The Irish experience of fiscal retrenchment under crisis conditions poses new questions of governance, the evolving answers to which are likely to involve importance changes in the state’s organizational profile and in its policy competences. The government is required to formulate and...

This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both countries were exposed to the same set of changes in their international policy...

Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many...

This paper reassesses the relationship between social partnership and the broader Irish policy process. What has developed may be conceptualised as “flexible network governance”. While pay regulation may be less strongly institutionalised than in other countries with national-level pay...

Ireland has been taken to be an exemplary case of successful growth-promoting fiscal retrenchment, not once but twice – first, in the fiscal consolidation undertaken in the late 1980s, which was taken as one of the classic original instances of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, and again...

Acronyms for groups of countries provide an often useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities, and terms such as PIIGS, BRICs and LDCs pervade the lexicon of international and comparative political economy. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these...