Joe Whelan has written a very important book that breaks new ground in Irish social policy discourse. He brings a fresh voice that represents a new generation of Irish scholars willing to take up more critical approaches to analysing Irish social policy. That is a very exciting development that should be welcomed with enthusiasm. The remarkable scholarship of the work marks the book out as a seminal contribution to Irish and international social science. This book captures a ‘bottom-up’ perspective on the lived experience of the Irish poor.

Irish social policy has been historically shaped by two conservative forces: first, the Catholic Church, which resisted a welfare state in order to maintain religious hegemony over Irish civil society, through the principle of subsidiarity; and second, the initiative to create a new post-revolutionary society, envisaged in the Marxist Democratic Programme 1919 and quickly suppressed. Nationalists favoured a residual welfare model that retained poor law attitudes towards those in need. The new leaders of Ireland developed what the distinguished Irish commentator and public intellectual, Fintan O’Toole, has characterised as ‘a half-baked Welfare State, a chaotic and enormously inefficient mix of public, private and charitable provision’ (Irish Times, 25 April 2017). Universalism had no place in the post-revolutionary social contract.

The Irish Revolution produced a residual welfare system, ideologically shaped by the belief that government should play a limited role in the distribution of benefits and services. Religious charity, in the form of a very conservative mixed economy, would have a central role in what Joe Whelan calls the ‘welfare space’.

The theocratic phase in Irish social policy began to disintegrate following the beginnings of modernisation in the 1960s, albeit that the Catholic Church still controls almost 90 per cent of primary schools. Modernisation was led by foreign direct investment, over the decades turning Ireland into a tax haven for multinational corporations. Ireland's 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate has recently become the subject of international criticism and is likely to be modified. That will probably be a beneficial policy development that enables Ireland to refocus from wealth generation to poverty alleviation.