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03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 43
Administration, vol. 69, no. 2 (2021), pp. 43–65
doi: 10.2478/admin-2021-0013
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and
retrenchment in Ireland’s
political economy
Fiona Dukelow
School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, Ireland
Abstract
This article provides a critical commentary on Irish activation policy. It is
framed with reference to the point made in Pathways to Work 2016–2020 that
a key purpose of activation is ‘to help ensure a supply of labour at competitive
rates’. It looks at how a tougher work-first activation regime can be situated
within the wider landscape of reform and retrenchment in the social
protection system following the 2008 financial crisis. Broadly utilising
Pierson’s concepts of programmatic and systemic retrenchment, it situates the
roll-out of activation within shifts toward greater reliance on means-tested
benefits for the unemployed, and toward work first, with varying degrees of
compulsion, for other working-age adults in the social protection system.
Suggesting that this results in a hierarchy of ‘welfare sacrifice’ for the sake of
the competitiveness of the Irish economy, it also looks briefly at how some of
these ‘sacrifices’ are experienced by different groups both in and out of the
labour market. The article concludes by noting that the Covid-19 pandemic
has temporarily transformed state–market relations such as these; however,
whether this offers the opportunity to forge a more supportive turn in
activation policy post-pandemic remains an open question.
Keywords: Activation, Ireland, social citizenship, retrenchment, welfare
reform
4303 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 44
44 FIONA DUKELOW
Introduction
The task of this article is to provide a critical commentary on Irish
activation policy in the context of the welfare reforms and
retrenchment that have evolved since the 2008 financial crisis. The
starting point is a sentence from Pathways to Work 2016–2020 which
refers to one of the key purposes of activation in the context of
economic recovery. This purpose, according to the document, is about
increasing ‘active labour market participation by people of a working
age (including people with disabilities and lone parents) so as to help
ensure a supply of labour at competitive rates and to minimise welfare
dependency’ (Government of Ireland, 2016, p. 14; author’s emphasis).
This point frames the critique pursued in this commentary.
The significance of this sentence did not really hit home until it was
quoted by the author in a presentation on Irish labour market policy
and activation at the European Trade Union Institute in 2018. A
remark made by a respondent to the presentation, who commented on
the ‘violence’ of this activation aim, was hugely thought-provoking
and, in a sense, revealed the ideological underpinnings of Irish
activation hiding in plain sight. While associating activation with
‘violence’ might be contentious, in the context of that remark it came
from a place of critical distance. Such critical distance is a valuable
check against policy debates that can often be quite insular affairs,
taking the nuts and bolts of reform, and the assumptions and
imperatives of domestic policy agendas for granted. This commentary
wishes to acknowledge the ‘miserableness’ of being unemployed, the
vital importance of access to decent work or the ‘right to be
commodified’ (Orloff, 1993, p. 318), and the constraints and
challenges under which policy is formulated. However, in the spirit of
critical distance, it reflects on the ways Ireland’s activation trajectory
connects activation with retrenchment in the service of an economy
and welfare system under the influence of a particular articulation of
neoliberalism. Maintaining economic competitiveness has for a long
time been the linchpin of Ireland’s political economy and is, in a sense,
a portal through which understanding and acceptance of neoliberal
thinking and values in Ireland is narrated. In this context, activation
policy, entangled with an agenda of welfare retrenchment, is
problematic in the way that it erodes social protection as social
citizenship. It appears that social protection is instead viewed as a
fiscal-cum-cultural problem of welfare dependence, and whose main
role is to make people ‘fit’ for a labour market which, in the context of03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 45
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 45
maintaining competitiveness, means, for many, low-paid, insecure
employment. The commentary concentrates on reforms following the
2008 financial crisis and recovery. Over a decade on, we are now in the
midst of a new welfare state crisis, and responses to the Covid-19
pandemic have temporarily upended the thrust of the post-2008 policy
reform. With thoughts turning to post-Covid recovery, it is a pertinent
moment to also consider what trajectory welfare reform might take
this time. This question is briefly reflected upon in the concluding
section.
