ‘the myth of wealth’, in which purportedly (in the official narrative) prodigious economic growth shrouded an impoverished public sector. The Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, has recently referred to Irish economic growth statistics of 26% for 2015, as ‘leprechaun economics’ (2016a). (The leprechaun is the trickster in Irish folklore.) Fantasy statistics have obscured the truth in the eyes of critics. O’Toole (2010: 124) views the Celtic Tiger economy as the product of a myth: ‘given the ludicrous bar charts showing the Irish to be 60% more wealthy than the Germans, it was rather ironic that the illusion of Irish wealth was partly created by swamping the country in a tide of German money’. The ‘myth of wealth’ was based on a development fantasy. It was also the product of Ireland’s tax haven status, epitomised by its low corporation tax rate (which some EU partners feel lacks solidarity and ethical justification). Major distortions in the measurement of Irish national wealth may be due to multinationals’ mobility enabling the relocation of profits to low taxation regimes,

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such as Ireland. The net effect leaves Irish economic growth statistics open to derision as fake news based upon statistical fantasy.

Economic development, capital and political corruption Marshall Berman (1982), in his novel exploration of modern consciousness All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity, portrays Goethe’s Faust as ‘the first developer’. Faust, who made a pact with the devil, is represented as a metaphor for the deterministic modern idealisation of all development as ‘good progress’ and the origins of ‘the myth of wealth’. Berman (1982: 78) represents capitalist development as a human tragedy: In the world’s more advanced industrial countries, development has followed more authentically Faustian forms. Here the tragic dilemmas that Goethe defined have remained urgently in force. It has turned out – and Goethe could have predicted it – that under the pressures of the modern world economy the process of development must itself go through perpetual development. Where it does, all people, things, institutions and environments that are innovative and avant-garde at one historical moment will become backward and obsolescent in the next. Even in the most highly developed parts of the world, all individuals, groups and communities are under constant relentless pressure to reconstruct themselves; if they stop to rest, to be what they are, they will be swept away. The climactic clause in Faust’s contract with the devil – that if ever he stops and says to the moment, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön’, he will be destroyed – is played out to the bitter end in millions of lives every day. Berman’s title, All that is solid melts into air, is borrowed from Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 on the eve of major revolution across Europe, including Ireland. He links development to the anarchic forces of unregulated capitalism, and prophetically warns the resulting risks to the social fabric will end in human tragedy. Alan Thomas (2000: 24) also explores ‘the ambiguity of development in relation to capitalism’, revealing its Faustian character. Development is not simply a narrative of improvement: it is about a totalising transformation of society and people. This is the revolutionary nature

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of modern capitalist development. In his analysis, Thomas (2000: 24) makes several crucial points about the meaning of development within the world of globalised capitalism: • Development generally implies an all-encompassing change, not just improvement; • Development is not just a question of a one-off process of change to something better, but implies a process that builds on itself; • Development is a matter of changes occurring at the level of social change and the individual at the same time. Changes in society have implications for the people who live in that society and, conversely, changes in how people think, interact, make their livings and perceive themselves form the basis of changes in society; • Development is not always seen positively. In relation to capitalism, Thomas (2000: 25) views it as an ‘immanent’ form of development driven by its own acquisitive dynamic. On the other hand, he argues that consequences of capitalist ‘progress’ (poverty, unemployment and human misery) require ‘intentional’ development’ in the form of the welfare state in order to manage the social risks arising from economic development. Fintan O’Toole, in his 1995 book Meanwhile back at the ranch: The politics of Irish beef, narrates the historic role of ‘sacred cows’ in the evolution of Irish wealth. In a mock-heroic account, he links the historic and contemporary from the legendary wars of Gaelic Chieftains (for example, Queen Maeve’s cattle raids in Connaught) to the ‘beef barons’ and ‘cattle capitalists’ of modern Ireland. It is an epic tale that has all the hallmarks of morality theatre. The latter aspect took the form of the Beef Tribunal in the early 1990s, which sought to investigate the allegedly murky links between beef exports and politicians (Hamilton Report, 1994). The inquiry raised fundamental questions about the effectiveness of Irish democracy and the accountability of wealth. O’Toole (1995: 275) concluded that Irish democracy had become ‘unhinged’, asserting: ‘Over a period of five years, certain fundamentals of democratic government-accountability to parliament, the assumption that governments obey the law, the conduct of an independent foreign policy, the right of citizens to consent to the actions of their government-had been set aside’. The legacy of the Beef Tribunal was to open a Pandora’s box in the form of public inquiries and tribunals over the next decade, many of which focused on the links between politicians and wealth. The McCracken Tribunal was established in 1997 to investigate the finances

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of Charles Haughey, who had served as Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in several Fianna Fail-led governments. Professor Thomas Bartlett (2010: 550) notes that the McCracken Tribunal: ‘discovered that a very wealthy elite in Ireland – not just Haughey – had enjoyed a privileged banking regime, complete with tax evasion, if required, and friendly offshore accounts at the Ansbacher Bank’. A perhaps inevitable link between wealth and property emerged in the Flood (later Mahon) Tribunal, charged with investigating planning irregularities in North Dublin. It resulted in damning evidence against local councillors and officials in the planning process. Public anger became evident in the rejection by the electorate of two EU treaties in referenda (Nice, 2001 and Lisbon, 2008). While in both cases the results were reversed in second referenda, a signal of public disquiet had been sent to the political and economic elite, who were strongly invested in the European project, epitomised by the national ideal of social partnership.

The ‘social partnership project’ The Irish ‘social partnership project’ reflected the corporatist influence of the European social market model on Irish governance. It involved a series of national agreements, which were inspired by a 1986 National Economic and Social Council (NESC), report, A strategy for development: Growth, employment and fiscal balance. It was very much in line philosophically with a productivist welfare capitalist approach to economic and social development at a time when Ireland’s development strategy had stalled and there was once again rising unemployment and high levels of emigration. Social partnership provided a series of national agreements between business (Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation [IBEC] and the Construction Industry Federation), unions (the Irish Congress of Trade Unions) and the State. In return for productivity and growth the State offered guarantees in relation to taxation and social protection. It began with the Programme for National Recovery (1987-90), which was followed by the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (1990-93), the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (1994-96), the Partnership 2000 for Inclusion, Employment and Competitiveness (1997-99), the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (2000-03), Sustaining Progress (2003-05),and Towards 2016 (2006-08). Professor Charles Sabel (1996) called the social partnership project ‘democratic experimentalism’. This is a somewhat Panglossian view of social partnership, which depended on a tripartite social pact based on perceived mutual interests. Its existence was dependent on sustained economic prosperity.

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Social partnership collapsed after the 2008 crash, when the property bubble burst. Its efficacy as a model for governance came under severe media and political scrutiny. Sharply rising unemployment – increasing from 4 to 15% – undermined public confidence in social partnership. Cuts in the wages of public sector workers and the imposition of a pension levy added to the strain in industrial relations. IBEC withdrew from social partnership at the end of 2009. The Irish trade union movement was damaged in terms of declining membership. Its misguided belief in social partnership as a form of Nordic social democracy was exposed. In the event, social dialogue with the government continued but in the form of negotiating a wage freeze that was to continue into Ireland’s economic recovery. So what was the achievement of social partnership? Social partnership between 1987 and 2007 was an attempt to manufacture a consensus for economic growth and development – building on Ireland’s corporatist architecture from the past but in a new project of governance, shaped by advanced liberal rationality. While the power of the Church was in rapid decline, the idea of the nation as a community harnessed a traditionalist iconography of a communitarian past of popular and shared struggle based on the partnership ideal. It was a powerful exploitation of historical imagery by the State. The liquidity of change in late modern Ireland, shaped by globalisation, needed a counterpoint. Social partnership offered solidarity in the midst of chronic uncertainty. Its objective of manufactured consensus around the ideal of a social dialogue and unity of purpose was based on an idealised concept of a national community. Partnership conjured up a future that rested upon an acceptance of the legitimacy of deeply entrenched social divisions, based upon class, gender and ethnicity in a residualised welfare state regime. In a rapidly modernising society that increasingly embraced modernist social ideals (such as human rights, free speech and democracy), social partnership was an archaic idea. But the Celtic Tiger economy (with its roots in a more authoritarian East Asian model) gave partnership governance political purchase, so long as it could deliver prosperity. In its deep structure, social partnership was rooted in an acceptance of neoliberalism, with a corporatist façade. For the Irish modernisation project, it offered a bridge between modernity and a conservative past, shaped by advanced liberal technologies of power evidenced by its reach into local communities and targeted initiatives towards ‘at risk groups’, such as marginalised young people (Powell and Geoghegan, 2004; Geoghegan and Powell, 2006, 2009; Powell et al, 2012). It arguably provided a unifying idea about the future in the form of the

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‘partnership state’ based upon what Nikolas Rose (2007: 200) has called: ‘Government through community’, which involved ‘a variety of strategies for inventing and instrumentalising these dimensions of allegiance between individuals, the state and communities in the service of projects of regulation, reform and mobilization’. Rose (2007) is concerned that advanced liberal rationality is reconfiguring the social domain by undermining traditional welfare state forms of governance, based upon social citizenship as the practice of an inclusive democracy. Critics of social partnership shared this dystopian vision. Kieran Allen (2000, 2007) viewed social partnership as a form of class domination in the interests of corporate capital. Seamus O’Cinnéide (1998) suggested that social partnership was inherently anti-democratic, dubbing it ‘creeping corporatism’. However , social partnership did deliver a sense of unity and purpose in a globalised world. That will be its lasting achievement and signature theme. Neoliberalism offered a very different worldview.

