From bank bailouts to austerity, Europe's and Ireland's response to the economic crisis has been engineered specifically to shift the burden of paying for the crisis onto ordinary citizens while investors, financiers, bankers and the privileged are protected. The authors expose the class-based nature of Ireland's crisis resolution.

Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.

Austerity is not always one-size-fits-all; it can be a flexible, class-based strategy taking several forms depending on the political-economic forces and institutional characteristics present. This important book identifies continuity and variety in crisis-driven austerity restructuring across Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Spain. In their analysis, the authors focus on several components of austerity, including fiscal and monetary policy, budget narratives, public sector reform, labor market flexibilization, and resistance. In so doing, they uncover how austerity can be categorized into different dynamic types, and expose the economic, social, and political implications of the varieties of austerity.

While "economic forces" are often cited as being a key cause of language loss, there is very little research that explores this link in detail. This work, based on policy analysis and ethnographic data, addresses this deficit. It examines how neoliberalism, the dominant economic orthodoxy of recent decades, has impacted the vitality of Irish in the Republic of Ireland since 2008. Drawing on concepts well established in public policy studies, but not prominent in the subfield of language policy, the neoliberalisation of Irish-language support measures is charted, including the disproportionately severe budget cuts they received. It is argued that neoliberalism’s antipathy towards social planning and redistributive economic policies meant that supports for Irish were inevitably hit especially hard in an era of austerity. Ethnographic data from Irish-speaking communities reinforce this point and illustrate how macro-level economic disruptions can affect language use at the micro-level. Labour market transformations, emigration and the dismantling of community institutions are documented, along with many related developments, thereby highlighting an issue of relevance to communities around the world, the fundamental tension between neoliberalism and language revitalisation efforts.

David Etherington provides bold and fresh perspectives on the link between welfare policy and employment relations as he assesses their fundamental impact on social inequalities. Exploring how reforms, including Universal Credit, have reinforced employment and social insecurity, he assesses the role of NGOs, trade unions and policymakers in challenging this increasingly work-focused welfare agenda. Drawing on international and national case studies, the book reviews developments, including rising job insecurity, low pay and geographical inequalities, considered integral to neoliberal approaches to social spending. Etherington sets out the possibilities and challenges of alternative approaches and progressive new paths for welfare, the labour market and social rights.

Art Cinema and Neoliberalism surveys cinematic responses to neoliberalism across four continents. One of the first in-depth studies of its kind, this book provides an imaginative reassessment of art cinema in the new millennium by showing how the exigencies of contemporary capitalism are exerting pressure on art cinema conventions. Through a careful examination of neoliberal thought and practice, the book explores the wide-ranging effects of neoliberalism on various sectors of society and on the evolution of film language. Alex Lykidis evaluates the relevance of art cinema style to explanations of the neoliberal order and uses a case study approach to analyze the films of acclaimed directors such as Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Lucrecia Martel in relation to the social, political, and cultural characteristics of neoliberalism. By connecting the aesthetics of art cinema to current social antagonisms, Lykidis positions class as a central concern in our understanding of the polarized dynamics of late capitalism and the escalating provocations of today’s film auteurs.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus spoke frequently and unabashedly on the now-taboo subject of money. With nothing good to say to the rich, the New Testament—indeed the entire Bible—is far from positive towards the topic of personal wealth. And yet, we all seek material prosperity and comfort. How are Christians to square the words of their savior with the balances of their bank accounts, or more accurately, with their unquenchable desire for financial security? While the church has developed diverse responses to the problems of poverty, it is often silent on what seems almost as straightforward a biblical principle: that wealth, too, is a problem. By considering the particular context of the recent economic history of Ireland, this book explores how the parables of Jesus can be the key to unlocking what it might mean to follow Christ as wealthy people without diluting our dilemma or denying the tension. Through an engagement with contemporary economic and political thought, aided by the work of Karl Barth and William T. Cavanaugh, this book represents a unique and innovative intervention to a discussion that applies to every Christian in the Western world.

The majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas and the 21st century has been declared as the "urban age". However, closer inspection of where people live in cities, especially within so-called advanced liberal democracies such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, reveals that most people live in different types of suburban environments. Drawing together scholars from across the globe, this book provides a series of national, regional, and local case studies from Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to exemplify the diverse and dynamic nature and importance of suburbia in 21st century urban studies, city-building, and urbanism. This book explores the evolving social, physical, and economic character of the suburbs and how structural processes, market dynamics, and government policies have shaped and transformed suburbia around the world. It highlights the continuing importance of the suburbs and the suburban dream, which lives on albeit under increasing challenges, such as the global financial crisis, structural racism, and the Covid-19 pandemic, which have given rise to various suburban nightmares.

This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovatively address the impact of crisis on the welfare state in Northern Ireland. The result is to isolate key drivers of structural welfare reform, and assess how globalisation, financialisation, neo-liberalisation, privatisation, marketisation and new public management have deepened and diversified their impact on the post-crisis Irish welfare state. This in-depth analysis will appeal to sociologists, economists, political scientists and welfare state practitioners interested in the Irish welfare state and more generally in the analysis of welfare state change.

Though any psychoactive substance can be revered or reviled as a drug, as people’s cultural norms shift, ultimately its status is determined in law by the state. This publication explores the regulation of drugs – alcohol and cannabis to heroin and cocaine – and practices such as social drinking and public injecting under political regimes. Drugs are discussed in their geographical contexts: the colonial legacy of cannabis prohibition for bioprospecting in Africa; the veracity of the persistent notion of the narco-state; Turkey’s governance of drinking amid civil unrest; and alcohol’s place in the neoliberal political economy of Ireland. In addition, drug policies are examined: from problems in managing drug-related litter in the UK to supervised injecting facility provision in Australia; harm reduction in Canada; and the global network of drug policy activists. Place is significant, but porous borders, territorial overlaps and multi-scalar linkages are influential in remaking the world through current challenges to the ‘war on drugs’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Space & Polity.