The word liminality undoubtedly conjures the notion of being ‘in-between’. Perhaps it is most famously acquitted in the religious domain of the Christian afterlife in the form of ‘limbo’. Limbo is that place in-between, that place where persons go when their souls are not pure enough to enter heaven. It is neither heaven nor hell, but something outside of each. You will not experience the torture of the dammed there, but neither will you be privy to the blessed relief that is heaven. It is the first circle that Dante enters after crossing the Acheron. There he finds unbaptised babies and virtuous pagans who, while not deserving of eternal damnation, have chosen, where they could, rationality over the spiritual and so must remain outside of heaven (Alighieri, 1995 [1321]). Liminality then is conceptualised here as being at once ‘outside’ and ‘in-between’. It might be useful to think of it as a nondescript corridor. This corridor is ‘somewhere’; it is also between many destinations in the form of adjoining rooms, yet it is also outside of these rooms.

Here, in the first of the chapters presenting the empirical material, I use the concepts of marginality and social liminality within the context of welfare recipiency. In doing so, effectively, what I show is that for many of the people I spoke with, being reliant on welfare begets, at first, an often very marginal existence and that this in turn can lead to social liminality in a number of ways. It is not a hard task to show the presence of marginality for those receiving welfare by looking at available keyline figures. For example, the weekly income threshold for a single adult to stay above the ‘at risk of poverty’ rate stands at €252.11 approximately (Social Justice Ireland, 2019). The typical rate for a single adult claiming a non-contributory welfare payment stands at €203 per week. This figure is substantially below the weekly ‘at risk of poverty’ threshold and so suggests that a reliance on welfare as a primary strand of income almost guarantees a relatively marginal existence. Social liminality in the context of welfare is a somewhat more intangible concept, yet even here there has been some work of note. In the literature, Boland and Griffin (2015a) have addressed the idea of liminality directly in the context of the jobseeker.