Neoliberalism, modernisation and the welfare state Neoliberalism provided the ideological inspiration for the reinvention of the Irish public sector, along the lines of market principles, known as ‘modernisation’. Neoliberalism has been defined by David Harvey (2005: 2) as ‘in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade’, adding, ’the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices’. Modernisation in public policy terms is a process which seeks to update the public services in a manner that makes them more responsive to the needs of citizens and meet the market realities of a neoliberal economy. Newman (2000: 47) asserts: Modernisation is a discourse which sets out an agenda for change across different sectors (health, education, criminal justice, local government, the Civil Service). It also denotes a wider political transformation, involving the reform of key relationships in the economy, State and civil society. It offers a particular conception of the citizen (empowered as active, participating subjects); of work (as a source of opportunity for the ‘socially excluded’); of community (non-antagonistic and homogeneous); and of nation …

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viewed in this context, the modern public management takes on a different inflection: it is a fundamentally political project, to which the rhetoric, narratives and strategies of managerialism are harnessed. Landry and Mulgan (1994: 6) have detected ‘a worldwide shift in terms of the relationship of the individual to the state, and in the operation of the state itself ’. They conclude that ‘the objective has been to improve institutional performance by decentralization, shifting to new forms of control (such as performance indicators, financial controls and fostering competition on service delivery between the public, private and nonprofit sectors’ (Landry and Mulgan, 1994). It is very difficult not to view the modernisation of the public sector as essentially a reinvention of governance. The emergence of a social partnership between the state, the private sector and the third sector represented, as discussed earlier, a paradigm shift in governance. Landry and Mulgan (1994: 7) have been led to ask the question of whether the whole ‘reinventing of government argument really covers a longer-term absorption of the [third] sector into the rules and concerns of government, with ever more charities modelling themselves on social service departments and an appropriation of a language of independence by arms of government at a time of cost cutting’. Hulme and Edwards (1997: 275) have been led to pose a similar question as to whether the relationship between NGOs, states and donors is ‘too close to the powerful, too far from the powerless’. Manifestly, there are profound concerns arising from the modernisation of governance in terms of its impact upon the future of civil society. Modernisation in Ireland has been initiated through the Strategic Management Initiative (SMI), which was launched in 1994 and the Public Service Management Act 1997. The aims of the SMI are set out in the government’s social inclusion strategy (Ireland, 1998: 9): • The contribution [each government department] could make to national development; • The quality of services provided to the public; • The provision of value for money to the taxpayer. The Public Service Management Act 1977, implemented in September 1997, sought to introduce new management structures, more transparency and greater accountability in government. The social inclusion strategy (Ireland, 1998) was prepared in the context of this new government ethos, emphasising the link between government

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and policy implementation including: ‘the provision of quality services, the establishment of a performance management system, the implementation of revised financial management systems and the business planning process’ (Ireland, 1998: 10). Modernisation meant that a core set of market-inspired values was laid down for the public services: monitoring individual and organisational performance; financial accountability; better customer service and quality assurance; and outright privatisation (for example, of the telecommunications system and the national airline, Aer Lingus). Sometimes, such policy initiatives have been given the force of a charter of citizens’ rights (Powell, 2001: 134-40). But the underlying thrust has been to reinvent the public sector in the image and philosophy of the private sector. In Eastern Europe, after the collapse of communism, this process was called marketisation. In both East and West the project of reinventing governance, known to its critics on the political left as ‘neoliberalism’, involves a classic Polanyian choice. This is to opt for the self-regulating market as the future of governance in a new partnership between business and government, reinventing the ‘social citizen’ of the welfare state as the ‘consumer citizen’ in the image of the market. Following a constitutional referendum in 1999, modernization was extended to Irish local government. Harvey (2002: 29) notes that this has had a significant impact on the voluntary and community sector: Under the new arrangements, operational from 2002, social, economic and cultural development is guided by 25-strong City (or County) Development Boards (CDBs), comprising councillors, statutory agencies and representatives of local interests and the community sector. CDBs are now an important part of the local authority structures, each headed up by a director of community and enterprise. As part of the reforms, the local authorities are now assisted in their work by Strategic Policy Committees (SPCs) with a similar representative structure. These bodies constitute an important area of work for voluntary and community organizations and set a number or organisational, resource and policy changes. The White Paper, ‘Supporting voluntary activity’ (Department of Social Welfare, 2000: 39-40) discusses the implications of these changes in structures of governance and poses several questions:

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• Will civil society be enhanced or undermined by the growth in new forms of governance? • Can the capacity of civil society be developed to enable the organisations within it to play an effective role? • How will these organisations evolve to ensure they remain representative? • Can the institutions of government rise to the challenge of managing increasingly complex, cross-sectoral relationships? The White Paper (Department of Social Welfare, 2000: 14) also notes the impact of ‘rollback’ (the hollowing out of the State), which further heightens the pressures on civil society: ‘a parallel development, both internationally and nationally, is a trend in recent years away from State Welfareism towards a more pluralistic system of provision, with many governments looking to the voluntary sector and to volunteers to play a larger role in the direct delivery of welfare services’. It concludes that the change in governance ‘requires a philosophy reflecting what is sometimes an enabling state or assisted self-reliance where local globalisation is assisted through the provision of external resources and technical assistance’ (Department of Social Welfare, 2000: 43). The concept of an enabling state complements the policy of rollback, with its emphasis on ‘a hand up rather than a handout’. Manifestly, the modernisation of governance has had a major impact on the role of civil society. The Irish White Paper (Ireland, 2000: 52) recorded that 52% of third-sector funding comes from statutory sources, either the Irish State or the European Union, employing 3 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce (31,136 paid employees). Powell and Guerin (1997: 129), on the basis of a national opinion poll, found that 2% of the adult population described themselves as employees of voluntary organisations. The poll also recorded that 2% of the adult population described themselves as employed by a voluntary organisation as part of a government Community Employment (CE) scheme. While the numbers in the sample were quite small, requiring caution in interpretation, it is clear that there was amongst the survey population a substantial overlap between coercive ‘workfare’ style employment schemes and genuine employment in the third sector. It raises ethical questions about the creation of a secondary labour market within the third sector, based upon a low-wage social economy (O’Donovan and Varley, 1995). Professor Colin Scott (2014), in a challenging essay on ‘Welfare, regulation and democracy’, has argued that Ireland has developed as a state (with limited resources) on the basis of state regulation rather

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than social protection. In terms of governance, Scott (2014: 93) asserts that ‘public management from the start of independence was dependent on regulatory agencies, which have proliferated under new public management doctrines’. He observed that ‘the Irish state has always had a somewhat skeletal or hollow character’ (Scott, 2014: 95). According to Scott (2014: 97) reckoning the number of state agencies has grown from 50 in 1922 to 350 in 2009. He sees the period 19902009 as ‘a particular boom time for new agencies, reflecting growth in numbers of both delivery and regulatory agencies, and partially vindicating claims about the use of the regulatory state in Ireland’. While this process of ‘agentification’ (as Scott puts it) is partly explicable by European Union requirements for the liberalisation of markets in energy and communications, it also extended governance into the social sphere. The logic behind the establishment of independent regulatory bodies was to ‘improve’ governance by reducing the effects of political interference, augmenting the rights of the consumer citizen and promoting competition. The impact of the regulatory state regime has been limited by the continuing voluntary structure of the education system, where primary and secondary education remains largely under Church control. In healthcare, there has been a gradual transition from voluntary and local/regional provision to a centralised model called the Health Service Executive (HSE). The establishment of the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) in 2007 was intended to bring the regulatory ethos to the healthcare sector. HIQA has been successful in its limited task of standard setting and inspection, as well as in addressing the problematic issue of standards and rights in care homes. It has developed a justified reputation for independence (Scott, 2014: 102). However, without additional resourcing of the public sector in healthcare, quality will continue to be poor and reflect a policy of residualisation. Some commentators have sought to change the debate by refocusing it on future investment.

The developmental welfare state: ‘Recasting the Irish social debate’ The idea of a ‘developmental welfare state’ is modelled on a new emerging European welfare state paradigm that dates from the 1990s, the ‘social investment state’. The concept of the social investment state has been the subject of a major 2012 study by Nathalie Morel, Bruno Palier and Joakim Palme (Morel et al, 2012). They set out the key features of this model, which include:

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• A futuristic reorientation for social policy, geared towards the needs of a knowledge-based and service-orientated economy that promotes an activist labour market; • Addresses new social risks unforeseen by traditional Keynesian welfare state, such as an ageing population, more diverse family forms, and the need to respond to technological change and automation by reskilling the labour force; • Perceived need to replace the compensatory approach of the Keynesian welfare state with a more marketised model better suited to welfare retrenchment (cost-cutting) and the privatisation of social services; • Alternative focus to that propagated by neoliberalism (which seeks to rollback the welfare state on the basis of unproven concerns regarding spiralling costs and the promotion of a dependency culture) by changing the policy focus onto welfare productivism, orientated towards economic growth, in line with the East Asian Tiger model; • Invests in human capital development with emphasis on early childhood education, life-long-learning and upskilling the labour force (for example, continuing professional development), commonly known as a life-cycle approach; • Social protection policies that promote ‘flexicurity’ for labour force in line with current Nordic model; • Reconciliation policies that are orientated towards supporting women’s participation in work, such as subsidised childcare, parental leave, focus on work-life balance. Key criticisms of the social investment (or third-wave) welfare state model include its futuristic orientation, which does not address contemporary issues such as poverty, homelessness and the needs of displaced people like asylum seekers and refugees. Its attitude towards gender is arguably highly instrumentalist. Even more fundamentally important is the unavoidable criticism that the social investment state project is profoundly geared towards recommodification, arising from its economicisation of welfare at the expense of its democratic foundations in social citizenship and human rights. On the other hand, the developmental welfare state idea is a positive strategic attempt to invest in the future. This will involve a careful balancing act between redistribution and investment, if it is to link its vision of future social investment to a progressive political narrative based on social equality. The proponents of the social investment state need to develop a universalist vision that explains to voters how investment in health, family, schools and a fairer labour market will

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create a better society. It is by definition a long-term strategy that is unlikely to appeal to unskilled voters on the margins of the labour market. However, it may have a wider appeal to families, if it is clearly linked to a progressive agenda. Ireland since the 1980s, if the Celtic Tiger slogan is to be believed, has become a ‘developmental state’ in common with East Asian Tiger economies, Brazil and many other fast growing countries that manage to combine growth and globalisation (O’Riain, 2014). Of course, some of these economies (notably Brazil) have collapsed in recent times. Political crisis follows in the wake of economic failure, as in the case of post-crash Ireland. Bailouts don’t just bring hardship. They also cause national humiliation, after economic hubris is followed by the nemesis of austerity, turning developmental states (such as Ireland) into debt colonies. Professor Peadar Kirby (2010: 138) observes ‘the concept of the developmental state was taken up more in policy discourse than academic literature on the Irish state. This is most marked in the concept of the developmental welfare state adopted by the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) in 2003’. In 2005, NESC advocated the concept of ‘the developmental welfare state’ in a futuristic report that was strongly influenced by the social investment state model (National Economic and Social Council, 2005). NESC’s (2005: 88) developmental welfare state project rested upon a clear welfare reform agenda that sought to address: • The complexity of Ireland’s hybrid and mixed welfare state; • The multiple groups and interests that are involved in providing services and in seeking them; • The degree of consultation and participation to which there is already a formal commitment; • The extent of disagreement and fatigue that has dogged much of the search for more effective social policies on several fronts; • The unevenness of the progress that has been made on different fronts; • The inability of substantial increases in resources at times to produce commensurate improvements in outcomes; • The need to balance capital with current spending and to adopt multi-annual budgets for developing services as well as for rolling out capital infrastructures; • The necessity of close interdepartmental and cross-agency working if expenditure programmes in several instances are to be evaluated by outcomes; • The need for a coherent strategic vision of the future of Irish society.

