Discuss the emergence of welfare within Irish society
Barry Gilheany ©
This essay analyses the development of the welfare
state in the Republic of Ireland. It
looks at the piecemeal development of welfare policies in the Republic and at
the main actors within the Irish welfare ‘field’ conceptualised by Pierre
Bourdieu. It is argued that the
exceptionalism of the Irish welfare system is best understood by reference to
Bourdieu’s model.
Until the middle of the 19th century no
state income maintenance existed in Ireland.
. The concept of outdoor relief
was introduced to Ireland for the first time under the Poor Relief (Ireland)
Act 1847 which tried to deal with the hordes of desperate landless labourers
seeking to enter workhouses as a result of the Great Famine (Rehill and Mills,
2005).
After independence in 1922, Ireland did not adopt the
Beveridge model of the welfare state introduced in the UK and during the early
years of the UK welfare state the paucity of income maintenance provision in
Ireland in contrast to the generous UK provisions was often commented
upon. Arguable this situation has been
reversed since the 1990s as many mainstream schemes in Ireland are now more
generous than their UK analogues (Rehill and Mills, pp.9-10).
The following are distinctive features of the Irish
income maintenance system: it is contingency-based
as entitlements depend on the contingency experienced by a claimant (e.g.
unemployment, old age, illness) with the exception of the needs based Supplementary
Welfare Allowance Scheme; payments based on contributions to the Social Insurance Fund by both employers
and employees; means-tested social assistance
payments for a variety of schemes; payments in kind e.g. Cheap Footwear Scheme and free electricity and virtually
all schemes are entitlement based with the exception of the Supplementary
Welfare Allowance which has large areas of discretion (Rehill and Mills,
pp.11-13).
Welfare policy proceeded in a largely inconsistent and
ad hoc fashion in Ireland. For example
the report of the Commission on Social Welfare in 1986 found that there were 36
different child dependent rates in the system.
It recommended a standard basic rate of payment be made to all recipients
and concluded that although social welfare payments were an important part of
the redistributive process, they could not be considered in isolation from the
tax system that finances them (Rehill and Mills, p.15).
More recent initiatives[1] have sought to address
unemployment and poverty traps through back-to-work schemes which allow
participants to retain most of their benefits and have proposed the
benchmarking and indexation of social welfare payments to improvements in the
general standard of living and individualization of welfare payments whereby
each partner would receive their own payment rather than on being a dependent
(usually on a male breadwinner) (Rehill and Mills, pp.20-28).
The significance of the Irish
welfare system, as a case in comparative studies, rests mainly in its counterpoint
value. The old version of Ireland as a
semiperipheral country is outdated as its welfare system has moved closer to
that of Northern European countries.
Peillon defines it as ‘a case study of the welfare mix: of the way the
state, market mechanism, voluntary organisations and the informal sector are
combined. The Irish social security system is one of the most centralized in
Europe, along with a loose welfare mix in the provision of many social
services: the state pays the costs of such services such as education and health
but enjoys very little control over the way that services are delivered
(Peillon, 2001).
Peillon uses the concept of welfare field,
loosely derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu[2] to fit welfare
institutions within Irish society and to account for their internal logic. For Bourdieu a field refers to a particular
domain of activity or structures of domination in which a struggle takes
place. The issue at the core of the
struggle relates, within each field, to the generation and distribution of a
type of resource which Bourdieu calls capital (Peillon, p.25). The structure of
a field corresponds to the distribution of capital whose possession enhances
the chances of appropriating the capital that forms the stake in the field
(Peillon, p.30).
The welfare system is not solely
a direct relationship between administrative agencies and clients. It forms a mix of not only the state but also
market mechanisms and many agencies within the civil society. The welfare field thus extends beyond the
bureaucratic field, with which it nevertheless overlaps (Peillon, p.28). Within the welfare field, welfare recipients’
position is defined by the distribution of the existing capital and by access
to the capital that social agents may seek to accumulate. However lack of capital turns them into
passive objects of welfare and the experience of such powerlessness may cause a
habitus, a matrix that routinely generates the practice of welfare clients
(Peillon, p.33).
The welfare field is composed of
many subfields of different policy areas (health, education, social security
etc.) characterised by different structures, different habitus and possibly
different stakes. Within the same income
maintenance scheme, some social policy programmes are based on contributory or
insurance principles and others on means testing (Peillon, p.34).
Having sketched out the typical
structure of the welfare field, three major actors in the Irish field are now
examined – the state, Catholic Church and feminism
The state represents a central
player in the Irish welfare field (Peillon, p.40) but the role it plays
diverges sharply from that played by the state in other Western European
welfare systems. Historically Ireland
has not relied on local authorities to deliver welfare benefits. Most critically, the central state wields
very close administrative control over the county councils ;( Peillon, p.42). As the welfare system grew, it did not
increase its reliance on local government.
