I am delighted to provide the foreword to this book. The book's main contribution is the bringing together of varied discourses concerning the social policy impact of ageing within the context of fiscal austerity. As the editors rightly state, the economic recession has sharpened the focus of governments on the implication of demographic ageing. It is vital, therefore, as the editors again argue, that the social policy implications of societal ageing are studied and understood within a wider political economy of austerity. Of course, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the ensuing first wave of neoliberalism in the Anglo-Saxon countries in the 1980s gave us a foretaste of the various ways in which the public burden thesis has been applied with great force to the older population. This recession is different, certainly in Ireland, but a combination of neoliberal ideology and neoclassical economics is enforcing severe budgetary constraint on a range of countries (within and outside of the Eurozone) in the name of funding deficits. Policymakers appear to be disinterested in both the origins of the 2008 financial crisis and the distributional consequences of their austerity policies. In the absence of official concern, social science research has a key role to play.

We should not lament the absence thus far of critical perspectives on ageing and austerity because events are still unfolding before us. In fact, it is helpful to remind ourselves that poverty and inequality in later life did not originate with post-2008 austerity policies. What the latter have done is to exacerbate existing inequalities, particularly between rich and poor, and added new ones. Located as it is within a critical-gerontology perspective, it is not surprising that this volume is sensitive to the importance of unequal ageing. This is exemplified in discussions of the extending working life agenda and social inclusion and exclusion.

A further significant contribution of the book, in my view, is to bring Ireland in from the cold in social-gerontology literature by providing us with a specific case study of austerity and ageing. In social policy terms, Ireland is often seen as an appendage of the UK, being similarly classified as a ‘liberal’ welfare regime, which is wrong in many ways – size, culture, rural–urban split and membership of the Eurozone, to name only four. It is helpful and refreshing to see an account of contemporary ageing in Ireland in its own right.