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Irish membership of the European Communities in 1973 represented the most significant development in the life of the independent state, and it helped to refashion the economic, political, and social landscape. Membership of the EU brought considerable change to domestic politics, and also to the executive and administration. Adjusting to a dynamic rules-based supranational order required adaptability and pragmatism. This chapter evaluates the impact of ‘Europe’ on Ireland, and the extent to which there are patterns of ‘Europeanization’ in politics and public life as a result of almost five decades of EU membership. It argues that, domestically, Ireland used EU membership as a vehicle for modernization, while externally, the EU provided an increasingly important ‘geopolitical anchor’. And although this Europeanization has been far from uniform, the effect has been a move towards a more self-conscious ‘choice for Europe’. Brexit has confirmed this renewed commitment to European integration.

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.

Portugal and Ireland exited Troika loan programmes; Greece did not. The conventional narrative is that different outcomes are best explained by differences in national competences in implementing programme requirements. This paper argues that three factors distinguish the Greek experience from that of Ireland and Portugal: different economic, political, and institutional starting conditions; the ad hoc nature of the European institutions’ approach to crisis resolution; and the very different conditionalities built into each of the loan programmes as a result. Ireland and Portugal show some signs of recovery despite austerity measures, but Greece has been burdened beyond all capacity to recover convincingly.

European countries have been required to formulate a national preference in relation to the EU Financial Transaction Tax. The two leading approaches to explaining how the financial sector makes its views felt in the political process – the structural power of the financial services sector based on potential disinvestment, and its instrumental power arising from direct political lobbying – fall short of providing a comprehensive account. The missing link is how and why policy-makers might be willing to adopt the priorities of key sectors of the financial services industry. We outline how two levels of ideational power might be at work in shaping outcomes, using Ireland as a case study. We argue firstly that background systems of shared knowledge that are institutionalized in policy networks generated broad ideational convergence between the financial sector and policymakers over the priorities of industrial policy in general. Secondly, and against that backdrop, debate over specific policy choices can leave room for a wider range of disagreement and indeed political and ideational contestation. Irish policymakers proved responsive to industry interests in the case of the FTT, but not for the reasons normally given. This work seeks to link literatures in two fields of inquiry. It poses questions for liberal intergovernmentalism in suggesting that the translation of structurally grounded material interests into national policy preferences is far from automatic, and argues that this is mediated by ideational considerations that are often under-estimated. It also contributes to our understanding of how constructivist explanations of policy outcomes work in practice, through a detailed case study of how material and ideational interests interact. European Commission European Commission Horizon 2020

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.

This exploratory paper outlines an approach to the evolution of the tax state in four countries: Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. It is motivated by our interest in a cluster of countries that are all too often excluded from comparative studies in political economy. Both the volume and the composition of tax revenues in these four countries display somewhat different patterns from those of the wealthier European countries. Their systematic exclusion may distort comparative generalizations in important ways. We focus here on three analytical themes that merit further exploration. Each of them helps us challenge the conventional understanding of the dynamics of tax policy. The first is that of timing. These four countries were late welfare developers, which meant that the demands placed on the tax capacity of the state is at variance with trends elsewhere, with implications for the constraints and opportunities available to their governments. The second concerns the specific domestic political economy mechanisms involved in these countries’ tax choices, which can be opened out using perspectives drawn from fiscal sociology. The third theme concerns the international political economy, and suggests that the economic and financial vulnerability of countries on the 'periphery' may influence many aspects of their policy choices, including the size of their tax state and the composition of their revenues. This preliminary version of our work focuses on the experiences of Spain and Ireland; further work on Portugal and Greece will follow.

The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus in the wake of the global financial crisis. This paper re-evaluates the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The conventional approach to explanation is based on segmenting episodes of fiscal change into discrete observations. We argue that this misses the dynamic features of government strategy, especially in the choices made between expenditure-based and revenue-based fiscal consolidation strategies. We propose a focus on pathways rather than episodes of adjustment, to capture what Pierson terms ‘politics in time’. A case-study approach facilitates analysis of complex causality that includes the structures of interest intermediation, the role of ideas in shaping the set of feasible policy choices, and the situation of national economies in the international political economy. We support our argument with qualitative data based on two case studies, Ireland and Greece, and with additional paired comparisons of Ireland with Britain, and Greece with Spain. Our conclusions suggest that the conventional literature, by excluding key political variables from consideration, may distort our understanding and result in misleading policy prescription.

The international economic crisis hit Ireland hard from 2007 on. Ireland’s membership of the Euro had a significant effect on the policy configuration in the run-­up to the crisis, as this had shaped credit availability, bank incentives, fiscal priorities, and wage bargaining practices in a variety of ways. But domestic political choices shaped the terms on which Ireland experienced the crisis. The prior configuration of domestic policy choices, the structure of decision-making, and the influence of organized interests over government, all play a vital role in explaining the scale and severity of crisis. Indeed, this paper argues that Ireland has had to manage not one economic crisis but three – financial, fiscal, and competitiveness. Initial recourse to the orthodox strategies of spending cuts and cost containment did not contain the spread of the crisis, and in November 2010 Ireland entered an EU‐IMF loan agreement. This paper outlines the pathways to this outcome.

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.

