Social rights, culture, crisis, and austerity: the strange case of Ireland

• Department of Law

The EUI Constitutionalism and Politics Working Group hosts an event featuring a paper presentation by David Kenny, Visiting Fellow at the EUI and Professor of Constitutional Law (Trinity College Dublin).

Abstract:

The Euro Crisis, and the austerity that came with it, put the social state in many EU states under severe strain. Very few means of resistance availed states subject to EU-IMF bailout programmes. One limited exception was constitutional protection of social rights. Recent research shows that these constitutional rights, and/or attendant principles such as equality, were successfully invoked to resist austerity in moderate ways in Greece, Portugal, and elsewhere. Ireland, by contrast, had no social rights response to austerity. A simple account would suggest this resulted from differences in constitutional text, with very limited social rights protection in the Irish Constitution. But this is not the whole story: rather than express social rights protections, constitutional principles such as dignity and equality—which are present in the Irish Constitution—principally grounded the judicial response in Greece and Portugal. Moreover, there has been no insertion of social rights into the Irish Constitution after of the crisis as a response to austerity. We suggest both these phenomena are best explained by Ireland having a hostile social rights culture, a governmental and judicial resistance to seeing social rights as important and in need of defence. We conclude by considering how and whether this culture might change.