Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State: Property, Family and Welfare in Ireland

© The Author(s) 2016

Michelle NorrisProperty, Family and the Irish Welfare State10.1007/978-3-319-44567-0_1

1. Introduction

Michelle Norris¹ 

(1)

School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

The Start of the Story

Every story has to start somewhere and like many stories about Ireland the story presented in this book starts in a conflict regarding land. This conflict is the mass revolt against the landownership system by tenant farmers, which began in 1879, petered out by 1902 and is popularly known as the Land War. Conflicts between the (mainly Protestant and unionist in political orientation) landlords who owned most of the land and the (mainly Catholic and increasingly nationalist) farmers who rented it had of course shaped Irish history for a long period prior to this. However, between the late 1870s and early 1890s, this conflict was manifested in an unprecedented mass agrarian tenants’ movement, which was led initially by the Irish National Land League and subsequently by a series of successor organisations. Irish nationalist members of the UK parliament realised that taking up the cause of land reform had the potential to unite the bulk of the population behind their banner and provide clear evidence of the practical benefits of supporting the nationalist movement (Clark, 1987). While, depending on their political hue, different UK governments supported Irish land reform in order to procure nationalist support in parliament, smother nationalist sentiment or simply because they could see no alternative way to foster a sustainable agricultural economy in Ireland (Hudson, 2003).

These political pressures inspired a series of radical legislative interventions (the Land Acts) which first regulated the letting of land and then enabled and finally subsidised the transfer of landownership from landlords to tenant farmers (Clark, 1987). When the first major Land Act was introduced in 1870, only 3 per cent of Irish farmers owned their land and fewer than 800 landlords owned half the country. By the time Ireland seceded from the UK and an independent Irish state was founded in 1922, some two-thirds of tenant farmers had bought their holdings and the ownership of over 316,000 holdings, comprising 11 million acres, had been transferred from landlords to tenant farmers (Aalen, 1993).

The Irish land reform policies were not unique. Governments in many European countries introduced measures to support the replacement of previously widespread large capitalist farms with small family farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This action was inspired primarily by the widespread depression in agriculture triggered by imports from the new world which undermined the economic viability of the farming model (see Koning, 1994). However, compared to Britain and the rest of Europe, the Irish land reform experiment was unparalleled in terms of its scale, cost to the exchequer and long-term impact (Swinnen, 2002). Land redistribution in many Central and Eastern European countries was rolled back by communist regimes, and Swinnen’s (2002) study of land redistribution in Ireland, England, Scotland, Belgium, France and the Netherlands since 1880 demonstrates that this policy was historically most ambitious in Ireland with the result that, by the late 1990s, far more Irish farmland was owner occupied (rather than leased) than in any other of these countries.

Despite its significance, the Land War is just the starting point of the story presented here. The primary focus of this book is on the long-term development and (until recent decades) distinctive character of Ireland’s social policies and system of welfare provision. Therefore, this story’s starting point in the 1870s reflects not only the emergence of the land reform movement, but also of the government interventions in the economy and society which would provide the foundations for the comprehensive welfare states which emerged in Europe and several other developed countries during the twentieth century. Around this time in Germany, Bismarck established the first system of social insurance benefits, encompassing: health insurance (introduced in 1883), accident insurance (1884) and old age and disability insurance (1889), and this model was subsequently copied across Western Europe (Balier, 2010). Concurrently, Western European governments began to intervene in housing provision by regulating private rented housing, clearing urban slums and, in some cases, making provision for the construction of replacement social rented housing for the poor (Pooley, 1992). Also in the late nineteenth century, government funding of health care was introduced or significantly extended in Britain (non-paupers gained access to public hospitals from 1886), Sweden (health insurance system established in 1891) and France (medical assistance provided to the poor from 1893) (Freeman, 2000).