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It viewed its task, as already noted, as no less than ‘recasting the Irish social debate (NESC, 2005: xxiii). NESC (2005: 36-39) argued that in reality Ireland has historically established a ‘welfare society’ (as opposed to a welfare state) built around three domains: the family, civil society and the market. However, it concluded that changes in family structures, the decline of the Church’s role in social provision and developments in corporate social responsibility have altered the welfare landscape. NESC (2005: 194) proclaimed that its developmental welfare state model was based on a paradigm shift to an ‘activist’ strategy harnessing the voluntary and community sector in the coproduction of the welfare state: A characteristic of the Developmental Welfare State is that it recognises and embraces the role of activist measures in ensuring its own vitality and development. Initiatives in providing local services are fostered and examined. It accords, in particular, greater recognition to the community and voluntary sector for pioneering ways of addressing the marginalized position of individuals, families and communities – and seeks to create the right framework that allows this to happen while also engaging community and voluntary groups in networks and processes which raise their standards, increase their effectiveness and ensure transparency and accountability in return for funding security in the medium to long-term. It also fosters the willingness and ability of government departments and public agencies to plan and implement pilot projects for experimenting with new approaches and procedures. This entails pro-actively fostering a radically greater degree of autonomy for local actors and experimenting with new forms of public-voluntary and public-private partnerships. These feature a strong emphasis on performance and accountability, provision for systematic learning and evaluation, and new forms of centre-local relationships. NESC (2005) contrasted its futuristic model with the ‘former welfare state’ and the many shortcomings in its residualised and dualistic structure. The development welfare state model on the other hand is represented in this ‘paradigm shift’ as more dynamic and democratic but also, in keeping with its welfare productivist philosophy, more

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activist, promoting the responsibility of individual citizens alongside the harnessing of active citizenship. Structurally, NESC (2005: 153) asserted that the future development of the Irish welfare state ‘needs to be guided by the appreciation that significant learning is possible from each of the more sharply defined welfare family in Europe while maintaining the hybrid character of Ireland’s system that now, more than before, is a potential strength’. It acknowledged the social deficits and institutional voids and the lack of an overarching strategy in the Irish welfare state. NESC (2005: 156) advocated a developmental welfare state based on three core architectural elements: services (health, education, childcare, housing, elder care, employment services and training); income supports (progressive child income support, working age income for participation, minimum pension guarantee and capped tax expenditures); and activist measures (social inclusion, area-based strategies, particular community group projects, emerging social needs and novel contestatory approaches, e.g. emphasis on life-cycle). All of these elements add up to a positive vision of Ireland’s future. Underpinning this strategic vision is the life-cycle approach that focuses on childhood, the working age population and ‘elder care’. As already suggested, this vision may appeal to families if it is persuasively articulated. NESC (2005: 153) emphasised the pragmatism of its vision: ‘The challenge in formulating an overarching strategy for Ireland’s welfare state can be expressed, in part, as identifying where and how further universalism, extending social insurance and redesigning targeting are now required in Ireland’s society and economy, with paramount respect being accorded to improved outcomes rather than greater ideological clarity’. This lack of political and definitional clarity has left the NESC developmental welfare state model open to fundamental criticisms: • It fails to address the basic issue of funding, which is critical to welfare state development; • It lacks any clear ideological definition, locating the developmental welfare state somewhere between social democracy, neoliberalism and the welfare productivist ideology of the East Asian Tiger economies; • It will not change the residual welfare state; • Its focus on the life-course distracts from class inequality and the role of the welfare state in the maintenance of social solidarity.

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In summary, NESC’s concept of the developmental welfare state is seductive in its apparently visionary character. However, as already suggested, it fails to stand up to critical scrutiny: lacking a funding strategy, ideological definition and an adequate emphasis on social equality. The NESC (2005) proposal did have some policy influence, but on the margins. Its advocacy of a ‘life-cycle approach’ was adopted by the last social partnership agreement – Towards 2016: Ten Year Framework Social Partnerships Agreement 2006-2015. The developmental welfare state has been consigned to the realm of historical projects by the 2008 crash. It will undoubtedly re-emerge on the policy agenda as Ireland wrestles with the challenges of designing a third-wave welfare state.

The Irish model: a failed welfare state? Dr Garret Fitzgerald (Taoiseach 1981-87), lamented in The Irish Times (11 October 2008) ‘the contrast between our new-found wealth and pathetic inadequacy of [health] and other public services is frankly disgraceful’. In this article, Dr Fitzgerald posed a number of critical questions regarding the social outcomes of Irish development: Why is it that, with a level of income higher than that of 22 of the 27 EU states, our public services fail to look after children in need or to care for the ill and the old; fail to make any serious attempt to rehabilitate our prisoners; and fail to ensure access to clean water – not to speak of failing to provide efficient competitive public transport, just to mention a few of our more obvious public service deficiencies? After all, over the past half century our political leaders were remarkably successful in securing much faster economic growth than anywhere else in Europe, moving Ireland from the poorest of the dozen countries in the northern part of Western Europe to becoming one of the richest. Given this success, why have our governments failed so miserably to deploy the vast resources thus created in such a way as to give us the kind of public services we can clearly afford and desperately need? (The Irish Times, 11 October 2008) Dr Fitzgerald’s acknowledgement of the ‘pathetic inadequacy’ of the Irish welfare state at the point of economic collapse highlights the absence of an effective countermovement advocating social justice

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in the bourgeoning Celtic Tiger economy. It is very difficult not to attribute the ‘pathetic inadequacy’ of the Irish welfare state to the failure of economic growth to create a more inclusive society that afforded citizens real social justice. The developmental model adopted in 1958 enabled rapid economic growth to occur in Ireland in tandem with a widening gap between rich and poor. Social policy, in the shape of the welfare state, offered institutional moderation of this development process, notably in the form of social transfers. The 2008 crash and the resulting EC/ECB/IMF bailout that imposed austerity policy on the Irish population (resulting in mass unemployment, rising homelessness and overstretched public services) was the final verdict on the Celtic Tiger. The Irish state’s one-dimensional overly generous financial support for industrial development and research and innovation, coupled with a strong emphasis on populist tax cuts between 2000-08, constitutes an economic development strategy but not a redistributive welfare state regime based on a reciprocity. In Polanyian terms, theoretically all citizens ‘gain’ economically in an increasingly commodified society. However, in terms of social reality the corporate gains reveal ‘the winners’ and the high levels of poverty and social inequality ‘the losers’. This development strategy, as already noted, has led some commentators to describe Ireland as a ‘competition state’ (Kirby, 2002, 2010; Dukelow, 2004; Kirby and Murphy, 2008). Arguably, the crucial issue underpinning Irish public policy is a drive towards ‘welfare productivist capitalism’ based on market values, as opposed to redistribution and reciprocity – the core objectives of Keynesian welfare states. Productivist social policy is clearly appropriate to a ‘competition state’ but in normative terms diametrically opposed to the humanistic values of the welfare state. It denies the humanity and dignity of the citizens by commodifying labour and promotes the debasement, disempowerment and destruction of societies, as witnessed by the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Some scholars have cast doubt on the use of the term ‘welfare state’ in the Irish context. Peadar Kirby (2010: 135) fundamentally questions whether Ireland can legitimately be regarded as a welfare state: ‘While Ireland has been characterised as a welfare state, therefore, it has been a weak and fragmented one that has served to reinforce privilege rather than overturn it’. Murphy and Millar (2007: 83), in response to an assertion by the National Economic and Social Council (2005) that the Irish welfare state is ‘hybrid’ and ‘complex’, argue that it is ‘a failed welfare state’ that ‘hides the role tax and social welfare policy plays in growing inequality and treats high levels of relative income poverty

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as less problematic than they really are’. These damning verdicts on the Irish welfare state bring us back to the criticisms made by Social Justice Ireland as early as 1987 of what they called ‘The widening poverty gap’. Their core argument has been reflected in Wilkinson and Pickett’s (2009) inspirational study The spirit level, which linked a variety of public ills (poor health and education and high crime) to social inequality. In reality, Ireland has developed a residual welfare state regime, reflecting the dominance of market values in Irish society.

Conclusion The Irish welfare state enigma is the product of a series of development models geared towards the promotion of economic growth often at the expense of social justice. Political pragmatism rather than socioeconomic redistribution has guided Irish governance between 1987 and 2007. The influence of neoliberalism is formative, reflected in the growing globalisation of productivist welfare capitalism. While social partnership, which dominated Irish governance between 1987 and 2008, demonstrated that the legacy of traditional corporatist ideology was very much alive in Ireland, albeit in the modern form of neocorporatism, which was very different from the 1930s authoritarian conservatism. The emergence of the ‘developmental welfare state’ model in 2005 reflected a futurist vision for Irish social policy that sought to incorporate the language and ideas of the social investment state, currently influential in European thinking about welfare state futures. However, there was a lack of public debate about this innovative, if deeply flawed, policy departure (although it did influence social partnership in its final,and arguably terminal, programme). Problematically, there was a lack of funding (or at least the political will to provide resources) to reform the Irish welfare state and address the critical challenges of residualisation and dualism in its underlying architecture. Instead, an investment welfare state model has been promoted in the futuristic language and vision of the developmental welfare state. The Irish welfare state evolved between 1987 and 2008 in a fragmented way that produced increasing levels of ‘hybridity’ and ‘complexity’. Some commentators cast doubt on whether it was legitimate to speak of an Irish welfare state. Others concluded that it was a ‘failed welfare state’. At best, the pre-crash Irish welfare state was a work in progress towards a welfare productivist society driven by the overarching policy objective of economic growth.

