Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Publication
    Cutback management in Ireland in the wake of the financial crisis
    (Routledge, 2017-06-16) ;
    Ireland was one of the European states most severely affected by the financial crisis. A number of official reports into the causes of that crisis (Regling and Watson 2010; Honohan 2010; Nyberg 2011; Independent Review Panel 2011, Houses of the Oireachtas 2016) have pointed to a combination of domestic contributing factors, including weak regulation of financial institutions, weak state capacity and pro-cyclical fiscal policies adopted by successive governments from the late 1990s. The crisis resulted in one of the world’s largest ever state-backed bank guarantees and a subsequent ‘bailout’ loan from the Troika of the IMF, EU and ECB in late 2010. Also as a consequence of this crisis, the 2008-15 period was defined by an unprecedented series of cutbacks in the Irish public service, as part of a broader strategy to reassert control of the state’s finances.
      274
  • Publication
    The Irish Experience
    (Birlinn Books, 2013-06)
      192
  • Publication
    Governance and State Structures
    (Oxford University Press, 2012-03-29)
    ‘Governance’ denotes the various ways in which economic and social coordination is secured to implement rules and to produce collective goods. As this involves actors engaging within institutional contexts, it has a structural as well as an actor-centred dimension. State structures matter for analysis of governance because government itself matters. The analysis of governance in this sense converges wi th core preoccupations of comparative political economy, involving engagement between organized interests in a specific domestic and international institutional context. This chapter takes a more selective approach and focuses specifically on the significance of state structures for explaining cross-national variations in processes of securing coordination and implementing rules within the domestic political context , where the underlying concern is with the provision of collective goods in the form of stable administrative systems and effective government.
      417
  • Publication
    The politics of fiscal effort in Ireland and Spain: market credibility versus political legitimacy
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014-02) ;
    Austerity measures in response to Eurozone crisis have tended to be planned and implemented as if only the technical parameters of budget management mattered. But policies that impose budgetary hardships on citizens go right to the heart of voter expectations about what it is both appropriate and acceptable for governments to do. Pro-cyclical measures that worsen an already difficult situation in a recession run counter to deep-seated norms and expectations in European countries, built up over decades of democratic governance, whereby governments are expected to provide offsetting protection for their citizens against the vicissitudes of the market. Moreover, if austerity measures are viewed as externally imposed by international authorities, new kinds of challenges to political legitimacy are likely to arise. While Greece is commonly seen as a critical test case, this chapter explores these issues through the contrasting experiences of Spain and Ireland.
      152
  • Publication
    Austerity in the European periphery - the Irish experience
    Ireland has come to be seen as an exemplary case of the successful practice of austerity, both economically and politically. But these inferences would be misleading. The real story about fiscal adjustments in Ireland is more problematic, the reasons for recovery are more complex, and the political consequences are a good deal more nuanced. This paper sets the Irish experience alongside that of the other Eurozone periphery countries. It argues that these countries' recovery prospects depend on the EU economic policy framework, but that Ireland's connections to non-Eurozone economies also shape its growth prospects. Political stability is problematic in all the periphery countries, with the rise of challenger parties articulating values and priorities that may be difficult to accommodate within the current European policy regime. This is connected to a wider problem of the decay of older political identities and loyalties and the emergence of a new legitimation gap for EU member states.
      292
  • Publication
    Ireland: Hubris and nemesis
    Ireland has had one of the most catastrophic experiences of financial crisis in the developed world, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. Unlike the US or Britain though, Ireland’s enormous banking exposure was almost entirely related to property speculation and to the unchecked domestic housing bubble of the preceding ten years. This paper analyses the conditions that led to the crisis, taking account of patterns of corporate governance, regulatory institutions and practices, and the linkages between the banking sector and the political system.
      245
  • Publication
    Repeating History: Fiscal Squeeze in Two Recessions in Ireland
    (Oxford University Press, 2014-10)
    Ireland has been taken as an exemplary case of fiscal adjustment, not once, but twice, in its recent history: firstly in the late 1980s, more recently in the implementation of a sharply contractionary policy mix after the crisis of 2008, underpinned by the terms of the international loan agreement negotiated in November 2010. History has in a sense repeated itself, first as tragedy, we might say, and then as tragedy again. In both cases, Ireland attracted international plaudits for the determined way in which it implemented fiscal consolidation measures. Indeed, since the experiences of the 1980s were followed by a return to growth within a few years, Ireland was one of the key cases on which the argument for 'expansionary fiscal contraction' was made. The lessons from Ireland have therefore played an important role in shaping international conventional wisdom in the post-2008 period.
      521
  • Publication
    Tracking the state in a liberal economy
    (Oxford University Press, 2017-03)
    After 2008, many commentators anticipated that the effects of the global economic crisis would bring about a sea-change in the terms of political debate about the role of the state in economic and social policy. Neo-liberal ideas that financial markets were self-regulating and that minimal state intervention was both necessary and sufficient to facilitate growth had, it seemed, been put to the toughest test possible, and found sorely wanting. How could a whole cluster of ideas and policy priorities prove resilient to the effects of the crisis that, to their proponents, should not have happened?
      562