Activation and retrenchment as tangled drivers of welfare
reform
Across Europe, activation and retrenchment have been twin drivers of
welfare reforms since the 1990s, with a stepping up of both following
the 2008 crisis (Borosch et al., 2016). Unsurprisingly, interest in
welfare retrenchment research stems from the 1980s when the
economic shocks of the 1970s, combined with the resurgence of
neoliberalism, began to undermine the fiscal and normative
foundations of the post-World War II welfare state. A number of
endogenous challenges ran in parallel with these, including the
maturation of social protection programmes, in particular pensions;
and the emergence of new, or heretofore unrecognised, social risks,
including those related to diverse family formations, caring and the
needs of growing cohorts of people with long-term, chronic illnesses
and disabilities. How retrenchment is conceptualised, how it is
measured and the degree to which it is occurring, has since been the
subject of much debate and contention (Starke, 2006, forthcoming). In
the process, debates often lose sight of the real impact of
retrenchment in exercises beloved of data crunching and what can
seem classificatory minutiae. Often rather narrowly and literally
associated with cutbacks, in the sense of reductions in social
expenditure, a broader conceptualisation trains us to look at
institutional changes. A foundational and enduring contribution in
this regard comes from Pierson (1996), who saw the potential for
retrenchment across three institutional dimensions in terms of how
welfare is designed and delivered, including ‘(1) significant increases
in reliance on means-tested benefits; (2) major transfers of
responsibility to the private sector; and (3) dramatic changes in benefit
and eligibility rules that signal a qualitative reform of a particular
programme’ (Pierson, 1996, p. 157). Many of these dimensions fall03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 46
46 FIONA DUKELOW
into what Pierson identified as programmatic retrenchment, which
refers to the way that states reduce the level of, or the rights and
entitlements attached to, social protection.
As Starke (forthcoming, p. 3) points out, another type of retrench-
ment identified by Pierson is systemic retrenchment, which ‘refers to
policy changes that, while leaving social welfare programs intact in the
short run, weaken its funding arrangements, manipulate public
opinion and weaken support groups or key features of the institutional
environment that form the basis of the welfare state or individual
schemes’. This type of retrenchment is typically given less attention
and is more difficult to identify as intentional retrenchment. In the
Irish context this is doubly difficult, especially when it comes to how
public opinion is shaped by political discourse; the clientelist system
still holds sway, and policy and political discourse motivated by welfare
retrenchment can often be ambiguous, euphemistic and oscillating.
Contrasting with retrenchment, activation is typically treated as a
separate dimension of welfare reform: as an expansionary impulse that
offers opportunities for those claiming welfare, especially forms of
activation that offer training and employment opportunities.
However, as well rehearsed and typologised, activation means many
things, both ideologically and practically, across different countries
(Barbier, 2004; Bonoli, 2011), ranging between human resource
development and labour market attachment (work-first) approaches,
or between enabling and punitive interventions. Typically the former
have been in retreat and the latter have been the ones to ‘expand’
(Knotz, 2019). This is a trajectory that can be discerned across many
European instances of activation since the early 2000s, with a further
stepping up in the context of scarce resources and increased need
since the 2008 crisis (Lødemel & Moreira, 2014). From this it can be
said that retrenchment and activation are not binary opposites but are
in fact entangled, and that many types of activation interlock with
welfare retrenchment, especially if we go beyond the literal
understanding of retrenchment as cutbacks in social expenditure.
Taken together they contribute to the ongoing project of welfare state
restructuring that elides welfare in favour of work within the social
protection system and accelerates (re)commodification and the
individualisation of social risks.
Wendy Brown’s (2016) concept of sacrificial citizenship seems
particularly apt here, even more so in the context of economic
competitiveness in Ireland’s political economy and activation strategy.
According to Brown (2016, p. 3), the neoliberal economisation of03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 47
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 47
political and social life means that everyone is seen in human capital
terms: ‘work and citizenship are configured as modes of belonging to
the business (“team”) one works for or the nation of which one is a
member’. In this sense ‘neoliberalism emancipates individuals from
one kind of state regulation and social solidarity to make them
available for interpellation and integration by a different set of
political–economic imperatives and arrangements’ (Brown, 2016,
p. 4). Orders of value conventionally associated with welfare such as
equality, social justice, personal autonomy or even the paternalistic
traditions associated with the protective value of welfare are displaced
by the prioritisation of market values. All ‘working-age’ adults are seen
in terms of their value as a competitive supply of labour, and the value
of social protection is displaced by welfare dependency and the need
to minimise it.
