Exploiting conditionality: EU and international actors and post-NPM reform in Ireland

Abstract

Between 2008 and 2015, Ireland undertook unprecedented and systemic public sector reforms in a polity not traditionally considered a prominent reformer. While some of these reforms comprised part of the loan programme agreement with EU and international actors, many others did not. This article argues that the crisis in Ireland provided a window of opportunity to introduce reforms that political and administrative elites had previously found difficult to implement. The authority of the Troika was invoked to provide legitimacy for controversial initiatives, yet some of the reforms went further than the loan programme strictly required. A number of these concerning organisational rationalisation, the public service ‘bargain’ and transversal policy coordination are considered here. Agreements were negotiated with public sector unions that facilitated sharp cuts in pay and conditions, reducing the potential for opposition to change. The reform effort was further legitimated by the reformers’ post-New Public Management, whole-of-government discourse, which situated considerations of effectiveness and efficiency in a broader framework of public service quality and delivery.

The reform of human resource management in the Irish public service

“…The SMI also avoided imposing reforms top-down and was committed to seeking consensus for reforms with public service unions and professional bodies, following a reform pattern similar to small north-west European countries (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2000). Assessing the SMI in terms of the depth of reforms and achievement of reform objectives, other commentators portrayed Ireland as a 'comparative laggard' (MacCarthaigh & Hardiman, 2020). Such a portrayal of the Irish case is more consistent with the assessment of SMI HR reforms presented in this paper.…”

Introduction to The Governance of Labour Administration

“…The intensity of reform in individual countries has been influenced by policy conditionality: by whether the country had requested financial assistance from international institutions during the crisis and had been required to implement austerity in exchange. In Ireland, for instance, the objective of streamlining the administration of unemployment benefits, social assistance payments and active labour market policies -which led to the merger of a range of state agencies into the Intreo service -was explicitly set by the Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as part of the 2010 bailout, in the name of reducing costs and simplifying the state administrative apparatus (Köppe and MacCarthaigh, 2019;MacCarthaigh and Hardiman, 2019). effectively covered by at least one social protection benefit.…”

Capitalising on External Constraint: Six Things You Should Know About Eurozone Bailouts

“…Moury and Standring (2017) show that executives in Portugal were to a great extent convinced of the need to introduce spending cuts and deregulate structural reforms, and passed reforms that went beyond the lenders' original demands (see also Lutz et al 2019;Asensio and Popic 2019). MacCarthaigh and Hardiman (2019) argued that the troika allowed the Irish government and the administrative elite to invoke the troika's force majeure to strengthen their own hand vis-à-vis the public sector workforce and to engage in a profound reform of the Irish public administration. Finally, Cioffi and Dubin (2016) show that Spain's conservative government pursued radical neoliberal labour law reforms that were not requested by external actors.…”