European Stories

Stories about European welfare state development do not typically commence in agrarian politics and land redistribution policy. This is because most historians and social policy analysts link the establishment and expansion of public welfare systems to the emergence and growth of the urban labour movement – working-class agitation, trade unions and social democratic parties – which followed industrialisation, urbanisation and also the extension of the franchise to non-property owners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g. Esping-Andersen, 1999; Castles, 1978; Korpi, 1978, among many others: Baldwin, 1990, is an exception). The imprint of these urban labourist influences is evident both in the long-run development of European welfare systems and also in the academic research which examines them.

For instance, early public health and housing policies in Europe were strongly focused on urban slums; examples of significant government intervention in rural housing are rare (Pooley, 1992). Furthermore, access to early social insurance schemes (such as Bismarck’s 1883 and 1884 programmes) was generally limited to industrial employees and often to employees of businesses above a certain size. These arrangements benefitted many urban males but excluded self-employed farmers, the large number assisting relatives who also worked on farms and the female-dominated domestic service workforce. Land redistribution policies are not typically included within the remit of social policy and thus are largely ignored by welfare state historians. Indeed, public spending on capital goods such as housing is also largely excluded from comparative studies of welfare systems, which are heavily focused on current public expenditure on the redistribution of income (by means of taxes, social security benefits) and, to a lesser extent, on social services such as health care and education (Kemeny, 2001). This tendency is exemplified by Esping-Andersen’s (1990) highly influential typology of welfare states in OECD countries which is derived mainly from analysis of social security policies. On this basis, he categorises Ireland and other Anglophone countries as liberal welfare regimes where households rely mainly on the market to maintain their standard of living (or his parlance living standards are not decommodified) and government income support is minimalist and strongly targeted at the poorest households. However, this current spending bias in the social policy literature and the associated focus on social security benefits and social services does reflect the structure of most modern welfare states. Housing policy is often described as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state on the grounds that government spending on housing never came close to expenditure on the other elements of welfare and, unlike health care, education and social security, in all European countries most housing is provided by the private sector (Malpass, 2008; Torgersen, 1987). In 2009, OECD members devoted an average of only 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) to public spending on housing, but they devoted 7.3 per cent of GDP to old-age pensions and 6.6 per cent to health care (OECD, various years).

A Distinctive Irish Story

As its unusual beginning in agrarian politics and land redistribution policy suggests, this book tells a story about the development of the Irish welfare system which differs significantly from the dominant narrative in the literature about Western European welfare states. The key insight offered here is that the land reform policies which emerged in Ireland in the late nineteenth century were not only highly significant progressively redistributive and decommodifying social policies in their own right, they had a defining influence on the welfare and broader social system which developed in Ireland during the twentieth century. This is because, by conceding the principle of significant government involvement in the redistribution of landownership from landlords to tenant farmers, the Land Acts opened a floodgate of knock-on demands firstly for the provision of higher and higher public subsidies for peasant proprietorship and subsequently for subsidisation of the redistribution of other types of property, principally dwellings, with the result that property redistribution became a major focus of government activity for most of the twentieth century.

Thus, rather than developing weakly, this book suggests that for most of the twentieth century the Irish welfare system developed differently from most other North Western European countries. Ireland’s regime was distinctive firstly in terms of focus – which was primarily on property redistribution while the redistribution of incomes and provision of social services were relegated to a less important role than in neighbouring countries (Castles, 2002). The Irish welfare system was also distinctive in terms of purpose. Whereas welfare states in most other European countries were intended to operationalise the grand bargain between capital and the urban labour movement, Ireland’s system of State subsidised property redistribution was intended to support a familist social order in which individual interests, values and prerogatives were subordinated to those of the family (Fahey, 2002; McCullagh, 1991).

The atypical early focus of the Irish welfare system is illustrated by the scale of spending on property redistribution prior to the foundation of the independent Irish state in 1922. By 1921, UK government loans to enable Irish tenant farmers purchase their farms amounted to £101 million, whereas Irish GDP in 1914 has been estimated at £135 million (Fahey, 2002). The extent of the government support enjoyed by tenant farmers inspired knock-on demands centred on providing social housing for large population of landless farm labourers who were excluded from the benefits of land reform but sufficiently numerous to merit the attention of politicians particularly as the franchise was extended to include all non-property-owning men. Consequently, in the early twentieth century, social housebuilding rates in rural Ireland far exceeded output in Britain and Western Europe (Fraser, 1996; Fahey, 2002).