Looking at the specifics of the Irish trajectory, a variety of push
factors, both external and internal, led to a momentum coalescing in
the early 2010s to transform the social protection system, from what
the then Minister for Social Protection described as its ‘largely passive
approach’ to ‘a pro-active work first system’ (Burton, 2011). The
system’s passivity was emphasised in a range of appraisals, including
the OECD’s review of Ireland’s activation service (Grubb et al., 2009),
which Martin (2015, p. 9) likened to finding ‘the emperor who had no
clothes’ for its poor implementation of activation policy. Similarly,
under European Commission/International Monetary Fund/
European Central Bank (troika) scrutiny, Ireland’s activation system
was found lacking, particularly in terms of its institutional infra-
structure and implementation of sanctions, and its transformation was
central to the structural reforms attached to financial assistance. Irish
research also found institutions and processes were characterised by
‘inertia’ (Martin, 2015), and the activation process was criticised for
being ‘lax’ and ‘light touch’ (McGuinness et al., 2013). Activation was
also criticised for being poor in terms of outcomes, showing sub-par
performance in terms of employment progression; something which
McGuinness et al. (2013) suggested reflected participants’ learning of
the lax nature of the system upon attending an activation interview.
Between 2009 and 2015 a raft of changes took place to payment levels,
to programme rules and to the whole architecture of the system (space
does not allow a full discussion of these but see Dukelow (2018) and
McCashin (2019) for greater detail). In contrast to longer and multiple
waves of reform occurring elsewhere in Europe, Ireland underwent a
much more rapid and compressed phase of change. The speed and03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 48
48 FIONA DUKELOW
scope of change, and the overall capacity to institute change, were
certainly notable (Köppe & MacCarthaigh, 2019). Yet in some ways it
might be said that the country followed its particular style of ‘crisis
routine’ (van Hooren et al., 2014). This implies that the shock effect of
the 2008 economic crisis accelerated particular desired welfare
reforms, especially in the years in the immediate aftermath of the
banking crisis and when Ireland was under the tightest phase of troika
conditionality and supervision between 2010 and 2013. Subsequently,
even before the disruption posed by the pandemic, there was at least a
partial return to the more typically slow pace of policy reform, and
there are continuing tensions between policy aspirations and practice.
In this context, and reflecting the fact that neoliberalism in practice
transacts with local influences, path dependencies and resistances, not
to mention co-existing alternative practices and ideas, there remains a
‘hierarchy of welfare sacrifice’ for the economy in how activation and
retrenchment have evolved in the recent Irish experience. The
unemployed are under a new regime, as are lone parents, but in a
somewhat modified mode compared to the unemployed. People with
disabilities are being brought into the activation sphere, but on a
voluntary basis. Others, namely ‘qualified adults’, are still on the
margins, but are increasingly mooted in active/inactive terms. Almost
all working-age adults are thus potentially on a hierarchy of ‘sacrificial
citizenship’. This is to say they are being ‘made available for
interpellation and integration’ (Brown, 2016, p. 4) into a competitive
labour market via a lexicon and an evolving set of welfare practices
that revolve around constructs underpinned by an obligation to work,
including capacity to work, inactivity, dependency and joblessness. In
the next section these points are explored further.
The tangled trajectory of activation and retrenchment in the
Irish social protection system: A hierarchy of welfare sacrifice
Pierson’s understanding of retrenchment is returned to here to
decipher some of the ways activation and retrenchment have evolved.
However, his dimensions of retrenchment are broadly deployed rather
than as a systematic or precise measuring exercise. A rather
‘unfaithful’ use of the framework is therefore made, as a set of cues to
situate work-first activation policy within the wider landscape of
welfare retrenchment and how, in tandem, they chart a course of
‘sacrificial citizenship’. There is a tension perhaps in drawing on
Pierson’s conceptual framework as it makes no mention of activation03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 49
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 49
or of how it might relate to retrenchment. However, as argued here, in
the context of Irish welfare reforms since the financial crisis, the roll-
out of activation, and the impact it has had on the experience of social
citizenship by recipients of welfare, cannot be fully grasped without
considering the way it has unfolded within a wider project of welfare
retrenchment. A more demanding work-first approach works
alongside a less protective social security system for working-age
adults. In broad deployment, therefore, Pierson’s first and third
dimensions are looked at together; in other words, data trends on
means-tested and social-insurance-based payments are paired with
some discussion of how programmes have changed qualitatively in
terms of rules and eligibility, and what these trends imply for different
groups claiming welfare and/or being activated. The bulk of the
discussion that follows focuses on these areas in keeping with the
extent of changes that have occurred. This is followed by some brief
discussion of how services have ventured into private types of
provision before an equally brief look at some efforts at what might be
construed as systemic retrenchment.
