Ireland and the Great Recession: liberalism’s crisis or liberalism betrayed?

In early 2013, as I completed this manuscript, the Great Recession was in its fifth year. The shock of the acute crisis of 2008 had given way to the recognition of the chronic, long-term character of the recession. The outrage of the early months of the crisis had turned into a deeper erosion of trust and legitimacy of private and public institutions, often accompanied by despair that either public or private institutions could deliver economic recovery, let alone reconstruction.

Europe was at the heart of the crisis, even if its economy as a whole was performing at least as well as others that were struggling to respond to the recession around the world. However, Europe’s problems went deeper than specifically economic woes to the foundations of its socio-economic system, as the euro currency hung in the balance and the European project fractured in the face of economic crisis and political division. In the midst of this broader regional crisis, Ireland was one of the countries at the very centre of the economic storm. Not long before celebrated as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland was now experiencing one of the deepest and most sustained crises in Europe and beyond. After almost five years of recession and austerity, the Irish economy remained mired in an economic slump, with only fleeting glimpses of economic growth, burdened by banking and government debt and facing serious questions of solvency and sovereignty. Behind the public face of its status as the ‘poster child’ of austerity in Europe, Ireland was poised on a knife-edge between potentially unsustainable debt and the growing social and political costs of recession and fiscal consolidation.