Austerity measures in response to Eurozone crisis have tended to be conceived, debated, and implemented as if only the technical parameters of budget management mattered. But policies that impose budgetary hardships on citizens, whether in the form of increased taxes or cuts to public spending 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. If austerity measures are held to be unavoidable in response to market turbulence, and especially if this view is underwritten by international authorities, new challenges of political legitimation are likely to arise. These issues are explored through the experiences of Spain and Ireland.

Austerity measures in response to Eurozone crisis have tended to be conceived, debated, and implemented as if only the technical parameters of budget management mattered. But policies that impose budgetary hardships on citizens, whether in the form of increased taxes or cuts to public spending 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. If austerity measures are held to be unavoidable in response to market turbulence, and especially if this view is underwritten by international authorities, new challenges of political legitimation are likely to arise. These issues are explored through the experiences of Spain and Ireland. A version of this paper will be published in Georgios Karyotis and Roman Gerodimos eds., The Politics of Extreme Austerity: Greece beyond the Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan) Author has checked copyright AMS

Ireland has been taken to be an exemplary case of successful growth-promoting fiscal retrenchment, not once but twice – first, in the fiscal consolidation undertaken in the late 1980s, which was taken as one of the classic original instances of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, and again now, in the context of meeting the fiscal deficit targets set by the current EC-ECB-IMF loan conditions. This paper argues that many of the apparent lessons drawn from Ireland’s experience turn out to be more complex and even misplaced upon closer inspection. Ireland was never an instance of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ in the sense in which it now understood, in the late 1980s; and the conditions that facilitated the restoration of growth at that time are no longer possible now. Firstly, the paper shows that standard methodologies for identifying the object of interest in fiscal consolidation misses out on what is really central, which is the ongoing politics of ‘fiscal effort’. Secondly, this approach challenges conventional ideas about the primacy of spending cuts over tax increases. Thirdly, Ireland’s fiscal stabilization in the earlier period depended on devaluation, international growth, and strong social pacts. None of these conditions is present in the ‘internal devaluation’ under way since 2008. Ireland has committed to fulfilling the terms of the EU-ECB-IMF loan programme, but there are few grounds for anticipating that this will of itself result in the resumption of growth. Fiscal adjustment efforts are much more painful without the growth-promoting contextual conditions that were present in the earlier period. Author has checked copyright Move to Geary working papers and map to Politics when live - OR 18/10/2014 kpw14/11/13

Acronyms for groups of countries provide an often useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities, and terms such as PIIGS, BRICs and LDCs pervade the lexicon of international and comparative political economy. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these terms as heuristic devices are usually not well elaborated. This can become problematic when the use of such heuristics drives market responses in areas such as risk perception and changes in interest rates. In this paper we look at the narrative construction of the group of countries that has been grouped as ‘PIIGS’ (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain). We examine the process whereby the group came into being, trace how Ireland became a member of this grouping, and assess the merits of classifying these countries together. Our contention is that the repetition of the acronym in public debate shaped the behaviour of market actors toward these countries. We find evidence of Granger causality, such that increased media usage of the term ‘PIIGS’ is followed by converging interest rate correlations between Ireland and the other PIIGS, compared to the interest rate correlations between Ireland and the ‘northern’ Eurozone economies. We argue that this is a pointer toward the independent effect of perceptions and discourse over economic fundamentals. We conclude with more general thoughts and cautions on the use of heuristics in comparative political economy. Author has checked copyright Move to Geary working papers and map to politics once live - OR 18/10/2013 kpw14/11/13

This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both countries were exposed to the same set of changes in their international policy environment in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the form of a low interest rate regime associated with the creation of European Monetary Union (EMU). The two countries have very different economic structures, different political decisionmaking profiles, and different relationships between the political and banking systems. Yet these two countries had the most extreme experience of housing bubbles during the 200os, and both suffered a similar construction-related economic collapse that ruined their respective banking systems after 2008. The paper argues that the decision-making taking place within their very different domestic institutional frameworks was subordinated to the fact that they shared a similar form of international vulnerability. Both were extremely open to mobile international capital during the 2000s. Their vulnerability to financialization resulted in a common experience of very rapid asset price inflation, which left both countries particularly exposed when the international financial collapse took place. The shared experience of European ‘peripherality’ meant that two countries belonging to different ‘varieties of capitalism’ ended up with very similar kinds of economic collapse Irish Research Council Author has checked copyright Move to Geary working papers and map to politics once live - OR 18/10/2013 kpw14/11/13

The Irish experience of fiscal retrenchment under crisis conditions poses new questions of governance, the evolving answers to which are likely to involve importance changes in the state’s organizational profile and in its policy competences. The government is required to formulate and implement extremely tough choices, particularly since Ireland entered an EU-IMF loan programme in November 2010. Yet government does retain some policy discretion in the priorities it adopts in the composition of budget adjustment and in the distributive impact of cuts. This paper sets out to explore where the adjustments have been ma e through examination both of the composition of budgets and of the organizational configuration of state institutions, and it analyses how these outcomes can be accounted for. The paper draws upon a new official database setting out a detailed compositional analysis of Irish public spending between 2008 and 2012, and upon the Irish State Administration Database (http://isad.ie) through which the organizational aspects of the state's policy capacity can be analysed. Author has checked copyright Move to Geary working papers and map to politics once live - OR 18/10/2013 kpw14/11/13