Shifts in the reliance on means-test benefits and changes to
benefit rules
Looking firstly at how Jobseeker’s Benefit (JB) has evolved vis-à-vis
Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA) in terms of claimant numbers, a gap has
opened between those able to claim via social insurance and those
accessing support via the means-tested process (Figure 1). Even as the
unemployment rate, in the pre-Covid context at least, returned to the
lower levels prevailing before the 2008 crisis emerged, proportionately
more unemployed people now rely on the more conditional JA
payment.1 While historically there has been a less dualistic system in
Ireland compared to many other European countries between labour
insiders and outsiders in terms of unemployment insurance and how it
compares to minimum assistance programmes, unemployment
insurance has been downgraded further since the 2008 crisis. It is more
difficult to claim because of the greater number of contributions
required, and the duration of benefit, already comparatively limited,
has been further reduced. In short, social protection for the
1 There are two dynamics at play here, policy-based change and outturn change, namely
the expiration of entitlements, regardless of policy change. Calculating the relative
balance of each is outside the scope of this paper.03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 50
50 FIONA DUKELOW
unemployed is more likely to be in the form of the insecure,
individualised, intrusive and stigmatised route of means-tested JA,
compared to the rights and entitlements, abridged as they are, of JB.
Ireland was also comparatively unusual in its pursuit of retrenchment
via three different policy settings; that is, reducing benefit levels,
reducing duration of entitlement and tightening eligibility criteria. Use
of these instruments as single measures was common across Europe in
response to crisis, but it was rare for governments to use all three. In
Borosch et al.’s (2016) comparative study, for example, all three
instruments were used only by Portugal and Ireland. However, in
Ireland a number of changes were executed before the onset of troika-
imposed conditionality (Dukelow, 2015), whereas in Portugal, after
initially improving social protection in 2009, retrenchment occurred
under the conditions imposed by the troika (Lødemel & Gubrium,
2014).
Figure 1: Jobseekers’s Allowance, Jobseeker’s Benefit and the
unemployment rate
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, and
Eurostat.
Outside of unemployment/jobseekers’ payments, when we look at
numbers on insurance-based working-age payments compared to03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 51
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 51
numbers on assistance-based working-age payments, the trend is less
distinct and subject to more fluctuation (Figure 2). However, between
2008 and 2019, as a totality, the gap between the former and the latter
widened.
Figure 2: Non-job-seeking working-age welfare recipients (insurance
and assistance)
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.
There have also been some shifts in the composition of both
insurance and assistance-based payments (data presented in two
separate Figures, 3 and 4, for legibility), which relate to changing
eligibility rules. In particular, the eligibility criteria and duration of
Illness Benefit (IB) have changed significantly so that it is now limited
to one or two years, depending on contributions paid. Prior to 2009
entitlement was indefinite. The increase in Invalidity Pension recipient
numbers, though not quite matching the drop in IB, may reflect this
change to the duration of IB (Figure 3). For the programmes with
smaller numbers of claimants, the growing number of claimants of
Partial Capacity Benefit is most notable (Figure 4), and reflects the
gradual conversion of disability into a work capacity issue, as discussed
further below.
As for assistance-based payments, there have been some
compositional changes here too. Figures 5 and 6 include the payment03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 52
52 FIONA DUKELOW
Figure 3: Non-job-seeking working-age welfare recipients
(insurance)
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.
Figure 4: Non-job-seeking working-age welfare recipients
(insurance), cont.
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 53
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 53
types with the most discernible shifts. Some correlate with policy
changes, most notably in relation to the One Parent Family Payment
(OPFP) and increasing efforts to roll out activation to lone parents.
