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| Socrates Intensive Programme 'Culture and Social Policy' Demokritos University of Thrace, Komotini, Greece 27 March to 6 April, 2003 Seamus O Cinneide Jean Monnet Professor of European Social Policy National University of Ireland, Maynooth Head of Applied Social Studies, which includes "community work" and "youth work" studies. (1) Values and Welfare State Reform in Ireland Since the 1950s, the when Irish society reached its lowest point, there have been two periods of great economic and social change, first in the sixties and early seventies and most recently in the past decade, which saw unprecedented and unrivalled economic growth). In the 1950s the Irish welfare state was relatively underdeveloped, but in the 1960s and 1970s the full range of social services was expanded, and Ireland came to compare well with many larger and more prosperous European states. A certain pattern of provision was established, a so-called "pay-related system" (sometimes called a two-tiered or three-tiered system) providing an adequate floor of income and services, with scope for topping up for the better off. This pattern has been characterised by a high level of state involvement, low commodification and a redistributive/dualist stratifying effect, a pattern that does not fit Esping-Andersen's classification. Since the 1970s there have been almost continuous increases in social security and social service expenditure but a decline in expenditure as a proportion of GDP. Underlying this apparent paradox is a certain path dependency, a continuity of the earlier structural characteristics. Public discourse has been dominated by two sets of ideas, on the one hand the need to deal with "poverty" or "social exclusion", on the other hand the imperative of privatisation and market solutions, for example in the areas of health insurance and pensions and residential care. But this discourse focuses on particular policy areas rather than on general principles and the contest between solidarity and individualism is as yet undecided. (2) Community Care and Community Development "Community Work" (the generic term used) has developed enormously in Ireland over the past 25 years. It consists of three models: community development, traditionally associated with rural development, community care (or community organisation) and community action (which began with poverty programmes in the 1970s). Community development, meaning local economic development on a consensual basis, has taken new forms, especially in urban areas, with the active participation in local "partnerships" of state organisations, the social partners, and local representative groups. Community care is not just a matter of traditional voluntary bodies providing services to, for example, older people and people with disabilities; it also means new projects dealing with drug abuse, lone parents and young people in deprived areas. Community action consists of local projects (with in many cases national co-ordinating bodies) concerned with the mobilisation and empowerment of disadvantaged groups, people in poor neighbourhoods, women's groups, Travellers (the indigenous nomadic people) and latterly asylum seekers. There is now a loosely organised "community and voluntary sector" represented in various "partnership" arrangements, even up to the level of national "partnership" or neo-corporatist bodies. The "sector" faces a number of challenges. There are tensions between the "voluntary" side, which is identified with service provision, and the "community" side, which is concerned with "action", in a policy environment in which the tide of expansion of government services has turned. The lack of success in terms of progressive social policy change raises questions about "social partnership". The government now wants to rationalise its relationships with voluntary bodies and introduce some order into locally based projects. Prof. Maria Petmesidou Social Policy in Greece in the nineties An extensive debate on the transition that European welfare states have been undergoing in the last decades has brought into the fore issues of value change significantly affecting the social relations of welfare in West European societies. A new discourse counter poses the values, principles and problem space characterizing public policy under the organizing principle of the "welfare state", to a new constellation of values and principles underpinning the "active society" as a new policy design implying significant changes in the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and the role of social security. A repertoire of catch-words like employability, pro-active measures and workfare reflect this shift of value orientation elaborated in the political debates at the national and EU level; though there are competing views as to how far and what ways the "active society" can be embedded in solidaristic commitments that for a ling time have been characterizing the European social models. The central question addressed in this lecture is: How does Greece fare in this context of social and value change? Greece is a laggard in social welfare and despite the fact that in the last two decades social protection expenditure significantly expanded, an immovable institutional arrangement and logic is highly evident. This is reflected in Greece's path peculiarity in social policy development, as the "short glimpse" of the welfare state in the eighties was scarcely framed by universalist and social citizenship values that could contribute to overcoming entrenched characteristics of fragmentation, polarization and particularism. Diffuse influence of post- Fordist practices in welfare linked to an active society principle have progressively been mediated by EU policies in the country. Yet public dialogue on new (and often conflicting)visions of social welfare has remained rudimentary, while organizational and governance patterns have barely broken out of the sterile tradition of centralist, statist practices. These issues are briefly examined in relationship to reform trends in the nineties. |
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