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Crisis, austerity and water By 2008 the benefits of the boom years had faded completely from view and the Republic of Ireland had moved into the greatest recession since the Great Famine. Thomas Bartlett (2010: 552) Thomas Bartlett’s analogy between the 2008 crash and the Great Famine (1845-51) is undoubtedly wildly overdrawn. The Great Famine resulted in 1 million deaths and 1 million emigrating in its immediate aftermath, with many more following in what came to be called the Irish diaspora. Ireland has yet to recover demographically from the consequences of the Great Famine. Undoubtedly, the impact of the 2008 crash on the psyche and welfare of the population was very severe. A Central Statistics Office report (2016), Measuring Ireland’s progress 2014, estimated that almost half the population (49.3%) was at risk of poverty before pensions and social transfers were taken into account – the second highest rate in the EU. (The rate fell to 17.2% when transfers were included.) It is nonetheless a startling statistic, which reveals the high level of dependence on the welfare state for many citizens’ basic survival. It also highlighted Ireland’s social polarisation and its dualistic welfare state that residualises poverty and promotes wealth creation. Ireland’s reputation was seriously damaged by the 2008 crash. As Bartlett (2010: 552) puts it: ‘Ireland, once bracketed with Taiwan and South Korea in terms of the strength of its economy, now found itself compared to the sick men of Europe – Portugal, Italy and Greece’. Construction and banking, which had increasingly sustained the Celtic Tiger economy after 2000, collapsed. A bailout was provided by the ‘troika’ of the European Commission/ International Monetary Fund/European Central Bank (EC/IMF/ECB) with penal financial conditions, analogous to post-war reparations. These financial conditions came to be popularly known as ‘austerity’. Ironically, it was not Irish citizens that had caused the crisis or benefited from financial speculation but private capital in the form of European and Irish banks. Yet, in an unprecedented peacetime inversion of democracy, Irish citizens were required to pay off the debts accumulated by private capital. This suggested that Polanyian ‘greed’ in the form of reckless

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financial speculation was a legitimate activity. Somebody had to pay! So Irish citizens were deemed responsible for the debts of Irish banks and were required to bail them out. It would seem on the face of it oligarchy had triumphed over democracy, setting a very dangerous precedent. Clearly, there are very close comparisons with Greece. The long-term negative consequences for the solidarity of the European Union may be greater than Brexit, which was at least legitimated through a referendum process. Humiliated and subdued, the Irish population initially acquiesced in austerity policies that caused the Irish welfare state to shrink from its already modest size. For example, public expenditure on healthcare, which had risen sharply from 6.6% to 9.7% as a proportion of gross national income between 2004-09, fell back to 8.7% in 2013 (Central Statistics Office, 2015). Similarly, despite a rise in the total student population from 491,432 to 520,444 between 2008-12, total expenditure remained static (Central Statistics Office, 2014b). The OECD report, Education at a glance 2016, notes that Irish expenditure per student in primary and secondary non-tertiary institutions had fallen by 7% compared with 2008 levels, while on average across the OECD countries’ expenditure per student had increased by 8% over the same period (OECD website). The Irish Times (15 October 2016) in an editorial comment reviewing the impact of austerity policies on child poverty asserted: The biggest burden of the austerity years that followed the great crash of 2008 was placed on those least able to bear it. In 2013, Eurostat reported that Ireland ranked 23rd out of 27 EU countries in tackling child poverty. A study published by UNICEF in 2014 placed Ireland 37th out of 41 developed countries in the protection of children from poverty during the global financial crash. The child poverty rate in Ireland rose by more than 10% between 2008 and 2012-18 other states recorded a reduction. The 2008 crash manifestly has had a major impact on children, arguably the most vulnerable group in society. The failure of the Irish welfare state to protect children indicates social priorities that seriously deviate from the norms of international children’s rights. Austerity has turned these welfare deficits into a full-blown social crisis.

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Alchemy, greed and ‘leprechaun economics’ The former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in a 2016 book entitled The end of alchemy: Money, banking and the future of the global economy employs the term ‘alchemy’ (a magical process for turning base metals into gold) as a metaphor for the financialisation of the world economy. Financialisation is the product of deregulation. After the 1930s crash that produced the Great Depression, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement subjected global finance to a regulatory regime, overseen by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The dollar was pivotal to the global financial stability which followed the Bretton Woods agreement, a period known as the ‘great moderation’. However, in 1973, the Bretton Woods system was replaced by a floating-rate system of currencies (Judt, 2005). Liberalisation led to the deregulation of the global financial system, in turn leading to the emergence of what Paul Krugman (2016b: 22) calls: ‘the rise of “shadow banking” – new financial institutions and arrangements, such as hedge funds and money market funds, that bypassed traditional banking and recreated all the risks of the bad old days’. Krugman (2016b: 21) argues that ‘the de- or unregulated financial system became an accident waiting to happen’. The accident happened in 2008 with the collapse of the global banking system, starting in the USA with the insolvency of Lehman Brothers bank. Traditionally, banks operated on the basis of sufficient differential between loans and debts, but on the eve of the banking collapse ‘the ratio of debt to equity was 25 to 1 or more – leaving it [the financial system] extremely vulnerable to panic. And panic came’ (Krugman, 2016b: 21). Within the Eurozone, there was a crisis within a crisis enveloping the peripheral economies of Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. Kirby and Murphy (2011: 158) have observed in relation to the impact of deregulation on Ireland: ‘Indeed, during the Celtic Tiger boom, these liberalising measures were seen as a major contribution to the Irish success’. However, they note that after the 2008 crash and the consequent 2010 bailout, the issue of responsibility moved to the fore. The Irish Socialist MEP, Joe Higgins, sparked a sharp exchange of views in the European Parliament with the EU Commission President (Manuel Barroso), claiming the transfer of the European Bank’s debts to the Irish taxpayer had turned citizens into ‘vassals’ – to which Barroso retorted: ‘the problems of Ireland were created by the irresponsible financial behaviour of some Irish institutions and a lack of supervision in the Irish market’ (quoted in Kirby and Murphy, 2011: 158). Both protagonists in this heated debate had a point. There was a serious

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failure of bank regulation on the part of the Irish state during the hubris of the Celtic Tiger years. Paul Krugman’s mockery of Irish growth statistics as ‘leprechaun economics’ (2016a) conjures up the universal archetype of the trickster, with his magical powers of deception and casuistry. Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keohane (2007: 30-1) analyse the leprechaun as symbolising the trickster in Irish political culture; they suggest it is one of deep dishonesty. They assert: The Leprechaun, like most trickster figures, specialises in making deals and conducting exchanges between realms, His access to the powers of the supernatural realm enables him to influence events in the mundane, just as Trickster politician, as broker of his clients, specialises in deals and exchanges between centres of power, circles of influence and local theatres of action. (Kuhling and Keohane, 2007: 37) Kuhling and Keohane (2007: 208) conclude in reference to tribunals of inquiry charged with investigating allegations of political corruption in Ireland: … the tribunals seek to catch trickster Leprechauns and force them to reveal the whereabouts of their treasure. The treasure is always just out of sight – the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow … And a further twist: the perception that the treasure is everywhere – i.e. the discovery by tribunals that corruption is widespread – is itself corrupting, as it now appears that corruption is so widespread and diffuse as to be in fact normal, therefore corruption is nowhere. This analysis certainly helps to explain the nature of contemporary Irish political culture and the challenges of accelerated economic modernisation. At a deeper level, the debt crisis in the peripheral countries (Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece) was a product of a structural weakness within the euro project. The creditor countries, notably Germany, took a mercantilist view (that is, one nation’s gain is another’s loss) of the debt crisis, eschewing the debt mutualisation and wealth transfers that would normally be associated with the sustainability of a common currency. Solidarity was absent. Instead, ‘austerity’ was adopted as a draconian

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strategy, designed to impose discipline on supposedly rogue financial states – or so went the convenient austerity fiction that underpinned this bizarre policy response. Austerity arguably transformed the citizen of debtor EU nations into subjects of the European Union (Powell, 2010: 136-68).

Property bubble and housing crisis Paul Krugman (2013: 67) has observed in relation to deregulation that, by 2008, both the USA and Europe were poised for an economic crisis because ‘they had become excessively dependent on an overheated housing market, their households were too deep in debt, their financial sectors were undercapitalised and overextended’. Economic historians quickly recognised a pattern evocative of the Great Depression 1929-33. In the years 2008-09, according to Krugman (2013: 67) ‘the slump in trade and industrial production was comparable to the Great Depression. Some have called it ‘the Great Recession’ because of the resemblance with the catastrophe of the previous century. In Europe, countries with stronger welfare states were better positioned to weather the crisis (Krugman, 2013). Ireland, with its open market economy and residual welfare state, proved particularly vulnerable to the economic crisis. In Ireland, the home-ownership rate was to peak in 1991 at 80%, with private renting accounting for 8% and social renting for 10%. By 2011, the home-ownership rate had fallen to 71%, with 19% of households renting from a private landlord and 9% from a local authority or voluntary association. Home-ownership rates in Ireland are comparable to EU averages (67% for the EU15 and 71% for the EU28). Ownership levels are significantly higher amongst Irish nationals (77%) compared with immigrants (34%) (National Economic and Social Council (NESC), 2014: ix). There has been considerable price inflation in the housing market since 1984. Drudy (2007) has demonstrated that, in 1984, the priceto-income ratio was 4.3:1, rising in 2006 to 10:1 for the country as a whole and in Dublin to 13.4: 1. By 2013, prices had fallen back to late 1990 levels (NESC, 2014: 24). These price levels were unsustainable, placing pressure on the capitalisation of the banks and the capacity of home-owners to repay wildly inflated mortgages. As many of these mortgages (145,000 by the end of 2013) were on buy-to-let properties, upward pressure was put on rent levels, creating a crisis of homelessness with 89,872 on the social housing waiting list in May 2013 (Focus Ireland website, September 2016). In 71% of cases, the rent did not

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cover the mortgage in the buy-to-let sector (NESC, 2014: 22). This in turn led to increasing levels of mortgage arrears in the buy-to-let sector and repossessions by banks and vulture capitalist funds. The problem of mortgage arrears in general grew from virtually zero in 2004 to 12% (90,343) in 2014. In the case of buy-to-let mortgages, arrears had risen to 31,749 in 2014. Arrears were most prevalent amongst those buyers who had taken out mortgages in 2006-07 at the height of the property boom. Rent arrears also became a growing problem as a result of the economic crisis, particularly impacting on households headed by lone parents or ‘other households with children’, the unemployed, ill and disabled (NESC, 2014: 31). This problem in turn stoked a spiralling level of homelessness. In July 2016 there were 6,525 people ‘officially homeless’ including 2,177 children, an increase of 40% on 2015. The decline in local authority house-building from the mid-1980s sharply reduced this form of social tenure, which was heavily subsidised by the state and has been described as ‘asset-based welfare’ (Fahey, 2002; Norris and Fahey, 2011). These trends have impacted on the poor and young people. NESC (2014: 16) record a decline of 20 percentage points in the proportion of those living in local authority accommodation between 1991 and 2011 and a corresponding rise of 17 percentage points in the proportion of tenants living in privately rented housing. The impact of changing long-term trends in housing policy promoting home-ownership have inevitably impacted on tenure. NESC (2014: 36) concludes that the impact of housing policy on home-ownership was ‘mixed’, making purchasing more difficult for ‘low-income households’, adding ‘however, many households still purchased, often through taking out large mortgages’. After the 2008 crash, new mortgages decline sharply from 111,253 in 2006 to 11,227 in 2011. Simultaneously, the government reduced mortgage interest tax relief and in 2011 withdrew affordable housing schemes to new applicants, suspended the main tenant purchase scheme and introduced a residential property tax ‘further rolling-back the support for owneroccupation’ (NESC, 2014: 36-7). These draconian policy decisions were the product of EU/IMF/ECB austerity policies.