This payment therefore saw some of the most significant change to
eligibility rules during the crisis period, because of the cut-off point
when the claimant’s youngest child reaches seven years of age (as
opposed to twenty-two if the youngest child remained in full-time
education, prior to 2014). The significant decline in the number of
OPFP claimants is partially made up by the introduction of
Jobseeker’s Transition Allowance (JST), which brings lone parents of
older children (those aged seven to thirteen) into the orbit of
activation and sanctions for non-compliance, but does not require
claimants to meet the ‘genuinely seeking full-time work’ clause of JA
(Figure 5). Other notable increases in claimant numbers can be seen
in Carer’s Allowance (CA) and even more prominently in Disability
Allowance (DA). Some of the increase in CA claimants maps on to the
rise in numbers of people claiming DA where recipients are people
being cared for (Boyle, 2019) (Figure 6).
However, the rise in DA claims is the subject of much policy
concern in its own right, as is the activation of people with disabilities.
The latter issue partly reflects the desire on the part of people with
disabilities who rely on social protection, and for whom the risks of
poverty, exclusion and discrimination are well established, to have
access to decent training and employment opportunities. Yet it also
signals a framing of disability in economic terms as a matter of fitness
to work: government actors are ‘waking up to the fact that ... an awful
lot of people are in that grey space between being fit for work and
being unfit for work’ (government respondent cited in Vossen & van
Gestel, 2015, p. 170). This in turn is fused with concerns about the
fiscal sustainability of the growth in disability-related payments; the
fact there is a demographic increase in people with disabilities;
‘migration’ from IB and JA to disability payments; and the fact that
people with disabilities make up a significant number of the adults to
be found in ‘jobless households’ (Callaghan, 2017; Government of
Ireland, 2017). While there has been a proliferation of disability-
specific activation programmes and activation is not compulsory for
this cohort, such moves, however, do gradually change the status of
disability in the social protection system. It shifts from an eligibility for
welfare or social protection issue to an availability for work or work
capacity issue. This in turn mirrors the earlier displacement of
unemployment with job-seeking and the behavioural expectations03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 54
54 FIONA DUKELOW
attached to this recategorisation and mode of ‘making up people’
(Hacking, 2006, p. 24). Moreover, in a neoliberal political economy
environment this is embedded in a discourse of ‘neoliberal-ableism’
that evaluates disability against an ideal standard of autonomy and
self-sufficiency through work (Goodley & Lawthom, 2019; Van
Aswegen, 2020).
The decline and eventual disappearance of Pre-Retirement
Allowance is also notable, especially as complete abolition of
programmes is rare in the context of retrenchment (Starke,
forthcoming). The allowance, which allowed those aged fifty-five and
over to switch from JA and thus not be required to be available for and
genuinely seeking full-time work, was abolished for new recipients
from 2007. Since 2011 this meant that older jobseekers were also
subject to the new sanctions and penalty rates regime; however, those
aged sixty-two and over were given a reprieve from January 2014.
Behind all these recipients are large numbers of ‘qualified adults’.
They are partners of recipients and predominantly women, whom
Murphy (2018) describes as ‘invisible’, and who conventionally do not
Figure 5: Non-job-seeking working-age welfare recipients
(assistance)
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 55
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 55
Figure 6: Non-job-seeking working-age welfare recipients
(assistance), cont.
Source: Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.
