Abstract
In this chapter, Féilim Ó hAdhmaill argues that responses to the global economic crisis which emerged in 2008 reflected a dominant ideological discourse, with ‘austerity’ being a tool in a wider agenda to reassert neoliberalist thinking in the global economy and welfare provision in the richer countries. In Ireland, North and South, however, the experience of and the responses to the crisis and ‘austerity’ were different, reflecting different social, economic, and political contexts and influences, as well as different levels of democratic control. Ó hAdhmaill, outlines some of these differences and argues that while democratic control in smaller jurisdictions may be limited by the ‘real rulers’ of the world, global capital, people still have ‘agency’ and do not have to be mere passive observers of unfolding events.
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Notes
- 1.
Terminology is controversial on the island of Ireland. Nationalists usually refer to ‘the North’ and ‘the South’, for example, reflecting their desire for unification. Unionists who want to maintain separation usually use the official constitutional terms for those entities, ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Ireland’, although ‘Ireland’ is also the name of the island. In this chapter, the terms ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Irish state’ will be used interchangeably with ‘North’ and ‘South’, to distinguish between the two entities (and the island) with no intention of insult to any tradition.
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Ó’hAdhmaill, F. (2016). Ireland and Crisis: One Island, Two Different Experiences. In: Murphy, M., Dukelow, F. (eds) The Irish Welfare State in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57138-0_13
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