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The performance of the Irish economy stands out across western economies over the past two decades as the later years of its "Celtic Tiger" phase gave way to a sharp and extremely large economic downturn between 2008 and 2012. This severe recession has been followed by a Lazarus-style economic recovery in recent years. This paper examines the role played by the credit-driven housing net worth channel in the path that Irish economic performance has taken between 2002 and 2019 by specific reference to developments in the domestic labour market. We find a significant positive relationship between housing net worth and employment growth in Ireland, manifesting itself through the non-traded sector of the economy between 2007 and 2012. This followed the emergence and then bursting of a substantial credit-fuelled housing market bubble in the Irish residential property market. Our analysis indicates no evident link between economic activity and a credit-driven housing net worth channel in recent years. This may reflect market and regulatory responses to the banking crisis-led recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of recent economic and financial crisis in Europe, questions about the power of the core executive to control fiscal outcomes are more important than ever. Why are some governments more effective in controlling spending while others fall prey to excessive overspending by individual cabinet ministers? We approach this question by lifting the veil of collective cabinet responsibility and focusing on intra-cabinet decision-making around budgetary allocation. Using the contributions of individual cabinet members during budget debates in Ireland, we estimate their positions on a latent dimension that represents their relative levels of support or opposition to the cabinet leadership. We find some evidence that ministers who are close to the finance minister receive a larger budget share, but under worsening macro-economic conditions closeness to the prime minister is a better predictor for budget allocations. Our results highlight potential fragility of the fiscal authority delegation mechanism in adverse economic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the impact of the 2008–10 financial crisis and the UK's 2016 Brexit decision as a 'dual crisis' which impacted significantly on Irish foreign policy over the past decade. It argues that though Ireland's foreign policy has remained remarkably consistent over time, the 'dual crisis' placed considerable pressure on state capacity and institutional resources. Ireland's financial implosion carried with it potentially catastrophic consequences for the Eurozone and thus successive governments placed a particular priority on restoring Ireland's tarnished reputation within the European Union. At the same time, Irish foreign policy was 'rebooted' to take on a more muscular promotion of Irish economic interests across the globe. Brexit constituted an existential threat to the island of Ireland, and, in particular the peace process marked by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The Brexit crisis set in train a determined effort by Irish policy-makers to both confirm the EU as Ireland's 'geopolitical centre of gravity' and re-position the country within the Union, as the need for new allies and coalition partners became evident following the United Kingdom's planned departure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals in Ireland are among the most enthusiastic supporters of European integration since European Union (EU) accession in 1973, and are often labelled 'good Europeans with a pro-integrationist attitude'. The 2008 financial crisis is regarded as a turning point in Ireland's relationship with the EU as a result of the economic downturn and the widening of economic disparities experienced by individuals. Meanwhile, Brexit poses significant and specific challenges to Ireland and has the capacity to impact Irish attitudes towards the EU. Using a combination of Standard Eurobarometer data from 2007 to 2018 and a variety of opinion polling data, this paper examines how the economic crisis and Brexit have shaped Irish attitudes towards the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of the access provided to Management Information System (MIS) data to subject librarians in the library of University College Dublin (UCD) during a print resource cancellation project. Challenges the library faced during the cancellation of resources are identified, such as managing the perception of library services, promoting alternative resources with existing materials, and the identification of the types of information to provide users.

