Rosie Meade

We hate it here, please let us stay! Irish social partnership and the community/voluntary sector’s conflicted experiences of recognition

This article critically assesses the outcomes of community and voluntary sector participation in the partnership processes that have dominated the Irish social policy scene for the last decade. As community organizations have embraced the state sponsored corporatist project in both its local and national manifestations, they have been given official recognition by government as de facto representatives of the socially excluded. State policy discourses have celebrated this development as evidence of its own enablement of civil society and as reflective of participatory democracy in action. However, because the state has taken such an instrumental role in the initiation, funding and direction of community organizations at the local level, the actual autonomy and independence of the community sector has been grievously undermined. At a national level, community and voluntary organizations have found that because they lack economic clout - the basis of political influence in Ireland’s neo-liberal climate - they have been granted only a marginal influence over the substance of policy decisions. The article concludes by urging that community organizations begin to cultivate alternative alliances outside the state controlled sphere of social partnership, in order to challenge neo-liberalism’s hegemony and to promote the political interests of those they claim to represent.

Community Development and the Arts

In some ways 2011 was a bad year for authority figures in Ireland and the UK. Rioting, the drip feed of abuse revelations, the phone-hacking scandals, the Euro currency crisis and the unfolding consequences of financial retrenchment, have concentrated the minds of populations on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The re-signification of state-funded community development in Ireland:1 A problem of austerity and neoliberal government:

This article analyses the changing rationalities and techniques through which the Irish state seeks to govern community development; specifically, how the displacement of its flagship Community Development Programme by the Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme has been justified and operationalised. Adopting a governmentality perspective, it explains how community development came to be constructed as an anti-poverty strategy and why it should also be understood as a ‘technology of government’. This article argues that the changing governmentalities shaping Irish community development are reflected in a re-problematisation and re-signification of community development’s purposes, rationalities and sources of legitimacy. Under the cover of austerity’s manufactured public spending crisis and new forms of expertise, preoccupations with effectiveness, efficiency and international best practice have intensified, thus demonstrating ongoing incursions by neoliberal ideas and practices in Irish Social Policy.