The central government retained a close control over the various social
insurance schemes. However this
centralised mode of state operation did not correspond to another major element
of western welfare systems: their management. The state did not actually run
social services but paid for them with control residing with selected private
organisations, most notably the Catholic Church (Peillon, p.44).
For almost a century and a half
after the Great Famine, it could be said with confidence that the Church
exercised a moral monopoly[3] over Irish discourse and
practice. It controlled the delivery of
much of Ireland’s education and health services and exercised coercive moral
authority over individual behaviour especially in the areas of human sexuality
and women’s reproductive rights. More
recently, it has successfully presented itself as a voice for the poor and
socially excluded. In Bourdieu’s
framework, the Church generates and control religious capital. The acquisition of social capital (being well
known and connected) depended greatly on the ownership of religious capital. Catholic habitus or social reproduction of
Catholic power was generated by the institutional control of schools and
hospitals, provision of personal social services and the policing of religious
adherence through attendance at Mass.
The legitimacy of the institutional Church has probably, of course, been
terminally undermined by revelations of the extent of physical and sexual abuse
of children perpetrated by clerics and, relatedly, an almost exponential
decline in vocations.
Welfare issues have been central
in women’s movement activity and its focus on the familist ideological
construction of the Irish welfare system with its division of family labour
between the breadwinner husband and the caregiver wife. These gendered roles were formally written
into the 1937 Constitution which proclaimed that the state is meant to ensure
that mothers are not obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the
neglect of their duties in the home[4]. The Irish women’s movement originally
mobilised in the early 1970s around five demands: equal pay, equality before
the law, equal education, legalisation of contraception and justice for
deserted wives, unmarried mothers and widows[5]. In the following three decades women’s
activism was centred in the main on reproductive issues; around the
availability of birth control devices and the constitutional prohibition on
abortion. Elements within the feminist
movement veered towards self-help and single-issue groups such as Women’s Aid,
Rape Crisis Centre, Cherish (for single mothers) and Well Women Centre. Out of these initiatives developed a shadow
welfare system whereby women’s groups identified services not delivered by the
state and simply assumed responsibility for them. They then turned to the state to secure
funding in the form of discretionary subsidies from ministerial departments.
But tension persisted between the need for state funding and the desire of
these groups to retain their ethos over service provision.
However the main gains for
women’s financial welfare came from outside Ireland principally the EU
Directive in 1978 on the equal treatment of men and women in matters of social
security[6]. Prior to its implementation married women
received lower rates of social welfare payments and were mostly excluded from
claiming unemployment assistance (Rehill and Mills, p.11). It took the Irish government fifteen years in
total to fully implement this directive.
Thus in the welfare field, the
feminist movement relied, like trade unions, on its power (political) capital
which it deployed to maximise economic capital, by securing state funding of
women’s agencies, by recasting the way in which benefits are distributed and
gaining more generous benefits. The
limited power (control) capital in the form of the control that women’s agencies
exercise over the delivery of some services represents another resource for
them (Peillon, p.96).
This essay has shown that the
Irish welfare system produces its own sets of clientele around the access to,
and the level of, welfare benefits and services. Income maintenance programmes remain highly
centralised. But a great deal of
autonomy is permitted to a spectrum of voluntary agencies (religious and
women’s groups are cases in point) in the running of education and health
services, but not to local authorities. Bourdieu’s concept of welfare fields is a good
explanatory tool for the exceptionalism of Irish welfare services.
Bibliography
Peillon, M., 2001 Welfare in Ireland. Actors, Resources, and Strategies,
Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers
. Rehill, P. and Mills, F. Income Maintenance pp.7-29) in Quin, S.,
Kennedy, P., Matthews, A. and Kiely, G (2005) Contemporary Irish Social Policy Second Edition
[1] Report of the Expert
Working Group on the Integration of the Tax and Social Welfare Systems in 1996;
Social Welfare Benchmarking and Indexation Working Group established in 2000
and Building and Inclusive Society: National
Anti-Poverty/Social Inclusion published in February 2002 which set out an
Action Plan for 2002-2007 (Department of the Taoiseach, 2002).
[2] Bourdieu, P (1990) In other
words. Essays towards a reflexive
sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press; (1993) Sociology in Question. London: Sage; (1996) The rules of art. Genesis and structure of the literary field.
Cambridge: Polity Press
[4] Conroy Jackson, P. (1993); “Managing the mothers: The case of
Ireland.” In Lewis, J (ed.) Women and
social policies in Europe. Work, family
and the state (72-92). Aldershot: Edward Elgar
[5] Mahon, E. (1987) “Women’s rights and Catholicism in Ireland.” New Left Review 166: 53-77 p.63
[6] Council Directive 19.12.1978, 79/7/EC)
No comments:
Post a Comment