After Irish independence, land reform spending declined because most of the landed estates had been broken up and redistributed by this time, but this policy was radicalised in terms of objectives because it now focused not only on the redistribution of land title (i.e. from landlords to the tenants who rented it) but redistribution of the land itself (from large landowners to smallholders and the landless) and the redistributive character of this policy was further amplified when the government increased the public subsidies available to peasant proprietors in the 1930s (Dooley, 2004). Therefore, land reform was a core social policy in the new State and, usually in this case, the welfare system focused on the consolidation of a permanent rural smallholder class, rather than on supporting the urban working class. As was the case before independence, these developments in land policy inspired knock-on claims for similar concessions from rural social housing tenants – in 1936, they were granted the right to buy their dwelling (for 75 per cent of the previous rent) and, in the interests of equity, their urban counterparts were granted the same right by the 1966 Housing Act (Norris and Fahey, 2011). Obviously, the urban middle classes could not be excluded from this largesse, so, during the final phase in the extension of property redistribution subsidies from land into other asset classes, numerous homeownership supports were introduced, including tax reliefs, grants, provision of mortgages by local government and subsidisation of mortgage provision by building societies. These exchequer supports and the associated public spending were gradually expanded until they equated to a socialised system of homeownership. This was not the same as the socialist system of state-owned housing operated by the communist regimes which governed Central and Eastern Europe at this time because Irish homeowners enjoyed unfettered property rights. Rather, it means that unlike the norm in Western Europe, homeownership in Ireland was not primarily a marketised tenure (supported by market forces such as commercial mortgages and private builders) because most capital for home purchase and construction came from the Irish government and many homeowner dwellings were also government constructed (Norris, 2016). By the mid-1950s, the United Nations (1958) calculated that state housing subsidies in Ireland were the highest among 15 Western European countries examined both in terms of the proportion of housing capital derived from the exchequer (75 per cent) and of new dwellings which received public subsidies (97 per cent). This policy regime also expanded owner occupation to super normal levels – well above what could be supported by the market alone (Norris, 2016). In 1971, 70.8 per cent of Irish households were homeowners, compared to 50 and 35 per cent of their counterparts in the UK and Sweden, respectively (Kemeny, 1981; Central Statistics Office, various years).

As exemplified by the legal recognition of the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society in the Constitution adopted by the Irish government in 1937, familism enjoyed wide political and societal as well as religious support in this country during the first half of the twentieth century (Government of Ireland, 1937). This book argues that a key reason for the expansion of property redistribution subsidies provided social support for this social order by reinforcing familial (in practice usually patriarchal) authority, because under the Irish common law legal system further redistribution of farms and dwellings to inheritors was at parental discretion. Subsidies for the purchase of family farms and low debt also foster the economic viability of the familist model, particularly the stem (or three-generational) family system which became widespread in Ireland after the Great Famine of the 1840s (Gibbon and Curtin, 1978). Commonly heirs designate worked unpaid on the family farm and marriage was delayed until they were deemed fit to inherit, the farm income could support an additional family and the patriarch was sure he would not be edged out by the new generation. The unpaid labour of heirs and other assisting relatives made subsistence farming viable and provided a valuable form of welfare in the context of limited alternative employment options in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century.

However, the drivers which had inspired the growth of this property-based welfare system slowly weakened from the late 1960s as the number and political power of small farmers declined; developmentalism and a hunger for modernisation replaced familism as the dominant ideology and the generous public subsidies required to maintain this welfare regime became increasingly unaffordable in the face of demands for increased spending on mainstream welfare services such as social security and education. In tandem with the fiscal crisis which was sparked by the 1970s oil crises but grew more acute by the early 1980s, these developments enabled the rolling back of most key elements of the property-based welfare regime such as land reform, universal public subsidies for homeowners and government-provided mortgages during these decades (Honohan, 1992).