Austerity, welfare and water Paul Krugman (2013: 72) argues that ‘the turn to austerity after 2010, however, was so drastic, particularly in European debtor nations … Greece imposing spending cuts and tax increases amounting to 15%

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of GDP; Ireland and Portugal rang in with around 6%; and unlike the half-hearted efforts at stimulus, these cuts were sustained and indeed intensified year after year’. He then poses the question, ‘so did austerity actually work?’ His conclusion: ‘The answer is that the results were disastrous – just about as one would have predicted from textbook economics’ (Krugman, 2013: 72). Krugman (2013: 73) concludes of austerity policy: ‘As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers’. Austerity, as the IMF has conceded, was a failure economically but politically it protected capital at the expense of working people, leading to social division and fomenting populist resistance. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy dramatically occurred within the context of the global economic crash of 2008. Ireland has been hit hard by the Great Recession. A reduction of 12% in GDP and cuts of €30 billion in public expenditure over six years severely impacted on the population, notably the youth population, highlighting intergenerational inequality (Powell et al, 2012). The 2012 EU survey on income and living conditions (SILC) offered an insight into the social impact of austerity policies, revealing that the deprivation rate (those experiencing two or more types of enforced deprivation) rose sharply from 11.8% in 2007 to 26.9% in 2012 (Central Statistics Office, 2014). The National Economic and Social Council (2013) estimated that 10% of the population were experiencing food poverty, evidenced by the increased use of soup kitchens and sharply rising levels of homelessness. Public expenditure cuts were accompanied by new charges in the form of a property tax, increased utility and transport costs and, most controversially, water charges. Many families who could not meet their mortgage repayments faced the threat of eviction. While the Irish population were initially viewed as stoically bearing the brunt of austerity measures in a climate of national solidarity, akin to a wartime emergency, the attempt to impose water charges fractured public unity. An organisation emerged in civil society, called Right2Water, composed of trade unions, left-wing parties and local and community organisations, protesting the social injustice of water charges. The Right2Water message was that water was a universal human right, one the government was seeking to redefine as a commodity that must be paid for through consumer charges. The first water protest march was organised by Right2Water in October 2014. Subsequently, Right2Water organised over 100 nationwide protests against water charges. On 21 October 2014, the new public utility Uisce Irish Water announced a 66% non-compliance

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rate with the water charge and was forced to extend the deadline for payment. Further protest marches ensued during 2015 and 2016, culminating in the suspension of water charges – after a Dáil vote against them by 59 votes to 38 (with Fianna Fail abstaining) on 25 May 2016 (Irish Examiner, 26 May 2016). The Minister for Public Expenditure Reform, Paschal Donohoe, observed in relation to the parliamentary opposition: ‘This is not to do with water. This is more to do with politics of old and if we suspend water charges, then tax revenues will have to be redirected from elsewhere’ (Irish Examiner, 26 May 2016). Opponents of water charges took a different view, arguing that once the public utility Uisce was fully capitalised, it would be privatised, in line with EU policies for liberalising the ownership of energy and transport utilities (Irish Examiner, 26 April 2016). The Public Water Forum is reported to have criticised ‘the utility’s perception of the public as customers rather than citizens and said its reliance on market research based on public opinion falls short of the dialogue needed’ adding that there was a need for ‘meaningful engagement’ with the public, ‘driven by a commitment to active citizenship, and informed by participation and parity of esteem’ (Irish Examiner, 6 April 2016). Water charges had become a metaphor for the defence of the welfare state in Ireland, which was being systematically scaled back at the behest of the EU/ECB/IMF ‘troika’, who required Ireland’s social expenditure agenda. The ousting of the Fine Gael/Labour coalition in 2016 was a popular verdict on austerity.

The Apple tax debacle: the contradictions of Irish public policy Ireland has defined itself in the era of uber-globalisation as an offshore, low tax financial haven for multi-national corporations. The Apple tax debacle in 2016, when Europe’s competition watchdog ruled that the world’s top corporation owned the Irish government €13 billion (with interest added €19 billion) in unpaid taxes between 2003-14, exposed Ireland’s industrial strategy to international criticism and censure for colluding in alleged corporate tax avoidance. The basic issue at stake is simple. If wealthy global corporations can avoid paying their fair share of taxes, then citizens must make up the deficit or government must be downsized. This is at the core of ‘the Big Society: Small Government’ debate that emerged as the neoliberal recipe for prosperity (Powell, 2013). The EU decision reallocated profits destined for the USA to Ireland, causing the Irish government enormous reputational

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embarrassment and prompting it to join Apple in appealing the decision to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Apple tax scandal puts Ireland’s fantastical 26.3% GDP growth rate in 2015 in perspective. It is the product of tax inversion (‘redomiciling’) resulting in multinational companies like Apple reallocating more of their intellectual property, such as patenting and branding rights, to Ireland. It suggests that there may need to be a retrospective recalculation in the nominal GDP rate in the postbailout years of 2011 and 2012, when the rate was estimated to be zero or to have shrunk to positive between 6-8%, making a mockery of the swinging welfare cuts demanded by the ‘troika’. The (sadly prosaic) explanation for these fantasy statistics is in the ethereal realm of statistical accounting, required by the European Statistics agency, Eurostat. Eurostat records the value of a country’s capital stock based not only upon tangible goods, such as roads and hospitals, but also on intangible goods, such as intellectual property rights. In the Irish case, the latter are inflated by multinational corporations redomiciling their assets in Ireland (Guardian, 2 September 2016). Kieran Allen (2007) warned against ‘the corporate take-over of Ireland’ which he views as subverting democratic decision-making and the quality of life. Matt Cooper, in his 2009 book Who really runs Ireland?, comments that in the eyes of the corporate elite, ‘Tax is for little people’. Kuhling and Keohane (2007: 207-8), writing on the eve of the 2008 crash, concluded that economic modernisation had had a negative impact on the health and well-being of the population: ‘Their illnesses are symptomatic of the present crisis of Irish society arising from extensive and intensive experiences of globalisation, a crisis, or crises, that is simultaneously moral, practical, and ecological, and provokes a return to the perennial and fundamental questions, namely, what is our idea of the good life and the possibility of its realisation’. But what of the politics of the Apple tax? How can the government explain to hard-pressed citizens why it is rejecting up to €19 billion that would ‘at a stroke’ solve the homelessness crisis? The respected political columnist, Noel Whelan, in an article in The Irish Times (2 September 2016) ‘Turning down €13 billion will be politically explosive’, declared: ‘The events of this week will have their most dramatic impact, however on our fragile domestic politics’. This is the biggest challenge for Irish politics in many years. It is a more potent one than water charges and the political ramifications could be even more dramatic. The political response could further erode confidence and trust not only in the current government but also politics generally’.

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Whelan’s comments underline the political dangers of promoting a competition state model over a welfare state model in a democratic society. What he is suggesting is that the citizens will not understand the Irish government’s decision to ‘turn down’ €13 billion (or €19 billion with interest). From the government’s point of view, it is acting in a manner consistent with the rationale of Irish industrial policy over many decades, which is based on attracting and preserving Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Business leaders have been audible in their support for the government’s decision to appeal the ruling (alongside Apple) to the ECJ. But, as Noel Whelan argues, this may be the product of ‘group think’ between elite politicians, business leaders and civil servants, which ignores ‘the bubbling public anger at the notion of abandoning this tax claim’ (The Irish Times, 2 September 2016). If he were alive today, Karl Polanyi might regard the Apple tax story as a parable of a country that has engaged in a Faustian bargain with international capital and is now facing the consequences. In Polanyian logic, the Apple tax debacle is a classic example of the failure of the market to regulate itself and the triumph of corporate interest over social responsibility. The ECJ will decide on the legality. It needs to be politically viewed within a context of growing popular revolt across the European Union against the perception that multinational corporations are gaming the tax systems of national states, leading to demands for a restoration of protectionist measures and effective border controls on free population movement, such as Brexit. In Ireland’s case the low corporate tax regime is reinforced by low taxes on wealth and low company social insurance contributions, relative to most EU states. It is perceived outside Ireland as development strategy based on the morally dubious principle of ‘beggar thy neighbour’, leading to discussions of an EU ‘common corporate consolidated tax base’ (CCCTB). Paul Gillespie (drawing on Gabriel Zucman’s study, Hidden wealth of nations) has noted that, while Ireland is phasing out egregious tax loopholes such as the infamous ‘double Irish’, it opposes the CCCTB (Irish Times, 3 September 2016). This is, in turn, facilitating a global tax evasion problem, reckoned to be in the order of 7.6 billion dollars or 8 per cent of personal wealth located in tax havens and other instruments of financial engineering (The Irish Times, 3 September 2016). The consequences of corporate tax evasion are spiralling global social inequality, the scaling back of welfare states and the erosion of public confidence in the state, in turn, producing a democratic crisis in the form of demonstrations, disorder and disturbance. In Ireland, the Apple tax story has focused public attention on the dominance of economic

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policy over social policy and the preferment of wealth creation over the welfare state in public policy formation.

Conclusion The 2008 crash undermined the Celtic Tiger project. The EU Apple tax decision called into question Ireland’s relationship with uberglobalisation and the fundamental integrity of Ireland’s economic strategy. The public were caught in the middle of a debate between elites arguing the case of an austerity state purportedly designed to produce the restoration of prosperity and advocates of social rights in the form of a welfare state. The water charges campaign crystallised the deep tensions within Irish public policy between dependence on selfregulating markets, mainly in the form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and popular democratic expectations for social justice, in the form of a welfare state. The Apple tax debacle perhaps most sharply focused the contradictions in the Irish welfare state. The government’s preference was to appeal a €13 billion tax allocation to Ireland that could have addressed several of the country’s pressing social and economic challenges. It was, of course, consistent with the model of a competition state, but totally at odds with the ideal of a welfare state based upon the principle of social justice and democratic accountability. The Irish elite and the population at large were potentially on a destructive collision course that was undermining democratic processes. The issue: welfare state or competition state – democracy versus oligarchy?

