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6 Lone parents, leisure mobilities and the everyday Bernadette Quinn Recent social and economic commentary on Ireland has tended to accentuate the extreme changes associated with the Celtic Tiger era. Stories of ostentatious consumption patterns dominated discursive narratives in popular, academic and policy forums. This was for good reason as trend data of all descriptions attested to startling transformations in people’s lifestyles and mobilities. To take just one example, data from the Census Statistics Office (CSO) (2007; 2008) show that foreign overnight
Ireland is a turbulent place. This book engages readers with the contours of transformation of Irish society through a series of distinct episodes and sites where change can be confronted. The content of the book intersects with the boom and bust themes to explore the economic and social implications of the recession. The processes are as diverse as cross-border development, farming knowledges, food movements, and the evolution of traditional Irish music. The modernisation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent demise was a 'spatial drama' involving transformation in the material landscape and the imaginative representation of the island. The first part of the book explores the revolving intersections of identity politics with place. It tracks the discovery of the ghost estate and the ways in which it has been implicated in debates about the Irish economic crash, complicating ideas of home and community. After a discussion on immigration, the book discusses the role of migrants in filling labour and skill shortages. The second part pays attention to questions of mobility and consumption in urban and rural contexts. The new Irish motorway network, free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger, and the role of National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) are discussed. The third part explores diverse cultural practices and some longstanding representations of Ireland. An autobiographical tour of the pub session, National Geographic's representations of Irish landscape and the current Irish imagination are the key concepts of this part.
Minister for Justice and Equality. (Written Answers Nos. 134–141) While Irish epistemological perspectives took a Nordic turn in relation to thinking about parental leave, the answer from a Labour Party minister to a parlimentary question privileged the vested intersts of Irish employers over the social protection and decommodification of Irish working fathers. Non-resident fathers and the liable relative provision Fathers, especially non-resident ones, became central to Irish social policy debates about welfare reform for lone-parents. This was not always the case
public expenditure cutbacks, and on women’s position in both the formal labour market and in relation to unrecognised care work. It will also look at the issues of domestic and sexual violence against women, the female body as a site of struggle during the crisis, and the ways in which women have organised to resist austerity. Precarious work As regards the labour market, there are contradictions in the way in which women are being treated during the current crisis. While some women, such as lone parents, find themselves being forced out of the home to seek waged work
marriages of their parents. In the aftermath, in 1960, a third of births of children of unwed parents were registered by both parents. Again, this change was partly due to new attitudes towards divorce, since children with lone parents were more and more common. The transitional nature of the time was also highlighted in the debates over the 1959 bill, which showed three different, and sometimes conflicting, attitudes: a concern for the children, an understanding of the ‘natural’ bond between a mother and child, but also a continued assumption of a two-parent, male
) and then cohabiting couples (5.9 per cent). Such households would have been exceptional in Ireland when Seamus and John, whose stories we examined in Chapter 1, were starting their families. Figure 2.1 provides an overview of family household composition in Ireland, Denmark and Portugal in 2009, based on the European Survey on Income and 30 Denmark Ireland Portugal 25 20 15 10 5 0 Single person aged under 65 Single person aged 65+ Couple both under 65 Couple 1 or both aged 65+ Couple + dependent children Couple + adult children Lone parent + dependent
labour – provided by middle-class married women debarred from paid employment – dwindled after the war, when more such women were in paid work, including social work. At the same time a larger stream of qualified people, trained in social work and the social sciences, were emerging from the universities, often keen to work for organisations they saw as aiming at the radical improvement of society. Another important change was that from the late 1960s there were many more, and more diverse, lone-parent families as the numbers of divorced, separated and unmarried parents
With race as a central theme, this book presents racial stratification as the underlying system which accounts for the difference in outcomes of Whites and Blacks in the labour market. Critical race theory (CRT) is employed to discuss the operation, research, maintenance and impact of racial stratification. The power of this book is the innovative use of a stratification framework to expose the pervasiveness of racial inequality in the labour market. It teaches readers how to use CRT to investigate the racial hierarchy and it provides a replicable framework to identify the racial order based on insight from the Irish case. There is a four-stage framework in the book which helps readers understand how migrants navigate the labour market from the point of migration to labour participation. The book also highlights minority agency and how migrants respond to their marginality. The examples of how social acceptance can be applied in managing difference in the workplace are an added bonus for those interested in diversity and inclusion. This book is the first of its kind in Ireland and across Europe to present inequality, racism and discrimination in the labour market from a racial stratification perspective. While this book is based on Irish data, the CRT theoretical approach, as well as its insight into migrant perspectives, poses a strong appeal to scholars of sociology, social justice, politics, intercultural communication and economics with interest in race and ethnicity, critical whiteness and migration. It is a timely contribution to CRT which offers scholars a method to conduct empirical study of racial stratification across different countries bypassing the over-reliance on secondary data. It will also appeal to countries and scholars examining causal racism and how it shapes racial inequality.
network may symbolise little more than a fruitless act of political and economic hubris. In Chapter 6, ‘Lone parents, leisure mobilities and the everyday’, Bernadette Quinn regrounds the discussion with a look at the challenges of one marginal societal group and their space in contemporary Ireland. Her chapter is concerned with lifestyle and quality-of-life issues, particularly with the role of free time, leisure and holidaying in the lives of lone parents during the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath. As the majority of lone-parent families in Ireland are 10 Introduction
offers up to 70 per cent of the cost of child care to any poor parent who wishes to work. Child tax credits are available for poor families. Working families with children are now offered substantial income support The working families tax credit system, as shown above, is designed to have a major impact on children’s welfare. Perhaps less directly, but nevertheless creating an impact on poorer families with children, especially lone parents, a place for all 4-year olds is not guaranteed at nursery school. In 2002 it was announced that the government also intended for