Social Inclusion and the Limits of Pragmatic Liberalism: The Irish Case

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Irish public policy has been framed by a concern with social inclusion. While the idea of social inclusion has considerable potential from the point of view of social justice, critical engagement with the concept reveals it to mask and justify more regressive political agendas. This paper maps the competing models of inclusion operational in Irish social policy, and reconceptualises them in terms of a ‘narrow’ version of inclusion, which reproduces the status quo through a process of including into existing structures, and a ‘broad’ version of inclusion, which refers to a vision of a constitutively inclusive society. Drawing on the normative political theory reflected in the different conceptions of social inclusion, this paper asks whether is possible to use the idea of social inclusion to produce a constitutively inclusive society. It concludes that this is possible, though likely to be difficult to achieve in the current political climate.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The author would also like to thank Mary Murphy CDCU, the Staff of the Equality Studies Centre for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. See ‘Review of the national anti poverty strategy under the programme for prosperity and fairness’, Building an Inclusive Society, introduction by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern (2002: 1).

2. The DES Statement of Strategy, 2003–05, chapter 3; National Action Plan against Poverty and Social Inclusion, 2003–05; Sustaining Progress, Social Partnership Agreement 2003–05, chapter 5; and National Development Plan, chapter 10.

3. These correspond broadly, rather than perfectly, with Levitas’s ‘social integrationist’, ‘moral underclass’ and ‘redistributive’ discourses of inclusion, respectively.

4. Rorty (1993) explains that he employs the term ‘bourgeois’ not in a Marxist sense to signify middle class, but rather to emphasise the contingency of the current allegiance to liberalism. He attached the label ‘post‐modern’ to signify the incredulous attitude of his community towards meta‐narratives, thereby suggesting their allegiance to liberalism is pragmatic rather than ideological.