This book presents a systematic analysis of the Great Recession, austerity, and subsequent recovery in Ireland. It discusses the extent to which the Irish response to the recession led to significant changes in economic policy and in business, work, consumption, the labour market, and society.

The austerity that followed the recent economic and financial crisis in has led to impassioned debates across the social sciences and the public at large. Although Ireland was not its only victim, the depth of the interacting economic, banking and budgetary crises has meant that the level of public interest has been especially intense. Among the hotly debated questions: what is austerity? Was it necessary? What have been its consequences? One of the defining features of the debate to date has been its tendency to polarise opinion and adopt a one-dimensional perspective. This book challenges us to adopt a more nuanced approach to understandings of austerity, and by extension the path to recovery. The book brings together leading national and international experts from across the social sciences to debate this traumatic period in Ireland's economic and social development.The papers were selected from a conference at the Royal Irish Academy, peer-reviewed and rewritten with the addition of a substantial introduction and conclusion by the editors.

Offers a deeply informed diagnosis of Ireland's current socio-economic and political malaise, suggesting a political earthquake may benefit the left.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 2, University of Vienna (Institut für Europäische Integration), course: Political Economy of European Integration, language: English, abstract: In this paper I analyse the recovery plans for Ireland by the EU Commission and the Irish government, as well as the developments of the Irish economy throughout its crisis. I find that both the austerity and growth measures are of vital importance to the country's recovery and as such the same can be said for the rest of the European Union. Ireland is on its way back to a stable economy. The GDP, inflation and the current account are rising, but the country still faces challenges with unemployment and an ever increasing pile of debt. Greece and other countries affected by the crisis and now under the Troika programme, should take Ireland as an example, but the EU will have to do its part to help these countries with their growth programmes, instead of persisting on strict austerity measures alone.

A revealing look at austerity measures that succeed—and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging economic issues, three leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt, shows that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.

This monograph examines the ways in which discourses on the public sector were articulated in the print media during the 2011 financial crisis in the Irish, UK and European news media. It finds that coverage of the public sector was ideological, portraying public sector workers as overpaid, inefficient, and sheltered from the worst of the crisis. These explanations perpetuated the view that there was a need for austerity through cutbacks to public services and public sector pay. The central thesis is that these representations must be understood as being part of the complex organisational culture of the newsroom. Additional themes explored in the book include but are not limited to: Media ownership concentration and journalistic self-censorship. The marketisation of news and its impact on journalistic practice. The casualisation of the newsroom. The fourth estate function of the media. The discourse of austerity. Neoliberalism as a dominant ideology. Reflexivity in the newsroom. The crisis of credibility in journalism. Media portrayals of The “Looney” Left versus the “Reasonable” Right.

Ireland has been marketed as the poster boy of EU austerity. EU elites and neoliberal commentators claim that the country's ability to suffer economic pain will attract investors and generate a recovery. In Austerity Ireland, Kieran Allen challenges this official narrative and argues that the Irish state's response to the crash has primarily been designed to protect economic privilege. The resulting austerity has been a failure and is likely to produce a decade of hardship. The book offers a deeply informed diagnosis of Ireland's current socio-economic and political malaise, suggesting that a political earthquake is underway which may benefit the left. Austerity Ireland is essential reading for students of Irish politics and economics, as well as those interested in the politics of austerity and the eurozone crisis.

The global financial crisis has had a seismic impact upon the wealth of nations. But we have little sense of how it affects one of the most fundamental issues of all: our physical and mental health. This highly significant new book, based on the authors' own groundbreaking research, looks at the daily lives of people affected by financial crisis, from the Great Depression of the 1930s, to post-communist Russia, to the US foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s. Why, it asks, did Sweden experience a fall in suicides during its banking crisis? What triggered a mosquito-borne epidemic in California in 2007? What caused 10 million Russian men to 'disappear' in the 1990s? Why is Greece experiencing rocketing HIV rates? And how did the health of Americans actually improve during the catastrophic crisis of the 1930s? The conclusions it draws are both surprising and compelling: remarkably, when faced with similar crises, the health of some societies - like Iceland - improves, while that of others, such as Greece, deteriorates. Even amid the worst economic disasters, negative public health effects are not inevitable: it's how communities respond to challenges of debt and market turmoil that counts. The Body Economic puts forward a radical proposition. Austerity, it argues, is seriously bad for your health. We can prevent financial crises from becoming epidemics, but to do so, we must acknowledge what the hard data tells us: that, throughout history, there is a causal link between the strength of a community's health and its social protection systems. Now and for generations to come, our commitment to the building of fairer, more equal societies will determine the health of our body economic.

One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.