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Conclusion The problem we have to transcend is that many intelligent people put their faith in the idea of self-regulating markets as piously as others put their trust in God. Now that this God has failed, perhaps people will have the freedom to see things more clearly again, reclaim responsibility and organise the future in more promising terms. David Begg, The Irish Times, 3 October 2008 In this opening comment David Begg, the General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trades Unions, invokes Karl Polanyi in an analysis of the 2008 crash, arguing: Polanyi’s great attraction lies in his concern to advance both freedom and social justice. He believes that allowing the market to control the economic system was a fundamental error because it meant no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are then embedded in the economic system. Begg concludes: ‘Polanyi points out that human beings are not a product made for sale. Nevertheless, upon the fiction that labour is a commodity is the whole market system organised. It is therefore based on a lie’ (The Irish Times, 3 October 2008). In these prophetic words Begg demonstrates the folly of the Celtic Tiger project, built on a fable that unlimited wealth from foreign direct investment (FDI) could enable Ireland to become one of the richest countries in the world. The 2008 crash exposed the Celtic Tiger as a fiction. The purpose of this book has been to evaluate the political meaning and social reality of the Irish welfare state at the centenary point of the Irish Revolution (1913-23). As a democratic ideal, the welfare state is widely represented as the completion of citizenship, which has evolved from civil rights through political rights to social rights, which give it its institutional embodiment (Marshall, 1975). The welfare

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state is grounded in modern republican values of justice, decency and fairness. On the surface, Ireland as a political construct is defined by a republican imaginary. But scratching beneath the surface of its rhetorical (and sometimes violent) force, it is hard to find a clear set of political values informing Irish republicanism. It is more about mystique and memorialisation than civic values, more style (flags, songs and symbols) than substance (rights and entitlements). That has, of course, the advantage of being a very flexible political brand that accommodates a lot of actors under its ‘republican’ umbrella. The book has argued that the mainstream post-revolutionary elite regarded modernity as a problem to be overcome rather than a challenge to be met. Unlike many other modern democratic societies, the term ‘welfare state’ has had a weak political resonance in the lexicon of Irish social policy discourse. This reflects the weakness of the modernist project in Ireland and the absence of a classical European left-right political divide that gave shape to modern democratic politics. How did this happen? Why was Ireland’s path development so different from its European neighbours? Michael Walzer (2015), in The paradox of liberation: Secular revolution and religious counterrevolutions, argues that there are a variety of historical examples of revolutions being followed by politically quasi-religious regimes (such as Algeria, India and Israel) that betrayed the secular democratic hopes they originally inspired. This was certainly the case in Ireland, where a revolution, which encompassed a national liberation struggle alongside socialists and feminists seeking a social revolution, was followed by an intense period of religious nationalism that subjected the new state to rule by an opaque Church-State alliance. Its anti-democratic and secretive character was exposed in 1951 by the Mother and Child Scheme controversy about socialised medicine, which brought down the government because the public perceived a corroded democratic process. Arguably, the critical flaw in the Irish Revolution was the absence of a clear secular set of republican ideals. The only attempt to establish such a political platform was the quickly abandoned, in the form of the Democratic Programme 1919 which was based on socialist republican ideals, such as common ownership. Karl Polanyi (2001: 189) has asserted that the secularisation of church assets has been an essential aspect of modern republican revolutions. There was no appetite amongst Irish republicans to address clerical power – based on the social ownership of schools, hospitals, care institutions and its ideological hegemony over civil society – in the wake of the revolution. Instead, the clergy stepped into the power

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vacuum left by the departing imperialist government which was not replaced by a clear republican vision. Advocates of a ‘second’ or ‘new’ republic (Kirby and Murphy, 2011; Higgins, 2011; O’Toole 2010 and 2012) argue that national liberation in the form of the unachieved social revolution can only be realised through a fundamental reimagining of the Irish state. They view previous attempts at state-building, through invoking the ideal of a republic, as political failures. In my view, the essential argument made by advocates of republican renewal rests on the failure of social policy to give substance to the ideal of achieving a secular republic that would have addressed the welfare needs of the whole Irish population. Such a republic would have positively embraced a welfare state as the embodiment of its purported national liberation project. Instead, the Irish welfare state debate (in so far as there has been one) reflects the dominance of economic policy in Irish governance and its hegemony over social policy. Interest groups, most notably the Catholic Church, have resisted the forging of civic values. The Church’s continued resistance to divesting itself of school ownership in the wake of the historical child abuse scandals testifies to its continuing opposition to the secularisation of the Irish state (Powell and Scanlon, 2015). That poses a democratic challenge in an increasingly multicultural society. Some scholars have cast doubt on the appropr iateness of conceptualising Ireland as a ‘welfare state’, suggesting ‘competition state’ would be more apt. For example, Professor Peadar Kirby (2010: 138-42, drawing on Boyle, 2005), argues that ‘the competition state concept emerged from analysing the ways in which developed industrial states were restructuring themselves in response to the constraint and opportunities opened up by neo-liberal globalisation’. Boyle (2005) has somewhat colourfully dismissed the Irish model as ‘Europe’s most anorexic welfare state’. In his analysis, Kirby (2010: 141) contends that the concept of ‘a competition state more accurately describes the nature and operation of the Irish state in the era of the Celtic Tiger, since it prioritises goals of economic competitiveness over social cohesion and welfare’. Undoubtedly, Ireland shares with more developed AngloSaxon countries a policy direction oriented towards free trade, low tax and a liberal (deregulated) market economy that fits uneasily with a welfare state. In Polanyian terms, the choice is clear: free market versus social justice? So what would a renewed republic based upon the principles of social justice look like? Would it would look like a universal welfare state? What does that mean? It means a reimagining of social policy

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in a socially inclusive choice that would embrace redistribution and reciprocity, as the cornerstones of Irish democracy. That would in turn mean a more balanced approach to policy development that moves beyond the self-regulating market economy – epitomised by the Celtic Tiger – avoiding accusations of corruption in the international arena and addressing the growing public perception of a corrupted democratic process. So what would a more socially just republic involve in specific terms? First, a universal welfare state would be charged with tackling the challenges of insecure job markets, scarce housing and overstretched public services as a democratic imperative. Second, a universal welfare state would involve ten core social policy initiatives. It would: 1. Promote the idea of a universal guaranteed income designed to protect all citizens from the accelerating societal changes in the twenty-first century, arising from globalisation and automation; 2. Introduce a universal health and social care system funded from taxation that would support reproductive rights, including abortion rights; 3. Change the balance between private housing markets and social housing in favour of the latter, and construct new homes in socially balanced and ethnically integrated neighbourhoods and communities; 4. Laicise and desegregate all public primary and secondary schools, and provide open access to all levels of education (free of charge) from kindergarten to university, on the basis of social rights and life-long-learning principles; 5. Extend maternity and paternity leave by allowing it to reprise when children are older (for example, when children are sitting examinations or suffering from illness) or in cases of child deaths; 6. End child poverty and address social inequality; 7. Promote a multicultural society built on the principles of diversity and tolerance, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and age; 8. Prioritise the treatment of mental illness as a basic human right; 9. End ageism, which disrespectfully constructs older citizens as a surplus population which no longer has any productive value, and provide an adequate system of community care; 10. Address the conditions of asylum seekers and refugees in direct provision accommodation by allowing them to live and work in the community with full access to welfare benefits and the right to citizenship in line with international human rights practice.

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Critics will instantly raise the question of cost, declaring ‘we can’t afford a universal welfare state’. The answer is, ‘yes, we can’. Decommodification is the basis for real democracy that liberates all citizens in a society based on human rights and social inclusion. We already pay for these services through a combination of taxes and private transactions that benefit the better-off. The scandal of Irish tax loopholes shows that there is a large untapped corporation-tax base (as illustrated by the Apple case) that is undermining public confidence in governance and Ireland’s reputation internationally.

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290

Index

Index

Numbers 2008 crash. see economic crisis

A abortion, 8, 149, 201, 211–214 abuse, 150, 200–201. see also child abuse academia, 27–28 accelerationism, 10–11 adoption, 89, 157, 197 Ahearne, Bertie, 187–188 alchemy, 255 Anatomy Act 1832, 43 Anglo-Saxon welfare model, 17–18, 166, 228, 267 anti-semitism, 106–107 Apple tax scandal, 260–263 assisted self-reliance, 244 asylum policy, 106–107 austerity Free State of Ireland, 70–73 post-2008 economic crisis, 6, 8, 171, 253–254, 256–257, 258–260

B banking crisis, 255–256. see also economic crisis Beef Tribunal, 238 Begg, David, 265 Belfast, 47 Berman, Marshall, 237 Bessborough, 87 Beveridge Report, 14, 96, 115, 135, 164 birth rate, 207 Bismarck, Otto von, 14 Blanshard, Paul, 104, 105, 125, 135, 140, 141 Blind Person’s Act 1920, 84 Blom, Philipp, 31, 32, 57–58, 63 Bloody Sunday, 62 Booth, Charles, 44 breadwinner model, 81 Bretton Woods agreement, 255 Brown, Terence, 65, 99–100, 196 Browne, Dr Noel, viii, 141–144, 145–146, 151, 165, 217

Browne, Michael (Bishop of Galway), 114, 139, 140 Burke, J.A., 73 Burleigh, Professor Michael, 137

C capitalism, 9, 16–17, 237–238 productivist welfare capitalism, 5, 9, 18, 25, 28, 233–235, 251 Catholic Church. see also Church-State Alliance anti-semitism, 106, 107 child abuse, 221–222 children’s allowances, 97 conscription, 52 corporatism, 135–137 education, 100–101, 104, 105–106, 154, 245, 267 family planning, 203, 209 health insurance, 81–82 mass attendance, 196–197, 220 Mother and Child Health Service, 142–146 resistance to welfare state, 69–70, 134, 135–140 social power, 7–8, 33, 199–200, 202 decline in, 6, 197–198, 203, 220–221 as welfare actor, 151–154 Catholic social movement, 110–116 Catholicism, 42, 67, 68, 103–104, 131 ceílí, 64 Celtic Tiger economy, 9, 24, 235–237 censorship, 108, 197–198 change, politics of, 219–221. see also modernisation child abuse, 150, 221–222 child mortality, 46 child poverty, 190, 254 children, 56, 104, 210–211 children’s allowances, 96–97 Christus Rex Society, 114 Church-State Alliance, 5, 67, 101, 124–125, 143–146 citizenship, 19–20, 22 civic virtue, 128 civil rights movement, 133 civil society, 128