make welfare claims in their own right, because of the continued
legacies of Ireland’s male breadwinner tradition and the lack of
individualisation in practice. The overall number of working-age
qualified adults is quite sensitive to labour market trends and so it
mirrors the recent arc in job-seeking claimants: rising from 78,577 in
2008 to a peak of 133,158 in 2014 and falling back again to 71,133 by
2019.2 And while job-seeking-related qualified adults are declining in
number, this is offset somewhat by a rise in qualified adult claims
associated with the rise in disability-related claims. Folded into
discussions about ‘economically inactive’ adults, joblessness and
jobless households, ‘qualified adults’ are becoming increasingly visible
as a policy problem in need of an activation solution, from their
inclusion in 2006 in discussions in Government Discussion Paper:
Proposals for Supporting Lone Parents (Department of Social and
Family Affairs, 2006) about reform of OPFP through to Pathways to
2 This excludes any partners of recipients of the various state pensions who may be of
working age.03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 56
56 FIONA DUKELOW
Work: Action Plan for Jobless Households (Government of Ireland,
2017). Together with people with disabilities, and also increasingly
carers, they are interpolated in terms of their potential as labour
supply in tight labour market conditions (Government of Ireland,
2017). Problems with the fact that activation services do not have
direct contact with this cohort because of their indirect/dependent
claim status mean that reforms are still primarily at proposal stage for
this cohort, as outlined in Pathways to Work: Action Plan for Jobless
Households (Government of Ireland, 2017). If fully implemented,
these proposals will gradually absorb this cohort into job-seeking
policy and practices via a JST process, following the same model of
how OPFP has been transformed, complete with the conditionalities
associated with this transformation. It is worth noting that while
conditionality and compulsion are being stepped up in terms of their
reach (from jobseekers to lone parents, to ‘qualified adults’), there
remains a demarcation with people with disabilities. This may reflect
different dynamics of deservingness and the organisation and ability of
this sector to resist retrenchment and particularly negative reforms, in
contrast to the ‘qualified adult’ cohort, who continue to remain
‘invisible’ in this regard.
Underlying the bulk of the changes discussed so far is, in turn, the
substantial change to eligibility rules represented by the normalisation
of sanctions and penalty rates in the social protection system since
their appearance in the Social Welfare (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act
2010 and their extension in the Social Welfare and Pensions Act
(Miscellaneous Provisions) 2013. In contrast to the pre-existing
legislative code (Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005), which
provided for a nine-week disqualification period but whose use was
very rare, these more recent changes in conditionality/threat of
conditionality potentially add a more ‘everyday’ element of fear and
punitiveness in the terms of engagement between caseworkers and
claimants. Since the practice of imposing penalty rates was introduced
in 2011 (when 353 penalty rates were applied in total), the number of
people penalty rated continued to rise until 2017 (13,503) while falling
slightly since (9,878 in 2019 until 3 November), a pattern which signals
that an increasing proportion of the unemployed are being sanctioned
over time. Another dynamic not reflected in the formal statistics is the
‘hassle effect’ (Lødemel & Gubrium, 2014, p. 343) of such a regime,
where fear of sanctions serves as a work-first strategy in its own right
and pushes people off the live register and into precarious
employment. While still being described as more ‘benign’ (National03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 57
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 57
Economic and Social Council, 2018) than sanction norms in other
countries, and that is certainly the case in contrast with our more
‘illiberal’ UK neighbour (Dukelow & Kennett, 2018), in the wider
OECD context they are considered to be reaching OECD norms
(OECD, 2018). Whatever the benchmark, their introduction does
represent a significant departure in Ireland’s activation and
retrenchment trajectory.
Transfers of responsibility to the private sector
Moving on from discussion of the shifting patterns in the social
protection system vis-à-vis means-tested versus insurance-based
claims and related discussion of changes to eligibility, here discussion
turns briefly to the remaining dimension of Pierson’s (1996, p. 157)
retrenchment schema, namely ‘major transfers of responsibility to the
private sector’. However, privatisation is taken up here in a different
fashion compared to how Pierson identified it, which was payment by
private providers. In the Irish context, privatisation of services via the
introduction of JobPath in 2015 is most notable, which, as a service, is
intended to drive more ‘intensified engagement’ (Government of
Ireland, 2017) with the long-term unemployed. This was developed
under troika conditionality, in the context of a lack of public service
capacity, along with the perceived attractiveness of outsourced
services, to deliver efficient and clearly defined outcomes in the
context of Ireland’s economic crisis. Still at the end of an extended first
contract phase, JobPath represents a substantial policy departure and
is now a sizeable component of Ireland’s activation infrastructure,
having worked with 283,826 referrals by October 2020 since its
institution in 2015 (Dáil Éireann, 2020). It comprises over one-third of
personnel working in Public Employment Services (631 out of a total
of 1,717 staff) and the largest share of activation expenditure (39 per
cent) (Lavelle & Callaghan, 2018, based on 2017 data), and works on
a partial Payment-by-Results model. Besides the publicly provided
service, Intreo, other providers are also external, but are not-for-profit
and paid by grant for the cost of the service, including Local
Employment Services (LES), Job Clubs and the EmployAbility service
(together comprising 378 staff) (Lavelle & Callaghan, 2018, based on
2017 data). Following the maxim ‘if you can’t privatise it, market it
anyway’ (Dryzek, 2013, p.129), these services have also come under
the orbit of market-based tools in how public services are contracted
and governed. Competitive tendering is in the pipeline for LES and
Job Clubs. This is anticipated to have a substantial impact on how03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 58
58 FIONA DUKELOW
these services operate as local community-based and socially valued
services (Murphy et al., 2020).
