‘Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt’: Solidarity between generations in the Irish crisis

Ireland has gained a reputation for peaceable acceptance of austerity following a European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout in 2010. While proponents of austerity praise Ireland’s stoicism, critics of global capitalism argue that individuals and families are paying for mistakes made by elites. However, little is known about the strategies people adopt to cope with cutbacks to welfare entitlements. Drawing on a study of solidarity between generations living in Ireland in 2011–12, this article explores the lived experience of economic crisis and austerity. One hundred interviews with people of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds are analysed using constructivist grounded theory. Data show how austerity impacts differentially according to socio-economic status. While solidarity between generations leads to re-distribution of resources within families, providing some security for people with access to family resources, it reinforces inequality at societal level. We conclude that reliance on family promotes ‘coping’ rather than ‘protesting’ responses to austerity.

Intergenerational Solidarity and Justice in Ireland: towards a new national dialogue

Gross domestic product plummets. Unemployment soars. Large-scale emigration reemerges after a decade of labor-market driven immigration. The International Monetary Fund and European Union are called to bail out the economy. Indebtedness haunts households in the aftermath of a spectacular housing market crash. The Celtic Tiger is firmly consigned to history books as Ireland’s economic fortunes have waned with unprecedented rapidity. The trials of the economy and policy are highly visible in the media and political debates. However, we know little about how these public travails are reflected in the private sphere where the recession is translated into mass emigration of young workers, defaults on mortgages, former twoearner households turning into no-earner families, and cutbacks in health and social care services that leave many younger and older citizens without the supports on which they could rely.

Politics without the Vernacular: Liberal Culturalism and the Language Policy of the European Union

Will Kymlicka's liberal culturalism presents a tension between the idea that linguistic diversity in multilingual polities should be protected and the claim that democratic debate across linguistic boundaries is unfeasible. In this article, I resolve that tension by arguing that trans-lingual democratic deliberation in multilingual polities is necessary to legitimise those measures aimed at the protection of linguistic diversity. I conclude that my account provides a coherent normative response to the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in the field of language policy and that an EU-wide deliberative forum is not as unfeasible as Kymlicka suggests.

L'indicateur EU2020 de suivi de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion: une analyse critique

The reduction of poverty and social exclusion is one of the targets of the European Union's 2020 strategy. The appropriateness and success of such a policy require the choice of relevant indicators that not only highlight poverty gaps between countries but also identify the groups of individuals in each country that need particular attention from social policies. The target retained in the European strategy combines three criteria: people living in households below the monetary poverty threshold, poor people “in terms of standard of living” who live in a situation of severe material deprivation, and those who live in households with very low or zero work intensity. We first show that neither the combination nor the intersection of these three criteria produces an adequate measure of the fight against poverty, or an objective for it. We therefore propose an alternative concept, that of “consistent poverty”, which targets people who simultaneously live below the monetary poverty threshold and above a certain level of material deprivation. The special material deprivation module of the EU-SILC 2009 database allows us to examine two versions of this notion of deprivation: the measurement of “severe” deprivation currently used by the European Union, which adopts a threshold with four items, and an alternative measure of “elementary” material deprivation with a three-item threshold. The intersection between our three-item elementary deprivation criterion and the monetary poverty criterion produces more satisfactory results than those obtained by the European Union approach, in terms of both coherency and profile of the population identified.