The welfare debate has regressed by generations

Iain Duncan Smith’s plan to restrict child benefit to the first two for new claimants is compared in the Independent to  China’s one child policy. My own comparison is much closer to home. In my 1950s childhood it was commonplace to hear lots of Prod grumbling about  payments to  all those  big Catholic families – “breeding like rabbits, they won’t have the Crown but they want the half crown”  etc. Even as child this  struck me as a futile argument. …

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On the advantages of a ‘social investment welfare state’…

Here’s a nicely topical post from Niamh Hardiman who is spending a semester in North Carolina at the moment… In it she talks about the the idea of the ‘social investment welfare state’, which may have implications for Ireland as it struggles not simply with a debt problem, but a widening gap in income levels and a potential deadening of social mobility levels we’ve seen in the UK: New books (1) by Nathalie Morel, Bruno Palier, and Joakim Palme and by Anton Hemerijck …

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An encomium to the British (Welfare State)…

And who better to deliver it on the day that’s in it than Fintan O’Toole… If, in the period between 1945 and 1979, you wanted to understand the difference between ideology and human realities, the question to ask was: what’s the difference between England and Ireland? In the realm of rhetoric and abstraction, the answer was to be found in endless discourses about history, religion, victimhood and oppression, the Empire and the Four Green Fields. But for those who grew …

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Does the South now have a better welfare state than the North?

Growing up as a Northern Irish and British boy in the 1950s and 1960s, it was an article of faith that the wealthy United Kingdom had the best welfare state in the world and the Republic of Ireland was a backward and impoverished place that couldn’t afford such a socially advanced system. Even after nearly 40 years of living off and on in Dublin, I find it difficult to rid myself of the notion that  – despite all the Republic’s …

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