Systemic retrenchment?
Finally, what of systemic retrenchment? Here focus is placed on one
medium of systemic retrenchment, namely political discourse and
narrative that potentially has a negative impact on welfare attitudes
and support for the social protection system. While there are no
sustained, overt anti-welfare narratives in mainstream political
discourse, notable influential episodes of negative welfare framing
have included the early economic crisis phase when the ‘generosity’ of
the welfare system came under the spotlight. In this case, generosity
was a word used in a subtle mix of credit claiming and blame
avoidance in political discourse for the cuts to welfare payment levels
in 2010 and 2011, and which became amplified in public and media
discourse (Dukelow & Considine, 2014). Subsequent divisive
narratives have included references to ‘people who get up early in the
morning’ used in the Fine Gael party leadership campaigning in 2017
and the relatively brief but very prominent welfare fraud campaign,
also in 2017: ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’. Both these narratives
craft stories of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and potentially cast doubt on the
legitimacy of all welfare claimants. While the specific and long-term
impact of these narratives are questions that cannot be answered
without dedicated research, some indication of the changing nature of
Irish welfare attitudes can be gleaned from two rounds of the
European Social Survey, which gathered data on welfare attitudes in
2008 and again in 2016. What is most compelling about the Irish data
is the near uniform move towards more positive attitudes to a fair and
equal society, and to the role of social protection and social services,
occurring during this period. In contrast, survey questions specifically
about the unemployed show the opposite result and demonstrate a
hardening of attitudes towards the unemployed and the level of
support they ought to receive. Table 1 demonstrates this with the
results for selected attitudes towards fairness, the role of social
benefits and social services, and towards the unemployed.
‘Sacrificial’ consequences
One of the clearest ways we know of the consequences of recent
reforms in Ireland has been through research which has evaluated03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 59
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 59
Table 1: Irish attitudes towards fairness and equality, social services
and unemployment, 2008 and 2016
2008 2016
Overall Overall Overall Overall
agreeing disagreeing agreeing disagreeing
(%) (%) (%) (%)
For fair society, differences in 62.2 20.7 66.4 14.4
standard of living should be
small
Social benefits/services place 60 22 51.5 31
too great a strain on economy
Social benefits/services make 62.9 22.6 58.4 25
people lazy
Most unemployed people do 31.1 53.5 39.6 42
not really try to find a job
Overall Overall Overall Overall
bad (%) good (%) bad (%) good (%)
Standard of living of 26.3 16.8 17.9 33.5
unemployed
Overall Overall Overall Overall
yes (%) no (%) yes (%) no (%)
Standard of living of 55 4.4 51.6 6.5
unemployed, government’s
responsibility
Source: European Social Survey, 2008 and 2016.
their impact on lone parents. This puts the ‘sacrificial’ nature of the
changes in sharp relief, with an evaluation of the reforms finding that
employment increased amongst this cohort, but so did the risk of
poverty, with lone parents being especially at risk of low-paid, part-
time jobs. In all, 48 per cent of those who lost OPFP experienced a loss
in income (Indecon, 2017). Asked about the impact of the reforms on
their well-being, 43 per cent of lone parents who participated in the
research felt their well-being had deteriorated, compared to 23 per
cent who felt it had improved. For their children, 40 per cent felt the
reforms had damaged their children’s well-being; 21 per cent felt they
had improved it. More recent analysis by the Society of St. Vincent de03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 60
60 FIONA DUKELOW
Paul (2019) found that the proportion of working lone parents in
poverty more than doubled between 2012 and 2017, rising from 8.9 per
cent to 20.8 per cent. This is much higher than the overall figure for
adults in work in Ireland (5.2 per cent in 2017, falling to 4.8 per cent
in 2018). Moreover, at this overall level, in comparative European
terms, Ireland has a relatively low level of in-work poverty.
