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Sexual images and innuendo have become commonplace in contemporary advertising; they often fail to register in any meaningful way with the audience. This book examines the essentially racist stereotypes through which Irish people have conventionally been regarded have been increasingly challenged and even displaced perhaps by a sequence of rather more complimentary perspectives. The various developments that are signified within the figure of the Celtic Tiger might be considered to have radically altered the field of political possibility in Ireland. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment. The Celtic Tiger shows that one can use the rhetoric about 'social solidarity' while actually implementing policies which increase class polarisation. The book discusses the current hegemonic construction of Ireland as an open, cosmopolitan, multicultural, tourist-friendly society. The two central pieces of legislation which currently shape Irish immigration policy are the 1996 Refugee Act and the Immigration Bill of 1999. The book offers a critical examination of the realities of the Celtic Tiger for Irish women. Processes of nation state formation invariably invoke homogeneous narratives of ethnicity and national identity. To invoke a collective subject of contemporary Ireland rhetorically is to make such a strategic utopian political assumption. For the last few hundred years, the Gaeltacht has exemplified the crisis of Irish modernity. Culture becomes capital, and vice versa, while political action increasingly consists of the struggle to maintain democratic autonomy in the face of global market forces.
macroeconomic environment through restrictive fiscal policy, stable exchange rates and so on.3 On this basis, economists cite the Irish case to support the orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the OECD and other international bodies that favour macroeconomic stability over all other social and economic policy variables. The new orthodoxy as the EU enters into a phase of enlargement is to convince the accession countries that they will converge if they maximise the openness of their trade, get the macroeconomics right and encourage labour flexibility. Mainstream
government shaped the macroeconomic environment in which they operated through tariffs, monetary policy and fiscal incentives. But the colonial state none the less relied on private enterprise to produce the wealth necessary to sustain the machinery of government. Corporations, banking houses and settler producers achieved profitability by the utmost exploitation of cheap colonial manpower rather than by the
states, even those not afflicted by large deficits; and the mandatory reduction of debt (as a percentage of GDP) for countries whose debt exceeded 60% of GDP.11 The important matter of the supervision of banks was approved by the European Parliament in September 2011. The new supervisory framework was applicable to the entire EU. The European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) now monitors the macroeconomic environment, provides an early-warning mechanism and makes recommendations with regard to any important risks it identifies. The supervision of banks is now the
for the asset or the liability’. (Summary of Statement No 157.) What is a market? The market itself is neither efficient nor inefficient. To ascribe such epithets to the market is to fail to see that such references are to an abstraction, since the market is composed of the various participants operating in the market and only operates within a particular regulatory, legal, cultural and macroeconomic environment. Markets are dominated by the political structure and local political decisions and policies, but global markets are
repeatedly during the public hearings were made in the macroeconomic environment of neoliberal austerity policies enforced by the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, though no reference was made to this broader context. For the Irish health services, austerity resulted in ‘radical resource cuts’, such as a reduction of public financing for the Health Service Executive (HSE) of 22% or €3.3 billion between 2009 and 2013, and significant ‘cost-shifting’ onto patients (Thomas, Burke and Barry, 2014: 1545). There is widespread acknowledgement that the
contracts, vacancy rates, macroeconomic environment, efficient hiring mechanisms Jobs Legal framework Welfare policy Structural features of the labour market The model sketched above and illustrated by drawing parallels between the labour market and a transport system, introduces a much-needed conceptual clarity to the debate about job quality and its measurement. By distinguishing a job from its holder and from a wider environment in which it is performed, including labour market policies, social provision and structural factors, we can arrive at a more focused study
is considered to have been essential in creating the conditions for the possibility of an economic boom. The enormous cuts in public expenditure that marked this period are held to have established a desirable, stable macroeconomic environment that, in time, induced investment by some of the largest and most dynamic multinational corporations in the world. The introduction of formally free schooling in the late 1960s is also often identified as a measure that would ultimately serve to alter the economic fortunes of the Irish Republic.23 It has become a common
consideration issues of production systems (manufacturing efficiency; shop-floor management), as well as market-related factors (model policies, distribution systems, differences in market access due to belated UK entry into the European Economic Community) and the broader macroeconomic environment (e.g. government policies). Moreover, the different historical legacies also need to be kept in mind – while VW was created from scratch during the Nazi era, BL emerged as a
international labour conflict ‘migration’: as German and British Ford and GM subsidiaries ceased employment expansion and instead started to cut headcount levels, capital ‘exit’ became a much more serious threat than it had been before. Against the backdrop of a much more hostile political and macroeconomic environment, the ‘defensive shift’ marked a radical break in the UK, which was first discernible during the 1980–81 recession. Notwithstanding