Introduction

Since the late 1990s, reflecting a growing interest in the nature of inequalities affecting ageing populations, researchers have increasingly drawn on the concept of social exclusion to characterise not only the multiple ways in which people experience disadvantage in later life, but also the different life trajectories that are commonly associated with such disadvantage. As an idea, social exclusion has a much longer lineage, reaching back at least to the 1960s. However, it emerged most forcefully during the last major economic recession that affected much of Western Europe in the 1980s. At that time, the language of exclusion provided research and policy communities with a useful alternative means of discussing concerns about the social and economic consequences of rising poverty rates. Above all, since the 1990s, social policymaking in European Union (EU) countries has sought to deliver ‘social inclusion’ and counteract potential risks of exclusion by prioritising the participation of (future) working-age people in education, training and/or labour market activities. Alternative approaches to conceiving of and acting to reduce risks of exclusion have increasingly come to occupy a secondary position in the thinking of national and European-level policymakers (Levitas, 1998, 2006; Madanipour, 2011). If anything, the recent economic crisis has strengthened national social policy trends that focus on active labour market measures, aimed primarily at young people and those of working age (Scharf, 2010).

The inevitable focus on the social and economic impacts on children, youth and people of working age of a widening and deepening recession, and related austerity measures, have meant that potential risks of exclusion in later life typically receive little policy attention. In Ireland, this is compounded by the relatively underdeveloped nature and unfulfilled implementation of ageing policies. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of the Irish context has been the emergence of a policy discourse which suggests that older people have weathered the recession relatively unscathed by the various tax increases and deep cuts in public expenditure that followed the country's bailout by the EU–European Central Bank (ECB)–International Monetary Fund (IMF) Troika in November 2010. While the recession and austerity programme raise obvious questions about impacts on older people's social integration, Ireland is not alone in terms of underplaying the risks of exclusion that exist in later life.