The UK and Ireland responded to the rapid health and economic impacts of COVID‐19 by supporting incomes through job retention and job loss instruments, However distinct policy legacies, political and institutional differences between the two countries mean critical differences in both the nature and the relative weight placed on these instruments. The UK income support package was announced in one go and centred on a generous, newly created Job Retention Scheme as well as an enhanced Universal Credit for people who became unemployed. Ireland, by contrast, created a new, more generous social security payment, the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, while a less prominent job retention scheme followed a week later. These initial decisions generated distinct policy dilemmas during a second round of policy changes, in which Ireland sought to reintegrate the more generous Pandemic Unemployment Payment into the mainstream welfare system, while UK sought to ensure that the Job Retention Scheme was only supporting retained (or “viable”) jobs. A second wave of infections in October 2020, requiring new restrictions, led both nations to make substantial retreats from resolving these core policy dilemmas.

Comparatively slow in adopting any clear activation strategy, postcrisis Ireland crossed the Rubicon and rapidly took steps to implement a work-first labour activation strategy. The article maps and examines the interaction of three variables-ideational influences, political interests and institutional processes-to assess the nature of post-crisis Irish activation policy. Troika imposition of aid conditionality, the ideational role of the OECD and domestic elites worked to shift the focus of Irish activation policy and its implementation. Post-crisis Irish activation is less influenced by social democratic versions of high-road activation than neo-liberal managerial stock management and conservative behavioural controls. These converge into a low-road model of activation. There is some demand for, but little articulation of, an alternative policy that could be centred around less conditionality and more focus on demandside issues including low pay, quality work, distribution of employment and removal of barriers to employment.

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This article examines the impact of the economic and social crisis in shaping political agency in women's and feminist organizations in the context of Irish austerity. Examining forms of political agency exercised by women in a range of gendered mobilizations, we isolate examples of defensive agency that seek to protect women's interests from fiscal retrenchment. Despite the damage to gender infrastructure we argue that feminist agency remains crucial to realizing gender equality in public and private decision making. Evidence suggests that in the Irish context, despite deep austerity, gendered forms of mobilization are resisting retrenchment but are doing so in an absence of intersectional solidarities.

Contemporary models of welfare capitalism have frequently been critiqued about their fit-for-purpose in provisioning for people’s basic needs including care, and longer-term ecological sustainability. The Covid-19 pandemic has also exposed the need for better institutions and a new welfare architecture. We argue a post-productivist eco-social state can deliver sustainable well-being and meet basic needs. Arguing Universal Basic Services are an essential building block and prerequisite for a de-commodified welfare state, we focus on examining the form of income support that might best complement UBS. The article develops, from the perspective of feminist arguments and the capabilities approach, a case for Participation Income. This, we argue, can be aligned with targeted policy goals, particularly reward for and redistribution of human and ecological care or reproduction and other forms of socially valued participation. It may also, in the short term, be more administratively practical and politically feasible than universal basic income.