291

The political economy of the Irish welfare state class inequality. see social inequality clientelism, 129–130 Cluskey, Frank, 180 colonialism, 4–5 Combat Poverty, 172, 174–175, 176, 178–179, 180–185 Commission on the Relief of the Sick and Destitute Poor (1925), 79–80, 86–89 Commission on Vocational Organisation, 114–115 commodification, 16–17, 226, 251. see also decommodification community care, 149–151, 152 Community Platform, 27 community sector. see voluntary sector Conditions of Employment Bill 1935, 93–96 Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI). see Social Justice Ireland Connolly, James, 43, 48, 49–50 Connolly, Linda, 204 conscription, 52 Considine, Mairead, 28, 81 consistent poverty, 169–171, 186, 187–188 Constitution of 1922, 66–67 Constitution of 1937, 109–110 contraception, 108, 149, 201, 202, 203, 208–210 corporate tax, 260–263 corporatism, 112–116, 135–137, 233 corporist welfare states. see European welfare states corruption, 222, 238–239, 255–256 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935, 108 Culpitt, Ian, 29–30 cultural modernisation, 6 cultural nationalism, 35–37, 61–64, 101 cultural policy, Free State of Ireland, 101–102 cultural politics, 204–205 cultural segregation, 104–106 Cunman na nGaedheal, 68, 71, 74–75, 82, 84

D D’Alton, John F. (Archbishop of Armagh), 139 dance, 63–64, 107–108 de Swann, Abram, 69 de Valera, Eamonn, 56–57, 89–91, 106, 117–118, 121n. see also Fianna Fail decommodification, 18, 19, 69, 269. see also commodification deinstitutionalisation, 150–151 democracy, 128. see also social democracy Democratic Programme 1919, 56–57, 67

demographics. see population dynamics; urbanisation deregulation, 255–257 Desmond, Barry, 209 development economic, 5–6, 231–233, 237–238, 251 path development, 231–233 rural community, 116–118 developmental welfare state, 24, 245–250, 252 Dignan, Dr J. (Bishop of Clonfert), 114, 115–116 disease. see tuberculosis dissent, 68–69, 120–121, 140, 189 diversity, 196 divorce, 108, 120, 198, 201, 202, 214–216 Dublin, 47 Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC), 162–163 Dublin Housing Inquiry, 38–39 Dublin Lockout, 50–51 Dublin Statistical Society. see Statistical and Social Inquiry society (SSIS) Duffy, Luke, 83, 85, 86 Dukelow, Fiona, 28, 81

E economic crisis, 6, 234–235, 253, 255–257, 259. see also austerity economic development, 5–6, 231–233, 237–238, 251 economic inequality, 189–190 economic modernisation, 5–6 Economic Monetary Union (EMU), 234 economic sanctions, 91 Economic War, 90–91 education Church control, 101, 245, 267 expenditure, 156, 254 private, 229 reform, 154–156 segregation, 8, 100, 104–106 Electoral Act 1923, 77 emigration, 3, 47, 72, 88, 91, 157–158, 201–202 employment, 93–96, 206, 229. see also unemployment Employment of Married Women Act 1973, 206 enabling state, 244 English, Ada, 59 equality, 8, 19, 164. see also inequality Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, 2, 17–18, 19–20, 233, 235 ethics, 103, 202–204 ethnic diversity, 196 Europe core values, 1

292

Index social model, 228 European Economic Community (EEC), 232 European Union (EU), 232–233 European welfare states, 18, 69–70, 131–132

F Fahey, Fr Denis, 137 fake news, 177–179 family allowance, 96 family planning. see abortion; illegitimate children; reproductive rights Family Rights Council, 215 family solidarity, 109–110 Family Solidarity (campaign group), 215, 218 fascism, 135–136, 137–138 feminism, 58, 95, 205–207. see also women’s movement Ferriter, D., 201–202 fertility rates, 207 Fianna Eirann, 63 Fianna Fail, 67, 68, 184, 195–196 child abuse, 221 children, 96–97 children’s allowances, 96–97 Conditions of Employment Bill 1935, 93–96 contraception, 208 education, 155 health policy, 148–149 housing, 162 protectionism, 90–91 social Catholicism, 111–112 unemployment, 92, 118 films, 197 financial crisis. see economic crisis financialisation, 255 Fine Gael, 134, 141, 179 abortion, 213 contraception, 209 divorce, 215 health service, 147–148 “Just Society” programme, 125 Fitzgerald, Dr Garret, 168, 202, 250 Flanagan, Oliver J., 106–107, 198–199 Flood Tribunal, 239 Foster, R., 101 Free State of Ireland, 65–66 1922 Constitution, 66–67 anti-semitism, 106–107 austerity, 70–73 Catholic social movement, 110–116 censorship, 108 children’s allowances, 96–97 cultural policy, 101–102 dissent, 120–121

education, 100–101, 104–106 first-wave welfare state, 69–70 Gaelic language revival, 99–100, 101 housing, 74–75 insurance reform, 80–83 land reform, 73–74 old age pension, 83–84 political activism, 118–120 Poor Law and health services, 77–80 protectionism, 89–91 public morality, 107–108 religious identity, 102–104 rural community development, 116–118 single mothers, 86–89 society, 67–69 unemployment, 91–93 women’s rights, 84–86, 93–96, 108–110 Futurist movement, 11

G Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 62–63 Gaelic language revival, 99–100, 101 Gaelic League, 35 gay marriage, 8, 219 gay rights, 216–219 gender, 57–61, 81, 84, 164, 206. see also women general strikes, 52, 53 Giddens, Anthony, 10 global economic crisis. see economic crisis globalisation, 27 Gonne McBride, Maud, 60 Goodbye to the Hill (Dunne), 161 Great Depression, 90 Great Famine, 3, 46, 47, 76, 253 Griffith, Arthur, 40, 41, 42, 57, 70–71, 74 gross domestic product (GDP), 259, 261

H habitus, 161 Halappanavar, Savita, 213 Harrington, Michael, 169 Harrison, Sarah, 39, 47, 58–59, 91 Harvey, D., 243 Haughey, Charles, 208 Hayek, F., 21 Hayes, Canon John, 116–117 Hayes, Joanne, 210, 211 Health (Family Planning) Act 1985, 209–210 Health Act 1953, 146 Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), 245 health insurance, 81–83, 85, 148 health policy, 77–80, 141–151, 152 health services, 146–149, 229, 245 Mother and Child Health Service, 123–124, 141, 142–146

293

The political economy of the Irish welfare state Hemerijck, Anton, 234 Higgins, Michael D., 9–10, 145–146 higher education, 155–156 home assistance, 77, 80, 93 homelessness, 162–164, 258 home-ownership, 74–75, 160, 257, 258 homosexuality, 216–219 Hone, Evie, 120–121 Hourigan, Niamh, 204 housing, 74–75, 159–164, 229, 232, 257–258. see also slums Housing (Building Facilities) Act 1924, 74–75 human rights, 127, 149–150 humanism, 127–129 Hyde, Douglas, 35–36

post-war Ireland, 125–126, 132, 231–233 Republic of Ireland, 134–140 Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), 58, 59, 95 Irish Women’s Franchise League, 59

J Jellet, Mainie, 120 Jews, 101, 106–107 Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (JCWSSW), 108 Joyce, James, 36

K

I identity, 62–63, 102–104, 194–195 identity politics, 23 illegitimate children, 210–211 inequality, 43–44, 172–173, 189–190. see also social equality infant mortality, 46 Inghinide na hEireann (‘daughters of Ireland’), 60, 63 Inglis, Tom, 199–200 institutionalisation. see deinstitutionalisation insurance reform, 80–83 Investment in education (1966), 155 Irish Communist Party (CPI), 54–55 Irish diaspora, 3 Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM), 217 Irish Housewives Association (IHA), 205 Irish Labour Party, 48–49, 52, 53, 54, 69, 92, 179 Irish literature, 36–37 Irish Medical Association (IMA), 142–143 Irish Poor Law, 43, 75–80 Irish poverty programme, 179–185 Irish Republic Democratic Programme 1919, 55–57 Proclamation, 31, 32–34 Irish Revolution, 5, 7, 9–10, 266–267. see also Irish Republic Irish social policy: A critical introduction (Considine and Dukelow, 2009), 28 Irish Social Welfare Act 1952, 164 Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), 49 Irish Unemployed Workers’ Movement (IUWM), 92, 118, 119–120 Irish welfare state criticism, 228–231, 250–252, 267 historic development, 4–7, 24–25 marketisation, 226–228 path development, 231–233

Kennedy, Sr Stanislaus, 175 Kenny Report, 160 Keogh, Dermot, 161 Keohane, Kieran, 1–2 Kerry babies case, 210–211 Keynesianism, 15, 19, 189 King, Mervyn, 255 Kohler, Gabriele, 13, 14 Krugman, Paul, 1, 236, 255–256, 257, 258–259 Kuhling, Carmen, 1–2

L labour market, 93–96 labour movement, 48–49, 51–54, 68, 72, 73, 81 Labour Party. see Irish Labour Party Land Act 1923, 73–74 land reform, 73–74, 90–91 land speculation, 160 language, 99–100, 101 Larkin, James, 48, 49, 50–51, 81 Lee, Philomena, 157 leprechaun economics, 256 LGBT community. see gay rights Liberal Party, 69, 80 liberal welfare model. see Anglo-Saxon welfare model liberty, 202–204, 221 Limerick pogrom, 107 Limerick slum, 40 Limerick Soviet, 53 literature, 36–37, 197–198 localism, 129 Lockout of 1913, 50–51 Lucey, Dr Cornelius (Bishop of Cork), 113–114, 136 Lynn, Kathleen, 59

M MacEntee, Sean, 147 MacSweeney, A., 45 Mahon Tribunal, 239

294

Index Maria Duce, 137–138 Markievicz, Constance, 60 marriage bar, 93 marriage benefit, 85 marriage rate, 160 maternal mortality, 85 maternity benefit, 85–86 McCracken Tribunal, 238–239 McDowell, Michael, 172–174 McGilligan, Patrick, 72 McGrath, Joseph, 72 McQuaid, John Charles (Archbishop of Dublin), 105, 106, 109, 144 media, 107, 176–179, 198–200 mental health, 150–151 migration, 3, 46–47, 72, 88, 91, 157–158, 201–202 Million Pound Scheme, 74 modernisation clientelism and social rights, 129–130 cultural, 6 economic, 5–6 education, 154–156 identity, 194–195 neoliberalism, 241–245 open society, 195–197 personal freedom, 202–204 politics of change, 219–221 young people, 157–159 morality, 107–108, 202–204 mortality, 46, 83, 85 mortgages, 257–258 Mother and Child Health Service, 123–124, 141, 142–146 mothers, 86–89 Muintir na Tire (People of the Countryside), 116–118 multiculturalism, 23 Murphy, Thomas, 80–81 music, 63–64, 158

