Dual conditionality in welfare and housing for lone parents in Ireland: Change and continuity?

Abstract

This article focuses on multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing from the perspective of lone parents in Ireland. The Irish case echoes historical experiences elsewhere and is offered not as an exceptional or extreme case but as an in‐depth single case study and a lens for comparison. Although contemporary forms and combinations of conditionalities are new to Ireland, the experience of multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing is not new. Hence, a historical perspective is used to examine contemporary multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing. In the past, conditional regimes for lone parents were justified in terms of moral reformation for first time mothers and avoiding moral contagion of mothers with subsequent pregnancies. In contemporary times, in the case of employment, lone parents are problematised as working part‐time and “nesting” on in‐work‐benefits, and in the case of homelessness, lone parents who prioritise the security of tenure embedded in social housing are accused of “gaming” the system. While acknowledging ambiguities, the paper finds the overlap of welfare and housing discourses contribute, intentionally or unintentionally, to epistemological foundations or understandings of lone parents, shifting public perceptions, and framing them as “problems” to be solved. They simultaneously temper lone parents' expectations. Increased precarity and disempowerment is associated with dual conditionality, and ontological uncertainty is multiplied when experienced cumulatively across employment, social protection, and housing regimes in a context of generally poor public services and labour market precarity and in the historical context of stigmatisation. Nonetheless, lone parents demonstrate considerable agency.

Responses to the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland: From feminized to feminist

“…- 349 This sense of women as "obligated givers" rings true in an essential economy like Ireland's where 70% of the front line economy are women, most of whom are low paid (CSO, 2020a(CSO, , 2020b and where the welfare architecture remains a male breadwinner household based regime (M. P. Murphy, 2019). Manne's (2019) powerful critique of what male entitlement costs women and other marginalized groups reveals the moral frameworks that support the deeply asymmetrical expectations and realities of care.…”

“…Women in Ireland entered the COVID-19 era in a gendered welfare and tax system and with a male breadwinner activation policy where women were obliged to seek full-time work with no care exceptions or accommodations (M. P. Murphy, 2019). Feminist campaigns before COVID-19 had largely focused on single-issue campaigns relating to austerity era cuts and conditionality's in lone parents income supports, access to labor market supports, and cuts to pension coverage for older women (NWCI, 2018).…”

Specters of Goffman: Impression Management in the Irish Welfare Space

“…Since the time in which Esping-Andersen (1990) was writing, welfare provision in Ireland has arguably undergone a paradigmatic shift, much of which has devolved upon increasing levels of welfare conditionality. Welfare conditionality and its effects have seen an abundance of recent contributions in the context of the United Kingdom but have arguably suffered from a lack of cognate data that shed light on the Irish example, although this is slowly changing (see Boland 2018; Boland and Griffin 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018; Collins and Murphy 2016; Gaffney and Millar 2020; Millar and Crosse 2018; Murphy 2018, 2020; Whelan 2020a, 2020b; Wiggan 2015). Internationally, literature suggests that ongoing reforms to welfare regimes across jurisdictions since about the 1970s are indicative of the bedding in of neoliberalism as a “global” ideology (Dardot and Laval 2013; Harvey 2007).…”

Work and thrive or claim and skive: Experiencing the ‘toxic symbiosis’ of worklessness and welfare recipiency in Ireland

“…Gaffney and Millar (2020) show how the ‘workfarist’ turn and the continuous focus on unemployment and welfare fraud potentially acts to undermine and delegitimise welfare states and this is a point I will return to in the discussion. Wiggan, (2015), Collins and Murphy (2016), Millar and Crosse (2018), Murphy (2020), Fitzpatrick et al. (2019), Gaffney and Millar (2020) and Whelan (2021) have all also documented increasing conditionalities and the ‘workfarist’ turn in the Irish welfare system; a turn which strongly couples the receipt of welfare with the need for the pursuit of work and thus enforces the ‘toxic symbiosis’.…”