Most analysts take the view that Irish welfare, urban and housing policy subsequently converged with the neo-liberal norm in Anglophone countries (e.g. MacLaran and Kelly (Ed.), 2014; Kitchin et al., 2012), but this book disputes this thesis. While acknowledging the clear imprint of neo-liberalism on some aspects of the contemporary Irish welfare system, the analysis presented here highlights the strong continued influence of the legacy of the property-based welfare system. This legacy is evident in a number of remaining policy and socio-economic vestiges of this welfare regime such as the large number of government subsidies for low-income homebuyers and the large number of small farms which require continuing public subsidies to remain economically viable (Norris et al., 2007). The weak banking and mortgage lending regulation exposed following the acute Irish economic crisis which commenced in 2007–2008 are at least partial institutional legacies of property-based welfare because, until the 1980s, the vast majority of mortgages were provided by government (directly by local government or indirectly by building societies which tolerated ongoing government interference in return for generous tax subsidies); therefore, sophisticated structures for regulating commercial providers were not required (Norris and Coates, 2014).

This book also demonstrates that the withdrawal of the expensive public subsidies used to promote property-based welfare did not mean that policymakers also abandoned all of the objectives of this regime – rather, they devised alternative, marketised methods to achieve these objectives. In particular, the tradition of using property to promote economic and employment growth which was integral to property-based welfare has remained influential but since the 1980s has been operationalised primarily by the private sector with significant help from government in the form of banking deregulation, permissive land use planning and some public subsidies (tax incentives for property development and public spending on infrastructure) (Brenner 2006 offers a similar analysis of the USA). Thus the most recent phase in the history of the Irish welfare system has not encompassed merely the rolling back of the state as some authors have implied but rather the rolling out of government into new spheres of activity and ways of working which aim to support the market rather than replace it (Peck and Tickell, 2002).

Parallel International Stories

Although the focus of the Irish welfare system is unusual in North Western Europe, this book explains that this case is not without international parallels. For instance, Ireland’s familistic, property-based welfare system shares key features with the property-based welfare states which emerged in developed South East Asian countries. In these countries, governments were willing to support the widespread accumulation of assets, particularly dwellings, in order to enable households to supplement the comparatively ungenerous system of public services and social security by liquidating assets if necessary; reinforce loyalty to the State, support the extended family model and underpin economic growth by animating construction (Groves et al., 2007; Ronald and Doling, 2010). Notably large-scale land reform programmes were successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after World War II (Dore, 1959; Fei et al., 1979; Shin, 1998). Significant parallels also exist between Ireland’s welfare regime and the residential capitalism system employed in the USA, where Prasad (2012) argues that government developed a Keynesian credit state, focused on enabling asset accumulation, in contrast to the income redistribution-focused Keynesian welfare states of North Western Europe (Allen et al., 2004; Groves et al., 2007; Schwartz and Seabrooke, 2009; Ronald and Doling, 2010).

As well as the extent of the parallels between Ireland and these countries, their causes and significance are examined here. In relation to the former, the role of rural conflicts around access to land and the capital required to develop it and agrarian social movements driving the emergence of property-focused welfare systems in these countries is considered (Prasad 2012 suggests that these factors were also formative influences on the US welfare system). The extent to which Ireland and the other countries which operate property-based welfare systems constitute a distinct social policy regime type – to modify Esping-Andersen’s (1990) phrase, they are fourth world of welfare capitalism – is also discussed. Notably many of the countries which employ property-based welfare regimes or have done so historically have been among those worst affected by economic and fiscal crises in recent decades, including the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 to date (which had a particularly marked impact on Ireland, the USA and some countries of Southern Europe) and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s (Kaufman et al., 1999; Rhodes (Ed.), 2013). The relationship between these economic and fiscal crises and the property-based welfare system is also examined here.