After the financial collapse of 2008, Ireland imposed a program of fiscal consolidation that was designed to address the debt concerns of the nation. The implementation of austerity measures became the inverse to the high-flying years of the Celtic Tiger. Mike McCormack's Solar Bones and Mary Morrissy's Prosperity Drive represent examples of post-austerity literature in how they engage with ideas of austerity as an inverted capitalist narrative of success. Their books examine a post-austerity Ireland where the influence of global capitalism has resulted in a disruption of local communities. Both McCormack and Morrissy critique post-austerity Ireland to show the psychological, emotional, and human cost ofthe nation's transformation into a post-austerity country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent did the resurgence of austerity in the post-2008 context reverse or indelibly alter established directions and thinking in public sector economic management? Historicising recent bouts of austerity in Ireland, Canada, Spain and Denmark, this article concludes that the implications of austerity are diverse but the direction is uniform: despite clear varieties, strikingly similar trajectories emerge. Given that patterns of public asset privatisation and public sector marketisation hold both before and beyond 2008, austerity may be considered an epiphenomenal feature in the orientation of public asset management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we take as a case study a developed country that both experienced one of the highest sustained growth periods in recent decades, but also had one of the largest economic declines during the recent crisis period; Ireland. In particular, given the availability of data and the period from the peak before the economic crisis and the lowest point in the crisis, we focus on the period around the boom 2007-2012. We find that inequality in terms of disposable income decreased over the period, with an increase in the redistributive effect of the tax-benefit system offsetting a rise in market income inequality. We utilise the Fields regression decomposition to understand the impact of demographic, labour market and other drivers. We find that the explanatory power of the Fields regressions fell over time, reflecting the asymmetric shock induced by the economic crisis. Labour market drivers had the largest impact on the level of income inequality over the period, accounting for 64 per cent of variability in 2007, but rising to 75 per cent in 2012. Educational attainment is positively associated with inequality. However, the effect greatly diminished between 2007 and 2012. Changes in the demographic structure and changes in the level and distribution of market incomes increased inequality. We also decomposed the change in inequality into price and quantity effects that result from a change in the return and composition respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on the economic crisis in Ireland, also known as the Celtic Tiger Crash, and their causes and consequences. Topics include the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger from 1990 to 2008, the estimated recovery of the Irish economy, and the crisis of global neoliberalism in the country.

The article focuses on the political condition in Ireland following the Great Recession from 2008 to 2016. Topics include the impact of the recession to the economy in the country and in British and European economies, the main development in Irish politics since the global financial crises, and the key factors that will determine the future political stability in the area.

This paper reviews Ireland's official development assistance (ODA) programme in 2016. It begins with an overview of the global context for development and aid last year, which was a turbulent one in terms of political and economic events. Forecasts of global growth and trade in 2017 and 2018 are insipid. The results of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US pose challenges for global political and economic policies and in the case of the former, particular challenges for Ireland. A number of important conferences took place in 2016, the most important of which was the World Humanitarian Summit held in Istanbul in May, preparations for which had been preceded by an Irish Humanitarian Summit held in Dublin in July 2015. In 2016, total ODA flows from DAC donors reached a peak of US$142.6 billion or 0.32% of their combined gross national income (GNI). This represented a rise of 8.9% compared with 2015 after adjusting for exchange rates and inflation. In euro terms, Irish ODA amounted to €723.7 million in 2016, a rise of over €76 million compared with 2015 and representing 0.33 % of GNI. The paper provides data on total Irish ODA for selected years since 1996 and a breakdown and analysis of bilateral aid expenditures for 2014, 2015 and 2016 by sector, channel of delivery and aid modality. The analysis of the multilateral programme includes data and comments on Ireland's work through the United Nations, the IFIs and the EU. Two notable features about the Irish official aid programme that are becoming increasingly evident from analysis of the data are the apparently inexorable shift from the bilateral side to the multilateral side of the programme and the concomitant shift toward humanitarian aid at the expense of long-term development assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Drawing on the international literature on pattern bargaining in Europe and other countries, the article examines the recent advent of pattern bargaining in Irish industrial relations. Qualitative and quantitative data are deployed to explore the genesis, features, institutional and economic context and future of pattern bargaining in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case of Ireland provides an example of a long-term critical reflection on the nature of democracy that is not linked to social movements. Instead it is the result of an interplay between social science research, mass media, and parliamentary debate, all of which employ the notion of clientelism. The structural feature on which the respective critique focuses is the peculiar relationship between public representatives and voters in Ireland. It is strongly based in constituency service and individual brokerage and thus contradicts universalistic expectations towards modern politics. The article starts with a justification of the choice of the case and the theoretical framework, i.e. the sociology of critical capacity proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot. It then introduces records of parliamentary debates and newspaper articles as the empirical material and qualitative content analysis as the main method of analysis. Subsequent sections reconstruct the dynamics of the critical reflection over a thirty-year period and highlight significant patterns of critique and justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of gentrification during the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger as an investment opportunity that sparked construction and development. Topics include the influence of global capitalism resulting to gentrification of space that creates commodities rather than communities, the cultural effects of gentrification and the material and economic damages of the property collapse, as well as the depiction of the effects of gentrification by authors Anne Haverty and Donal Ryan.

