We have our dignity, yeah? Scrutiny under suspicion: Experiences of welfare conditionality in the Irish social protection system

Abstract

Conditionality has arguably always been part of welfare and poor relief regimes dating at least as far back as the poor laws and the condition of less eligibility. Nevertheless, there has arguably been a more pronounced turn towards welfare conditionality in the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries and this appears to be continuing across jurisdictions largely unabated and despite the fact that large amounts of evidence continue to suggest the ineffectiveness of welfare conditionality as means of promoting re- entry to the workforce for those experiencing unemployment. Alongside this, much evidence also points to the ultimately deleterious effects of welfare conditionality on those at whom it is targeted. This is an area which has seen an abundance of recent contributions in the context of the UK and further afield but that has arguably suffered from a lack of cognate data that sheds light on the Irish example. In attempting to begin to remedy this, this article presents data from a series of interviews carried out with welfare recipients in Ireland in 2018. The purpose of this article is to shed light on experiences of conditionality in the contemporary Irish welfare state and to attempt to nuance further what conditionality can mean. In doing so, this article takes the approach of allowing the data to “speak for itself” in order to best showcase the experiences of those most affected by welfare conditionality.