Data and Analysis

One of the reasons why comparative analysis of social policies focuses so heavily on social security benefits and health services which (at least in Western Europe) are funded mainly by direct public spending is that these expenditures are recorded in public spending statements and collated into a comparative database by international organisations such as the OECD and Eurostat, so that they can be easily accessed by researchers. In contrast, the instruments governments can employ to intervene in the provision or redistribution of capital goods such as land and dwellings are often more numerous, varied and complex and, therefore, difficult for researchers to capture. Taking the example of housing provision, Fahey and Norris (2010) point out that housing is both a service (the accommodation that housing provides) and a capital asset (the dwelling that produces this service); therefore, governments can intervene on the capital side (for instance, by extending homeownership) or the service side (by regulating rented housing) and these interventions can be direct (providing housing or mortgages) or indirect (enabling others to provide housing or mortgages); monetary (grants, subsidies and taxes) or non-monetary (rent control, land use planning).

In an effort to examine all of these potential interventions, this book draws on a wide variety of sources including public spending and survey data, parliamentary debates, government policy statements, the media and existing research to assemble the first comprehensive picture of changes in the scale and nature of the Ireland’s property-based welfare state over more than a century. However, this book is not a standard history text based primarily on archival research; rather, the analysis presented here draws heavily on the work of other scholars of Irish history and social policy and reinterprets a fresh interpretation of their arguments. Among these scholars, the work of Daly (1981, 1984, 1997), Dooley (2004), Fahey (2002), Fraser (1996), Garvin (2004, 2005), Carey (2007) and Ó Rian (2014) was particularly influential, and it is important to acknowledge that the analysis offered there stands on the shoulders of these giants.

Unlike most books on Irish history, this book is written by a social scientist and therefore draws on relevant social-scientific theories to explain the policy developments it examines. As explained earlier, this book links the initial focus of government intervention in property subsidisation and redistribution to distinctive socio-economic and political context in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Ireland, particularly to the largely rural population and agricultural economy; disquiet about the particular inequities generated by Irish version of agrarian capitalism and the interlinking of these concerns with the nationalist politics and the nation building project. The analysis draws on a number of theories from the sociology, political science and social policy literature to explain why once this capital-oriented focus was established it remained the focus of government welfare policies for almost a century.

This development is related first of all to what historical sociologists call path dependence – that is, the tendency for policies to remain stable rather than to change except during periods of acute crisis called critical junctures (Mahoney, 2000). The first half of Chaps.​ 2–5 present a chronological account of path dependence in relevant policy fields between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, which is followed by an account of significant policy change which took place between 1990 and 2007 in Chap.​ 6. Unlike most history texts, in this book the description of policy developments is presented separately from the analysis of why they occurred. The latter issue is examined in the second half of Chaps.​ 2–6, and this part of the analysis draws on three of the most prominent themes in the extensive literature on the factors which shape policy decisions (Bengtsson, 2008). Firstly, policy decisions are related to the extensive literature on power which suggests that policies remain stable because their focus reflects the interests of the powerful in society and the social distribution of power rarely changes radically (see Baldwin, 1990; Esping-Andersen, 1985; Lukes, 1974 among many others). Here this issue is examined with reference to the size of different social classes or other social groups, their economic power and effectiveness at mobilising to promote their own interests and electoral competition between parties to secure their votes. Second, the influence of moral or political legitimacy on policy decisions, because certain approaches may be accepted as the best or only way of doing things or complement a specific ideological agenda, is explored using information from parliamentary debates and policy documents. However, assessing the influence of legitimacy is challenging in the Irish context because the political party system does not adhere to the conventional European left/right divide; Irish politicians rarely offer explicitly ideological rationales for policy decisions and many of the rationales which they have offered (such as familism, Catholic social teaching and peasantism) are unusual in the Western European context where social and Christian democracy and liberalism have been the primary ideological influences on welfare state development. Finally, the role of efficiency considerations in driving path dependency is considered. This line of argument suggests that once a particular policy direction is selected it is often adhered to in the long term because of the administrative and political ease of building on existing arrangements and the high transaction costs of changing them (Bengtsson, 2008). In