The purpose of this chapter is to delineate the Irish welfare state and, in so doing, situate it within a broader welfare context. Later in the chapter, I directly address where Ireland ‘fits’ with respect to the ‘doing’ of welfare. However, before this, and in order to give a sense of the different and often competing interests that have had a hand in shaping Ireland's welfare state, the primary method of delineation is to offer a history of that development. In this respect, we start by noting that the revolution that birthed the Irish Free State, which officially came into being on 7 January 1922, was not followed by any meaningful social revolution. This has been well documented elsewhere (see Powell, 1992, 2017; Peillon, 2001; Cousins, 2005; Ferriter, 2005, 2013, 2015; Dukelow and Considine, 2017 for just some examples). Reviewing this literature, what emerges is a picture of an Ireland that, after a bitter period of civil war, is conservative and austere, bearing the hallmarks of an emphasis on ‘self-sufficiency’ that had been propagated by figures like Sein Féin's Arthur Griffith (Lee, 1990; Powell, 1992; Ferriter, 2005; McGee, 2015). When considering the sociology of a newly independent Ireland, it is important to note the emergence of what would ultimately become ‘traditional’ sites of shame, trauma and stigma arising from the practice of mass incarceration through reform and industrial schools, in mother and baby homes and in asylums (Rafferty and O’ Sullivan, 2002). In this respect, the role of the Catholic Church and of Catholic social teaching is hugely important when considering the development of the Irish welfare state. It may be tempting to assume that an immediate and overt role emerged for the Catholic Church, that the Church became the state's conscience on the same day that the state formed. However, this is not entirely accurate and what at least constituted a visage of state secularism, evident in the 1922 constitution, at first remained (Ferriter, 2005; Powell, 2017). However, Powell (1992: 161) has noted that a ‘politics of informal consensus’ between state and Church meant that Church power was assured, and that early social policy was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and not the liberal-democratic ideology espoused in the 1922 constitution.