This paper explores developments in the labour force participation rate in Ireland. Given the important role of labour supply in explaining Irish economic growth, we aim to identify the relative influence of structural and cyclical factors in the recent dynamics of Irish labour force participation. Using a number of empirical approaches our results highlight the role of age, nationality and gender on the participation rate. We also find that the recent decline in female participation is entirely a response to the stage in the economic cycle given the weaker labour market, whereas the fall in male and overall participation also reflects the influence of some structural factors. Accordingly a rise in the participation rate is to be expected in the near term as the economic recovery continues, and current measures of slack in the economy should account for this. Combining our results and various population projection scenarios, we show that policy actions to increase female participation may not in and of themselves yield significant changes in the aggregate trend participation rate over the medium term owing to the stronger influence of the falling male trend. Higher immigration is the most effective way of offsetting the expected decline in trend participation out to 2025. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dramatic change in economic conditions in Ireland over the last ten years provides an opportunity to examine the impact of large macroeconomic shocks on inequality. We analyse wage inequality in Ireland, from the height of an economic boom, through a very deep recession, to the start of a recovery. In keeping with previous work we find that the dispersion in wages increased towards the height of the boom, driven largely by rising returns to skill. However the economic crisis of 2008-2013 was accompanied by a significant reduction in wage dispersion. Although the improving characteristics of the workforce increased wages for all workers over this period, this was offset by falling returns to these skills. Only workers in the lowest decile were unaffected by declining returns, resulting in a reduction in wage inequality during the recession. Our analysis highlights the important role played by the National Minimum Wage in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses responses to supply and demand shocks in PIIGS countries. We compare the results obtained for PIIGS with those of Germany and the USA, and also with those of France, which despite its government's efforts demonstrate relatively poor recent economic performance. The main objective of this paper is to establish whether it is still reasonable to consider PIIGS as a group apart. Our methodological strategy is based on the Okun Law (OL) which is incorporated in a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model with Blanchard-Quah (BQ) restrictions. We address two drawbacks that usually present in the OL: the interdependency problem and the non-stationarity problem. By using a non-parametric representation of OL, we identify the heterogeneity between countries. We build stable VAR models for each of the economies and use the BQ SVAR impulses to analyse the importance of contemporary and long-run effects of supply and demand shocks. The main conclusion of this paper is that it does not make any sense today to identify PIIGS as a separate group. Additionally, a country that stands out from our analysis is France. The question can thus be posed that if "PIIGS" signifies "countries with poor economic performances" then should not France also belong to this group? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Committee on Industrial Organisation was established in the early 1960s to evaluate the level of preparedness of Irish industry for the imminent dismantling of the country's protectionist trade barriers. The Committee's sectoral reports list the 900 or so manufacturing firms that it surveyed and that together accounted for more than half of Irish manufacturing employment. From a range of archival sources, this article identifies the nationality of ownership of most of these firms, alongside their date of establishment and level of employment in 1960. Industrial grants data are used to strip out export-oriented businesses that began to arrive in the 1950s. This makes it possible to estimate the employment share and sectoral presence of tariff-jumping foreign firms. The latter is analysed through the lens of modern perspectives on foreign direct investment. The article also enhances our understanding of the interest-group politics of the trade liberalization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the role of the planning system in the overproduction of development during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger needs to be analysed as instructive of contemporary neo-liberal transformations of strategic spatial planning. Leaning on a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the genealogy of modern Irish planning practice is explored to elucidate how neo-liberal rationalities became embedded in institutional norms through consensus-driven partnership governance. The central premise is that the turn to ‘strategic spatial planning’, particularly with the publication of the National Spatial Strategy in 2002, was usefully exploited to mask the