N National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS), 186–189 National Association of the Tenants’ Organisations (NATO), 163 National Economic and Social Council (NESC), 228–231, 247–250, 259 National Federation of Social Service Councils, 152 National Health Insurance Act 1924, 82 National Health Insurance Act 1929, 82–83, 85 national identity, 62–63 National Insurance Act 1911, 81–82 National Insurance Bill 1911, 80 National Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty. see Combat Poverty

nationalism cultural, 35–37, 61–64, 101 political, 40–42 religious, 68–69 women’s movement, 59–60 Nazism, 136–137 neoliberalism, 20, 21–22, 24, 234, 240–245 new right, 203 new social movements, 204–205. see also women’s movement New Zealand, 30 Newman, 241–242 Nolan, Professor Brian, 188 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 127 Nordic welfare model, 15–16, 18 Norris, David, 216 Norris, Michelle, 24, 159, 226 Northern Ireland, 132–133 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), 133 Norton, William, 89–90

O O’Briain, Felim, 139 O’Casey, Sean, 37–38 O’Connor, Emmett, 50, 51, 52, 54 O’Connor, Orla, 188–189 O’Donnell, Peadar, 120 O’Drisceoil, Donal, 55 O’Faolain, Sean, 124, 140, 144–145, 146 O’Flaherty, Liam, 54 O’Grady, Standish, 35 O’Higgins, Kevin, 57 old age pension, 83–84 O’Leary, Fr Jerome, 138–139 O’Loughlin, Fr, 110–111 O’Malley, Donagh, 155 One million poor? (Stanislaus, 1981), 175 open society, 195–197 other America, The (Harrington, 1962), 169 O’Toole, Fintan, 28, 29, 130, 193, 194, 236, 238 outdoor relief. see home assistance

P path development, 231–233 Paul VI (Pope), 203 pauper, def, 75 pauperism. see poverty pensions, 83–84 personal ethics, 202–204 Phoenix Revival, 6 Piketty, Thomas, 189 Pius, XI (Pope), 112–113 plays, 37–38, 157–158

295

The political economy of the Irish welfare state plough and the stars, The (O’Casey), 37–38 Polanyi, Karl, 9, 16–17, 226, 262, 265 political activism, 118–120 political corruption. see corruption political economy, 2 political nationalism, 40–42 politics of change, 219–221 politics of recognition, 24 Poor Law, 75, 75–80, 131 Pope Paul VI, 203 Pope Pius XI, 112–113 popular culture, 61–64 popular militancy, 52–55 population dynamics, 97, 160 populism, 4, 90–91 poverty, 42–46, 169–177 children, 190, 254 in the media, 176–179 National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS), 186–189 National Pilot Schemes to Combat Poverty, 179–185 urban poor, 44–45, 159 women, 200–201 in work, 190 primary poverty, 44 principle of subsidiarity, 70, 112–116, 135, 138–139 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, 31, 32–34 productivist welfare capitalism, 5, 9, 18, 25, 228, 233–235, 251 property ownership, 9. see also homeownership property-based welfare system, 67–68 protectionism, 70, 90 protest movements, 118–120. see also social movements; women’s movement Protestant population, 101–102, 104 Protestantism, 131 Public Charitable Hospitals Act 1930, 78–79 Public Dance Hall Act 1935, 107 public expenditure, 71, 156, 254 Public Health Act 1953, 152 public morality, 107–108 public sector, 230–231, 241–245 Public Service Management Act 1977, 242 public transport, 229

R recession. see economic crisis recognition, politics of, 24 refugees, 106–107 relative poverty, 169–170, 187, 188–189 religion and cultural policy, 101–102

and identity, 102–104 influence on education, 100–101 religiosity, 196–197, 220–221 religious nationalism, 68–69 reproductive rights, 207–210, 216. see also abortion; contraception Republic of Ireland, 109–110, 132, 134, 134–140 Republican Congress, 118 residual welfare state, 2–3, 225–226, 228–231 Rice, Deborah, 131 Right2Water, 259–260 Robinson, Mary, 219–220 Ross, Shane, 217 Rowntree, Seebohm, 44 ‘Runaway World’, 10 rural community development, 116–118 rural culture, 194 rural exodus, 46–47 rural population, 159 rural poverty, 45–46 rural revolt, 55 Ryan, J.P., 137–138

S Salzar regime, Portugal, 136 Scandinavia, 15–16 scatterin’ The (McKenna, 1959), 157 Scott, Professor Colin, 244 secondary poverty, 44 sectarianism, 104–106 secularisation, 6, 8, 66–67 segregation cultural, 104–106 in education, 8, 100–101, 154–156 self-regulating market, 16–17 self-sufficiency, 70, 90 sexuality, 198–200 Shan Ross Abbey, 87 Shaw, George Bernard, 36–37, 38, 44 Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna, 59, 95 Simon Community, 163 Sinclair, Betty, 95 single market, 234 single mothers, 86–89, 157 Sinn Fein, 40–42, 70 slums dramatic depiction, 37–38 social reality, 38–40 tenants’ leagues, 118–120 social Catholicism, 110–116 social citizenship, 19 social conservatism, 42 social democracy, 2, 20, 22–23 social democratic welfare states, 18 social equality, 8, 19. see also social inequality

296

Index social housing, 74 social inclusion strategy, 242–243 social inequality, 43–44, 189–190 social investment welfare state, 234, 235, 245–246 social justice, 9, 75, 172–174 Social Justice Ireland, 26–27, 152, 168, 176, 190, 225 social movements, 128, 204–205. see also labour movement; protest movements; women’s movement social obligation, 29–30 social partnerships, 233, 239–241 social policy, 2, 26–28, 128–129 social protest, 118–120 social reform, 69–70, 197–198 social services councils, 152 social welfare, 164–165 Social Welfare and Pensions Bill 2017, 178 socialism, 110–111 Stafford, T.J., 44–45, 45–46 Statistical and Social Inquiry society (SSIS), 26 Staunton, James (Bishop of Ferns), 123–124 stigmatisation, 3 Strategic Management Initiative (SMI), 242 subsidiarity, principle of, 70, 112–116, 135, 138–139 suffrage movement, 59, 60 Sweden, 14–15 Sweetman, Fr Michael, 162 syndicalism, 49, 50–51

T Taca, 161–162 TASC think tank, 27, 189–190 tax scandal, Apple, 260–263 Teeple, G., 21–22 tenants’ leagues, 118–119 tenement housing. see slums Thatcher, Margaret, 21, 186 theatre, 37–38, 157–158 Thornley, Professor David, 195 Townsend, Professor Peter, 175 Townshend, C., 40, 41, 42 trade unions, 48, 51, 52, 68–69 traditionalism, 129 transport, 229 trickledown theory of poverty, 174–175 Trinity College Dublin, 105 tuberculosis, 46, 82–83, 141–142

U unemployment, 47, 54, 72–73, 81, 91–93, 111–112. see also employment Unemployment Assistance Act 1933, 93

universal welfare state, 2–4, 7, 14–15, 268–269 urban poverty, 44–45 urban social protest, 118–120 urban working class, 159, 220–221 urbanisation, 159–162, 196

V vagrancy, 75 values, Europe, 1 vocationalism, 112–118, 121n voluntarism, 151–154 Voluntary Health Insurance (VHI), 148 voluntary hospitals, 78–79 voluntary sector, 163, 173–174, 243–244, 248

W Walzer, Michael, 266 water charges, 259–260 wealth, 238–239 wealth distribution, 189–190 welfare fraud, 178 welfare recipients, 3, 178, 230 welfare society, 248 welfare state regimes, 17–18, 127, 131–132 welfare states. see also Irish welfare state; productivist welfare capitalism; welfare state regimes crisis of legitimacy, 28–30 criticism, 20–24 developmental, 24, 245–250, 252 first-wave, 69–70 importance of, 13–14 Keynesian, 15, 189 origins, 2, 14–18 path development, 131–132 property-based, 67–68 residual, 2–3, 225–226, 228–231 second-wave, 125 social investment, 234, 235, 245–246 universal, 2–4, 7, 14–15, 268–269 Whatley Commission, 75–76 Whitaker, T.K., 232 women, 57–58 emigration, 201–202 employment, 93–96, 206 poverty and abuse, 200–201 religious identity, 103–104 single mothers, 86–89 social security, 164 Women’s Action Against Poverty, 179 women’s movement, 58–61, 68, 179, 205–207 women’s rights, 84–86, 93–96, 108–110 work. see employment workhouses, 76, 79

297

The political economy of the Irish welfare state working poor, 190 working-class women, 200–202 world depression, 90

Y Yeats, W.B., 120 youth culture, 157–159 youth mobilisation, 60, 63

298

“Fred Powell’s erudite but compulsively readable analysis of why Ireland has never managed to create a fully developed welfare state is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the country is as it is and what it needs to do if a just and caring society is to be more than an aspiration.” Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times “From this beautifully written book I have finally come to understand how the Irish welfare state model’s unique blend of residualism, familialism and subordination to the market economy evolved. Fred Powell provides us with an impressive and extraordinarily rich historical reconstruction of how conservative Catholicism and nationalism underpin the peculiar features of Irish social policy.” Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona “This book is highly accessible for an international readership, not only of people interested in Ireland but also for those who want to gain a better understanding of welfare state developments as outcomes of the interaction of social forces, religious and political beliefs, institutional interests and capitalist offers.” Paul Dekker, Tilburg University

The political economy of the Irish welfare state provides a fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital.

Using the evolution of the Irish welfare state as a narrative example of the incompatibility of political conservatism, free market capitalism and social justice, the book offers a new and challenging view on the interface between structure and agency in the formation and democratic purpose of welfare states, as they increasingly come under critical review and restructuring by elites. Fred Powell is Professor of Social Policy and Student Ombudsman at University College Cork, National University of Ireland.

www.policypress.co.uk PolicyPress

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Fred Powell

Using official estimates, Professor Powell demonstrates that the welfare state is vital for the cohesion of Irish society with half the population at risk of poverty without it. However, the reality is of a residual welfare system dominated by means tests, with a two-tier health service, a dysfunctional housing system driven by an acquisitive dynamic of home-ownership at the expense of social housing, and an education system that is socially and religiously segregated.

The political economy of the Irish welfare state

“Powell outlines the failure over 100 years of politics and institutions in Ireland, to deliver a universalist Welfare State based on social obligation, common citizenship and human rights. The book lays bare the consequences of this failure for the citizens of Ireland. Students of contemporary Irish social policy seeking to understand the enduring unacceptable levels of poverty, housing deprivation and an inequitable two-tier healthcare system will find provocative answers in this engaging book.” Eoin O’Sullivan, Trinity College Dublin

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE IRISH WELFARE STATE CHURCH, STATE AND CAPITAL

FRED POWELL