Aside from in-work poverty, when it comes to low pay, the
‘competitive’ nature of Ireland’s economy stands out in its consistently
high incidence of low pay in the OECD and in Europe, usually ranking
in the top five countries in the OECD index. This, according to
Sweeney’s (2020) analysis, is not because Ireland has an unbalanced
economy with a predominance of low-paid sectors (such as wholesale,
retail, hospitality and some parts of the public sector); it is more
because of the intensity with which these sectors use low pay. It is to
this segment of the labour force that many welfare recipients (the low-
skilled, the long-term unemployed, lone parents and potentially
‘qualified adults’) are channelled in activation that emphasises work
first over education, training and up-skilling that meet the needs, life
situations and preferences of the unemployed. When combined with
the ‘hassle’ effect of activation, the fact that low-paid work offers very
limited progression opportunities and employees are easily
replaceable because of the low-skills nature of the work poses a risk of
cycling in and out of work and welfare (Citizen’s Information Bureau,
2019; National Economic and Social Council, 2018). Pfannebecker &
Smith (2020) identify this as ‘malemployment’, where the boundaries
between employment and unemployment are blurred and conditions
of poverty and insecurity are common to both states. The combined
effects of welfare retrenchment and activation which underpin the
Pathways to Work aim of helping to ‘ensure a supply of labour at
competitive rates’ (Government of Ireland, 2016, p. 14) therefore
shape a certain type of work first. This is, moreover, integral to a
certain type of market making in Ireland’s political economy and the
unequal shape of the Irish labour market.
Conclusion
This critical commentary has offered an analysis of the ‘violence’ of
the aims of Irish activation policy by looking at how a tougher work-
first activation regime can be situated within the wider landscape of
reform and retrenchment in the social protection system following03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 61
Sacrificial citizens? Activation and retrenchment in Ireland’s political economy 61
the 2008 financial crisis. Broadly utilising Pierson’s concepts of
programmatic and systemic retrenchment, it has situated the roll-out
of a tougher activation regime within wider shifts toward greater
reliance on means-tested benefits for the unemployed, and toward
work first, with varying degrees of compulsion, for other working-age
adults in the social protection system. Suggesting that this results in a
hierarchy of ‘welfare sacrifice’ for the sake of the competitiveness of
the Irish economy, it also looked briefly at how some of these
‘sacrifices’ have been experienced by different groups both in and out
of the labour market, and cycling between the two states. This in turn
leads to the conclusion that activation policy does not approach the
labour market as a given but is integral to how the state is involved in
market making and the unequal, competitive shape of the labour
market.
The Covid-19 pandemic has upended state–market relations in
many ways. ‘A crisis like no other’ (Georgieva, 2020), it has brought
the state back in to social and labour market policy with force,
generating a scale of welfare and work support unthinkable prior to
the crisis across European welfare states. In the short term at least,
security has trumped sacrifice, and austerity and welfare retrenchment
are notable only for their absence in the initial response. As the
pandemic evolves and brings with it enormous uncertainty, it is
anticipated to create a lengthy unemployment shock as economies
remain in a weakened state, with the low-skilled, younger people,
migrants and women particularly vulnerable (OECD, 2020), including
in Ireland (Byrne et al., 2020). This is a huge challenge for activation
services for the next phase of the Pathways to Work policy. There have
been contradictions and invidious distinctions in the ‘two-tier’
pandemic response between the ‘pandemic unemployed’ and those
already unemployed. Moreover, discourses around incentives to work
have tended to focus on the ‘generosity’ of pandemic supports over the
realities of the low-pay economy. Yet, the supportive policy responses,
not only in the form of work and unemployment supports offered but
also in the suspension of sanctions, raise significant questions. In
particular, about whether this is momentary, a part of a new round of
a ‘crisis routine’, or whether it poses the foundation for a deeper,
critical juncture and a more enabling, supportive activation and social
protection system, if the crisis is really ‘like no other’. This remains an
open question, but one which seems more potent to ask now than any
time since the 2008 financial crisis.03 Dukelow.qxp_Admin 69-2 30/04/2021 14:01 Page 62
62 FIONA DUKELOW
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the guest editors and to the anonymous reviewers for
their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper.
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