spatial politics of the ever-increasing need for the state to facilitate capital switching into built environment formation in order to maintain conditions of high economic growth. Using the empirical case study of housing development in the ‘Upper Shannon’ region and large-scale commercial development in County Meath, it is argued that this contributed to a destabilization of the planning system and an abandonment of basic planning principles. The paper concludes that, in the context of the new and deeply uneven economic geography of post-crisis Ireland, there is an urgent need for a repoliticized critique of normative interpretations of strategic spatial planning practice in order for more progressive practices to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Credit rating agencies, through close relationships with (elite) news-media, hold a strong position in the specialist mediated discourse of contemporary financial capitalism that circulates narrowly among governmental, regulatory and corporate actors. Additionally, by issuing ratings on countries’ creditworthiness, the agencies hold the discursive power to affect, positively or negatively, the economic well-being of states and their citizens. Such was the case during Ireland's economic crisis, 2008–2013, when the world's three main rating agencies—Moody's, Fitch, and Standard and Poor's—progressively downgraded the country's sovereign rating. This study, through the lens of the watchdog and informed-citizenry functions of the Irish print-media, examines how the agencies were positioned in Irish news-discourse during this period. It evaluates the print-media's routine level of critical reflection on the agencies’ role in global financial markets and their actual or potential influence on Ireland's economic condition. Further, it interrogates the degree to which news coverage of rating actions was constructed within a closed network of elite institutional discourse (financial, political and regulatory). The study suggests that, even in the midst of a national and global financial crisis, the Irish print-media tended to reproduce the perceived legitimacy, authority and relevance of the rating agencies as elite institutional actors, and unproblematically accept the structures, mechanisms and values of the wider “market” system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary capitalism in Ireland took off in the late 1950s and affirmed itself as an inward investment-focused model of development. With enterprise development at the core of the policy (as a way of developing the economy and society and ending emigration), all other policy domains – financial, governance, industrial relations, welfare and education – became subservient to the ‘industrialization-by-invitation’ strategy. This article examines and characterizes the Irish model of development, using the lens of the varieties of capitalism literature (VoC) as a starting point. The article also examines whether a stage theory of capitalism perspective can capture changes which the VoC perspective might obscure. The collapse of the Irish banking system since 2008 and the subsequent recession raises major challenges for Ireland’s variety of capitalism and may represent a critical juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the puzzle of why Ireland has proved so open to immigration. It compares responses to immigrants in the Republic of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era and during the post-2008 economic crisis and finds no evidence of a political backlash during the latter period even though opinion polls suggest that opposition to immigration had increased and other evidence suggested that there had been an increase in racist incidents within Irish society. Nor did the resumption of large-scale emigration trigger political hostility to immigrants. The outcome of the 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which removed a constitutional right to Irish citizenship to the Irish-born children of immigrants, suggested that that nationalism still matters hugely and a latent tendency towards ethnic chauvinism amongst the host population. Yet, a decade after the 2004 Referendum it looked as if the old mono-ethnic sense conception of the Irish nation had been disrupted, at least a little bit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The news-media has been identified as an influence on donor nations’ overseas aid allocations, acting as a site where decisions are justified to ‘domestic constituencies’ and through which resistance is mobilised. Mediated pressures on aid allocations amplified between 2008 and 2011 in three donor countries experiencing domestic economic difficulties: Ireland, the UK and the US. This study suggests that each country’s print-media positioned the macro resourcing of aid primarily as an inward concern, neglected recipient country needs, and made weak connections to international policy frameworks to benchmark, contextualise and rationalise aid allocations. The research suggests that the explanatory limitations of the countries’ news-models in communicating the processes and rationales underpinning macro aid resourcing may be a factor in sustaining a knowledge and legitimacy deficit among domestic publics for international aid agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]